After Marrying the Male Supporting Character in a Period Novel

Coming soon: "The Spoiled Female Supporting Character in a Period Novel" and "The Workers' Family Compound in the Seventies"

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Blurb:

The lively days at the educated youth station in Dongsheng Brigade often make Li Ying feel that she must be an unnamed passerby in someone else's exciting life.

Nothing else to it: compared with this crowd, her daily life is so bland it doesn't even qualify!

But after spending two months as a passerby and watching a whole heap of drama, Li Ying accidentally falls into the water and is rescued. Only then does she realize that the people with exciting lives are the background characters in a book, while she is a named cannon-fodder female supporting character: the ill-fated first wife who dies young in a period romance about a doted-on second marriage.

Li Ying: "..."

No, thank you. I like being a passerby.

Cannon fodder doesn't live long!

In the original story, rescuing her forces the soon-to-be-married heroine and hero apart, and Li Ying becomes the villain who breaks up the childhood sweethearts.

After marrying the hero, Li Ying is despised by her in-laws as a spoiled young lady who can't do a lick of work. Her husband's younger siblings call her a homewrecker who came between their brother and sister-in-law, while her husband, who only loves the heroine, treats her coldly. Out of guilt, though, she lets the hero and heroine take whatever they want from her, and works like a beast of burden for her husband's family until she ruins her health.

In the end, all her hard work and kindness earn her not the slightest sympathy from anyone.

After Li Ying dies, the childhood-sweetheart heroine has just divorced her husband. At last, the hero and heroine get their happy ending, just as the readers wished.

In a husband's family where everyone loves the heroine, naturally she can do no wrong.

When she refuses to work, her in-laws say she's destined for great things and shouldn't do manual labor. When she orders her husband's younger siblings around, they say, "That's just how our sister-in-law shows she cares about us." She doesn't have to win over her husband, because the hero spoils her in every way.

Even Li Ying's children like the heroine, their stepmother, and sensibly help care for the children she has with the hero.

In the very end, Li Ying's life proves that it's not her husband's family who are difficult to get along with, but simply that she herself is no good. Even the marriage she entered because of an accident is rumored to have happened because she deliberately seduced him. After a lifetime of hard work, she gets nothing but contempt.

After reading the original story in a dream, Li Ying wakes up utterly shocked and unable to make sense of it.

She wants to give every member of this hypocritical family a good smack.

In the dream, she was moved by the hero and heroine's devotion and didn't want her presence to ruin their relationship, so she refused the hero's proposal, which he had made to save his own reputation. But the hero kept persuading her, the heroine kept talking, and her future in-laws joined in, insisting that she marry the hero and not joke around with her own happiness.

They were the ones who insisted on the marriage. So why did they resent her so much afterward?

Meanwhile, the hero, who was forced apart from the woman he loved, gets promoted and makes a fortune thanks to her, Li Ying, becoming an important figure.

And thanks to the children she left behind, he can keep getting benefits from the Li family, before finally living happily ever after with the heroine.

So she's just a sucker who gets him promoted and makes him money, is that it?

Li Ying refuses to sacrifice herself for this hypocritical, never-satisfied family. When the hero pressures her to marry him and the original plot starts playing out again...

Li Ying looks toward the cannon-fodder male supporting character who has quietly loved her all along.

"Cheng Zhou, want to go get our marriage license?"

Hah. They want a promotion and money? Then she'll make sure they don't get their way.

May the awful couple stay together forever. Lock them up tight!

Not a strong, independent heroine story. A domestic slice-of-life.

This blurb was screenshotted and saved on October 1, then revised on January 22, 2024.

Theme: People should live for themselves