Through the Farming Fields Full of Spring Chapter 52 Discussion

This farming BL romance story is more unusual than good. It's a very slowly moving slice of life narrative. Slow, because it takes several chapters to cover a couple of days and it takes nearly the entire novel for the main couple to get together. The MC is a few weeks pregnant when it starts and he has just become a widower. So it will take 2/3 of the novel for him to gestate and give birth and then still to wait for his year of mourning to be over (and the novel to end!) to be able to get together with another man. While the entire village is watching, of course. No privacy. Lotsa judgement. Everyone is oh so eager to sink him in a pig cage for the slightest hint of immorality in his behavior around men.

Spoiler

And then, to delay that happily ever after moment even further, the author resurrects the first husband of the original owner's of that ger body. He never died and never divorced his ger spouse, so deal with that.

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So if reading avery long story about the daily life of a pregnant man always suspected of hooking up with some wild male is something you would enjoy, be my guest. To me, it was "more unusual than good".

Spoiler

The MC is a highly educated gay man who grew up in a village and returned to live in his village after finishing number one university in China. His dad of course wanted him to marry and have a kid, but the man is a virg*n gay, so nope, no hope for that, but he still promised his dying dad that he would and his dad died without seeing his grandkids being born.

The MC has a spot on his hand which is his family's ancestral spiritual treasure. One day he was kowtowing at his dad's grave, broke skin on his head, touched the bloody spot with his hand and activated the treasure under that spot - a space with fertile land and a magical spring. So, he used that space even when he lived in modern day China, built a house in it, farmed fruits and vegetables, fish etc.

Then one day, on his dad's anniversary of passing, he got killed by a ray of lightning, he thought it was his dad's anger for not marrying and having kids.

He wakes up as a pregnant widowed ger in another world in ancient setting. He has a three years old ger child and another boy in his stomach. Of course, there are evil in- laws who want to take away his house and fields and an entire village of people whose sympathies and support he has to win if he wants to survive and prosper on this world.

Spoiler: the husband of that ger is not dead, just missing, but assumed dead. He comes back later, also behaving like an evil in-law (well, very patriarchal and filial to a fault) wishing to take everything away from his now prosperous and happy spouse and give it to his mom, the old family matriarch, to manage.

The entire novel is driven not so much by love (romantic or parental) and caring (motherhood/fatherhood) or even by the rags to riches plot but by envy and schadenfreude of the villagers and family members on both the MC's and the ML's side. These are two basic feelings or emotions that drive all of the events on this story: people being envious of people and people enjoying another human being's suffering.

If pleasure derived by someone from another person's misfortune is something you find interesting to read about, then go ahead and read this novel. There are very few of the pleasures of another kind in it.

It is not really about romantic love or family love or love of one's business or career. The author simply likes to write about envy, gossip, and how others do not like to see a person next to them to succeed even a little bit, but enjoy enormously another person's failures, humiliation and pain. She describes people en masse as bad with lowly and evil basic motivations. Who would want to live in such a world, even if imaginary? Not me.

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