Book Review of Water Outlaws: Front and Back Matter Ruins a Work (SPOILERS)

[Rivvy Elf]

TW: Discussing misogyny, gender, and SA

Book Review in a Nutshell: Water Outlaws is an example of how a book, that tries to be anti-misogynistic, unintentionally is one of the most misogynistic adaptations of Water Margin. If you have little knowledge of Water Margin, Chinese culture, Chinese history, Northern Song Dynasty culture (which is different from current Chinese culture), and Song Dynasty history, you'll really enjoy reading this.

Before I go into this review I will point out that if you have no knowledge whatsoever of the Song Dynasty, go ahead and read this work. There's a reason why there's a lot of positive reviews on it on Goodreads.

SPOILERS AHEAD.

Imagine reading a genderbent rewrite of The Odyssey, and seeing the author declare the background society of the adaptation to be regressionist and misogynistic. Then you notice the author excludes Calypso, Circe, Penelope, and almost every other woman character from the original novel save for 2.

One of the main surface-level differences in terms of cultural impact between The Odyssey and Water Margin is that knowledge of either is dependent on the hemisphere you live in. East knows a lot more about Water Margin compared to The Odyssey, and vice-versa.

The other main difference is that the more one researches Northern Song, the setting of Water Margin, the less clear-cut misogynist of a society it is. In fact, it's more progressive and women have more power in terms of aspects like households compared to most other societies in history. If you ask Cheng Yi, a person advocating for misogyny in the Song Dynasty, he will tell you this:

Cheng Yi: The men of Northern Song respect women too much and that a dead widowed woman should be better than a widowed woman looking for remarriage.

Cheng Yi's books were banned in the dynasty for a time btw. The turning point on the treatment of women is AFTER the events of Water Margin when a guy by the name of Zhu Xi put Neo-Confucianism on the map. But the scope of the setting Water Margin doesn't cover this. It is relevant to when Water Margin was written, however, along with its themes. That'll be covered later though.

This isn't some scholarly-level deep knowledge that I got from reading JSTOR. I got all this info from Wikipedia looking up Song Dynasty society and looking up Neo-Confucianism.. This is all surface-level knowledge nowadays, knowledge that you can get if you spend 20 minutes reading.

Water Outlaws advertises itself (if I remember correctly) as a genderbent adaption of Water Margin. So, a logical person would expect there to be some very in-depth front-matter or back-matter to go into this in Water Outlaws to not lead a person to think that the historical Song Dynasty was misogynistic and regressive.

Nope.

This will be a multi-post review showing how no matter how good your writing is, if you don't have good front or back matter, your book's setting and premise will fall apart really quickly in the face of anyone who knows how to read Wikipedia. I'll add a table of contents with links to the relevant parts of the review to this post later.

[Rivvy Elf]

The Cover

Let's start with the Cover of Water Outlaws:


This is a very striking cover. And if you have no idea of Chinese culture, a perfect way for you to be introduced to a story.

It looks to be inspired by one of the cover pictures of Water Margin (Outlaws of the Marsh):



This one looks to be depicting the Double-Speared General Dong Ping (not my first choice for a cover outlaw, but whatever).

Of course, if you are familiar with Chinese culture, particularly Chinese weaponry, one weapon stands out in the Water Outlaws cover picture: the guandao, the weapon held by the cover warrior.

Here's a picture of a guandao:


Now in China, everyone has heard of a person named Guan Yu. He is the wielder of the guandao, and in Water Margin, his descendant, Guan Sheng wields the weapon as well.

So. Some of you, now reading this, are probably inferring that the person on the cover art is some sort of descendant of Guan Yu, perhaps the same Guan Sheng in Water Margin. The guandao, after all, is associated with both Guan Yu and Guan Sheng, right?

Except if you looked at the summary, the story isn't about Guan Sheng at all. In fact, Guan Sheng isn't even one of the characters listed in the Dramatis Personae (I have so many gripes with having this in the front matter, but that's for another post).

So which character is in the summary? If you looked at Water Outlaws summary, one name sticks out: Lin Chong. Let's do a quick google search of Lin Chong shall we. Here's some pictures that pop up:





Wow. A very distinctive person. Very memorable with both the tasseled hat and the tasseled spear. Also doesn't need a horse to be majestic.


You see where I'm getting at here, right?

