The Bent Shoujo

She Is The Protagonist - Baihe Review

The Bent Shoujo — Sat, 09 Apr 2022 03:10:38 GMT

TL;DR - I love this sweet, soft story and I think you might too ❤️.

I just finished my second read of this webnovel and given that the human translation is now complete I feel safe in shouting about it and recommending it to you all :). Also, this is the first review that I've written so please judge gently orz.

If you like sweet, slow-burn, fake-dating, gentle, low-drama, long-form, entertainment circle, kuudere x genki, devoted lovers, transmigration baihe webnovels then you've probably already read this. If not, then you should correct your oversight immediately!

If you haven't already fallen into that incredibly specific niche allow me to be your guide :).

Overview

Key	Info
Title	She Is The Protagonist / Ta1 Shi4 Zhu3Jiao3 (她是主角)
Author	Re4Dao4 Hun1Jue2 (热到昏厥)
Length	203 chapters + 7 extras (~500k words)
Chinese Source	JJWXC
English Translation	Yuri Translations
Aggregator Link	Novel Updates
Main Pair	Tang2 Han2Qiu1 x Yu2 Ru2Bing1 (唐寒秋x俞如冰)

Tang Han Qiu is lucky in birth but not in love. She is the youngest daughter of the wealthy Tang business clan. She is a cool and picturesque beauty fit for display in a national museum. She is intelligent and studious, managing to get her degree from a prestigious foreign Ivy League university before coming home to take her place at the head of a new entertainment agency business within the Tang Group conglomerate. Unfortunately she is controlled by the system and forced to play the role of the "vicious female supporting character" in this world. She must pursue the "male lead" even though he doesn't love her and ends up suffering a terrible fate.

Or she was...

Yu Ru Bing is a soft and sweet girl with a terrible family situation who is a talented performer. She is the "female lead" of this world, meaning she ends up with the male lead even though she has to fight it out with Tang Han Qiu and a host of other women to be with him. She manages to become a successful actress even though her career is hindered due to the scandals and conflict caused by the romance plot in her life.

Or she did...

Until one day Tang Han Qiu reached her limit and in the moment where she might have killed Yu Ru Bing she was able to break the system's grasp and throw herself from the top of a skyscraper.

Strangely this didn't cause her to die, instead she was reborn years earlier with knowledge of the future and her freedom from the system. She had become a BUG in the system.

In order to correct this BUG, a host was brought in to take the role of Yu Ru Bing and fix the system. Unfortunately for the system this host was a rebellious troll who wanted nothing to do with forcing the now free Tang Han Qiu back into line.

This is the story of their love as they build their lives as a young executive and performer while battling the system for a chance at a future together.

Scoring

Category	Score
Plot	7/10
Characters	9/10
Fluff	10/10
Drama	2/10
😈	5/10*
Personal Opinion	9/10

* While the 😈 score may only be 5/10 it's a very sweet and lovely 5/10 and has one of the best abstract love scenes (maybe the single best?) that I've ever read. Check the spoilers section for more :).

Spoiler-Free Thoughts

YuTang! Sweet and Sour Fish! The Face God and the Troll Idol!

If you're looking for drama and angst this really isn't going to deliver. Of the 200+ chapters I'd say that drama really only happens in maybe 10 of them, and even then it's nothing that ever gets too heavy for too long.

This story makes me happy and gives me comfort. The plot is okay, but it really just exists to serve the characters and the cute fluffy interactions they have with each other.

From the start, we get to see the quick with and ridiculous banter of Yu Ru Bing meshing perfectly with the chill tolerance of Tang Han Qiu. It doesn't end up feeling static or boring though as they develop their careers, work through their personal problems, and slowly build their relationship.

The secondary cast of characters is also excellent. The author does a good job giving them personality and progression of their own without taking too much time away from our leading ladies. There's a wide variety of characters introduced, but not so many that you can't keep track of them. Some of these secondary characters even get their own chance at love :).

Another thing I really enjoyed was the culture. While Chinese webnovels are obviously all Chinese, this one felt especially nice and domestic. There's something very distinctive about the references (well documented), speech patterns, and other small cultural quirks that really charms me. It could be that I'm biased by having a goddess for a wife who happens to be from China, but reading the same sorts of comments that I hear around the table at family dinners makes me happy.

