halfcactus

Swimming Lessons for a Mermaid

SUPER cute and wholesome (and complete!) modern-day youth + straight romance manhwa that's kind of like a reverse Little Mermaid AU? The MC is a mermaid who is unable to swim. Her doting older sisters trade their hair for a pair of legs so the MC can live on land with their human dad instead. In the present day, the MC lives a regular high school life but avoids emotional connections until a boy from the swim team discovers her secret and offers to teach her how to swim.

This is so charming and funny and effusively warm. The characters are all very normal people and their interactions with their families (especially among the humans) are laughably real. The manhwa makes it a point to build up multiple relationships and set up the dynamics in what eventually becomes a long-term reconfigured friend group. There's some drama towards the end but it's very low-stakes because it's not like the MC can drown. The ending is moving and emotionally satisfying (and not even centered on the leads!). There's a kind of "pair the spares" situation in the bonus chapters but they're as easily read as gen. It does hurt me that

spoilers

the comic-relief friend never finds out that the MC is a mermaid, in spite of the rest of the group already knowing. ;____; I'm sure that specific character is okay with being out of the loop since he's gone on the record about being okay with his friends keeping secrets, but the fact that they have to go out of their way to hide it from him hurts me. There's even a point where the MC suddenly disappears for months(?) and while everyone else has been assured that she's safe with her mermaid family, all he's told is that she's sick, which must be incredibly worrying!!!!

Anyway, this was a 9/10 read and a 100% match to my preferences.

Guiding the Eccentric Tyrant
Space + military danmei with omegaverse elements, except that instead of alpha and omega you get "espers" and "guides"... which I discovered is known as guideverse ahaha. Anyway I mostly checked this out for the translator's notes, which are intriguingly passionate, and made it to chapter 5... The MC is an F-class guide and the ML is, by the looks of it, an eccentric tyrant who likes bedazzling everything he owns (from his phone to his spaceship):


妃为九卿- 神医小娇妃 The Goddess of Healing
I noped out right after the first chapter because I was finding the dialogue annoying and the translated names distracting: 婉兒 was Waner which is at least reasonable, but 子然 was Zion, which was baffling. (I was reading the official Tapas translation.)

The Tale of Goldiluck, the Black Kitten


This is the first time I've encountered anything I thought of as a hidden gem, because this sure is a gem, and it's on Pocket Comics (which never seemed to offer anything that I'd enjoy unironically and isn’t on the other platforms... until now)... It's a sweet slice-of-life series set in the Joseon dynasty about a sad black kitten, a sickly scholar, and family. There are some magical elements, ie. the cat turning human every night and forest creatures helping him find his way home, but otherwise, it's pretty mundane and fatally adorable. If you're a pet owner, this might make you cry.

How to Get My Husband on My Side
Checked this out because the novel was written by Spice & Kitty, who wrote A Stepmother's Märchen, but unfortunately this did not hit the same—maybe because the central relationship is romance and the character writing revolves around it, or maybe because the artist/team for this one isn't as good at adapting a novel. I guess it's recommendable if you like arranged marriage with hurt/comfort (where the MC, a victim of physical abuse and a creepy incestuous brother, has developed an eating disorder and a knack for masking), but the fantastical aspects (magical creatures that the MC can bond with) just didn't work for me. And outside of the MC's journey of healing, none of the characters are interesting.

Raising My Fiancé with Money
There's a glut of generic romance-fantasies with vaguely European settings saturating the manhwa scene, and though this series doesn't stand out as particularly unique, it's still better than average. It's a contract dating story where the MC and ML are trying to break off their current engagements. The MC has just recovered from the brainfog of being in a VERY ill-advised relationship (to the point of distancing herself from her loving family), and now she wants her life back. She's incredibly lucky with money and has the enviable problem of being incapable of spending more than she earns. Meanwhile ML is a high-ranking but functionally powerless pushover with social anxiety. He hides behind his RBF and wartime reputation and learns, with the MC's help, how to socialize and say no to things.

This is one of those canons where I'm not really sold on the romance but I want them to get married anyway because the ML deserves to be adopted by the MC and her chaotically protective family. And everyone (except maybe the MC's dad, who's... built different) is memorably hot.

PS. This manhwa has no transmigration or regression.

