Scum Villian’s Self-Saving System

The Scum Villian’s Self–Saving System

Danmei, Satire and Reader Experience

“A healthy maiden being replaced by a scum villain? How disheartening. Ordinary readers would throw the book to the floor.”
― The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System Vol. 1¹

Shen Yuan and Luo Binghe, from simplified CN print

The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System (SVSSS) or《人渣反派自救系统》(Rén Zhā Fǎnpài Zìjiù Xìtǒng), was first published to Jinjiang Literature City on September 21st, 2014, where it ran until June 23rd, 2015². Since then, the series has been published in print media, making its way from the Chinese internet to a global audience. As Mo Xiang Tong Xiu’s (MXTX) debut work, it is the shortest of all her publications. This by no means makes it a short read, as it boasts 95 chapters and 432,198 characters (approximatley the same length as The Infininte Jest).

Despite launching her prolific career as a danmei “queen”, Scum Villian remains the least commercially sucessful of MXTX’s three completed series. This by no means implies that Scum Villian was a commercial failure, only that it performed a quarter as well as the more popular Heaven Official’s Blesssing. MXTX was rumored to have served jail time for violating online profit laws, tied to Scum Villain’s Jinjiang earnings – essentially suffering from her own success³. “Profit laws” may have been and excuse for the government to penalize her, as the content of Scum Villian can be considered distasteful to some for a multitude of reasons (including but not limited to, graphic sex, sexual assault, and abusive dynamics). Regardless of whether or not the rumors are true, they are representitive of the controversial yet impactful nature of Scum Villian’s Self-Saving System.

Story Overview

Plot

Shen Yuan, avid hater (fan) of the never ending stallion novel, Proud Immortal Demon Way (PIDW), dies and is transmigrated into his most hated (loved) story. Now inhabiting the body of PIDW’s most reviled Scumbag-Villain, Shen Qingqiu, he has to find a way to thwart the original’s horrible end as a human stick… by accidentally becoming the main love-interest?.

Setting

Scum Villian is a transmigration novel and system novel. Protagonist Shen Yuan is transmigrated from his life as a modern shut in, to the Xianxia world of in universe novel Proud Immortal Demon Way, where he becomes a peak lord of the Cang Qiong Moutain Sect’s Qing Jing peak. As a peak lord he must navigate the fantasy world of cultivation, all while completing quests for the mysterious system. The world of PIDW is a typical fantasy world filled with cultivators, monsters, and demons.

Shen Yuan and Luo Binghe during Binghe's time as a diciple at Qing Jing pe — art from simplified CN print

Character and setting summary, from weibo

SVSSS Seven Seas Entertainment, English print cover

Characters

Shen Yuan (沈垣）(Shen Qingqiu (沈清秋)) Aka. Peerless Cucumber (絕世黃瓜

The protagonist of Scum Villian. Transmigrates into the body of character Shen Qingqiu. Now must work with the system to avoid the original’s fate of becoming a human stick. In the modern world he was a huge fan of PIDW known under the handel ‘Peerless Cucumber. His top skills include ecyclopedic knowlege of PIDW, unreliable narration, and making everyone fall in love with him.

Shen Jiu (沈九）(also Shen Qingqiu (沈清秋)) aka. Original Goods

The ‘original’ Shen Qingqiu and a Peak Master of the Cang Qiong Mountain Sect. He treated the Original Binghe terribly, and was killed as revenge for being a scumbag-villian. Known for being deeply unpleasant and disliked, but is later reveled to have a tragic past.

According to new extras published in 2025, follwing his replacement by Shen Yuan, he chose to be transmigrated into the modern world, and lives a relitivley happy and healthy life.

Luo Binghe (洛冰河)

The half-heavenly demon protagonist of PIDW, he originally conquered the world and had a herem of over 600 women. In Scum Villian he is the love interest of Shen Yuan and is obsessed with staying with his Shizun. Morally dubious and moderatley unstable, he is the perfect dark romance love interest. Noted by Shen Yuan as being the perfect protagonist.

Yue Qingyuan (岳清源）

The steady and kind leader of the Cang Qiong Mountain sect. Originally killed by Mobei-jun and 10,000 arrows. He has a known soft spot for Shen Qingqiu due to their shared past, leading him to enable Shen Qingqiu’s worst habits.