The cover art of Water Outlaws doesn't depict one of the major people in the novel. If someone bothered to search "Lin Chong" on Google, they would find distinctive pictures that would instantly form the foundation of their cover art.

Rivvy’s Suggestion to the Author: use Lin Chong’s cultural depiction already, pretty easy to remove the beard and make Lin Chong look like a woman if you’re depicting Lin Chong. This includes the spear, bonus points if it’s the iconic serpent spear that Lin uses in Water Margin. Don’t use a horse. A woman doesn’t need a horse to look badass, let the woman stand majestically on foot.

So we have a bad start here already. This is like publishing the Once and Future King in China and having King Arthur dressed as Lancelot and wielding a spear. But no biggie for those who don't put a heavy weight on weapon symbolism, this is a very minor issue and the cover art is pretty. An explanation via front or back matter would resolve things… if there was an explanation.

There are far bigger issues to tackle in the front matter. Which will be the next post.

[Rivvy Elf]

TW: The Author's Note contains potentially triggering words like SA.

SPOILERS AHEAD FOR WATER MARGIN

The Author's 3-paragraph Note that Poses More Questions than Provides Solutions (PART 1)

So before the Table of Contents there's an "Author's Note on Potentially Disturbing Content." Here's the note in its entirety:

“This book is a genderspun retelling of the Chinese classic novel Water Margin, in which antiheroic bandits rise up against a tyrannical government on behalf of the people. I’ve reimagined it as a melding of epic fantasy and wuxia, an action-packed battle against patriarchy that’s rife with indecorous women and fantastical sword fights.

In that context, this story is intentionally, gloriously violent—mostly in a cinematic style (based on the wuxia genre—think Chinese martial arts films). However, you’ll also find a few scenes of torture, the occasional extremity such as cannibalism, and one attempted sexual assault. The background society, in its regression and misogyny, also holds a number of values as normal that may disturb a modern reader.

That said, I hope this is primarily a joyous, toothy escapist adventure, one in which a group made up almost entirely of women and queer folk—who are in equal parts devastating, powerful, righteous, and terrible—stand up as self-proclaimed heroes to tear the world asunder.
—S. L. Huang 黃士芬”

I feel like this is the third or fourth time I'll say this. If you're unfamiliar with Water Margin and Chinese history, this note is fine and you're free to explore the book. However, if you're like me, or if you're a person who likes to research the original source material before you read its derivative to not get culture shock, you'll have questions. A lot of questions.

Let's analyze this paragraph by paragraph:

“This book is a genderspun retelling of the Chinese classic novel Water Margin, in which antiheroic bandits rise up against a tyrannical government on behalf of the people."

Now truthfully, the most popular edition of Water Margin, the one in which the last 50 chapters were removed, was like that. But this is 2023, there have been two famous TV series adaptations of Water Margin (1998 and 2011), and they both include the removed chapters.

Here's a more accurate summary of Water Margin:

Water Margin, the vernacular Chinese classic, is about 108 people who become outlaws and join up to fight a corrupt government. Then they rejoin society, fighting for the government against its enemies. This is a more accurate summary because the arguably most climatic and dramatic scenes of the whole book, where you don't know who's going to live or die, is after they rejoin the government.

I'm not going to go into the whole patriarchy thing in this post because the way the paragraph is structured, Huang is changing the actual complicated social society of the Song (in the prior century before Water Margin, 2 empress dowagers made decisions for the Song Dynasty for a cumulative total of 30 years) for her own fictional imperial entity. I will, however, go into it in part 2 when I address the problems of the second paragraph.

Notice I changed the word "tyrannical" to "corrupt" because the latter word is much more accurate. Northern Song operated under a bureaucratic government and the Emperor for almost all of Water Margin prefers drawing paintings, playing football, and composing poetry compared to actually running the country. So that's not a tyrannical government; that's a bureaucratic nightmare! It's also not tyrannical because the corrupt ministers cannot just blatantly execute people, otherwise most of the 108 would be already dead! The ministers have to resort to back-door tactics, bribes, assassinations, and underhanded stuff that we'd see in the modern day. That's not a tyrannical government, that's a corrupt government.

