A Foray into Translated Chinese M/M Webnovels, a Report and Maybe Recs

[extrapenguin]

Greetings! I come bearing canon recs. Chinese M/M (aka danmei) webnovels have been a whole new world for me, full of a slightly different set of tropes than Western fandom's idea of M/M and with slightly different narrative conventions. I've found it enlightening and enjoyable, so I decided to make this post. It's part recommendation, part reading log, and part musings. This post will use Eastern name order throughout, ie surname first. Note that with one exception, the translations are all WIPs. I found these by asking for recs in the xianxia genre, so it's mostly xianxia or multiple-world stuff where one of the worlds is xianxia.

Brief explanations of terms

Cultivation: Trying to achieve immortality and superpowers by Daoist (or Buddhist) meditative means. Should be relatively easy to grasp for people who've read fantasy before; if in trouble, just imagine they're all Jedi.
CP: Character pairing. Main ship.
Danmei: Chinese term for M/M aka yaoi aka slash. The top/seme is called the gong and the bottom/uke is called the shou. Most stuff is written from the bottom's POV.
Transmigration: "I have, for whatever reason, woken up in the body of another for a permanent-ish duration." Might be jumping to another body in the same universe, or more popularly, a modern reader wakes up in the body of a character from a novel.
Xianxia: Like fantasy as a genre, except taking Chinese folk religion and Daoism as its lodestones for making Ancient China magical. Expect a lot of cultivation and people flying around on swords.

( The recs and not-really-recs: )