1) You Are Error by Aftermath: a podcast I picked up because of geraineon's rec here, about details that videogames usually get wrong. So far there's only one episode out (about Arabic, and Islamophobia, and Palestine), but I'm looking forward to the next ones! It sounds like there's gonna be one about horses. XD

2) Wicked (movie): I enjoyed this a lot more than I expected, but act 1 was paced like it was 2 whole acts and I really needed an intermission. (ᵔ́∀ᵔ̀) The best number was What Is This Feeling? by a mile. Defying Gravity on the other hand felt underwhelming for how overdone (and overly long) it was.

More thoughts

I thought this adaptation made Glinda a sharper character, and her relationship with Elphaba more challenging. In the musical version her act 1 moments tend to be reduced to comic relief, but in the film version they come across as far more earnest but also far more dangerous. It's hard to watch this and not think about how white performativeness and conditional allyship are so easily rewarded, retracted, and insulated from consequences while marginalized people get punished and demonized for just daring to speak out, a point that the movie loudly makes but I'm not sure it'll fully follow through on.

Needless to say I got secondhand tired from watching Elphaba advocate for issues that affect her personally but are blind spots for everyone else. :')

And when I was discussing this with daisydiversions she wondered if there were going to be plot changes in the second movie, particularly for Nessa, since it seemed like the actress, a wheelchair user herself, had some input on her character... I'm cautiously interested but still very much afraid haha.

3) 廚廚動人, originally known as U Kill, I Cook and later on serialized as Kitchen Goddess and the Assassin on Tapas: martial arts + comedy manhua about a ditzy cook who becomes the personal chef for a boneheaded assassin. The translation is localized in a way that tries to preserve the wordplay at the cost of its sense of place, but I thought it was an interesting effort, even though it made me look up the raws to reorient myself. The English seems to do more food puns too, though I don't think the energy is sustained in later chapters. XD I'm at around chapter 26, and have put it in the backburner for now.

CW: sexual harassment + threats by minor villains in the first few chapters

( + some CN-EN comparisons (image-heavy) )

Books/Comics

Mostly Chinese-language lit that I have a lot of thoughts about but never wrote proper entries on... and then a couple of indie comics from Shortbox 2024:

priest, "橋頭樓上 End of the Bridge, Top of the Tower"

Jimmeh Aitch, "哈囉哈囉馬尼拉 Halo-Halo Manila"

接骨木花, "陰間沒有珍奶嗎？ Is There Boba in the Underworld?"

Nico Baidan, "Firsts"

Pearl Law, "Karma's A Peach"

Movies/Musicals

SIX The Musical

Twisters (2024)

The Wild Robot (2024)


RECENTLY: Read up to volume 3 of The Apothecary Diaries light novel series and then stopped reading because 12 volumes is kinda a lot... Picked up 青春18×2：重返最初的悸動 again as a palate cleanser and am happy to report that it's not het all the way through. (As a shoujo manga enjoyer I do love het, I just think that an anthology about youth and first loves shouldn't be exclusive to it.)

Watched the first two seasons of the Cinderella Chef donghua because it was suggested by the Netflix algorithm, though "watched" is a generous way of saying "skipped all the plot and non-cooking scenes". 😂 Plot was mostly a setup for the romance and the romance was downright awful from what I saw of it, which really is a shame because it had all the potential to scratch my shoujo + cooking anime itch. The food animation + cooking shenanigans were SO up my alley... And then season 2 gave us too many characters, not enough cooking, and the reactions leaned more ~emotional and nostalgic~ rather spectacularly OTT and I had to cut my losses and drop out... Disappointing because it had a strong season opener (cooking showdown with the restaurant across the street).


CURRENTLY: Watching the cdrama adaptation of Link Click with daisydiversions, since fansubs are complete. Don't think we'll finish before the year ends. ^^; Also watching Arcane s2 and grateful for the staggered release schedule because this show isn't exactly bingeable for me and I like to avoid major spoilers... AND I easily get overwhelmed with high episode counts. XD

Link Click

Overall thoughts about the donghua

Season 1 was pretty great and well-paced. It had a case-of-the-day format for the first half, with filler cases between the heavy ones... The noodle girlfriends were sweet... And the entire basketball arc was so well done! But I wouldn't have finished this on my own because it's just too stressful for me.