If I had to pick one thing to gripe about it would have to be the pacing. While the first 3/4 of the story is generally well paced the last quarter gets a bit slow. The chapters themselves are still entertaining and by the time I made it that far into the story I was too hooked on the characters to be too bothered by it. Still, it wouldn't be fair to completely ignore this.

SPOILER SECTION!!!

Don't be angry at me, you clicked on it 😜

Honestly there's not too much to say in the spoiler section for this story, since the plot was lived once, and most of the events of the story are relatively predictable.

I guess the one surprise f0r me was how much system agent 008 became a real and fleshed out character. I wouldn't have predicted that he would be more than another adversary or punching bag, but author really surprised me with him.

Oh and here's the scene I promised earlier. Without the context and buildup it doesn't hit quite as hard as it does in the story itself but I wanted to bring it here anyways. To me it's a beautiful example of how the terrible constraints put on our Chinese friends by their government can't stop them from telling their stories, this time in the form of a 3-line poem.

……

The sea of desire flowed, teasing and tempting their affection.

On the white snow, red flower buds bloomed one after another.

And the little bells on her thin white wrist jingled for most of the night.

……

What are Transmigration Stories?

The Bent Shoujo — Fri, 08 Apr 2022 01:56:16 GMT

TL;DR - Transmigration stories are the Chinese peer of Japanese Isekai (異世界).

Been scrolling your favorite tag on NU and don't know what to expect from transmigration stories?

Keep hearing someone refer to the system, agents, hosts, or transmigration?

No worries, I've got you covered :).

One way or another the protagonist finds themselves transported to another world. This can be due to the character dying in there previous world, but unlike Isekai death isn't a general requirement (insert truck-kun meme here). It's equally common for the protagonist to have transmigrated as a part of an assignment or punishment and be expecting to return to their own world at some point.

Once the transmigration has taken place, the protagonist finds themselves in another world. This world can be anything, but it's typically alt-historical, fantasy, alt-modern, or the world from a book/game/movie. They also typically retain their knowledge and memory from their previous life, while most or all of the other people in the world are natives who are unaware of transmigration.

In order to prevent the transmigration being immediately obvious, the protagonist is typically transmigrated into the existing body and life of one of the characters in the world. I've always thought that this was probably some type of murder but somehow that's basically never brought up and doesn't seem to matter to anyone... shrug.

Regardless, authors typically use Transmigration to provide relatable characters in unrelatable worlds, subvert expectations of archetypical stories, and allow readers to indulge in wild Chuunibyou (中二病) delusions as overpowered protagonists smash their way through whatever problems they encounter.

Some transmigration stories just proceed from this point so feel free to stop here and get back to reading, but a lot of them leverage a few more common patterns that are worth mentioning

Oftentimes authors feel the need to give some explanation for why and how transmigration happens and how a multiverse of different worlds exist to transmigrate between, and the typical answer is called The System.

The System is the power behind the scenes. It can be left vague or be well-explained and baked into the plot and world-building of the story. Either way, the system acts like the Dungeon Master of the transmigration universe, setting the rules for moving between worlds, and influencing the lives of characters within each world. For example, the system may consider that a certain world is out of balance and that the transmigrated character is responsible for bringing the world back into some desired state. In this example, it would also be super common for the character to decide that they don't agree with this mission, fall in love with someone in this world, and spend the rest of the story battling to avoid completing the mission set by the system. Fun times!

The character who is transmigrated into a new world is called the host. They often have knowledge of the system and even may have knowledge of what will happen in the future of the world that they're transmigrated to. This is where the Chuunibyou sets in because they start out with a bunch of unfair advantages. Given that they're often fighting the system I guess this is manageable, but it really gives a PC/NPC feeling to a lot of the encounters between the transmigrated character and other in-world opponents.

In order for the host to interact with the system and the world they may have access to one or more system agents. These system agents are programs/entities that represent the system and have direct interactions with the hosts. They can be guides, helpers, enforcement systems, or even just comic relief characters. I tend to think of them as the video game component of the story because typically the agents are only known to the host and follow some sort of rules or structure that allows them to be exploited or worked around.

Uh oh, I think I just realized that all transmigration stories are Matrix fan fictions... Maybe that should have been my TL;DR. Anyways, now that you know what transmigration stories are go forth and read with confidence!