on my reread i will be making a chart of all of the maids w who they serve and their non anglicized names. do any redologists in the comments have a good place i can find their non anglicized names because i appreciate hawkes a lot but her name is NOT skybright

so tldr to end it all. dont have this be your first hlm experience. but if you’ve got the time and have read the original it is a very interesting read to compare and contrast!
Chen did baoyu so dirty but i really enjoy this take on baochai and ESPECIALLY xifeng. fascinating changes to the plot

also a fan of how she wrote baochai a little later on. there’s more focus on her “coldness” and her Not feeling things she feels she should (in contrast to the -yus Feeling Everything Always) and a really good convo btwn her and grandma jia at the end where we get granny fucked up momence

basically they massacred baoyu. BUT i didn’t completely hate this adaptation!!! Probably my fav changes are with Xifeng. she cooked with all of the prose for her and nailed in a lot of her hardships a way the original book did not. she deserves the world & to kill her husband. it’s VERY compelling.

relationship completely non physical and is kinda displayed as “something to be left behind as baoyu moves into adulthood” idk man stop having sex!!!
Also they were way too soft on jia zheng i hate that guy. stop trying to redeem him. and baoyu isn’t even very transgender. thats the whole point!!

when he and daiyu meet. they’re much younger in the original but chen’s adaptation ages them up bc it gets a little “steamier”. I think it makes baoyu and daiyu’s relationship progress a lot cheaper and less believable. also they have sex at one point and i dont like it. the original has their+

baoyu+daiyu being “fated” adds a lot to the relationship,bc baochai is also “fated” to end up with baoyu due to the gold+jade thing and it furthers dai+chais roles as proxies for what baoyu wants vs. what the family wants. baoyu in general feels weaker to me here, definitely in part bc he is 18

Chen aims to focus on the relationship between Baoyu, Baochai, and Daiyu as that’s what draws most people to the book. I find it interesting that in spite of that focus ALL supernatural elements were cut, including baoyu and daiyu being reincarnations of the jade and the crimson pearl flower

dotrc is a very hard book to translate for a variety of reasons. it’s very long and dense and has a lot of hard to translate symbolism/double meanings and the like. The Hawkes tl is ~2500 pages across 5 volumes. Chen’s adaptation is ~400. So things had to be cut to keep the story meaningful.

THE RED CHAMBER (Pauline A. Chen)
If you are looking to read dotrc for limbus company/Hong Lu reasons. do NOT read this. it is not a faithful adaptation of the text. go read the Hawkes/Minford tl, The Story of the Stone.
If you’ve already read the original, this is a fascinating adaptation.

I’ve seen lets plays of this game but tbh i remember so little it was practically blind. I LOVE the villain cast here they’re all incredible!! super charming game that thinks that bad game design that exists solely to inconvenience can be good if it’s funny enough. and it’s correct. it is funny

Super Paper Mario.
I always wanted this one as a kid but never got it. it’s foundational media for my bestie mona. I Understand Everything Now. great game, fascinating design (both in visuals and game design). It’s super interesting bc i don’t think it could be made today. 👍