- #1
Charity 5 stars. A lot of things going on but my biggest impression is that it's a BG novel masquerading as BL. Also green tea. LOL It gets very draggy at times and I honestly skimmed through several chapters. There were some storylines that could have ran concurrently with the main one instead of being treated as separate arcs with their own separate chapters. Especially the ones for the side characters. And the identity & gender misunderstanding between the main CP dragged on too long for comfort.But it's still a pretty good read and my favorite character is Li Songyan. His character represents so many women irl.With that said, I always feel that this really isn't BL, because a lot of the settings feel like self-inserts/projections of what feels like a female author. I know a lot of these novels are written by fujoshis and this one felt so heteronormative that if you take out the words related to ABO, this can easily count as a straight CP novel through and through. Something about this feels very off-putting to me but I do like how it was portrayed that strength doesn't come from toxic masculinity.