Season 2 is almost purely plot-driven, but the plot wasn't that great... Without the time to breathe or the thread of emotional logic it had in season 1, the gendered violence and weaknesses in writing women were much more prominent. To be fair I don't think any of the characters are written well here (the main villain was cartoonishly bad), but the women definitely got the shorter end of the stick for me. It had a lot of missed opportunities with the lesser villains' motivations and character arcs, and one of the episodes had an extremely extended domestic violence scene.

AND episode 9 is a total waste of time. It was meant to be a "three stories" episode playing with different art styles, something that is normally my favorite kind of episode, but it ends up only showing us 1) nothing we didn't already know 2) information about the main villain that would have been better off revealed much earlier... The entire episode was like 26 minutes, and I was so annoyed by it I almost left the groupwatch ajskdl;ja;fdja;fa

First impression on manhua + live action adaptation

I checked out the manhua and live action afterwards to 緩一緩, and I'm really enjoying the manhua! Volume 1 has an opera troupe case set in the aftermath of the basketball arc, where you can see the emotional fallout and Lu Guang's attempt to give Cheng Xiaoshi some time travel therapy... Will definitely continue.

As for the live action adaptation... the Slam Dunk props are inconspicuous reminders that I'm watching a Sugarman Media production. :P The setup is also quite different, as Cheng Xiaoshi is superhuman in more than the specific time travel way... and he and Lu Guang meet as adults, with Lu Guang purposefully seeking him out to presumably set things right. (I haven't watched past episode 1, so it's still unclear what Lu Guang wants.)

热辣滚烫 YOLO (2024)
Chinese movie adaptation of 100 Yen Love.

Thoughts

I never saw the original, so I went into this assuming it was a sports movie, only to find out it wasn't as sports- and FL-centric as I initially thought.

The most interesting part about this movie for me is how it carefully avoids bodyshaming the main character, who for most of the movie is thirty years old, depressed, and fat. She ends up losing weight when she decides to get serious about boxing, but the focus is on how much better she feels when she pursues a goal and learns to do things for herself. The movie acknowledges her as not being conventionally attractive, but it also portrays her as being desirable, in a way that I found pretty natural and realistic.

That said, I don't think this was a very good movie... it uses that one cinematic gimmick that I've come to HATE in cmedia, in which scenes are omitted and then shown as "reveals" in the end, to purposes I don't understand... The main character's emotional arc would have been far more compelling from the get-go if it had been told in a regular, linear fashion!!!!!!!!!! The little 小紅花 montage would still have worked, I promise!!!!!!!

Anyway, I enjoyed the last 30-ish minutes (which had the training montage + ending), but I watched most of the middle bits in the fastest speed Netflix would allow me to watch it in.

The Double eps 1-20
DNF, but sometimes I go back to rewatch the music battle scenes (ep 11).

PS. Netflix appears to do this weird censored words thing where it avoids offensive language? Sometimes to ludricous effect. "Xiao jianren" got translated as "you cow" and "hellcat", which... okay...


Also saw other movies I saw when I was rooming with my parents (due to ant problems)! I think they were Oppenheimer and a recent Matt Damon heist movie (it wasn't great). Did another Kung Fu Hustle rewatch too, since it's apparently on Netflix, and yeah... still a classic. :) Curiously, I get more stressed watching this as an adult, in anticipation of the "painful" scenes (mostly in the first half, a.k.a. the best parts) which is funny because this movie is also now "comfort movie" status to me... Landlady with hair rollers you will always be a legend. ♥


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Other recents:
( August life updates )

Yong-Jiu Grocery Store (2019)

I was really enjoying this show, but sadly from ep6 onward it became a completely different drama, with weird tone changes that wandered into romcom and then dogsblood territory. It felt like episodes 5 and 6 were meant to be the natural stopping point that was meant to lead into the epilogue but they just dragged it on for a few more episodes.