Shang Qinghua（尚清华）aka “Grand Master” Airplane shooting for the Sky (向天打飞机)

The real world author of PIDW, known as ‘Grand Master’ Airplane Shooting for the Sky. He was accidentally transmigrated into his novel after electrocution caused by spilled instant noodles. As another transmigrator he tries to help out Shen Yuan, but does not remeber as much about his novel as one would think. He is also the part of the only secondary couple MXTX has ever written, falling in love with Mobei-jun.

The System

The enegmatic system that dictates the rules of Scum Villian, it gives Shen Yuan and Shang Qinghua quests, awards points, and drives new plot events. It acts as the reader and writer of the universe. By the end of the novel the interface has changed from Qidian to Jinjiang, representing the love between Shen Yuan and Luo Binghe. In new extras it is revealed to be a creation of the Original Luo Binghe, who was unhappy with how his life turned out.

What does Scum-Villian do?

The Nature of Scum Villian

Danmei
and
Mediating Labor

SVSSS is foremost a danmei (耽美) – written primarily for female audiences. As mentioned before, danmei “queer” (male-male) literature is written largely for and by (assumed) straight women. Danmei therefore acts as an outlet where fans can reflect on desire, gender dynamics and express worries about modern society⁴.

In modern society there is inherent tension between the traditionally male dominated productive labor (labor that directly creates goods/services), and femminine reproductive labor (labor that is required to maintain daily life). Productive labor is seen, and often paid, where reproductive labor is undervalued and non-paid, despite being essential to maintaining the out put created by productive labor⁵.

Danmei embodies the tension between these two opposing sides. Dominant male culture: male dominance, masculinity and productive labor, and minority female culture; emotional care, femmininity, and reproductive labor. Many Jinjiang readers embody the “three highs” of Chinese society, high education, high social status, and high salary⁴ .The women reading and writing danmei are not spinsters on the fringes of society, but active working adults. Danmei exists in the space between the two types of labor, as it has incredible profit making potenital, yet is generated undeiably via the reproductive labor of fans and centers modern womens frustrations.

In SVSSS, MXTX meta-textually critiques and pokes fun at the male-centric view of labor, reconstructing how in digital labor theoy femmine labor is converted into productive labor. Furthermore, she deconstructs popular male webfiction tropes. Furthrermore it highlights mediating labor, how labor done by fans, creates thirspaces for cross cultural interpretaion.

Scum Villain’s protagonist, Shen Qingqiu, begins the story as a Freudian Father figure, reviled and punished, before transforming into a nurturing Mother figure⁶. Through Shen Qingqiu’s emotional journey, and romance with Luo Binghe, and more importantly the meta-textual acknowledgement of reader and author interaction, SVSSS acts as a subversion of typical male-power fantasy novels. It offers female escapism by reifying the desires of the female readership it is written for.
However, dispute its emotional meaning, Scum Villian is perhaps MXTX’s most polarizing work – some think it is brilliant, and others hate it. This divide can cleanly be exemplified by two different Goodreads reviews:

algy

“i don’t want good gay representation, i want whatever the hell luo binghe and shen qingqiu have going on”

November 24, 2023

Lily Mae

I’m not sure if I’m going to continue this series. I adored the first book but I didn’t enjoy this one nearly as much. A lot of elements in the story felt just plain weird and made me uncomfortable.”

April 1st, 2023

There are very real reasons why Scum Villian is so derisive – its complicated story matter, dark tone, and copious references to Chinese web culture. The crux of the issue; Scum Villian is deeply rooted to online culture a holdover from its origins on Jinjiang. When removed from its online space Scum Villian struggles to find it’s footing, and it stumbles even more when traveling from the Chinese publishing industry to the West. Moreover, as arguably queer literature, between the West and China there are different understandings of what “good” representation is creating tension between the intended meaning of Scum Villian and the meaning Western readers take away.

Proud Immortal Demon Way: Male Power Fantasy

Proud Immortal Demon Way is originally, as Shen Yuan defines it, a “garbage and a total power fantasy “stallion novel”. Luo Binghe, the protagonist, is a dark romance leader. The embodiment of a revenge fantasy, Luo Binghe begins PIDW as a lowly orphan, abused by those more powerful than him, especially by his cruel Shizun, Original!Shen Qingqiu.

Only after discovering his mysterious internal power and being expelled from his sect (cultivation school) that he becomes the most powerful cultivator, and eventually Emperor of multiple realms. Along the way he collects a harem of over 600 female characters, all of whom exist only to serve and emphasize his sexual prowess and power. Importantly, he tortures and executes Original Shen Qingqiu, committing pseudo-patricide and violently removing what could be deemed as a “sexual” threat to his power.

