Fengshui Boyfriends (我五行缺你)

西子緒 Xi Zixu, 《我五行缺你》My Five Elements Lack You

I've been reading this on and off since ~2021 and mentally tagging it as the fengshui boyfriends novel... I finally finished on the eve of dragon year. \o/ Here is my reading thread.

Relevant links: JJWXC link / Novel Updates / Image/cover source

PLOT:
Humble government worker Zhou Jiayu dies in a car crash and finds himself thrust into the world of fengshui when he transmigrates into the body of someone with his exact same name—the fraudulent fengshui master Zhou Jiayu whose crimes have cost lives. He is captured by Lin Zhushui, a blind fengshui master that he has been brought back to save from certain death.

Zhou Jiayu's new body leans extremely yin. This causes him to be more sensitive to the supernatural and unable to have midnight excursions without running into ghosts. He is taken to consultations with clients, forced to participate in a fengshui tournament, and... honestly, I don't know because the main plot and romance kind of suck.

I think I would recommend reading this til the end of the tournament arc (before it gets to the “main plot”) and skipping to the dog case (a traumatic but excellent standalone horror episode) and the last few chapters as well as Lin Jue's parts. She turned out to be the most well-written character in the entire novel even though she's kind of the token jiejie side character while everyone else is just sort of... plays their part..

The author is really good at one-off horror mysteries with cute critters and comedic shenanigans, but very bad at writing bigger arcs. If this had just been a series of horror episodes and interconnected short stories, I would have loved it! Unfortunately, there had to be a plot, which simply just was not plotting. The paper clan case was pretty cool, but the book never successfully threaded the themes of twin clan tragedies and instead just dragged on and on for fifty chapters. :(

The jokes about Shen Yiqiong's skin color were increasingly annoying too, and I didn't care for his extras because some of it tied his skin color to his undesirability as a romantic partner. He does get his HE, but there were too many "no one can see you when the lights are off" jokes even towards the end... The subplot about Xu Ruwang's hairstyle and the long-term effects of Lin Zhushui trolling the entire fengshui community were really good, though! So the comedy was a mixed bag of tired jokes and good running gags.

Other chapter notes:

fengshui bfs 56-66

the livestream MLM case was a lot of fun! though i didn’t exactly enjoy the “pretending to have an intellectual disability” part

ZJY’s supernatural children continue to be cute 🥹 pic.twitter.com/pMLliqaGC4

— 🌟 (@halfcactus) November 20, 2023

fengshui bfs 71-73

aftermath of the dog storyline is suitably twisted. i guess??? it’s a HE??????

it’s a good enough little self-contained horror story that for once i’m not tilting my head at the details 😂 (the author def has a better hand at stories of this scale & type)

— 🌟 (@halfcactus) November 23, 2023

fengshui bfs 100

so, i do rly like the plot development of: the yin energy from ZJY’s previous death progressing the longer he lives in his new body, LZS leaving him BAGS OF BLOOD to help him tide thru the winter, and ZJY hating that he has to drink LZS’s blood to not waste it.

— 🌟 (@halfcactus) January 26, 2024

fengshu bfs 100

also, his fellow disciples have to take turns coaxing ZJY into drinking milk and trying to keep on the pretense that xiansheng’s blood is absooolutely not mixed in, and ZJY having a hard time drinking it all down + hating that they’re treating him like a child

— 🌟 (@halfcactus) January 26, 2024

fengshui bfs extra#4

they are now checking CCTV footage from the wedding night bc LJ refuses to believe she accosted and slept with the dragon boy, in spite of the marks she left on his body and his own demands for her take responsibility

— 🌟 (@halfcactus) February 9, 2024

i love her 😭:

小金面无表情的看向林珏：“还要继续吗？”

林珏用视死如归的表情说：“继续！”她还在嘴硬，“我酒品很好的，最多就是哭一场，绝对不会对你做出那种事！”

— 🌟 (@halfcactus) February 9, 2024

fengshui bfs:

anw LJ’s emotional space as someone who lives on, quite jadedly, bc of a promise to her lost love is so real and complex. she’s the only character that rly makes sense in this book.

and while her romance is v. tropey, it does offset the heaviness of her past.

— 🌟 (@halfcactus) February 9, 2024

tl;dr - A really fun read for about 30 or so chapters, with some delicious angst at the end. Will likely not read another book from this author unless it’s 50 chapters or shorter… they are great with short stories, fantasy elements, urban horror, and fun ensemble dynamics, but not plot or romance 😭 (I did enjoy the Lin Jue/[spoiler] side pairing, but that's more of a love story that is characterized by grief and the value of a previous relationship than a romance.

This could have had the space to be a decent Nirvana in Fire AU setting because of the sort-of-but-not-really rebirth thing and how it affects a person physically + having a single purpose (to save the ML from prophesized death by flame)... But alas. XD

Food-centered media

Hunger (2023)

Aoy, a young woman who runs her family's pad see ew joint, enters the high-stakes, high-pressure world of fine dining and gets a front seat view of its decadence and absurdities.

The cooking showdowns and menu concepts were artfully done, and the soundtrack was very effective. Half the time I was convinced that we were two seconds from a gruesome murder just because of the music haha.

The gap between the cinematography and the script was too wide to bridge and the film took itself a bit too seriously to glide over the ill-fitting parts, but it was still really nice to see a Southeast Asian movie take on this format. There was definitely a specificity to some of the shots it took that went over my outsider head. What stuck with me was the undertone of a cautionary tale: that an eldest daughter's lapses into ambition will only drive home the reality that her true place is at home, supporting her parents and her younger siblings. If she was a more well-written protagonist, this wouldn't have been an issue for me. Instead she was just a vehicle between two worlds without a strong sense of self or purpose, so the ending stung for me and my sensitivities.

Personally I feel like they could have given Aoy more cooking/sports anime protagonist energy too. XD

作りたい女と食べたい女 She Loves to Cook, She Loves to Eat (S1)

Jdrama adaptation of a GL manga of the same name: Nomoto, a hobby home cook, feels her cooking options are limited since she lives alone. She also resents how society reduces her passion to a marriageable skill, and yearns for an audience for her craft. One day she gets carried away and makes too much food for herself. Gathering her courage, she seeks out her neighbor who lives two doors away and is conveniently the perfect patron for her art.

Season 1 was a really cute, short, and low-stakes show at 15 minutes per episode. I haven't read the manga so I was worried that the topic of sexuality wouldn't be addressed, but there's an entire lesbian awakening arc that happens quite naturally and is very nice to see in a woman who's in her twenties/thirties (age is unclear).

Daisy pointed out that it was nice to have a "one cooks, one eats" romance where both characters are actually pretty competent and self-sufficient, it's just that one of them pursues cooking as a hobby, and... yeah! The dynamic also changes when they become more intimate with each other, and their individual preferences become more apparent both to themselves and the audience. The food they make is very attainable and homey, but with personal or regional twists.

I personally enjoyed how Kasuga's stoicism and Nomoto's little anxieties are only aspects of their personalities that don't define them any more than their interests; they're both well-socialized introverts with baggage. And on top of that, Nomoto's co-workers are refreshingly... normal. Annoying without being obnoxious, curious without being nosy... just people with their own lives working together.

Overall, a quick, sweet watch with enough substance to sink one's teeth in! Season 2 is still airing (20 episodes this time!!!), so I'm waiting quite a bit to get into that. :)