This Tortured Romance Isn't That Deep [Quick Transmigration]

A word of warning

This book was written five years ago, when I was into melodrama and tropes like "She got so much, but in the end she still lost the person she loved most."

"Only after losing them did she understand what mattered most."

And so on.

So it's going to be very melodramatic, and Xiao and Ye do not end up together! They do not end up together!!! It becomes a complete tragedy as soon as the first world ends.

The whole story has a lot of once-popular tropes like "toxic positivity" and "the crematorium." But by the time Xiao loved Ye, she had basically already died for love. Only in the first world does Ye love Xiao. In the worlds after that, she goes through the plot with no feelings involved.

Because Xiao is a scumbag, she cheats in the first world and gets together with a man. She thinks she only feels sisterly affection for Ye, so she has no guilt whatsoever. She's just a terrible person.

The second world is mainly about putting the man through misery, with Xiao acting out a forced-possession trope. But what I mainly wanted to write was the man's emotional reckoning over how he treated Ye, who used to be family to him.

The third world is ABO, and the title is Chauvinism. Xiao is written as a chauvinistic scumbag, a terrible, selfish hypocrite. She only realizes her mistakes at the very end.

The fourth world is my favorite, because Xiao finally learns to love someone. She's written as an antisocial, abnormal person, genuinely mentally ill. She finds it hard to empathize with others, and when she feels uncomfortable or unhappy, she wants to destroy everything. But in this world, she truly loves Ye.

In the fifth world, she finally moves from loving one person to loving the world because that person loves it, and she tries just as hard to love the world too.

In the end, it's simply a conclusion that brings the story's threads together.

When I first started writing this, I had a bit of a spiteful mindset, because I was going through some things myself at the time. But I changed my mind before I'd even finished writing the first world.

I like Jinge best, but I wrote her and Xiao in much the same way. Jinge is always the one who gets hurt, but in the second world she'd already had her sense of pain blocked, and she never got emotionally involved, so she wasn't hurt physically or emotionally.

But people have been saying ever since I first wrote it that I was too cruel to her. I understand; it's easier for everyone to relate to her or feel sorry for her.

Whenever I write Jinge, I use a lot of indirect description: Xiao's gaze when she looks at her, her thoughts when she sees her, and the perspectives of other supporting characters and passersby. Jinge is always so stubborn and beautiful that I can't help feeling for her as I write.

At first, I wrote Xiao purely to create a scumbag, a terrible person. But later I thought that wasn't very interesting, so I gave this terrible person a growth arc: learning to love herself, then others, then the world.

But I've never believed in rekindled romance, so Xiao and Ye were truly over as soon as the first world ended.

I poured a lot of my dissatisfaction and resentment from that time into this book. I wrote almost entirely in the grip of my emotions. Most of the time I was angry, sometimes I felt wronged, and only occasionally was I a little happy.

My emotions were unstable back then, so as I wrote, I kept amplifying my pain and sense of grievance. I only started to calm down in the last few worlds, but by then I was also getting tired. I kept writing while being swept along by my emotions, and when those emotions disappeared, I didn't know what to write.

If you've read this warning and still think you'll be okay with it, then please keep reading! Don't force yourself, don't force yourself!

Theme: Love isn't everything. Learn to love yourself.