MXTX makes a meta-textual poke at the fantasy fuillment aspect of PIDW, where Shang Qinghua says “I wrote deep thought prvoking works before, but nobody liked them and I needed to make money”. With this line MXTX clearly outlines how real world works such as PIDW are written, for profit, and no care for quality (implying that danmei is better).

This is the exact opposite of what danmei represents. Instead of feminine desires reified, it is masculine power fantasy through and through – reifing male desires, to the detriment of everyone in the story. With this MXTX makes a very clear point as to what exactly she thinks of profit driven male seires, garbage and low quality.

Shen Yuan summarizes the plot of Proud Immortal Demon Way in Scumbag System, the donghua (animated) adaptation of SVSSS⁷.

Feminine Subversion, Reader Labor and the System

In Scum Villian, Shen Qingqiu circumvents his original fate by becoming “female”, wherein he embodies traits and performs labor associated with reproductive labor. Instead of a threatening father figure (domineering, cruel, and emotionless), he represents the nurturing mother figure, this circumventing the violent end of PIDW by becomeing Luo Binghe’s lover. The female labor he enacts improves the outcomes of the story, showing how feminine labor reshapes narrative worlds. This embodies the second circuit of the danmei dielectric, male desire from the original fantasy transformed by emotional labor.

Shen Yuan and Luo Binghe in Wedding attire, from Official Seven Seas Entertainment art

Shen Yuan is a web-fiction reader inside the world of PIDW. He comments on and reacts to the male violence in universe. This advertently mirrors female fandom labor, critiquing female objectification and questioning violent plot-points. These actions then reshape the narrative, all without the use of brute strength. Transmigration further allows this projection of the female reader⁸, who goes from a “normal” life to a key player inside the story world. Shen Yuan’s power is a soft one, that highlights how women everyday play an integral role in improving real world conditions and fandom.

The system fiction aspect of Scum Villain furthers the connection between Shen Yuan and the reader. The game-like semi-omnipotent hub rewards Shen Qingqiu for fan-service, finishing potlines, and developing relationships. Thus, the system mirror the online ecosystem of platforms such as Jinjiang, sometimes rewarding and sometimes punishing authors. The transaction relationship between Shen Yuan and the system is a stand in for the push and pull between authors and readers, crystallizing reader desires and anxiety.

The combination of transmigration, system, and danmei genres is the hidden genius of Scum Villian. MXTX successfully creates a meta-textual subversion, the villian becomes the love interest, masculine power is softened, and reproductive labor literally reshapes the world. The system evolves from Qidian (male-centric) to Jinjiang (female-dominated). A tongue in cheek criticism and love letter to modern web-fiction.

The Struggle of Satire

Scum Villain Self-Saving System’s international stumbling block begins with its deep immersion in Chinese web-fiction conventions⁹. The novel leans heavily on a built-in “System” that awards and deducts “B-Points,” footnotes, glossaries of terminology and genre tropes, and real-time authorial asides—devices that domestic Jinjiang readers instantly recognize but leave international audiences puzzled when stripped of their original context. Without familiarity with serialized publishing, “chapter-by-chapter” commentary, and the shared lexicon of xianxia/BL circles, much of SVSSS’s wit and structure simply doesn’t translate.

Unfortunately for those seeking to reach wider audiences, SVSSS is foremost a satirical deconstruction of common BL and cultivation clichés. It riffs on the generic overpowered leads, harem tropes, and fan-service by consciously spotlighting their absurdities. Luo Binghe, playing the role of overpowered protagonist, quite literally has a harem of 600 women and becomes the demon king. In the context of webnovels, this is clearly mocking the overpowered main character who begins weak and then grows to be powerful enough to kill god while attracting any woman he possibly desires. Outside the web-novel milieu and among those unfamiliar with it’s common tropes, this clear satire is more likely to feel offputting.

“Satire requires a clarity of purpose and target lest it be mistaken for and contribute to that which it intends to criticize”
-shelving_unit, r/tumblr comments, 2018

Without mediatnig labor doing the work to translate the meaning of Scum Villian much of the satire is lost, and instead reads as reductive.

