This week’s Top Ten Tuesday theme is “Ten Things I Loved About [Insert Book Title Here]”.
The obvious choice for me would be to tell you all about the things I love about Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor — and there’s so much I could tell you about that I love, from the world-building to some of the descriptions, like one character looking at another (whom she has underestimated) “like she’d been bitten by a pillow”.
But it would be terribly obvious for me to pick The Goblin Emperor, and I’ve talked about it plenty before. So instead, here’s my list of things I love about The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System. It’s technically released as a series of four volumes, but it’s really a single story (originally a webnovel), so I’m going to talk about the whole thing.
- The illustrations in the English translation! I usually have trouble imagining characters, as I have total aphantasia, but the illustrations in these books are gorgeous and expressive.
- Luo Binghe’s curly hair. I know it’s not actually in the text of the books, as far as I can remember, but it looks pretty lush in the illustrations.
- Shen Yuan/Shen Qingqiu’s total lack of self-knowledge. Bless him, he’s an idiot, he has no idea he’s gay, he doesn’t understand his own motivations, he’s just a mess. But he gets there in the end!
- Shen Yuan/Shen Qingqiu is a total nerd. He tries to hide it, but he has so many opinions about the story and the monsters, and he’s unabashedly fascinated by so much of it.
- Liu Qingge. He becomes so protective and supportive of Shen Yuan (as Shen Qingqiu), and he doesn’t try to sugarcoat anything. When he thinks Shen Qingqiu is worried about being a burden to the sect, he doesn’t try to say he isn’t — but he says he doesn’t fear that burden. How supportive can you get?!
- The fact that Luo Binghe and Shen Qingqiu canonically get married, and that Shen Qingqiu’s total idiocy doesn’t stop him from trying out calling Luo Binghe his husband one more time, even when they aren’t having sex.
- None of Luo Binghe’s love interests from the original story are demonised, and the fact that the story becomes about Luo Binghe and Shen Qingqiu’s love story allows those characters to grow and shine.
- The story doesn’t take itself too seriously. Shen Qingqiu is constantly commenting about the dramatic moments and silly plots, lampshading it all. And it’s so aware of fandom: the story knows what the fans are thinking (indeed, that’s kind of the point).
- It’s one of the few stories where the love interests have bad sex, not just once or as a plot point, but continually. It makes sense with their characters and levels of experience, and the constraints of the world — and they are getting a bit better at it in the extras… They’ll get there. It just feels surprisingly realistic, all things considered, that things aren’t magical for them right away.
- It has a happy, unambiguous ending. Luo Binghe and Shen Qingqiu are in love, together, married, and will work things out, whatever life throws at them. I won’t say no tragedy here, because they go through a lot to get there — but despite everything, they get their happy ending.
Now, would I recommend this series to everyone? Mmm, no. I thought I wouldn’t like it myself, reading the first book, and there are things about it which are tricky (a teacher having a relationship with his former student, whom he met when he was a lot younger, for example). But it wormed its way into my heart, and dealt with all of that surprisingly well, and I could use about three books more (especially if they feature Liu Qingge and Luo Binghe having to wear a metaphorical get-along shirt).
