I’m not much of a hate-reader. Life is short, time is precious, and I am lazy. But there are exceptions. There are times when I get caught up in a story that I vehemently dislike, but I keep reading because how can I hate it properly if I don’t read the entire thing? How will I be able to text my friends increasingly angry updates if I stop? Don’t we all sometimes crave the cathartic pleasure of a good long rant?
Sometimes it’s a novel that has been extravagantly praised by people who normally have good taste. Sometimes it’s fanfic with the most creatively baffling approach to characterization, punctuation, and the acrobatic abilities of the human body in intimate situations. Doesn’t really matter what it is. What matters is the experience of getting wholly sucked into something that could have been good but is in fact so terrible there is nothing to do but tell patient friends and disinterested cats all about the squandered opportunities, unfulfilled plot threads, and characters so ridiculous they deserve to be drop-kicked into the ocean.
What I do not do, under any circumstances, is tell the author themselves how much their book sucks.
Because I’m not an asshole. Also, I’m afraid. I won’t be tricked! I know what happens if you flame an author after hate-reading their beloved magnum opus:
You die.
Then you wake up in the world of the story as the villain, and there’s a voice in your head telling you to fix the narrative or else, and along the way you’ll be forced, very much against your will, to reconsider everything you thought you knew about yourself, your relationships, and what you want from life.
…Okay, maybe I’m not 100% certain that’s what happens, but you can’t prove it doesn’t. I’m not about to take any chances.
Let us consider the cautionary tale of Shen Yuan, the main character of Mo Xiang Tong Xiu’s The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System. He is a young man who really, really, really, really hates a crappy book, dies mad about it, and wakes up to discover the whole novel is now very much his problem.
Note: There are a lot of spoilers for The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System in this piece, but I’m not sure even extensive spoilers could ever hope to convey the experience of reading this utterly, delightfully madcap book.
I love a book where the main character dies on the first page. In this case, Shen Yuan has just finished reading the webnovel Proud Immortal Demon Way by an author known as Airplane Shooting Toward the Sky. Proud Immortal Demon Way is a trashy male power fantasy novel about a downtrodden, part-demon young man named Luo Binghe who becomes an all-powerful demon lord by crushing his enemies and collecting a massive harem of beautiful women. It’s hundreds of chapters and millions of words long and Shen Yuan hate-read all of them. Under his own online pseudonym (Peerless Cucumber) he flamed the author extensively and repeatedly for all of the bad decisions, bad writing, bad characters, and more. He’s furious about the novel’s conclusion, but he literally dies in the middle of typing up a comment about the final chapter.
Then he wakes up in the world of the novel. He’s genre savvy enough to understand that he’s now in a transmigration story, so he begins playing along immediately. This is reinforced by the appearance of a mysterious game-like System, which challenges him to fix the story to be more satisfying. The System awards him points when he does well and detracts points when he does poorly. If his point count falls to zero, he’ll be returned to his original body—which is dead.
One tiny complicating factor is that he’s transmigrated into the body of Shen Qingqiu, the novel’s primary villain, who will eventually come to a horrific end at the hands of the protagonist. (In the close third-person perspective, Shen Yuan starts thinking of himself as Shen Qingqiu immediately, which is a narratively interesting choice. It also means that’s the character name I’ll be using from now on.) The newly-transmigrated Shen Qingqiu decides, somewhat desperately, that he’s going to save his own life by never making an enemy of protagonist and future demon lord Luo Binghe.
It’s not all self-preservation. Shen Qingqiu genuinely has no interest in being a sadistic, lecherous, child-abusing villain; he just wants to use his cool new powers and learn about this world’s many cool monsters. He seems to enjoy his new role as a mentor, teacher, and leader as he spends years preparing Luo Binghe for the many obligatory hardships ahead. The System never lets Shen Qingqiu forget the narrative framework, but it’s impossible for him to keep thinking of the people around him as mere characters. His fondness for them is real. The hurts they suffer are real. He might be stuck in a mysteriously gamified world that should only exist in a webnovel, but this is his life now, and he’s doing his best. He’s going to beat the System by being a good teacher, never becoming the protagonist’s nemesis, and using his knowledge of the world to escape a painful death.
At least, that’s what he tells us. He wants us to know he knows exactly what he’s doing.
I love an unreliable narrator. I love when there is a story between the lines, and I love that there are so many different forms it can take. These can include narrators whose perspective is skewed because they are young or innocent (To Kill A Mockingbird, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn); narrators who are missing vital information due to manipulation or mental illness (Shutter Island, Fight Club); or narrators who are deliberately misleading (Gone Girl, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, We Have Always Lived in the Castle).
And then there’s Shen Qingqiu, who is an unreliable narrator because he is constantly, confidently misinterpreting the story he’s living in.
You see, Shen Qingqiu might be genre savvy enough to know what to do when he transmigrates into a male power fantasy novel, but he is not quite genre savvy enough to recognize that his own actions have transformed the entire story into a sweeping gay romance.
But we know. We, the readers, know that we picked up a danmei novel. We’re not remotely surprised when it becomes blazingly obvious that Luo Binghe has fallen in love with Shen Qingqiu, nor are we surprised when it becomes equally obvious (to everybody except Shen Qingqiu himself) that the feelings are mutual. This tension between what the main point-of-view character is telling us and what is actually going on underpins both the humor and the pathos in the book—and it has both in abundance, as it is a very funny book with a whole lot of tragedy and pain just underneath the surface.