Source Material and Black Comedy

In a similar vein, the relationship at the core of SVSSS is significantly darker and more controversial than in MXTX’s other works. The master–disciple bond between Shen Qingqiu, a not uncommon trope in webfiction, is unpalatable to the average viewer. Luo Binghe includes non-consensual beatings, psychological gaslighting via nightmare “system” quests, and an unreliable narrator whose early actions verge on abuse. Later into the novel, we get explicit depictions of sexual assault that could unsettle viewers and put off larger publishers. While moral ambiguity exists in works like Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, the love in that narrative is more traditionally difficult, unlike SVSSS’s deliberate emphasis on these problematic dynamics that make broad appeal significantly less likely.

Bingqiu meme, poking fun at their dynamic

There is also the fact that Shen Yuan is a notoriously unreliable narrator. He refuses to acknowledge either his or Luo Binghe’s feelings expicitly. While this works for some readers, to others it makes Binghe seem manipulative, and Shen Yuan as a vicim of coersion, adding to readers’ discomfort with their relationship dynamic.

To fully appreciate this book, one must understand the Chinese web-fiction ecosystem, the common cliches of cultivation novels, and be comfortable with a relationship that is much less careful about consent. The explicit nature of the text combined with just how steeped in online culture the text is makes it unapproachable for the general audience that would need to embrace it in order to make it widely popular. When taken from the original context of the work (Jinjiang and other translation pages). Scum Villian loses its clarity of purpose and thus suffers in reception.

Mediating Labor:
The Rise of the Scum Villian Thirdspace

For these reasons, Scum Villian thrives in a digital thirdspace, where Chinese and Western readers interact. Together they are able to share and negotiate the meaning of the story together. Online, footnotes, genre conventions and cross-cultural fan interaction create shared scaffolding that allows the novel’s subversive humor and moral complexities to be understood. This mediating labor is what made Scum Villian legible. Remove this back and forth and the negotiation disappears, leaving new readers isolated and not incorrectly discomforted.

Before official translation, readers accessed the novel via fan translations hosted primarily on self-made blogs and online communities. To interact with web-fiction, the Western reader had to interact with the Chinese web, or at least someone who existed in both the Chinese and Western side of the internet. This created a thirdspace, a little part of the internet where Western and Eastern netizens interacted. In this era Western danmei readers were effectively selected both for online literacy and willingness to engage with cross-cultural understanding. These interactions, hosted on small (somewhat illegal) translation sites, such as tumblr, wordpress, or other such platforms¹⁰, bred a mediated environment where culture was shared. Negotiated meanings allowed for Scum Villian’s subversive qualities to shine and allowed readers to navigate the Chinese cultural references, internet slang, and genre conventions¹¹.

“[svsss] is definitely …hardest to read for people who don’t know the genre/don’t know much about Chinese internet culture. There’s a lot of jokes that would have sailed over my head if the translator didn’t have extensive footnotes. But it is definitely worth the effort and will always have a special place in my heart”
– scattered thoughts (reddit)

Shen Yuan flipping off the system, from u/nerdy_kittypaw on r/DanmeiNovels

When Scum Villian was officially translated and published by Seven Seas Entertainment for the West, it became accessible to a much wider audience. Anyone who walked into a Barnes and Noble could pick up the novel and read it. Despite the increased accessibility, the official publication effectively stripped the story away from the third space it had inhabited. The online rapport built between fans vanished from text, isolating readers from the cultural context of Scum Villian and removing the negotiation that allowed the story to function as intended. Furthermore, concerns were raised over the quality of these translations by older fans of the work, further alienating the story from its original audience¹². While readers are okay with typos in a free translation, they are not okay when those typos are attached to a 17 USD book.

Without the strong scaffolding produced by mediative labor, what is understood as subversive and whitty on Jinjiang feels confusing or even discomforting to Western readers. A prime example is the relationship between Shen Yuan and Luo Binghe. While Shen Yuan’s actions are seen as a direct critique of male-centered stories in China, in the West they can be seen as reductive, especially by Queer readers¹³. Without context, Scum Villain read through a Western lens falls into gay stereotypes, a femmine bottom, and a domineering top. This is before discussions of the more controversial aspects of danmei come into play¹⁴. While this is not to say that critiques of Scum Villian or danmei as a genre cannot be made, or that there are not valid. There are real concerns about the romanticization of sexual assault¹⁵. It is a disservice to the social commentary aspects of Scum Villian to critique the story without understanding the full context.

The loss of context, interpretation and mediating labor explains why Scum Villian struggles in Western print media, despite its success online. The removal of the third space is detrimental to Scum Villian and highlights the tensions between meaning in the West and the East, especially when marketed as “queer” literature, as different values and expectations regarding what good literature is.

