Reading

A bank teller says don't tell me the account holder is dead. A variety show rewards players who exploit rules their teammates can't see. The structure is the same: whoever knows the unwritten rule wins; whoever doesn't, pays.

How an intellectual history student spent four hours at 3am going from 'I only like your face' to 'why is Dionysus here a packaging concept rather than a work-internal structure'

Two games, thirteen years apart, two female protagonists engineered as vessels for player identification — and in both cases, the romanceable male character broke containment. On the structural persistence of the transparent-protagonist problem in interactive fiction, and what happens when the audience decides to finish the story the developers would not.

Theoretical addenda to two earlier essays on Road to Empress — five frameworks for why romanceable characters consume their protagonists, a Foucauldian autopsy of Wu Yuanzhao's hollow subjectivity, and an anatomy of the fandom coalition that turned a seven-chapter route into a cultural event.

A critical essay on how the Prince of Wei outgrew his narrative container, and what that tells us about character, sacrifice, and the limits of the 'big female lead' genre.

A companion piece to 'The Bluebird Who Outgrew the Throne,' examining how fan rhetoric, platform economics, and developer panic turned Li Tai into the most contested character in Chinese interactive fiction.

Character-by-character comparison between the original Water Margin and Kitakata Kenzō's 19-volume reimagining. Research notes on a revolutionary who rewrote a peasant revolt as an elite guerrilla operation.

On the WOWOW adaptation of Water Margin — cultural projection, the sanitization of subaltern voices, decaffeinated revolt, and the double castration of a dangerous text.