It also is much less plausible for the Outlaws to rejoin society if the government is tyrannical instead of corrupt. Think of the movie Training Day. Training Day depicts corruption and its plausible for people to want to join the cops because they think they can fix it. Much harder to do if the system is seen as tyrannical, otherwise the whole system would be brought down.

" I’ve reimagined it as a melding of epic fantasy and wuxia, an action-packed battle against patriarchy that’s rife with indecorous women and fantastical sword fights."

This is the most hilarious thing because Water Margin has a lot of these qualities already. Water Margin was already an epic fantasy and was the progenitor of all wuxia novels. The magic system that Water Margin uses is Daoist sorcery. The whole confusing first chapter fits the definition of EPIC FANTASY. The novel is also filled with indecorous women. The issue here is that most of the indecorous women in Water Margin are antagonists. Where Water Outlaws is making it a novel against patriarchy, Water Margin is a novel that fights against both governmental corruption and indecorous women. The most famous indecorous woman that has a spin-off adaptation of her own, which is another Chinese classic called Jin Ping Mei, is the femme fatale Pan Jinlian.

So the way Huang frames this is that we're going to finally see the likes of Yan Poxi, Pan Jinlian, Madame Jia, Bai Xiuying, Li Qiaonu, Pan Qiaoyun, among others get their spotlight and make this an epic gender-bent Water Margin. I ain't even mentioned the three actual women outlaws who could beat up like 30 men at the same time: Gu Dasao, Hu Sanniang, and Sun Erniang (ranking them in martial prowess), who would all get literary promotions and become main POV characters, right?

Right?

Yeah, more on that in the Character List. Here's two words to hint at a future post: UNINTENTIONAL MISOGYNY.

There's also a minor nitpick that the sword is the weakest weapon and the fighting should remain polearm and spear-based because swords lose to spears and polearms due to reach in real life. This is minor though.

So right off the bat with the first paragraph there are multiple questions: Did the Author stop reading Water Margin at a certain point skipped the ending? Does the author know what "tyranny" means? Did the author skip the first chapter of Water Margin where it literally says that the 108 were once demons who were released into the world? Does the author not realize that the original novel had indecorous women antagonists and will they appear in the novel as protagonists or become the BIG BADS? Is this really a reimagining?

And none of these questions are answered in the next two paragraphs.

The second paragraph deserves a post of its own and I'll get to that once I have time.

[Rivvy Elf]

Same TWs.

The Author's 3-paragraph Note that Poses More Questions than Provides Solutions (PART 2)

"In that context, this story is intentionally, gloriously violent—mostly in a cinematic style (based on the wuxia genre—think Chinese martial arts films). However, you’ll also find a few scenes of torture, the occasional extremity such as cannibalism, and one attempted sexual assault. The background society, in its regression and misogyny, also holds a number of values as normal that may disturb a modern reader."

There's a better way to phrase the first sentence of this paragraph.

Rivvy's Suggested Revision: "Current martial arts is a very diluted and flowery version of the unarmed fighting styles taught to soldiers in the past. Whereas current martial arts focus on self-defense, 12th-century martial arts focus on hurting and killing your opponent as well as self-defense. Much of the fighting, both unarmed and armed, that you'll see depicted here is the latter. It will not be pretty and it shall be intentionally violent and gory in a cinematic style."

This is a very important cultural distinction because many of the martial art forms like Eagle Claw, Chuojiao, and Xinyi come from this era, championed by The Patriot Yue Fei in the 12th century. And you do not want to offend the image of Yue Fei or their descendants. The guy who betrayed Yue Fei, Qin Kuai/Hui, was hated so much that statues were built of QIn Kuai/Hui just for people to spit on. Yue Fei's descendants are still a force and will pursue legal action against you if you offend them. See their legal actions 10 or so years ago in regards to something regarding Qin Kuai/Hui.

Second sentence is fine.

Third sentence... boy this is where an author needs to make abundantly clear which setting they're talking about. The author has either failed to draw the distinction between the actual society of the Song and her own setting or is arguing that her setting is congruent to the setting of Water Margin. Both are condemning since the author is borrowing a lot of worldbuilding from another work.