Publishing vs Fandom the downfall of internet culture

The Collapse of the Scum Villian Thirdspace

Mediating labor is what caught that lighting in the bottle moment for Scum Villian, but as fandom generally becomes more popular, and more mainstream, the importance of mediaing labor is increasingly highlighted.

Part of why Scum Villian struggles in the Western publishing market is a mismatch between Western queer expectations and danmei as a genre. In its transition to Western markets, danmei is marketed as queer romance or LGBTQ+ fiction, despite not consistantly fitting into these genres¹⁶. Danmei while always centering male/male romance is not the same as Western queer lit and cannot be understood the same way. This misalignment of expectations creates tension, particlalry with readers unfamillar with dainmei, BL, and more broadly East Asian media traditions. As fujoshi.info notes, Western readers resistance to danmei often arises from a lack of cultural and historical context, rather than the text itself¹⁷

This tension is further intensified by the collapse of the digital thirdspace where Scum Villian is best understood. Western readers, especially ones not versed in internet culture, approach the novel expecting Western-style queer narrative. As a result, the feminist implications of Shen Yuan’s character, particularly his affective and transforative labor, are frequesntly flattened into Western stereotyples such as feminine bottom/masculine top. These reading are further shaped by long standing Western perceptions that feminze Asian men, copounding the misiterpretation of danmei protagonists¹⁶.

Similarly to Western queer expectations, the marketing of Scum Villian fails the novel. Amazon and good reads tags promote the series as “humor”, “romance”, and “LGBT”. These labels, which are some readers first introduction to the series imply expectations of acessability and tone, which Scum Villian fails to fufill.

The offical Seven Seas Entertainment site explicity tags Scum Villian as “comedy”¹⁸, which while not untrue, is not wholly accurate. While it is a comedy, the work falls much closer to “black comedy”, and highlighting the most marketable aspects of the book, romance and “light hearted” is inaccurate, and fail to include the copious tiggerwarnings most fans of the work will happily provide when asked¹⁹²⁰

Readers are likely to pick up the novel, expecting something akin to Yuri!!! on Ice, or a more traditional romance such as Mo Dao Zu Shi²¹, only to be suprised when the darker aspects of Scum Villian begin to make thier appearance in book two.

The Western marketing stratagies of Scum Villian attept to detatch the text form its “messier” eleent, including its darker themes and the the meta engagment with Chinese internet culture, in an attempt to make the book more acessable. This process obscures how the novel functions and leaves Western audiences confused when the content does not align with what they were promised or MXTX’s other works.

Scum Villian, despite what this analysis might make it seem, is by no means unsucessful, however it it the least sucessful of of MXTX’s three major publications, fans even joking about it²². On Jinjiang, it earned significantly less points than Heaven Official’s Blessing (天官赐福）(about one fourth of TGCF). Furthermore, it has recieved fewer and shorter adaptations, including a cancelled manhua and a single season 3D donghua. These indicate Scum Villian’s difficulty breaking into larger consumer bases beyond core readers.

Despite this, Scum Villian thrives within a small but dedicated fan community. While its fandom lacks the bredth of MXTX’s other works, its members engage deeply with it which exceeds easurable metrics of simply commercial success.

Western netizens will joke that you can tell how popular a work is by how many AO3 publications it has, and Scum Villian does not dissapoint with 26,962 published stories to date²³. Fans also exibit behaviors often considered “lost” in current fandom, such as crackships such as “cumplane” (Shen Yuan/Shang Qinghua), multi-shipping, and general “cringe” behavior²⁴. A notable hallmark of this is the general “don’t like, don’t read” attitude most Scum Villian fans take.

Notably, the same aspects that push casual fans away from Scum Villian, such as dark themes, explicit content, and moral ambiguity, are what sustain its fandom. Fans willing to enage with ethically ambiguous narratives are the ones willing to produce and engage with the fan labor that sustains fandom spaces and mirror the “golden” days of fandom before it became corpratized²⁵.

The mediating labor sustaining Scum Villian fandom reflects borader patterns of unpaied digital work, particulalry by female fans. This dynamic direcly pallelles the novel’s protagonist, Shen Yuan, whos labor within the narrative literally reshapes the genre and plot.

As within the fandom, this labor remains largely invisable and under appreciated despite being the backbone of fandom. The under-recognition of Scum Villian within MXTX’s body of work parallels the undervaluation of digital housework in fan cultures.

Scum Villian’s fringe status even within MXTX fandoms and its unmarketability underscore the problem of modern day fandom – corporatizaion and the sanitation of anyting discomforting or “weird”.

