SPOILERS: I couldn’t find a way to write this review, which is about my own reading experience, without some very general spoilers about setting, plot arc, and tropes. This includes a relatively detailed explanation of the setting and how the novel begins, and discovering this might be part of the fun of reading for the first time. If you really want start your reading from a point of complete and total innocence I’d recommend not reading the review till afterwards.
I did not, originally, love The Scum Villain’s Self Saving System.
Probably like thousands of other English speakers, I found SVSSS after devouring The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation (Mo Dao Zu Shi) in a fan translation, so it was only my second exposure to xianxia, danmei, and Chinese webnovels in general. I was confused and annoyed by the intrusion of the System, didn’t understand the jokes, and was disturbed by the emotional tenor of the main couple’s relationship, which came off as abusive on a first read (and to many people remains deeply problematic). What was there to love? I moved on to Heaven Official’s Blessing (Tian Guan Ci Fu) and continued from there to Fei Tian, Priest and 2HA (more on those later, I promise)!
I came back to it again perhaps six months later. This time, I could understand some of the jokes, and I actually found the relationship to be moving and complex (after 2HA it even seemed cute). Still, though, my least favorite of the MXTX canon.
I just read through the official English translation in hard copy, and after another full year of reading Chinese BL/danmei webnovels, set in xianxia and contemporary and interstellar worlds, I finally get it. This novel is genius, and I’m guessing as a monolingual English reader I’m still missing lots of its nuance and best points.
First off, the book is extraordinarily meta. It mocks itself and the entire cultivation webnovel genre from the opening to the very end, not only the novels themselves but the ecosystem of author and readers that creates them and forces them to be structured in certain predictable ways, while also skewering gender norms and cultural expectations around relationships. The main character is a mostly good-for-nothing young second gen (a term for the child of parents who have made it financially and who inherits their wealth without working for it) who dies just after he finishes reading a multi-million-word “stallion novel,” Proud Immortal Demon Way, on Zhongdian, a webnovel publication site that caters to young male readers. He’s spent months on end reading and paying chapter by chapter, constantly posting in the comments about how awful it is: Plot holes! Ridiculous characters! Unbelievable rescues! Sex for the sake of sex! Villains that should be castrated!
He then chokes on a bun, dies, and transmigrates into the role of the main villain. Whump.
The System, which manages his transmigration status, reminds him constantly that if he acts out of character, or doesn’t fill plot holes, he’ll die for real. With this setup, MXTX takes readers on an incredibly unexpected, hilarious, and tender ride full of twists and turns, where the Proud Demon Way stallion male lead, with a harem of thousands of beauties and a vengeance kick that just won’t quit, is transformed through the main character’s desperate efforts to save his own pathetic life and his never-ending negotiation with the System.
As a writer, one of the main things I loved about finally “getting” this book was the acknowledgment that there’s so much more an author always wants to do, and can’t – because genre, because publishing, because expectation, because too much backstory – and the characters that an author wants to write can’t always come to the page. The original author of Proud Immortal Demon Way confesses that his original idea and outline for the novel was totally different, but the market forced him to write crap. The protagonist himself eventually realizes that many of his mistakes come from not taking the characters seriously as people, simply assuming that they were there to forward the plot for this reason or that. Taking the characters seriously ends up creating a world of complex and contradictory beings, who don’t always get what they want, who don’t always succeed in their goals, who have pain and joy far beyond what the stallion novel formula could provide. It transforms the protagonist as well.
Also, of course, there’s romance. From a stallion novel it becomes a danmei/BL novel, and from a novel written for straight men who want sex and power fantasies, it becomes a novel written for people longing for relationship and complexity and challenging the expectations of the powers that be. The romantic relationship in this novel is a little incomplete; we don’t often get the male lead’s viewpoint. As in Mo Dao Zu Shi and Tian Guan Ci Fu, personal sacrifice and care for the other person is central, even if it doesn’t always look that way. Despite the intense romanticism of MXTX’s work overall, sex is not romanticized emotionally or physically. Sex is complicated, emotionally weird, even embarrassing or physically uncomfortable as well as sometimes pleasurable, overdetermined with too many meanings to easily compartmentalize as “good” or “bad.” To avoid spoilers, I’ll just leave it at that, which I find to be true for all of her novels.
With this story, like all of MXTX’s novels, in the end there are no real villains. Everyone who might become one is shown to be someone suffering – even the “original flavor,” the Scum Villain that the main character transmigrates into, had a backstory no one ever knew. This is one of the things I find most valuable and meaningful about the genre overall, and with SVSSS, all of the characters prove to be lovable, or, at least, “pitiful,” despite whatever catastrophes they might be causing. The Scum Villain’s Self Saving System in the end saves everyone around him, and the story itself.