Because the Northern Song's culture is neither regressive nor misogynist. The Modern Reader, especially if they are American, will find a lot of parallels between pre-women suffrage (women being allowed to vote) society and the society of Water Margin. It was a capitalist society with paper money, metal money, and banks. Women had a lot of legal rights especially pertaining to property and divorce (divorce needed consent from BOTH parties). There was a high sense of nationalism and a fear of neighboring countries, because there literally were protests of 100,000 people outside of the Imperial Palace when they were making concessions to foreigners like the Jin. Northern Song's government had two political parties: the Conservatives and the Reformists (what we deem liberals today).

Women could be Regents of the Dynasty. If the ruler was too young, oftentimes the Empress Dowager would run the state. For instance, in the 11th century, for at least 30 years, a woman held de-facto power of the Northern Song Dynasty. So although they could not be individual members of the bureaucracy (I'm pretty sure they weren't allowed to do the civil service examination but feel free to correct me), they could run the empire.

The main issue of Northern Song was its corruption, particularly in government. It is largely the same corruption that exists nowadays. Feel free to ask me for more info on that.

If you want more info on why Northern Song wasn't misogynistic feel free to ask and I'll elaborate. It was male-dominated but there wasn't a strong prejudice against women. There were philosophers in that era who wanted to make the Northern Song into a misogynistic society and they complained that their society wasn't misogynistic. I hate Cheng Yi, by the way.

Rivvy's suggested revision of the whole paragraph: "Current martial arts is a very diluted and flowery version of the unarmed fighting styles taught to soldiers in the past. Whereas current martial arts focus on self-defense, 12th-century martial arts focus on hurting and killing your opponent as well as self-defense. Much of the fighting, both unarmed and armed, that you'll see depicted here is the latter. It will not be pretty and it shall be intentionally violent and gory in a cinematic style. You’ll also find a few scenes of torture, the occasional extremity such as cannibalism, and one attempted sexual assault. The background society's corruption may disturb a modern reader due to its similarity with many current societies today."

The issues are resolved if there's either a separate distinction of what society they are depicting, or a closer alignment to what society they're mirroring. If those issues are NOT resolved, then the author is unintentionally going into Culturally Offensive territory.

Next is part 3!

[Rivvy Elf]

The Author's 3-paragraph Note that Poses More Questions than Provides Solutions (Part 3)

"That said, I hope this is primarily a joyous, toothy escapist adventure, one in which a group made up almost entirely of women and queer folk—who are in equal parts devastating, powerful, righteous, and terrible—stand up as self-proclaimed heroes to tear the world asunder."

I'm fine with this. It's Huang's adaptation. When you change the demographics and genders of characters you're going to change the plot and its results.

The challenge though is incorporating the many women in Water Margin in the narrative so that they retain some aspect of their original personalities to pay homage to the author.

And that's the end of that Author's note. Just 3 paragraphs. We don't know what setting Huang'll use, the setting Huang creates or the already-built setting of the Northern Song Dynasty. We don't know how in-depth Huang read Water Margin because we only have 3 paragraphs to infer that.

One of the things I loved about Water Margin is that it truly was like A Song of Ice and Fire, in which you didn't know who was going to show up, which people were going to die, which people were going to reappear, and which people were going to survive. Though a bunch of times, Water Margin literally tells you (e.g he shall no longer appear in this story) but in its TV series adaptations, you wouldn't know that.

... So can you imagine the utter SHOCK and HORROR I felt upon seeing a Dramatis Personae list? Spoiling all the important and relevant named characters? Especially when you don't have an introduction explaining the changes you made. Especially because part of what helps makes Water Margin a page-turner is that you don't know who's going to be a main character or minor character or who's going to live or die.

So will this Dramatis Personae give me a good impression? Will it give me a reason to read the book, or will it give me a reason not to read the book?

You'll find out in the next post.

[Rivvy Elf]

The Dramatis Personae (Part 1)

Minor nitpick that since Water Margin was written in vernacular, everyday, language, I would've changed Dramatis Personae to 'Character List.'

SPOILERS AHEAD

You have to be very careful when you include a dramatis personae, particularly if you're excluding characters from the derivative source. This is why I don't advise including it. Let your writing determine who the memorable and forgettable characters are. The readers can then form their own opinions on who the important ones are.

So remember when I argued that Water Outlaws is the most unintentionally misogynistic adaptation of Water Margin? You're going to see why I believe that.

Here's the list of women in Water Margin. I have bolded who I saw as antagonists and organized it. I have bolded the names that I can easily recall and are memorable.