Since 2020, fandom has exploded, bringing in more fans than ever. With this explosion, corporations and large print corporations have increasingly become aware of the profit potential in these spaces. This hase led to the widespread corporatization of fandoms and more pubic disucussion of fandom culture. Such as the New York Times siting AO3 Heated Rivalry Fanfiction²⁶.

However the promotion and popularization of fandom comes with its own issues. Many new fans are unaware or unused to the conventions of fandom or even rejecting them. One such discourse is shipping or AO3.

Shipping has a long history in fandom, and is the basis for much of fandom. Shipping is defined as thinking two characters should be in a relationship. Some popular ships overall are Spock and Kirk, Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy, or Sasuke and Naruto. However there has been pushback by new fans on old conventions such as multishipping (shipping multiple pairings) or ‘problematic’ ships.

In old fandom it was not uncommon for people to ship multiple couples – specifically non-canon couples. But some people find it ‘changing the characters’ or ‘cheating’²⁷. Similarly people find issue with ‘weird’ or ‘problematic’ ships, such as ones with toxic dynamics, weird age gaps, or other discomforting aspects²⁸. This is doubly true on AO3, where almost anything is allowed, including controversial topics such as non-consent, age-gap, and a pelethora of other taboo topics²⁹.

While this is not a defense of these types of dynamics, this is not a new aspect of fandom. Fandom has long been built on the idea of creative play and ‘freaky’ behavior. People engage with these topics, not nessicarily because they endorse the dynamic or believe that they are ‘good,’ but becasue they are acts of exploration. What would make this dynamic happen? How would a character react to this situation? What if we all vere wolves (omegaverse)?

This criticism extends to Scum Villian in that the series has also come under fire for many of the reasons stated above. The problem is not disliking or not wanting to engage with this part of fandom, but the erasure and demand that nobody else does, especially topics people personally find ‘weird.’³⁰ The question is why come into a space that has historically been for and created by weirdos and expect it to fit into your personal tastes?

AO3 has one of the most comprehensive tagging systems on the modern internet, specifically so one can avoid anything they do not want to see. Many old fans are happy to say, if you ‘don’t like, don’t read.’ But corportization demands likeability by everyone, or choses, in the case of Scum Villian, to obvuscate less palateable parts of the story for profitability.

This new attitude in fandom scrubs fan of thier autonomy and creativity. Fandom is not nessicarily supposed to be marketable or for everyone, but rather a space to express creativity, without the constrains of general acessibility or consumer marketing. Adaptations of wattpad are making it to the big screen, AO3 tags found in Barnes and Nobel, but along the way it loses the root of fandom, bring back the freaks.

Conclusions

“Okay Shen Yuan” – a common SVSSS fan response to hate

The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving Systerm, was an explosive start to Mo Xiang Tong Xiu’s writing career and put her on the map for danmei fans. However, as her first work it does have its flaws, but it also has its beauty.

The path Scum Villain has taken highlights the tension between commercialization (productive labor) and reproductive labor. It critques heavily monetized masculine dominance, while emphasizing feminine digital labor. Furthermore its struggle in the West reveals what is lost when third spaces are erased under formal publication, and the constant push to make more revenue.

The existance of this work ask whether profit-driven storytelling and fandom diminishes complexity, ironically someting that could be asked of MXTX’s later works. Scum Villian is messy, it shows the best and the worst sides of danmei and is unapolagetically itself. It takes context, negotiation, and a willingness to step into another digital space for Western readers to be able to enjoy it to the fullest. Detached from the digital ecosystem it is easy to be swept away in the current and lose the original wit and satire of MXTX’s writing. But, perhaps that is the point.

Scum Villain could also be considered MXTX’s love letter to Chinese web fiction – its chaotic, sometimes problamatic, passionate, and most importantly it is fun. While it is an undeniable truth that not eveyone will enjoy The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System and that there are problems with its content, it is also an undeniable truth that it and its fandom have captured something special. Something about it despite its difficulty finding its footing allows it to connect with people, and perhaps it is that unpolished nature. Rather than trying to smooth its edges, or sanitize the content for marketability, perhaps the solution is to return to its roots. The online thirsdpace was special, and while foreign webnovels have never been easier to access, maybe we need to recognize that not everything should be universally consumable. Let some things exist as they were meant to, and let the right people find it. Afterall that is how this writer found her favorite MXTX novel, Scum Villain.