Seregosa
★
★
★
★
☆
c226
Status: c226
June 16, 2023
Hello everyone, I have to say that this novel is a special one. I really liked the first 150 chapters, after which I dropped it and the reason for this is of vital importance for the english reading audience and I'll discuss it towards the end, it simply can't be left out of the review despite not directly being related to the source work. The protagonist, gu changge, exists in an universe where favored daughters and sons of heaven show up everywhere, protected by the grace of the heavens, doted upon ... more>> with countless opportunities and inexplicable luck. Here, he takes the role of the supreme heavenly villain who is an abnormality outside of the whole fortune of heavens thing, so he has neither good nor bad luck, but with his system he can absorb the luck of people with high fortune after ruining them step by step or, in the case of the daughters of heaven, seducing them. He's a rare protagonist in that he's evil for the sake of being evil. He has no particular trauma, experience or reason to be evil other than his body previously being dominated by a devil heart and his transmigration memories where he hates run of the mill lucky protagonists. Everything he does is as if it's for the sake of being evil, or rather to enhance his own might and he loves playing evil by bullying people. Basically, he's tr*sh in a way and he's more blessed than even all other protagonists, never having to strive for much as it all falls into his lap, he simply spends his days being calculating and plotting. But this is what we're here for, right? That's the crux of the issue, to like this novel, you probably have to read a lot of other chinese cultivation novels first so you can get familiar with their plots and character stereotypes. Hell, the author literally copies some stories altogether, the first guy we meet is that guy from battle through the heavens in almost every way with slightly altered plot like his master being female, later on we find the genderbent guy from perfect world (with a slash of tales of herding gods) who is now the little sister of the MC who he stole the bone from. Then we have protagonists from the future and corpse possessing dudes, you know, everything we already know. Now, if you ever found yourself thinking "hey, I hate this kind of dude", maybe you tired of the tropes after a while or some of their ridiculous luck or actions rubbed you the wrong way, in this novel you can fulfill your desires as he cuckolds and kills the males and conquers the females. That's the entire shtick and where all the fun comes from, he's morally bankrupt in every way. By the way, be ready for him never killing any female daughters of heaven. He actually kills non-favored females, but the ones that are important he'll never kill. All the males will die though. There's some s*x but it's just at the level of "they tossed under the sheets" and boom, done, no big deal. Also, while he doesn't kill the favored daughters of heaven, I can somewhat get behind that because he shows no real affection for them other than as tools, they can provide him continuous amounts of fortune as they keep on generating and "sharing" it with him. The author tries to make sure we know that he "doesn't think with his D" and that he's not like other protagonists... Oh, and be ready for many kind of moronic "even though she's female" and "I know so much about women, they're all like this" kind of comments since the author thinks women aren't the same race as men and have very specific thought processes that men don't have. Anyway, that's it. Nothing much more to say about it. It's a fairly fun read... until chapter 150. I really feel that this needs to be mentioned, but I'll put it in a bubble since it's not related to the source material, just the material we, as english readers, can consume. Spoiler The problem is the translation. I don't know what the f* happened over the years or why there are so many translation groups for this, nor do I know why not even a single one of them manages to do the job right all the way. But let's just pretend there are only the three translations displayed on novelupdates, demonic translations, divine dao library and fantasy world online. I don't know much about demonic translations, because they didn't translate that many chapters so I wouldn't read their translations. What I read after comparing chapter 1 of divine dao library (DDL from now on) and fantasy world online (FWO from now on), was FWO's translation. It read pretty decently and was fun and energetic enough, while not being that great in grammar all the time, it wasn't bad enough to be an eyesore either. It was translated good enough to be worthy of being called a translation without throwing sh*t at the original, names and translations were clearly relatively accurate. After chapter 150, however, that changed. The translator stopped and someone else there picked it up, suddenly the quality did a huge nose dive and after checking much later chapters, the old translator never returned. Suddenly, the dialogue felt weird, flowed badly, had worse grammar and completely lacked the "energy" and "liveliness" a novel like this should have. I still felt like giving it a shot because I like the novel, and for 50 or so chapters after 150 it read good enough, but after that it got way worse. The quality became very irregular, sometimes good enough to read but for most chapters it was horrible, as if the editor just up and spontaneously disappeared. Very bad flow, huge grammar issues and clear mistranslations, titles started to often seem like machine translations as soon as the quality got horrible (which happened at chapter 200 that had the title "Husband ab*ses her for a while as she chase her husband's crematorium, I completely misunderstood him", which makes absolutely zero sense, haha. Makes you wonder if some girl chased a building with body incineration furnaces) and the chapter content's translation wasn't much better, some examples would be "Gu Changge personally explained what happened back then, and even dug up the bones to return the sister, no matter what happened in between, so that Gu Xian'er could not raise her hatred for him", "Gu Xian'er smiled sweetly, revealing a pair of shallow pear eddies", "if zhao tianxing's father had not interceded this zhao tianxing would have been beaten badly, and it would have been difficult for him to get off the ground for several months", "In any case, they came to escort, even if there was no credit, they still spent a lot of time and energy. But