A Freakin' Chinese Mythological Deity:

Jiutian Xuannü: The Goddess of war, sex, and longevity


The Historic Celebrity who is arguably the most influential character in Water Margin:

Li Shishi


The Three Outlaws Who Are Women:

Sun Erniang
Hu Sanniang
Gu Dasao


The Fourth Warrior Who Joins Later On:

Qiongying


Antagonist Queen:

Duan Sanniang


The Non-Antagonist Women:

Jin Cuilian
Lin Chong's Wife
Jin'er
Squire Liu's Daughter
Cheng Wanli's Daughter
Yulan
Li Kui's Mother
Wang Jin's Mother
Li Ruilan
Lei Heng's Mother


Antagonist Women:

Yan Poxi
Butcher Zheng's Wife
Liu Gao's Wife
Madame Jia
Pan Jinlian
Granny Wang
Jiang Zhong's Wife
Li Gui's Wife
Bai Xiuying
Li Qiaonu
Pan Qiaoyun
Ying'er


So in summary: 1 goddess, 1 historical celebrity, 4 warriors. 1 antagonist queen, 10 non-antagonists, and 12 antagonists. You know this surprises even me at the amount of women in Water Margin since it's known as a misogynistic book. But we have a lot of potential here to create a gender-bent Water Margin using only these characters alone.

Guess how many women from Water Margin that Water Outlaws used and displayed in its Dramatis Personae?

You'll find out the number next time.

[Rivvy Elf]

The Dramatis Personae (Part 2)

SPOILERS AHEAD

Guess how many of the 29 women from Water Margin that Water Outlaws used and displayed in its Dramatis Personae?

If you guessed 3, then you're correct! Now I know some may have guessed that the three women outlaws in the original novel are in Water Outlaws, but unfortunately, you would not be correct. Only 2 out of the 3 original women outlaws are in the Dramatis Personae list: Sun Erniang and Hu Sanniang. For some reason, Gu Dasao didn't make the cut even though the Xies are in the story (Gu Dasao, their cousin, was instrumental in freeing the Xies before they joined the outlaws.)

Do you know how frustrating it is when you're led to believe that this work is going to be less misogynistic but doesn't include one of the most prominent female fighters in the work?

It gets even more frustrating because both the woman who legitimizes the outlaws in Water Margin, Jiutian Xuannü, and the woman who is the reason why the outlaws get pardoned, Li Shishi, are not in Water Outlaws. What happened here? Surely the deity should be in here for this supposed fantasy re-imagining? Surely Li Shishi should get even more of a prominent role because she is not a warrior whatsoever but is arguably the most influential person in Water Margin?

The three women by the way are Sun Erniang, Hu Sanniang, and "Jia," who I assume is Madame Jia. I don't know if Jia is gender-flipped or not but I have not read any mention of this person in the reviews I read so Jia must've been a very minor character.

None of the female antagonists are in this work. As far as I can tell from the reviews, none of the antagonists are women. Huh.

Let's do an activity. Which work is more misogynistic based on the optics? A work with 29 women, many being antagonists, many being non-antagonists, and many that are critical to the plot? Or an adaptation that uses 3 out of those 29 women, have those original women essentially be secondary or tertiary characters, and gender-bends many of the men into women?

The adaptation is more misogynistic by default because the adaptation implies that 26 out of the 29 women are completely irredeemable and don't deserve to exist!

So remember when I pointed out that Water Outlaws is the most unintentionally misogynistic adaptation of Water Margin? This is why.

Now there's a possibility that these original women are referred to in the text, which then begs the question why have a Dramatis Personae to begin with? More likely that the Dramatis Personae is a list of all the characters that appear in the novel. This is why I dislike character lists at the beginning of the book unless it's a play: it's telling and not showing. It's not giving the reader the opportunity to decide or guess who the main characters are and who's going to stick around. Furthermore, if it's an adaptation, the dramatis personae becomes a horrible first impression if it lacks aspects of the original novel without any explanation why.

The other question though would be... Are we able to slot in the 26 women who were left out in the original Water Margin? Obviously, we can put in the deity, the two warriors, and the warrior queen somewhere in the narrative. But what of the others? What of the antagonistic women?

I will show and explain how to put in all of the original women characters in Water Margin inside an adaptation to make it less misogynistic and more genderbent in the next part.