review

1 comment on "BOOK REVIEW: Farmer’s Pampered Wife: Farming Crops to Raise a Bun (SPOILERS!!!)"

If the final days of Twitter gave me anything, it was translated Chinese novels. I’ve found some really good ones, like “Dao of a Salted Fish,” and I’ve found some really bad ones which I hastily did not finish (DNF).

And then there are ones like “Farmer’s Pampered Wife: Farming Crops to Raise a Bun” or “农门娇宠：养个包子来种田” as it is likely better known as.

And it was so long. And there was SOOOOO much needless family drama that didn’t really offset the lack of action. And I really wanted to like it after putting so much effort into reading the 537 (five HUNDRED and thirty-seven!!!) chapters.

But…

Oh my god, dudes. Oh. My. God.

It started off interesting enough with a modern woman waking up in the body of a peasant woman in old timey China. And she was really ugly with a starved body and a giant facial birthmark and horrific body odor that makes herself vomit to smell it and the previous owner had done horrible things like helping her mother and sister be abused by their terrible grandmother and that side of the family and cheating on her hunter husband (who she forced to marry her!) with the local man-floozy and poisoning her toddler with chili peppers to damage his vocal cords so he isn’t able to talk anymore. Just, from the descriptions, an all-around UGLY person.

And the modern woman has to deal with that level of HISTORY while being back in historical times where it seems pretty legal to beat a woman just because. Like, she’s almost murdered by the townspeople MULTIPLE times, as in, more than once and no less than ten times. Like, EVERYBODY hated that lady.

And she’s dealing with all that past history she’s figuring out as she goes along, while trying to take care of a traumatized child and living in a peasant hut with a husband that DOES NOT like her or trust her.

So she starts by cooking delicious foods. And she’s lucky enough to find a rare and precious scorpion to sell for a LOT of money. And she gets rid of the horrific armpit stench by cutting something that the translation only showed as ASTERISKS and putting it on her pits, but it was so astringent that she had to fight to keep from screaming at the pain.

But she solves the stench problem and begins to fix the no food/poverty problem. And her life starts to get better. And she goes to town and makes a deal with the apothecary guy to sell herbs and to sell a “miraculous” herbal diet recipe that she collects royalties on. Because she knows a bit of herbal dietary lore and acupuncture because she’s moderately amazing.

And the town doctor–who seems to disappear later on–helps her with a method to cure her giant facial birthmark which involves a scar reducing cream AND A SNAKE BITE. Like, she has to let a poisonous snake bite her directly on the face. Which causes part of her face to rot and she drains it by poking needles and starts wearing a veil around all the time, so nobody realizes when she starts getting more and more and MORE pretty.

And then a restauranteur comes to town and she joins the cook-off he hosts to find chefs for his restaurant. But she doesn’t become a chef, she instead sells recipes to him that he uses and she makes a lot of money. And throughout it all her dad’s mother and his family cause her all kinds of grief. Like, the horrible cousin that moves to town spends her whole portion of the story trying to get mc KILLED by various means and is all around awful.

And throughout it all, mc is upbeat and somewhat enthusiastic. No matter the trouble that finds her, she’s able to pivot things to her advantage. And her husband is gradually falling in love with her and helps her more and more and…

And that’s when the melodrama starts.

Like, she starts her own restaurant and her and her husband build a two-story house. And the apothecary guy is murdered so she helps the son. And the floozy guy that the previous body’s owner was cheating with turns out to be a really rich guy with a wife and multiple women he cheats with, which really brings into question why he bothered with the smelly lady in the first place??? And like, he has thug boys and people have to be scared of him, but earlier her husband punched the guy a bunch of times and she fed him wine with chili peppers and caused his lips to swell up to the point she was accused of poisoning him and…

Like, after the building of the house arc, it seems the author decided to take things in a whole new direction. And rather than creating new characters, just recycled the ones already in place to fill new roles. Because that floozy man seemed like a poor layabout dude, but suddenly he has a manor house and the kind of wealth where he can kill whoever he wants and only needs to pay off the local officials, no big deal.