it was not to get a good look from the other side.", "You still have a chance to leave here while I am not angry right now", "This woman was beautiful to the extreme. such empty valleys and orchids, clear fog in the forest, very dusty, there was a quiet and moving beauty". So, I dropped the novel knowing it would just be a waste of time and energy to read more after 26 more chapters of horrible quality and fluctuating garbage quality which showed signs of getting even worse (checked 10 chapters ahead of that point and it was even crappier). They butcher the fun of reading it with such crappy english, too bad because a transmigrator female that also talks about chapters and clichés was just about to appear and it would've likely been very fun to read about. Then I checked DDL's version at that chapter and after trying a few chapters, I once again confirmed just how utterly worthless their translations are and that it's a persistent issue all the way through. They systematically change almost every single ability and location name, sometimes even conjuring up nonsensical names with no basis (that might not even be english at all, chuunibyou much?), they also actively censor words or entire paragraphs, making the work very stale and lifeless. They practically parody the entire story by changing things actively, to the point where you question if they have any respect at all for the source work or author. Last time I checked, a translator needs to keep to the original meaning and story, just adapting some things slightly to mean exactly the same thing in english and make it easier to understand. But they change things to the extent that the story changes and it reads like crap. They have a, at first glance, good level of english, but the english they use doesn't fit a novel format at all as they often use rarely used or out of place english that would be more at home in education essays than a novel format, sadly the grammar and flow is nowhere close to being worthy of higher education either, it has tons of issues even if it looks decent at first glance. This fixation on "fancy" yet often inaccurate and out of place english instead makes it lifeless, flawed and dull to read, it barely even reads as a novel. It feels like they're tooting their own horns by trying to show off their english knowledge even though they're clearly not that good in the first place and the level of editing is not at the level of liberal but just not even correct anymore on any level. I really despise their translation, so sadly there wasn't any other options but to drop this otherwise pretty good novel so early, it really makes me sad. Who the hell translates destiny points/value as "fatum", fortune points/value as "fortuity", black as "onyx", golden crow clan (which is a very typical race in this kind of story) to golden raven clan, daoist immortal palace to skyward schloss, transcendent bones as absolute detachment bones, leaving out various parts of names like "black heavenly eagle clan" becoming "black hawk family" or "ancient immortal gu clan" becoming "immortal gu family". Then we have wonderful sentences like instead of writing "Damn it! How dare you come to our territory and kill our people! You are courting death!", they write "curses! how insufferable of him to kill people in our territory!". They also changed "they roared with anger and hatred since even their own clansmen were here! The dead must be avenged" into several sentences of completely made up text, namely "they yelled vexedly as if they were growing insane. Some of them were even letting out deafening shrieks. Given how there were members of the victims' clans and factions around, the dead would definitely be avenged." See how incredibly awkward it reads? Not only do they conjure up fake content, it's also extremely cringeworthy to read. It flows choppily and the english used is ill-fit for the purpose. As translators they should respect the author and their work and they should also have the awareness that they suck at writing dialogue and descriptions, so how about sticking to the script? This isn't some theater improv. The worst part is that they do this several times a chapter at least, you see why they're probably one of the worst "translators" out there? Even the new translator at fwo after chapter 150 still translates things pretty accurately and doesn't change things randomly. Oh, I gotta mention this one as well, just to show how bad their translation can get. They translated "Once these two ancestors are under my control, the entire black heavenly eagle clan will effortlessly fall into my hands." as "Once I gain control of these two ancestors, the Black Hawk Family will all be mine. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.". It almost made me god damn cry how moronic that sounded, they changed his entire personality for a lame joke as he's not the kind of guy who would say crap like that, not to mention he didn't even say "easy" or anything close to it, they just made it up. Go write your own damn novel if you want to write whatever you feel like and make things up. Also, not sure what the f* FWO is thinking, but their site is a hot mess, utter garbage from a design standpoint. I say this after having taken many game design and art design classes over several years with a player (user) -centric standpoint. It's a mess to use, it's as if they've done everything in their might to restrict and bother their readers, which is simply counterproductive. I had to get an addon just to be able to right click and have my mouse cursor change depending on where I hover it, but even then their text is locked behind idiotic code that makes it impossible to select it, not that I care much about selecting text, I just hate sites that disable right click and other options. They made any interaction with the site impossible without modifying the code or getting addons. Changing cosmetic things like color, font etc is also very difficult thanks to this. As if that wasn't enough, they cram in various floating buttons and when you scroll down, you get a huge banner of "next" "previous" and other sh*t options, but at the bottom and top of the page you find these options anyway. Also disruptive yellow boxes before the "next chapter button" in every chapter about donations and so on, which gets really annoying to repeatedly see. I had to use an adblocker to remove all the bothersome elements. One of the worst sites I've ever seen, but at least usable if you block the crappy elements. [collapse] <<less
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