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alias_sqbr) wrote2022-01-11 03:26 pm
alias_sqbr) wrote2022-01-11 03:26 pm
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Review: My Vow To My Liege
I 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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Goujian ended up being my personal "...in hindsight I don't like this" route. I was invested while I was on his route, and he's really interesting and in some ways sympathetic, but his manipulativeness and ability to justify reprehensible things to himself hit too close to home. He's very love him or hate him in the Chinese fandom. But I agree that Chenfeng felt like the weakest route, and I liked his BE better than his HE. I can appreciate what the writers were trying to do, the one love interest too insignificant to get written down in the history books, but the result is that he doesn't really feel as significant as the other dudes as an LI.
I do wonder why they didn't just make that Zheng Dan route instead of the Chenfeng route, but I guess with Chenfeng you get to have the interesting compare and contrast of having two LIs who knew her primarily as Tengyu and the two who know her as Fuchai. I found the contrasting political situations between routes interesting enough to make up for the repetitiveness--gurer'f ab jnl bs fnivat Jh Mvkh vs lbh tb jvgu n puvyqubbq sevraq bcgvba, naq Funbwvnat trgf pncgherq vs lbh tb jvgu na rarzl bcgvba. Tbhwvna tvirf lbh gur orfg trbcbyvgvpny bhgpbzr ng gur cbgragvny pbfg bs lbhe qbzrfgvp fvghngvba nf cre uvfgbel, jurernf Jh Mvkh'f UR vf gur bayl bar jurer gur pncvgny arire snyyf vagb rarzl unaqf. Naq gung yvar nobhg gurer orvat ab Cevzr Zvavfgre Jh jvgubhg Ybeq At naq ivpr irefn uvgf uneq tvira ur'f qrnq va rirel raqvat jurer fur qvrf be tvirf hc gur guebar.
Side note that Tengyu was an actual historical/legendary princess who was said to have committed suicide in outrage at being offered a fish dish that her father had already eaten half of. Her father buried her with treasures, a cursed sword, and human sacrifices. Shaojiang might be inspired by a Qi princess married to one of Tengyu's brothers, who was said to have pined away for missing her homeland, and asked to be buried at the top of a mountain so she could gaze toward Qi. I kind of loved the game taking these extremely minor female figures that get one line of mention in the history for dying and making them such major players in the Wu-Yue story. If you're interested in the history behind the game, here's a list of ancient sources available in English!
https://tiger-tally.tumblr.com/post/662962970787299328/wu-and-yue-premodern-sources-available-in-english
There are a ton of historical details in the game--even in the Steam achievements. As someone who loves the history, I was really impressed by the amount of research the writers clearly did, and how the historical elements and classic poetry were woven into the story. Wu Zixu's route especially smashed my "holy shit this is femdom" and "holy shit the parallels with his historical fate and his father's historical fate" buttons at the same time.
Anyway this is already long enough. XD I'm just someone who deeply adores this game in all its imperfect, ambitious, passionate glory, and I'm really happy you enjoyed it!
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Oh wow thank you for all this! I am keeping your link to historical records in another tab or I'll get distracted reading and never reply to your comment, but it looks fascinating! As do all the fun fannish discussions on your tumblr.
I am glad I played GouJian's route first, before I saw him be QUITE that awful, but I still enjoy it in retrospect, just with more dark "haha GouJian you bastard (affectionate)" amusement. I have a pretty high tolerance for certain kinds of appalling love interests, though (and very little for other kinds).
I am mostly just curious to know what a Zheng Dan route would even look like! Gur bguref ner nyy irel sevraqyl jvgu ShPunv sebz gur fgneg, rira TbhWvna va uvf jnl, ohg vg'f abg pyrne ubj zhpu, vs nal, bs ure rneyvre cbfvgvir eryngvbafuvc jvgu Murat Qna jnf fvaprer naq ur pregnvayl qbrfa'g npg yvxr ur yvxrf ure ng nyy yngre ba. Gung yriry bs vagrafr nagvcngul pna nofbyhgryl or gur onfvf sbe n ebznapr nep, ohg vg jbhyq or n irel qvssrerag bar gb gur bguref!
Oh no that last line of your rot13 text is giving me feelings ;_;
Side note! Looking at your blog you seem to have played a few other Chinese visual novels, are there any other voiced-with-English-subtitles ones you think are any good? Someone replied on another post I made about the game saying it looked like a good way to practice their Mandarin, and I felt like I SHOULD be able to rec some others but couldn't think of any. https://otome-games.dreamwidth.org/42049.html?thread=192065#cmt192065
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My crackpot theory is that gur erny Murat Qna vf fgvyy nyvir fbzrjurer, fvapr nccneragyl gur Qentba Tbq arrqf serfu oybbq sebz gur crefba ur'f gnxvat gur nccrnenapr bs. Gura ntnva, fbzrubj znxvat gur Qentba Tbq tvir hc eriratr naq pbzr nebhaq gb lbh jbhyq znxr n uryy bs n gurzngvpnyyl svggvat gehr ebhgr sbe guvf tnzr.
I can appreciate Goujian as a character and an antagonist! I just think Fuchai has much less stressful romantic options! But my Wu Zixu favoritism is strong. I really haven't seen another romance like his, poised at the intersection of all those power dynamics, full of fraught power play and mutual furious devotion and echoes of incredible historical tragedy. So many elements that are normally turnoffs for me just worked for these characters specifically.