And like, the dad’s family… Suddenly the sister-in-law has a secret lover whose identity we never find out, even after her loser gambler husband who rapidly went downhill throughout the story killed the guy and cut off his genitals.

And then there’s war, and it turns out her husband actually has a secret identity where he was a general that’s been living in hiding for the last three years with the son that’s not really his son. And by the way, she was actually a virgin before they finally made love for the first time in the story. And she finds out that the kid wasn’t hers and…

DRA-A-A-A-A-MA.

The whole time I thought they’d been married for at least 5 years if not longer, but it turns out they’ve only been married for less than three. And NOBODY told her that she was the stepmother to the son and that the previous body owner didn’t trick a single guy into marrying her but a single dad.

And then she’s fleeing with her neighbors and her sister and dad as refugees after her house and restaurant were burned down and her mother was killed. And she’s pregnant and they get robbed by other refugees because they decided for whatever reason to help the loudmouthed cousin who is like “There’s food!” every time she gets a little bite to eat, which results in them getting attacked and losing all their money.

And the restauranteur guy, who has feelings for her, is fleeing with them and he has some money and he must have hidden like 50 buns on his body somewhere and he keeps them alive and pays for the inn when they get to the city and helps them start up their new life. And the apothecary son guy shows up again with the rich girl fiancee that she previously helped, and they all end up living together in a mansion and starting a food stall business where they sell shrimp and crab that are so delicious the emperor himself actually uses them in a banquet to celebrate the return of the victorious general… her husband.

And she gets reunited with her man, and it should be happy forever, but the emperor wants him to marry the scheming girl that shows up multiple times attempting to steal him away. And she has her baby, but it’s a difficult birth and she pierces the veil or whatever and talks with the previous body’s host…

And finds out that the previous host didn’t die, but that they instead switched places. And she has to decide whether she’s going to stay in the past life or return to her previous life, and of course she stays in the past.

But she never asks about the family she was worried about before. And she never thinks that such a horrible person might be doing horrible things in her life. And she’s told that she will eventually start to forget modern stuff as she fully integrates into her new life and…

For reals: She’s going to forget life in the future. But after she wakes up and spends a month being sick in bed, she NEVER ONCE even thinks “Maybe I should write down all the recipes I know and all the other information for when I forget everything.”

She just goes about living her life… and gets kidnapped by the restauranteur who is now working for the bad guy and also turns out to be a bad guy himself. And he drugged her and made everyone think she was drunk and maybe sexually assaulted her? Which brings the previous time when she argued with her husband and got drunk in the guy’s restaurant into question… as well as the paternity of her child? Because she got “drunk” after they argued and spent a night out, and the story is really unclear about the timing of things, but a couple months later she finds out she’s pregnant so…

And throughout the whole story until the last like 50 chapters, the restauranteur guy had been a really great guy. There were even a couple of chapters from his point of view where he reveals that he always thought he was going to end up as a bachelor forever because he’s never had feelings for anyone before he started having feelings for her. And he sacrificed so much to help her and her group to get to the city when he would have had a much easier time alone.

It just feels like the author HAD to make him a bad guy because they realized that readers would advocate for mc leaving her husband for the restauranteur. Like, they have so much more in common and he’s such a helpful and pleasant guy… He HAD to be made into a villain or else mc’s husband just seems like a much lesser dude.

The whole story… Sigh.

I slogged my way to the very end… which turned out to be rushed and hasty to the point of whiplash. It was like, “Drama, drama, DRAMA, the end.” No wrap up. No real conclusion. Just a big dramatic bunch of stuff happening at the beginning of the chapter and THE END at the bottom of the chapter.

It was 537 chapters, and I was left feeling like the author could have squeezed out another chapter or two to make a more satisfying conclusion. Like, there didn’t need to be any added melodrama, just a roundup of events and a bit about what everyone is going to do next.

Because she started a massive restaurant in the city, but the end, which was like four paragraphs, made it seem like she and her husband were going to give everything up and move back to the country?

And like, she spent like 200 chapters pregnant, then she had the baby and… That’s it. I don’t think she ever holds the baby other than that one time. She’s off running around the city and being kidnapped a bunch and going places she’s specifically told not to go… and it never says who’s taking care of the baby for her. Like, she’s got a little maid now, but that kid hangs around her waiting to be told what to do.

