Review: My Vow To My Liege
Jan. 11th, 2022 03:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alias_sqbrI really enjoyed the Chinese fantasy m/f romance visual novel My Vow To My Liege, historical RPF set in the 5th Century BC Kingdom of Ng/Wu about various real and mythical people. The protagonist is King Fuchai, a woman cross-dressing for Reasons (to do with Evil Dragons)
It's well made, with good art, UI, music, and (Mandarin) voice acting. The writing is pretty good, too, a little repetitive in parts and with some pacing issues but made with a lot of heart. The English translation was done by one of the writers and is a little clunky and in need of proof-reading but has some moments of real poetry. And the game is LONG, you get a ridiculous amount of story for the low price.
Content notes for the game: suicide, violence, incest (not a love interest), rape (not from a love interest), age gap ships, slavery, fatphobia, hurtful gender reveal, master-slave relationship, major character death, violence between love interests
Here's the masterlist of my reaction posts and a character guide.
More thoughts, no spoilers:
The complicated power and gender dynamics were mostly handled pretty well as het dating sims go, and while FuChai is ultimately hard to read as anything but cis or maybe agender, everyone feels pretty bisexual.
FuChai is a rare sort of female character: androgynous, traumatised, bitter, pragmatic, blood-thirsty and badass. She does definitely have moments of being passive/forgiving/optimistic/pacifistic/in need of saving etc, especially in comparison to her love interests, but this is generally not presented as a gendered thing. And her most doggedly optimistic and trusting choices are based on the real, male Fuchai (for whom it did not end well)
The romances didn't always quite hit my buttons, but were pretty good, and the moments of bittersweet yearning were fantastic. The dynamic tends to be intense, fraught friendship that naturally slides into romance.
I had some issues with the ChenFeng Path, which I go into below.
So!
More detail on content notes: There is just generally a lot of violence and blood, not usually drawn. The incest and rape is a single event that happened before canon. The game flashes back to it sometimes, especially on the ChenFeng path. There are brief references to rape threats towards various characters. Characters commit suicide onscreen in some routes, especially bad ends. The slavery stuff is mostly the GouJian route, and is the sort of slavery they had in Ancient China.
FuChai owns GouJian as a slave for a while, but they both think of him as a political prisoner who will return to being the king of a nearby nation. It's still pretty fraught and sometimes messed up in both directions.
Wu ZiXu is FuChai's much older tutor, they met when she was 14 and he was 32. She describes him as like a father at one point. He doesn't express any interest until she pursues him as an adult.
FuChai, GouJian, and Wu ZiXu are all warriors and leaders in 5th century BC China, which involves a bunch of morally questionable actions like owning slaves, murdering political prisoners etc. They sometimes take the more honourable and/or ethical path, especially FuChai, but sometimes don't.
In general the characters sometimes do nasty or violent things to each other, for political reasons or otherwise.
FuChai having to pretend to be her dead brother and take on the responsibilities of a doomed royal line is seen as traumatising, and in some routes happiness for her involves rejecting that life/identity, which sometimes hit gender buttons for me. But there were ways being a princess was traumatising too, and endings where she happily stays king once the doom is gone.
On the ChenFeng path the game does what I worried it would: he is uncomfortable with her role as a King and wants her to return to being the powerless princess/woman she was before, and then she does. But that route bothered me for other reasons: I never felt like they really worked through the weird dynamic of him being her obedient servant she treats like a pet, and the plot is generally unpleasant without many fun shippy moments. But even on that route she's still a badass king and warrior and he does ultimately respect that. EDIT: On further thought, it's hard to untangle my other more general issues from the fact that it set off a specific trigger for me that will probably not bother most people: For reasons beyond his control, ChenFeng does non-sexual things which trigger FuChai's existing rape trauma.
I liked the other routes a lot more. Where she ends up politically varies, but it feels like a choice she's making because it suits the person she is on that route. The power dynamics are complicated but work for the couple. Wu ZiXu and GouJian try to be commanding and controlling sometimes, but she has total power over them and uses it, and ultimately they're into that. YiGuang is more chill, but also the toppiest love interest, and kind of doesn't care whether or not she's the King as long as she's happy.
I suspect it would be pretty fun to play as a slightly gender non-comforming straightish cis woman, but I had a complicated experience as a transmasculine bi person. Like a lot of cross-dressing het romance it's a heady mix of heteronormative and quasi-queer but not in quite the ways I'm used to. It definitely felt like they wanted to make it more overtly queer but were held back by censorship, eg there are zero no-homo moments, even when Fuchai and her love interest come across as a m/m couple to outsiders or even the love interest himself. Also Fuchai has a fiancee who she is very femslashy with and who is happy to find out FuChai is a woman (and then gets a het love interest in some routes but it felt pretty pasted on) FuChai hates feeling like a half-man-half-woman during the game, and always ends up wearing feminine clothes in happy endings, but it feels more like she hates feeling like a socially unacceptable failure than caring about womanhood or femininity in and of itself. Some love interests describe her as a beautiful woman when she's presenting as a man and she really likes it. Noone ever figures out that FuChai is afab based purely on her appearance, even someone who has reason to read her as a cis woman reads her as a slight but muscular cis man.
The fantasy plot is pretty fun, though it's similar on all paths which starts to get a bit boring. The battles are exciting even if a lot of the tactics went over my head. There's violent and horrorific elements I was super into but YMMV.
It's deliberately non-historically-accurate, but there's still a lot of references to Famous Historical Figures And Events etc which largely went over my head. But the basic plot is pretty easy to follow.
There's no onscreen sex, and generally just a few briefly described kisses. The implied sex is all 100% consensual, some of the kisses are a bit dubcon but FuChai is definitely into it.
