Xue Shan Fei Hu

The emperor has sent Prince Jing to the western border to prove himself by dealing with the bandit problem. Naturally, Li Yu, his boyfriend (and favorite fish), comes with him.

With a little (really little - seriously, Prince Jing does all of the actual work) help from Li Yu, Prince Jing more than proves himself, to the point that, despite his muteness, he gains even more favor with the emperor. Things also progress to the next level in Prince Jing and Li Yu's relationship, which leads to show more some...complications.

Meanwhile, the sixth prince is still scheming from the shadows but rapidly running out of options.

This series is basically fluffy cotton candy for the brain. As long as Li Yu sticks with Prince Jing and trusts in his abilities, nothing could ever go very wrong. The few times things do get a bit more dangerous, it's because Li Yu makes the mistake of not just sitting back and letting his boyfriend take care of everything.

It would be enough to make me gag, except it's such a light and easy read where it's nice to see the bad guys casually get stomped into bewildered pulp. Plus, while Li Yu isn't completely naive, if truly bad things happened to him it'd be like seeing someone kick a puppy.

My biggest issue with Seven Seas' danmei releases is that it can be hard to predict what you're going to get before you start them, both tonally and in terms of heat levels. In this volume, Prince Jing and Li Yu finally have sex. Once they get started, it's fairly frequent, but it's never explicitly described. That said, things somehow still get a bit kinky. At one point, for example, Li Yu gets the ability to transform into a merman, and he and Prince Jing decide to see if they can, ahem, make it work. (They absolutely can, but it isn't described in enough, or any, detail for me to explain how.)

This volume also introduces a few children (yes, plural). For the most part, they were an opportunity for the adults around them to gush over them. Prince Jing turned out to be a very sweet father. Kids in fiction are hit or miss for me, and mostly these ones were ok. The author absolutely did not shy away from the fact that kids are gross, though. I think I was supposed to find all the drooling and slobbering to be cute. ::shudder::

All in all, I'm really looking forward to reading the next book, the final one in the series.

Extras:

A couple color illustrations, black and white illustrations throughout, a few cultural footnotes, a glossary, and an appendix with character names and very brief descriptions and a pronunciation guide.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.) show less

The incident with the second prince's mother is resolved, effectively ending his chances of becoming the Crown Prince. Meanwhile, the third prince becomes more of a problem. Prince Jing becomes closer to Li Yu (named Xianyu as a fish) - Li Yu is unaware that Jing has figured out that his human and fish selves are one and the same.

Prince Jing is the definition of infatuated. The guy turns his entire home into an elaborate pond for Li Yu. The whole bit about the message carved into the palace show more walls gave me secondhand embarrassment. The guy does not care one bit what anyone thinks about his feelings for, as far as others are aware, some random dude who just showed up at the palace one day.

This is one of those romances that only works as long as everyone's feelings are relatively in sync. I got the feeling that Prince Jing's Devotion (yes, capital D) could turn into something scary if Li Yu wanted to break up with him. Readers have been given several examples of how ruthless Jing can be when he wants to be. There was an element of jealousy to Jing's feelings that I wasn't fond of, and that made me wonder how their relationship would fare if Jing wasn't aware that Li Yu was the fish who essentially lives with him 24/7.

I'm still willing to roll with it - this still approaches things from a pretty fluffy perspective, and there are some sweet moments - but if Prince Jing were a real-life dude, the red flags would be a concern.

The System's rewards for Li Yu's work are interesting. Not only does Li Yu get some extra fishy abilities and some fun aesthetic upgrades (that Prince Jing then has to bend over backwards to explain in a way that doesn't scream "supernatural!"), he also gets a peek at a couple of Jing's secrets. I wish I'd taken better notes about that stuff, because the details are now a bit fuzzy for me, and I'm sure this will become even more important later on.

All in all, still enjoying this, although those red flags made me wince. I hope that Li Yu gets some good opportunities to establish boundaries and have Jing respect them. That said, Li Yu is definitely not the smartest character in this series (the trouble he gets himself into by the end of this volume, OMG), so I guess we'll see.