I feel like I wasted 537 chapters of my life, lol.

DRAMA!

Pax,

~HarperWCK

Panoply at Amazon
0 comments on "Avenue 5 (spoilers)"

I realize that quite a few people don’t like "Avenue 5," which likely contributed to its cancellation. And perhaps their animosity was well-earned, as the jokes sometimes fall flat and most of the characters are unlikeable assholes. It is, after all, the story of a bunch of ludicrously rich people aboard a ridiculously luxurious space cruise liner flailing their way toward their own doom.

For reals: Their space cruise liner gets knocked off course, lengthening their voyage from 8-weeks to 3 years, and in their determination to right their course and get home earlier… They end up lengthening their journey to 8+ YEARS after nearly flying themselves straight into the sun.

A ship filled with the kind of people that most would barely feel an iota of empathy for and having them entirely comprise the cast of characters… of course viewers weren’t enthralled with the concept. And it’s not as though there weren’t other people aboard the ship that people might have had more of a connection with. There’s a full staff of maids, cooks, janitors, and entertainment staff that we never see.

One of the first episodes features a woman complaining that the maid that cleans her room folded her towel into an anus rather than the pleasant shape she expected. The comedian hired to entertain the ship has difficulty dealing with telling jokes while staring out a window at DEAD BODIES regularly passing by his view.

Yet we barely see any of the staff aboard the ship. They have to be there, as food is still being cooked and served. Rooms are still being cleaned and shipboard life is still running smoothly enough that the rich people have to be told that they’re in a dangerous situation. But we never see them or where they live.

There was a time in my life where I considered applying to be a crewmember aboard a cruise ship. The idea of being able to use the facilities aboard ship during my off hours and when they weren’t in use appealed to me. Being able to leave the ship and enjoy all the vacation spots while the ship was docked and I was off duty seemed like a great opportunity for someone that otherwise can’t afford to travel. The only thing that stopped me was looking up life aboard ship for crewmembers and seeing that there were a lot of stories of sexual abuse and some ships taking away peoples’ passports and basically treating them as slaves once they’re in international waters and unable to leave the ship.

All the pros made the corporate admitted cons seem bearable. Sharing a tiny cabin with multiple people and only having a narrow sleep berth and a small locker for my own didn’t seem that bad if I would be spending the rest of my time working, entertaining myself, or off the ship when it was docked. Being able to see other countries and enjoy an echo of the luxuries that paying customers did was enough to make me seriously consider replying to the job listing.

So with my knowledge of crew life aboard modern cruise ships–steps removed as it is–I was disappointed that the episodes of "Avenue 5" didn’t feature any of the real crewmembers as main characters.

We see the engineers, we see the comedian, we see the Captain and bridge crew that are actually actors, and we see the "humorously depressed" head of customer relations Matt. But we don’t get any stories featuring actual crew members. The people that are actually keeping life aboard ship running smoothly.

We see the most luxurious cabins aboard the space cruise ship, and we see the large economy cabins aboard the cruise ships… but we never see where the actual crewmembers live and work. We never see the behind-the-scenes life and work of the people that are now being forced to serve the demanding and unpleasant rich people for an EXTRA 8 YEARS.

They signed on to work for 8-weeks–2 MONTHS–and now they’re trapped for 8 YEARS. And we never see them.

I don’t know if the creators and writers of "Avenue 5" simply thought that telling the stories of the crew would be too depressing or if they never thought they would have stories at all… But it really makes you think and wonder about the kinds of people making the show.

Are they so wealthy and out-of-touch that the idea of the crew were complete non-entities? Like, they so lacked the depth of imagination that they focused on the passengers and main crew because those were the kinds of people they could empathize with and they simply couldn’t picture the trials and tribulations the "poor" crew were facing?

Are the crewmembers living in the same conditions as modern cruise ship crew live? Are they spending the next 8-years living in barely habital conditions while being screamed at by asshole passengers? The fake bridge crew obviously have normal-sized cabins, but is that because they regularly interact with the passengers and there’s a chance a passenger might see their living conditions? Or does the entire crew have normal-sized cabins?