The mother-daughter storyline was particularly disappointing as the escalated dramatics made the characterizations fall apart, ultimately absolving bad motherhood in a super lazy and stereotypical way. There were pieces in the mother's past that, though compelling, belonged to a completely different puzzle. This show was always about men (the main character, his grandfather, and his grandfather's friends), but the second half made it about men in a very unpleasant way in which women’s storylines were meant to complete the men's instead of existing on their own. So what was meant to be a really sweet and poignant epilogue scene ended up a bit soured for me. :( (Though I still really liked it!)

Acting-wise, the leads felt lackluster with little to no personality, but I'm unclear how much of that is the acting and how much of it is the writing and directing. Maybe a bit of everything.

This show also kind of tripped my SEAsian sensitivities (I'm very sensitive haha), but it's mixed with the show's lack of regard for women, and idk if that makes it better or not. ^^;

On the flip side, I did like learning how the Hokkien word for "kitchen" is written: 灶咖 (pronounced the same in Mandarin)! And the OST is still very very good and the whole thing is actually available for streaming internationally.


我五行缺你 (My Five Elements Lack You) chapters 25-35
(Temporarily dropped again bc my brain stopped braining this week haha)

I have mixed feelings about the case writing from the semifinal arc (building murders) to the bridge arc (lesbians). It feels like the author is still trying to get the hang of nailing longer, twistier mysteries. The lead-ups always have me SO invested, but the final answers are not very convincing. For the tournament arc, where the emphasis is more on interpersonal dynamics, the quick wrap-ups make sense considering the limitations of the characters who are at not leisure to truly investigate. But I think some of the reveals feel more focused on piling up the drama and the twists, rather than the integrity of a short story. I think I was most let-down by the Bridge arc because it was set outside the shackles of a tournament, and I feel like it did not pay me back for the level of emotional investment I had in the f/f couple because I still had so many questions left, lol.

fengshui bfs 35/

soooo are we going to address to the mirror situation or was all of that just part of TXC’s mental state at the time? i was a little confused by the pieces and roundabout route of this arc, and unsure if they’ll revisit these cases (it feels like they won’t)

— 🌟 (@halfcactus) August 21, 2023

I Ship My Adversary X Me manhua - volume 8
The latest chapter is showing us Lao Huang watching the variety show, so it seems we are not far from the end of the manhua. :(

I think this is the longest I've stuck with a danmei canon (I have been with these boys since ~2018 or 2019...)——the manhua really is just so good at keeping everything fresh. There's even an easter egg to the audiodrama-exclusive side couple ♥

ismm v8/

not me getting emotional bc 社會人’s pfp is a 小豬 🥹🥹🥹 ty manhua team for the fanservice crumbs even though this ship is only canon in the AD 🫶 pic.twitter.com/FS0Jq5oZhY

— 🌟 (@halfcactus) July 23, 2023

ismm v8 c88

i didn’t think they could possibly do justice to the guessing game in manhua form (since they are guessing songs/song lyrics) BUT!!!!!!!! MY HEART!!!!!!!! pic.twitter.com/hfSH9C25YV

— 🌟 (@halfcactus) August 8, 2023

Marry My Dead Body (2023)
A good arranged marriage movie centered on the dead person's life, relationships, and struggles as a gay Taiwanese man, though I think it went, as many dramas do, a bit too far on the parental apologism (with very contrived rationales for bad behavior). Plot-wise, it's very straightforward and focused more on getting characters where they need to be. As far as messaging goes, the commentary on sexism in particular felt more effective than usual, maybe because it plays with the characters' PoVs and the consequences of one's assumptions.

Anyway, I have been forced to look at Aaron Yan's face again and lay my childhood fondness for him to rest. /o\ He at least played a character that felt... appropriate.

CW for the main character's homophobia and ACAB-ness, especially at the beginning. It's meant to be part of his character's arc where he does get consequences from his actions, and I think they did well in casting an actor who is charismatic and funny. But it's still kind of a lot. He also has temper issues, which are just unpleasant to see in a cop character.

The use of Jolin Tsai's music (an icon, an ally, and an enduring pop star) really bumped this movie up a notch for me!



C.S. Pacat, "Fence" vol1–5
A graphic novel about fencing, boarding school memories, and... love?

Pros: ensemble cast; sports-centric; LGBT characters; homoerotic sports tropes are as homoerotic as they sound

Cons: the characters (except for Aiden) and the storytelling are not making this very engaging for me

( cut because this is going to get long )