Remnants of Filth

I’m not sure what drew me to these novels in the first place. Maybe I thought the cover art was pretty? Initially, I really couldn’t get into it. Half of it was that my brain was still firmly in Tian Guan Ci Fu mode (it still is—), and the other half…well, I’m not sure myself. Such a different tone than what I had been reading before. Chattel slavery, for starters. A world of constant war and corruption. Nightmarishly evil acts are just commonplace. A lot of sex and sexual desire. Love and hate that are one and the same—or rather, they magnify each other. Everything felt like a bleeding wound, throbbing dully with no catharsis in sight. By the third book, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to keep reading. The story was intriguing though (and the sexual content was pretty hot—)…

Curiosity (and honestly, lack of anything better to do while I was sick in bed) ended up winning over my reservations, and by book 5 I had somehow grown to love it. Maybe it was just that I could finally see a way forward in the midst of all that suffering. I awaited volume 6 and 7’s release with anticipation.

The sixth book left me feeling almost dizzy with all those plot twists. I couldn’t take my eyes off the pages for a whole night. man, Jiang Yexue and Murong Chuyi were on some real kohakiha shit, huh? I felt so sorry for him, but after the main couple became pure love it felt like I was back to getting what I came for in the first place(wait, what did I come there for?). Even when everything seemed the most hopeless for the main characters, I had no more doubts that this would have a happy ending—I figured that if I kept thinking like this, the last book would feel like a victory lap (Narrator's voice: it did not feel like a victory lap at all, and Winter’s belief wavered so much in the face of adversity that it makes one wonder if it was ever there at all. And they cried a whole lot.)

Reaching the ending felt like I was finally home after an exhausting trek. After a bunch of tears, with Temple of Soul blaring from my earbuds, I welcomed the morning and the end of Remnants of Filth—well, except for the extra story, which was kind of nothing. Their dynamic was all wrong, it just felt like a worse Mo Dao Zu Shi. And so long, too. Bleh.

Still, I ended up enjoying Remnants of Filth way more than I thought—I started Husky and His White Cat Shizun literally the day after finishing it, though a review for that is still a ways off. In the end, the real enemies to lovers was me and this series…