"How do you FIND this stuff?"

So, I have a Kindle. (I actually have several Kindles, but sidetracking myself on the second sentence would be a new record, so we're going to leave that for now.) I get a lot of ebooks from the public library, both because I got tired of hauling 20 lbs of dead tree back and forth and because sometimes I need to feed my brain something new at 3am when nothing's open. Amazon keeps a closer eye on me than the NSA and Santa Claus combined, so naturally whenever I open the Kindle Library, they do their best to sell me something I want. A few weeks ago, the New Releases lineup showed me a book called Red Side Story, by Jasper Fforde.

Though Jasper Fforde is probably better known for the Thursday Next books, Red Side Story is the second book in his Chromatacia series, the first of which, Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron, I read and loved quite a long time ago. It's been fifteen years since that one came out, and I had frankly given up in despair. Red Side Story is also fantastic. The series is a brutal parodic critique of fascist society, so I can only hope he gets around to writing the last one before reading it becomes a jailable offence.

Tragically, BPL only had Red Side Story in hardcover, so I had to bite the bullet and put on both real pants and shoes to go get it. I have all my holds sent to the Central Library at Copley Square, which I think is not the closest location, but definitely the most convenient, at least when the Green is a functioning trolley line. The Copley branch is in the middle of the Back Bay neighborhood of Boston, where 'an excess of money' and 'an excess of people who have nothing better to do than hang out on the street downtown' collide. Plus, you know, library. The combination makes a lot of weird and interesting stuff happen.

When I went down to get my paws on a copy of Fforde's book, the usual motley crew was loitering outside the main doors, and an assortment of tourists were clotting up the T entrances. Detouring around the elevator shaft to dodge a crowd of people alternately taking selfies and trying to ask Siri where the fuck they were, I tripped over a pile of CDs. Very nicely packaged ones, some kind of deluxe box set. There were about a dozen in a bag, with a sign that said FREE - TAKE ONE!

Who tf buys CDs nowadays? you ask. I'll tell you: K-Pop stans. Charting and ranking are still really, really big in the Korean pop market, and for some reason they're all stuck on the idea that streaming plays don't 'count'. Groups put out CDs packed with collectible tchotchkes, and fans buy them en masse to support their bias. (Translation for the olds: Your 'bias' in K-Pop terms is your obsessive crush/favorite artist. It's usually a specific person in the group, rather than the group itself.) Apparently, Enhypen just released a new album called Enhypen: Romance Untold. Someone bought about a dozen copies, and left most of them outside of BPL. 

It's... pretty okay? It's K-Pop. Most of the K-Pop on my playlist du jour is upbeat dance pop from groups like 2NE1, BLACKPINK, and f(x), and maybe one thing by Rain, so I'm probably not the target audience for this one. But if you like the boybands and ballad-ish stuff, sure, check it out.

Obviously I knew nothing about Enhypen, so I went and asked the internet about it. If you let the Almightly Algorithm^tm catch you looking up anything about K-Pop, and then let the AutoPlay run like I'm in the habit of doing, eventually YouTube will show you the entire collected output of KOOKIELIT, a delightfully trashy tabloid channel that covers the East Asian entertainment industry. Most of it was samey-samey, but I perked up when they mentioned a whole-ass entire scandal about fanfic.

The 227 Incident, as it was dubbed, is equal parts hilarious and horrifying. Hilarifying, if you will. The gist of it is that there was a very popular live-action series called The Untamed (陈情令 Chén Qíng Lìng) a few years ago, starring two extremely pretty Chinese actors. Someone wrote not just smutty fanfic about the series, but smutty RPF, and someone else decided to be a troll and post a couple of NSFW chapters to Weibo, which is basically Chinese Twitter. In my neck of the woods, people writing Rule 34 fanfic about your series is just a thing that happens when you put stuff on TV, but evidently China thinks otherwise. This blew into a shitstorm of epic proportions, involving (but not limited to): Public outrage, demands that one of the actors written about control his fans, the actor politely pointing out that he doesn't have the power to do that, boycotts of that actor's sponsors, flame wars, death threats on Weibo, prosecution for the death threats on Weibo, apologies for making public authorities waste their time and energy prosecuting the death threats on Weibo, Weibo bringing the banhammer down, and the nation of China outright banning Archive of Our Own.

I personally find RPF kind of creepy in the same way I find paparazzi photos kind of creepy, but I did get curious about where the fandom was getting all these ideas. (Often nowhere -- I basically grew up online, and I watch a lot of things where I still cannot for the life of me figure out why people will die for a particular ship.) The Untamed is posted online, subtitled in its entirety, for free, if you're curious too. Tencent Video strikes me as slightly more evil than your average corporation, so I watched on YouTube, where only Google can spy on me.

Overall, I found it a really enjoyable xíanxìa series. (Sort of the Chinese equivalent of our D&D-esque "high fantasy" settings in the West. Kung-fu wizards throwing magic powers around during sword fights and battling supernatural creatures in a setting that sort of vaguely has things in common with a very romanticized version of Ancient China, if you're willing to squint.) The CG is distinctly middling, but the wirework stage combat is really pretty. The performances are good enough that I kept trying to glance away and do other things, forgetting that I don't speak Mandarin and can't follow along with just the soundtrack. The color palette and cinematography are beautifully surreal.

The credits say that the series is based on a book. Wikipedia says the author is a lady writing under the pen name Mo Xiang Tong Xiu (墨香铜臭 or MXTX to her Western fans). The original book is called Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation (魔道祖师 Módào Zǔshī or MDZS). I still don't know where the fanfic author got the RPF inspiration from, but I 100% know why there is so much other smutty fic on AO3, because MDZS is a dánmiěn story.

Dánmiěn is roughly the Chinese equivalent of the Japanese BL genre, i.e, gay male romances. That is... not something you can put on Chinese TV. Ever. It did explain why the ending to The Untamed felt like a last-minute rush job -- presumably the original involved a pair of men getting their happily ever after, and there's no way the censors would allow that. I was intensely curious as to exactly what and how much they had to cut out to get a story like that approved by the Chinese government, and as it happens, all of MXTX's professionally-published work is currently available in English. In addition to MDZS, which is a lot longer (5 volumes!) than I thought it would be, she has two other complete webnovels in her catalog: Heaven Official's Blessing (天官赐福 Tiān Guān Cì Fú, 8 volumes) and Scum Villain's Self-Saving System (人渣反派自救系统 Rén zhā fǎnpài zìjiù xìtǒng, 4 volumes).

They are fucking great. Even in translation. Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation and Heaven Official's Blessing both take their adventure-novel nature pretty seriously -- although there are big chunks of both that will make you giggle -- and Scum Villain's Self-Saving System is a scathingly hilarious deconstruction/takedown of xíanxìa settings, cultivation novels, male power fantasy "harem" novels, dánmiěn stories, and fandom that made me snort-laugh in public more than once. MXTX writes genuinely clever protagonists, and regardless of where their spiritual powers are said to stem from, they all secretly specialize in Loophole Abuse.

So that is how I find this stuff, and how I ended up mainlining 6000+ pages of translated Chinese queer romances over the past two weeks.