她属于我 She Belongs to Me

[halfcactus]

I feel like this book could have been 50-70% shorter? Love that the women are both competent, but apart from the general romance and Wen Nian, not a single storyline is justified... It feels more like snippets about someone's OC than a full novel. Scenes are perfunctory, abruptly dropped as soon as their purpose is served, and there's no sense of continuity or thematicness, and consequently, no momentum.The author doesn't seem actually interested in the characters—all the side characters are props and even the main characters themselves don't feel quite like people. Jiang Ci is a piano tuner and a scuba diver but you don't really see any of this affect her worldview in any way, so all these elements feel very artificial.

In terms of reading difficulty, the abruptness and lack of context-building made this pretty difficult for me to read and follow (as a non-native reader who's still learning Chinese :P)...

Vocabulary log:

Tried to make a graphic out of my doodle (with the vector tools in Affinity Designer) but it doesn't seem crisp enough? Maybe I messed up my export:


More Affinity notes:

Affinity Designer is meant to be an Illustrator alternative in the sense that it's a vector drawing program, but I can't find the Pathfinder features, which really limits my already basic shape manipulation abilities ;___; This is potentially a dealbreaker, but idk, I'll need to try it out some more and also try out the desktop version in case the commands translate more intuitively there. EDIT: Affinity Photo seems to have a Geometry feature under the Layers menu which has Add/Subtract/Intersect commands; I'll try finding it in Designer.

I'm having a hard time working with layers on Affinity Photo. Layer via Copy and Layer via Cut with the marquee selection tool aren't available, so you have to rasterize layer, make selection, and then duplicate. Similarly, to crop to selection, you select your crop area with the marquee then click on the Crop tool.

I probably just need to play around some more, but: Affinity Photo's paintbrush tool is ridiculously jagged at 100% hardness?? There's no anti-aliasing at all and there's no option to turn on anti-aliasing which ??? Do I have to draw with my phone/tablet's native photo editing app or—

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In other news, my phone's having problems charging and I fear it's a hardware issue. :') Fingers crossed it's resolvable because I can't deal with the anxiety, especially because I basically live on my phone and don't even carry cash anymore ajk;jdapf;

Comments

[douqi]

You finished She Belongs to Me! My take on the book is basically the same as yours. The baihe novels of the 'mostly-sweet contemporary romance' variety that I've read are basically like that (though significantly longer), though granted I haven't read many because it's not a category I seek out. Anti-recommendation: contemporary romance specialist Mi Nao Nao, who books are even more personality- and structure-free, though she's bizarrely popular.

PS: Would it be okay for me to link to your review on the baihe comm?

[halfcactus]

though significantly longer
lmfao noooooo

Thank you for reccing one of the shorter and "better" ones! The popularity of this category surprises me because it doesn't feel like there's enough material for me to even self-insert to, and I can't imagine reading 100+ chapters of this haha.

I'm okay with the link! If you prefer me to make a post myself, I could do that over the weekend too, just lmk.

[douqi]

Oh, if you're happy to post, that would be great!

Of the contemporary romances I've read, the one I enjoyed most was probably 朝思暮暖 because I went in with zero expectations and it had super high levels of k-drama-style melodrama. Of the more 'realistic' contemporary romances, I thought 食局 probably worked best because it had actual stakes and explored what it would be like to be in a relationship with someone significantly wealthier than you (and also the food descriptions are great), though it doesn't quite stick the landing.