Extras:

A couple full-color illustrations (one of which is just the cover illustration), black-and-white illustrations throughout, and an appendix with a character, name, and pronunciation guide, as well as a short glossary.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.) show less

Li Yu is an 18-year-old guy reborn as a carp in the danmei novel he read (called "The Tyrant and His Delicate Concubine," I think). It's some kind of gamified rebirth - something called the System tells him that he must either change Prince Jing's personality or he, Li Yu, will die. To accomplish his task, he has to become Prince Jing's beloved pet fish and fulfill various other quests and subquests.

In this particular volume, Li Yu must somehow save the life of Prince Jing's cousin and only show more friend, Ye Qinghuan. In return, Li Yu will get to spend increasingly longer periods of time as a human, which will make future tasks much easier, but could also make things more complicated if Li Yu is thought to be a yao (if I remember right, some kind of dangerous supernatural being).

The title makes me wince (by the way, Prince Jing's disability is that he's mute - he communicates via writing and a servant who understands him and his wishes very well), but I'm so glad I took a chance with this series anyway. It's delightful and, so far, pretty fluffy.

There's court politics, but it's relatively uncomplicated and features a smallish cast of characters, compared to some other historicalish danmei novels I've tried. It's a clash between princes. The second prince is the unacknowledged Crown Prince. The third prince wants that spot and is being helped by the sixth prince. Prince Jing, due to his muteness, can't be the Crown Prince, although he's a favorite of the Emperor's. Prince Jing's love interest in the original book, the "delicate concubine," happens to be the person the third prince is in love with.

The setup is paper thin - there's no real reason why Li Yu ended up as a fish in this book. He's not a superfan of the book, he just happened to have read it, is all. There also isn't really a whole lot of info about Li Yu's sexuality - we know he read a danmei novel, but that doesn't mean he's gay or bi. That said, he recognizes Prince Jing's attractiveness without any particular inner turmoil. Still, at this point in the series he has no real reason to expect that he's going to be matched up with Prince Jing, because, you know, fish.

Particularly at the start, Li Yu doesn't have a lot of tools at his disposal to get things done. He's a fish. He can swim around, interact with Prince Jing in a limited way, and do his best to look cute. He finds his new existence mildly embarrassing but gets over it pretty quickly. All of the System talk reminded me of MXTX's Scum Villain's Self-Saving System - in SVSSS terms, personality-wise Li Yu is basically Airplane Bro, cheerful and kind of cute.

Prince Jing is the smart one in this series, which helps make up for Li Yu's limitations. He figures a few things out pretty quickly, not that Li Yu realizes it.

Overall, this was so much fun that I immediately went on to the second volume after finishing the first. Li Yu is dumb and adorable, and I'm enjoying the fluffiness of it all.

Extras:

A couple full-color illustrations (one of which is just the cover illustration), black-and-white illustrations throughout, and an appendix with a character, name, and pronunciation guide, as well as a short glossary (which I realized, while writing this review, doesn't include the word yao).

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.) show less

This final volume in the series picks up where things left off during the hunting party. The sixth prince makes a last ditch effort to snatch power away from Prince Jing. Things, of course, don't go the way he planned, but that's definitely not even close to the end of all the palace drama - there are hidden enemies still to be uncovered, more relationship developments, and all those secrets that the System could have revealed to Li Yu ages ago if he'd just used those System rewards show more earlier.

Li Yu had a more active role in the story this time around. It was nice that, for once, the solution to his problems wasn't always "wait for Prince Jing to fix things." It turns out that even Prince Jing can't fix everything.

It's amazing how much drama the author managed to cram into this last part of the story, although, on the whole, this series was the very definition of fluff. There were no problems that Li Yu and his husband couldn't conquer together, and when they were finally to a point where all the hidden enemies had been dealt with, Li Yu started happily started working on things like improving the rights of widowed women.

The series that this most reminded me of was MXTX's Scum Villain's Self-Saving System, what with its System, original plot vs. altered plot, and panicked main character having to deal with developments they never saw coming. Personally, I feel that SVSSS is a better and more emotionally complex story, but I did at least appreciate the lack of explicitly described horrifying sex (my brain involuntarily trying to figure out how the merman stuff worked doesn't count).

Although this didn't end with bonus stories the way MXTX's work did, there was a similar-feeling fan-service-y development that resulted in Li Yu and Prince Jing getting a brief trip to modern China. The author really tried to wrap everything up here.

Extras:

A couple color illustrations, black and white illustrations throughout, a few cultural footnotes, a glossary, and an appendix with character names and very brief descriptions and a pronunciation guide.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.) show less