Sunshine Revival Challenge #5

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Challenge #5

Journaling prompt: Be a carnival barker for your favorite movie, book, or show! Write a post that showcases the best your chosen title has to offer and entices passersby to check it out.

I haven't been much into movies/books/shows recently, so I can only give examples of ones I like but don't have a good memory of (and haven't finished lol).

Female General and Eldest Princess | 女将军和长公主

First thought was the Chinese novel FGEP by (fan translation at https://fgep.carrd.co/). As translated on that Carrd page:

To live on in this turbulent world, to take revenge for her family, to seek justice for her entire village of a hundred and eighteen people who had their lives cut short, Lin Wanyue took the name of her younger twin brother Lin Feixing to enlist in the military, vowing to kill every single Hun under the sky.

The Empress has passed into heaven, leaving the sixteen year old Eldest Princess and eight year old Crown Prince to depend on each other for survival.

The other Seigniors who were older than the Crown Prince look upon the royal seat with ravenous eyes, the position of these two siblings are in a precarious situation.

A crossdressing General and a strategic all-knowing Eldest Princess, drama, slow burn, romance, military, palace struggle, schemes, revenge, Happy Ending

It has a focus on war and politics, with a sapphic romance between the MCs as the B-plot. I suppose in that way, it's a little like a younger, lesbian version of MDZS. Eldest Princess Li Xian is wise, but Lin Wanyue is no fool either, once she gets the resources to develop her mind.

I would say that Lin Wanyue isn't masculinised that much, despite the cross-dressing and fighting, and Li Xian isn't feminised that much either, despite being a scheming princess who doesn't "move". I don't know how to describe it, but I feel like they are very normal people in this regard — they might be different if the circumstances changed, but ultimately are not restricted by generalising notions, which is more of a forefront concern for me when it comes to gay romance. Even now, it seems like there is too much "wife and husband" mentality forced on us.

I have to admit, I only got up to chapter 122/167, which I read in the span of 5 days back in February this year. But I'm hoping to find the will (and simply remember in the first place) to finish reading it soon, as I do have a desire to write fics for it. Though, I would probably have to reread most of it to really get enough detail for a canon-based fic aha.

The Apothecary Diaries | 薬屋のひとりごと

KNH is much more known.  I've watched up to S2Ep21. It's about the apothecary's adoptive daughter Maomao (who is skilled in medicine in her own right, but her position as an apothecary is limited due to being female) in a country based on Tang Dynasty China. She's forcibly turned into a worker in the imperial palace and ends up involved in a string of murders and other unpleasant plots of both internal and external strife. She has quite of a lot of practical knowledge that the sheltered nobility and uneducated commonfolk don't, as her medically-intelligent adoptive father and her other carers in the Verdigris House provided/allowed her opportunities to learn. Part of that manifests as her absolute obsession with being exposed to poisons. Maomao desires knowledge of how they work through experience, with the added bonus of building posion-resistence.

She has a male love interest, Jinshi, but honestly it's not that important so far. They're cute. I also like the wlw ship though.

Yu Yu Hakusho

Okay, might be a risk saying I like YYH, as the last time I watched it was like a decade ago, so I have no idea how it's aged to me and in general. Could not tell you anything specific, but it's about ghosts, demons, spirit powers... The MC literally starts off by dying on screen. I have the impression that it was funny and engaging. Ngl, I'm trying to get myself to rewatch it, specifically to see if it's got as much gay energy as I remember between 2 specific members of the main cast.