What I love most about it, however, is the way Shen Qingqiu’s perspective is used to show just how easy it is to fall into being an unreliable narrator about your own life. He claims to hate nearly everything about Proud Immortal Demon Way, yet he has an encyclopedic knowledge of every single thing that happens in the story and, most importantly, how it impacts the protagonist. He insists his primary goal is to survive the narrative, but he often throws himself into mortal danger to protect Luo Binghe. He repeatedly claims to be a straight man, but also waxes rhapsodic about the looks and prowess of male characters, while what he notices about female characters tends to be more along the lines of wondering if a woman’s feet hurt from going about barefoot all the time.
This wouldn’t be very interesting if there was nothing more to it than a tiresome “haha what a loser, he doesn’t know he’s gay” joke. But that’s not all there is to it. Shen Qingqiu is living in a story that he knows very well but is constantly changing all around him; he is also revealing bits of pieces of the stories he has been telling himself about who he is, what he wants, and how ill-fitting those narratives are turning out to be. Those stories are familiar to all of us, for all that we are trying very hard to live in a more evolved world than they imply: Men want women. Men want power. Conquest by violence is a victory. Fucking lots of women is a victory. That’s what every man wants! The fact that these things don’t apply to him and are therefore not universal doesn’t seem to enter Shen Qingqiu’s thoughts at all. He’s in a harem novel, which exists to give men what they want, therefore this is what men want. It is, in his mind, that simple.
This is the marriage of toxic masculinity and compulsive heteronormativity in its purest form. Shen Qinqiu even insists he is disinterested in the sex scenes and innumerable wives in Proud Immortal Demon Way only because the book is written by a talentless hack just trying to give the audience what they want—not because, say, it’s not the kind of sex he’s interested in, or that well-developed emotional connection between characters might be more engaging. (To his credit, he does frequently note that the female characters deserve better.)
Likewise, when Luo Binghe fails to show any interest in building his harem, Shen Qingqiu interprets this as a failure on his part: he has changed the narrative too much and ruined the protagonist’s chance at eventual triumph. He thinks this even when the System does not punish him for it; so ingrained is his belief that notches on the bedpost are necessary for a man’s satisfaction that he is continually baffled when every harem-related plot falls by the wayside. It has to mean he is doing something wrong. It certainly can’t mean he is doing something right—or that, say, Luo Binghe never actually wanted triple-digit wives; he was just a lonely, abused, deeply traumatized young man painfully desperate for any sort of positive connection or attention, and changing the narrative means he has found those things in Shen Qingqiu instead.
About that aforementioned talentless hack of an author… Shen Qingqiu learns fairly early in the story that he is not the only transmigrator around. The other one is Airplane Shooting Toward the Sky, author of Proud Immortal Demon Way. Who has, yes, transmigrated into his own fictional world, as one of his own fictional characters, and is every bit as messed up by that as one might expect. As the two become sorta-friends, Shen Qingqiu learns that one of his most scathing complaints about Proud Immortal Demon Way is correct: Airplane was constantly changing the story away from his original plan in order to try to give the audience what they wanted. Specifically, he abandoned plans to expand on the main villain’s backstory because, he says, readers didn’t want the moral complexity that would introduce. They wanted an unquestionably evil villain, a protagonist who could not fail, and no sticky questions about whether there is a real difference between the two, or whether it all depends on where the story happens to fall in a tragic and perpetuating cycle of violence and abuse.
We learn about Proud Immortal Demon Way through Shen Qingqiu’s disdainful view of it, and what we know about the story it could have been is even more indirect. There are stories within stories within stories, some of them incomplete, some of them unrealized, but all of them making up an interesting and vital part of the whole.
This is what I mean when I say there is so much more going on than an unreliable narrator trapped by his own cluelessness in an extended “he doesn’t know he’s gay” joke. To reiterate, this is a very funny book. But it is also, in so many ways, a deeply tragic book, for all that it is full of hijinks, shenanigans, and a happy ending.
Yes, it is about a man who hate-reads a shitty harem novel, dies mad about it, wakes up in the story, and eventually realizes that he’s accidentally altered the entire narrative with the power of gay love. It’s also about a young man so used to letting heteronormative gender norms define what he wants that he doesn’t recognize love when he’s feeling it himself. It’s about an author whose vision is stifled under the pressure of simplifying his complex ideas to meet the demands of an audience that he fears would never be interested in what he wants to say. It’s about how powerful a little kindness can be, and how cruel it is to withhold it from children. It’s about generations of men who are maligned, scorned, and mistreated in a hierarchical society, and why they learn that the only way to overcome that is to gain the power to mistreat others. It’s about a boy who doesn’t know he’s the protagonist of a novel, doesn’t know there are mysterious forces working to alter the direction of his life, because all he knows is that he craves kindness and love and power enough to protect the person who offers them, no matter what it takes.
It’s about the stories we tell ourselves about what life should look like and the pain we cause when we chase after things we don’t really want.
Kali Wallace studied geology and earned a PhD in geophysics before she realized she enjoyed inventing imaginary worlds more than she liked researching the real one. She is the author of science fiction, fantasy, and horror novels for children, teens, and adults, including the 2022 Philip K. Dick Award winner Dead Space. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, F&SF, Asimov’s, Tor.com, and other speculative fiction magazines. Find her newsletter at kaliwallace.substack.com.