The fact that we never see the crew using the amenities aboard ship makes me wonder if they’re forced to live in squalor in the depths of the ship. Are they all crammed in there like sardines while the passengers fall into despair over being trapped in the "tiny accommodations" of their luxurious cabins while enjoying the rest of the massive ship?

Is the crew being paid hourly wages for the entire length of the voyage no matter how long it is? Or are they under contract to receive a lump sum? Are they receiving the same food as the passengers or are they under short rations due to the lengthened journey?

The passengers are seen as being important because they’re still going to be rich when the Avenue 5 finally returns to Earth. As such, Judd and his board of investors see them as being more important than the crew. It’s why Judd hosts a revolving number of passengers in his cabin to try and sooth their disatisfaction and anger over being stuck on the ship.

When the various mistakes they make in attempting to shorten the journey results in further catastrophes, all that matters on the show is how unhappy the privileged people are. Maybe if there were some stories of the crew and their plight, viewers would have had more empathy for everyone. As it was, the whole show is unsympathetic people doing unsympathetic things with the viewer not feeling a sense that anything would be lost if everyone aboard died horrifically.

"And nothing of value was lost" would be the likeliest response if the Avenue 5 flew directly into the sun and burnt up. Which is sad, because there had been such potential in the premise of "Avenue 5."

It’s too bad we won’t ever see if the Avenue 5 makes it back to Earth. Or if everyone will starve or run out of oxygen or be eaten by the cannibal they foolishly allowed on board.

It is a story without an end. We will never know what happens to the crew and passengers aboard the Avenue 5. Their journey home unending and unresolved.

~Harper Kingsley

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Witch King at Amazon
0 comments on "Oxygen (spoilers)"

(WARNING: Spoilers for the movie "Oxygen" streaming on Netflix.)

A woman wakes up in a cryogenic pod with no memory of who she is or how she got there. The pod is running out of oxygen and she has to figure out how to either get help or escape on her own. The story unfolds as the viewer learns her identity at the same time that she does.

The idea that the future is so entirely bleak that the only hope for humanity is to send them to another planet is an old one. But to grow clone bodies loaded with digital copies of the consciousness of humans knowing that there’s no hope for themselves was a new one when I watched it.

I was thinking–along with the character–that she had been kidnapped and buried alive. I believed that she had been put in a medically-necessary cryogenic sleep and that her pod had been hijacked by dangerous people or maybe there had been some kind of natural disaster and the pod had been buried under a collapsed building.

Every single one of her ideas made sense. Her desperation was entirely present and real.

The shock of her first view outside of the pod was visceral.

The realization of who and what she was… and why she was in a cryogenic pod… it was powerful and memorable.

The idea that the Earth is so poisoned that humanity is on the brink of extinction. That the only way for humanity to survive is to create clones with digital memories and send them to a new world and a new chance at life… the sheer beauty and horror of looking out and seeing the damage that had been done to the ship.

Liv’s sheer refusal to lay down and die was admirable, as was her ability to work out where and when she was and what she would have to do to survive. That her tenacity resulted in her saving her own life made for a great ending to a great movie.

There are some that would see the ending of all life on Earth as an inevitability. "There is nothing to do and nothing that our religion will allow us to do. We must lay down our lives and accept the end of everything. It is the will of the cosmos."

The original Liv and her husband, despite knowing that they themselves were going to die, prevailed to save humanity and some form of themselves. They uploaded their consciousnesses, and while their bodies expired on a dying world, their clone-children were able to travel to another world and continue onward.

They died, yet they lived. They expired, but they did not fail in their attempt to survive.

The hope of humanity is not a prevalence of life… but a refusal to give up when there is any possibility for something more.

~Harper Kingsley

https://amazon.com/shop/harperkingsley0.

https://paypal.me/harperkingsley.
https://patreon.com/harperkingsley.
https://ko-fi.com/harperwck.

https://www.harperkingsley.net/blog.
https://twitter.com/harperkingsley0.
https://kimichee.com.