The bad endings tend to be kinda short but enjoyably tragic and bittersweet.
There's more I could say but this is already pretty long! If there's anything else you'd like to know let me know.
It's well made, with good art, UI, music, and (Mandarin) voice acting. The writing is pretty good, too, a little repetitive in parts and with some pacing issues but made with a lot of heart. The English translation was done by one of the writers and is a little clunky and in need of proof-reading but has some moments of real poetry. And the game is LONG, you get a ridiculous amount of story for the low price.
Content notes for the game: suicide, violence, incest (not a love interest), rape (not from a love interest), age gap ships, slavery, fatphobia, hurtful gender reveal, master-slave relationship, major character death, violence between love interests
Here's the masterlist of my reaction posts and a character guide.
More thoughts, no spoilers:
The complicated power and gender dynamics were mostly handled pretty well as het dating sims go, and while FuChai is ultimately hard to read as anything but cis or maybe agender, everyone feels pretty bisexual.
FuChai is a rare sort of female character: androgynous, traumatised, bitter, pragmatic, blood-thirsty and badass. She does definitely have moments of being passive/forgiving/optimistic/pacifistic/in need of saving etc, especially in comparison to her love interests, but this is generally not presented as a gendered thing. And her most doggedly optimistic and trusting choices are based on the real, male Fuchai (for whom it did not end well)
The romances didn't always quite hit my buttons, but were pretty good, and the moments of bittersweet yearning were fantastic. The dynamic tends to be intense, fraught friendship that naturally slides into romance.
I had some issues with the ChenFeng Path, which I go into below.
So!
More detail on content notes: There is just generally a lot of violence and blood, not usually drawn. The incest and rape is a single event that happened before canon. The game flashes back to it sometimes, especially on the ChenFeng path. There are brief references to rape threats towards various characters. Characters commit suicide onscreen in some routes, especially bad ends. The slavery stuff is mostly the GouJian route, and is the sort of slavery they had in Ancient China.
FuChai owns GouJian as a slave for a while, but they both think of him as a political prisoner who will return to being the king of a nearby nation. It's still pretty fraught and sometimes messed up in both directions.
Wu ZiXu is FuChai's much older tutor, they met when she was 14 and he was 32. She describes him as like a father at one point. He doesn't express any interest until she pursues him as an adult.
FuChai, GouJian, and Wu ZiXu are all warriors and leaders in 5th century BC China, which involves a bunch of morally questionable actions like owning slaves, murdering political prisoners etc. They sometimes take the more honourable and/or ethical path, especially FuChai, but sometimes don't.
In general the characters sometimes do nasty or violent things to each other, for political reasons or otherwise.
FuChai having to pretend to be her dead brother and take on the responsibilities of a doomed royal line is seen as traumatising, and in some routes happiness for her involves rejecting that life/identity, which sometimes hit gender buttons for me. But there were ways being a princess was traumatising too, and endings where she happily stays king once the doom is gone.
On the ChenFeng path the game does what I worried it would: he is uncomfortable with her role as a King and wants her to return to being the powerless princess/woman she was before, and then she does. But that route bothered me for other reasons: I never felt like they really worked through the weird dynamic of him being her obedient servant she treats like a pet, and the plot is generally unpleasant without many fun shippy moments. But even on that route she's still a badass king and warrior and he does ultimately respect that. EDIT: On further thought, it's hard to untangle my other more general issues from the fact that it set off a specific trigger for me that will probably not bother most people: For reasons beyond his control, ChenFeng does non-sexual things which trigger FuChai's existing rape trauma.
I liked the other routes a lot more. Where she ends up politically varies, but it feels like a choice she's making because it suits the person she is on that route. The power dynamics are complicated but work for the couple. Wu ZiXu and GouJian try to be commanding and controlling sometimes, but she has total power over them and uses it, and ultimately they're into that. YiGuang is more chill, but also the toppiest love interest, and kind of doesn't care whether or not she's the King as long as she's happy.
I suspect it would be pretty fun to play as a slightly gender non-comforming straightish cis woman, but I had a complicated experience as a transmasculine bi person. Like a lot of cross-dressing het romance it's a heady mix of heteronormative and quasi-queer but not in quite the ways I'm used to. It definitely felt like they wanted to make it more overtly queer but were held back by censorship, eg there are zero no-homo moments, even when Fuchai and her love interest come across as a m/m couple to outsiders or even the love interest himself. Also Fuchai has a fiancee who she is very femslashy with and who is happy to find out FuChai is a woman (and then gets a het love interest in some routes but it felt pretty pasted on) FuChai hates feeling like a half-man-half-woman during the game, and always ends up wearing feminine clothes in happy endings, but it feels more like she hates feeling like a socially unacceptable failure than caring about womanhood or femininity in and of itself. Some love interests describe her as a beautiful woman when she's presenting as a man and she really likes it. Noone ever figures out that FuChai is afab based purely on her appearance, even someone who has reason to read her as a cis woman reads her as a slight but muscular cis man.
The fantasy plot is pretty fun, though it's similar on all paths which starts to get a bit boring. The battles are exciting even if a lot of the tactics went over my head. There's violent and horrorific elements I was super into but YMMV.
It's deliberately non-historically-accurate, but there's still a lot of references to Famous Historical Figures And Events etc which largely went over my head. But the basic plot is pretty easy to follow.
There's no onscreen sex, and generally just a few briefly described kisses. The implied sex is all 100% consensual, some of the kisses are a bit dubcon but FuChai is definitely into it.
The bad endings tend to be kinda short but enjoyably tragic and bittersweet.
There's more I could say but this is already pretty long! If there's anything else you'd like to know let me know.
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