The other otome game by these devs, Lost in Secular Love, is also voiced with an English translation, and there's a "play back the audio for previous lines" function. It's a more lighthearted and lower-stakes game (though some endings get quite psychologically dark), and I really enjoyed it overall--the heroine is absolutely great, the love interests are really interesting takes on their archetypes (and voiced by the VAs for Chenfeng, Goujian, and Wu Zixu), and I loved all the old lady side characters. Warning that the sex scenes aren't the best about consent, though.
Other than that...some Chinese mobile games like Tears of Themis allow you to combine English subtitles with Chinese audio, although I haven't played them myself. (A lot of them have Japanese audio as an option and sometimes the only option, interestingly, and Tears of Themis in particular has a ridiculously all-star Japanese VA cast, because Chinese voice acting has a poor reputation, and even a lot of Chinese players prefer Japanese VAs.) And Soulslayer is more of a mystery game than an otome game, but it does have full voice acting (the MC is voiced by Shaojiang's VA!) and an English localization. The art isn't the best, but the story was more than worth the while, and the devs of that game have also made a wuxia otome game that I hope gets localized someday.
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That's a really interesting theory, and makes sense. But it would feel a bit like cheating to me, I'd want the second option unless they could make the first option equally weird and messy.
I just finished Lost In Secular Love myself and really liked it! I passed on your comment, so hopefully they can find something fun to play while practicing their language skills :)
no subject
Re gender, I was honestly taken aback at the dysphoria since it's not the typical trope in media. Even from the amab side (at least recently, not sure how stuff last year will affect it :<) people are often blithe/bland about having to crossdress, which might be thoughtlessness or just...general chill? I do get that Tengyu is forced into this situation (like you see sometimes in generic historical settings, with royal sons who have to pretend to be daughters to survive) and Watsonianly I can kind of see it's tangled up with all the head losing stress of kingship as career/being cursed to death by monster dragon, but on the Doylistic side, the amount of :[[[[[ Tengyu had was unexpected and something I'm wary of reccing to friends for whom it's going to land badly....I want to hug her a lot though. From a societal orthodoxy standpoint, her being a girl and trying to protect her country also shouldn't compel a narrative to include angst due of pressure from that quarter...? idk, I've seen a bunch of crossdressing webnovels/othermedia where everyone is going I AM HAVING FUN AND SUCCESS IN ANCIENT CHINA EVEN IF I GET STABBED in both the Mulan mode or the Zhu Yingtai mode (girl crossdressing to be a scholar in the equivalent of Romeo and Juliet) or the entrepreneurship mode. I guess for me I'm fondest of when Tengyu is happy in herself (and in say, harem fics gets to exercise that equivalent of droit de seigneur :3c get it king!!)
Harem endings ARE a thing that won't pass censors though. Alas for the beauties of the inner palace......
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Yeah I've played a lot of otome and FuChai is pretty unique. I can think of lots of otome games which have SOME aspects I liked in MVTML: Hakuoki has thoughtful bittersweet historical romance (plus vampires), the heroine of Seven Kingdoms the Princess Problem can have almost any personality (though it's pretty orientalist and also unfinished), Dandelion has a self hating heroine and mild femdom, etc.
I found the gender stuff really interesting, because as you say it's not the usual approach I've seen (admittedly, mostly in non-Chinese media in my case): I've seen, like, "I miss getting to look pretty", usually followed by the love interest(s) reassuring the heroine she is VERY pretty and feminine EVEN IN MEN'S CLOTHING etc, but not this level of intense unhappiness. It made me a bit dysphoric sometimes but also felt like the devs were really thinking about how it would affect her as a character instead of just playing around with cross-dressing as a fun trope (though they definitely did that too haha). But I like when she's happy with herself too, in the end.
Any harem fic recs? Or fic recs in general, I haven't explored that aspect yet, I keep getting distracted by thoughts about the ShaoJiang/FuChai fic I will almost certainly never write.
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More happily: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27239986 complete with historical artifacts!
I've seen Hakuoki around and if I have the chance I'll find that and see how it goes!
With "I miss getting to look pretty"...I feel like that's also rare, but just because of the set-up where not crossdressing would result in fairly drastic differences in quality of life (and having a life) at all, so...the introspection part gets skipped over due to surviving? Which makes me more well inclined to how they had it in this game, even if the dysphoria MC experiences is pretty much the main thing that keeps me from reccing it everywhere (plus that part which dragged a bit in the middle chapters >->)
It's good to have a wide variety of selection for this kind of narrative though!
(Though in the generic historical CN settings that I've seen, prettiness/beauty was a term used on all genders, so your crossdressed MC who was doing GREAT on the meritocracy exams would often have people cheering after them and throwing fruits and flowers and plant matter at them, like Pan An and that other guy who died from being gawked at for his beauty. Hilariously they made that Pan An's power in the Hundred Scenes of Jiangnan city building game - he gets 50 veggies for every building he constructs.)
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I've had this comment waiting for me to be able to articulate a good reply to your interesting thoughts but my brain refuses to cooperate. Anyway, I did read and enjoy some fic, including by CatfishSr...OH. I just realised! That's the same person who translated my comic! What a treasure!
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That's really interesting, thanks!
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I hope you enjoy it if you do play it!
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Thanks, it's really good to know people read these things, sometimes it feels a bit self indulgent. Glad you enjoyed it :)