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活着就是恶心
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 12, 2026
To Be Alive is Disgusting is a story I first heard about back in 2021 on a Reddit thread for darkest Danmei novels and had immediately struck my curiosity as I do enjoy dead dove works, however there was no TL and I get too frustrated reading MTL. After studying my Chinese for a while and getting annoyed with an attempt to give in and MTL, I decided to actually read it myself and give it a proper TL. The TL is still early and ongoing, but I finished the story ahead and honestly really enjoyed it!
First things first, this story lives up to it's name, it's dark as hell like holy crap, like comparable to something like 'Salo, or The 120 Days of Sodom'. The tone throughout the story is very gloomy and melancholy, our main couple are mutually victims from the higher ups in society that they deal with and really don't have anyway to escape from this fate aside from having each other in their lives and the sadomasochistic dynamic they mutually engage in. Even starting off, the shou is gangraped by co-workers after being found wearing lingerie under his clothes and the gong is sexually and physically assaulted by politicians that take joy in watching using him as a prostitute and laughing at his agony of having rodents forcefully shoved and trapped inside of his rectum all within the first 5 chapters. The two go through so much shit from the hands of other, but the love between them, even though it's very co-dependent, is actually pure love. The two never fall for anyone else, they place each other's well-being above their own selves (which in turns does lead to issues that could've been resolved had they opened up instead), and the one thing they solely wish for is that the other to not die before them. It's tragic in all sense of the word, but even still they still persist.
The plot itself isn't too complicated. The author, Nicotine, constantly mentions in her author's notes that she mainly wrote this to vent and to write SM smut (which is wild that she finished a 190k word story in 3 months), but you can tell a lot of her frustrations with society are in the work as the narration constantly critiques the hellish landscape for those who have to work paycheck to paycheck, the way that the rich stand at the top and look down on those below as less than them, and a very pessimistic view towards fate taking a stance of it being unchangeable but also having karma dished upon those who wrong others. The story itself is also pretty short, filing in at 28 chapters plus a prologue and epilogue, with the chapters usually averaging around 3-6k words. It's a fun read, but even someone like me who can withstand dark topics found myself wide-eyed in shock at some of the things happening, especially to the gong, I.K, like, holy crap she was not lying about torturing him some more.
For negatives though, the story towards the ending (around ch22 or so) you can tell it's winding down as a lot mainly becomes I.K getting sexually abused by others who don't see him as human, like omg let him get a break PLEASE. There's other stuff going on of course, but by the 4th time you want to see this man take a breather. And as well, the smut I get is BDSM, but it gets a bit too out there at times, like look someone would be dead at this rate with the things being done to their body.
Plus...this story REALLY needed a proofreader. Like, there are a LOT of spelling errors and typos that range from small words using the wrong character to straight up words being misplaced or using the wrong way to refer to something. Plus, there's so many run-on sentences, like when I first began I just thought that was normal in CN for sentences to go on with comma after comma to separate, but then a friend of mine who knows CN plus comments from readers both positive and negative on Zhihu all said that the sentences are way too long and need to be split up. Like you'll have an 8-9 line paragraph and there will be two, maybe three periods in that entire wall of text. Even in the author's notes Nicotine is mentioning that readers on Lucifer's Club were mentioning to her the grammatical and spelling errors to her.
But all in all, I did have a really good time reading TBAID, and am glad to have been able to read. It's dark and depressing, but in the end at least I.K and Er Chun are each other's light in that darkness. I recommend it if you enjoy dark works, but as Nicotine herself says, if you're a pure love/fluff fan, stay CLEAR from TBAID, this is not the type of story you want to just read through unknowingly.
First things first, this story lives up to it's name, it's dark as hell like holy crap, like comparable to something like 'Salo, or The 120 Days of Sodom'. The tone throughout the story is very gloomy and melancholy, our main couple are mutually victims from the higher ups in society that they deal with and really don't have anyway to escape from this fate aside from having each other in their lives and the sadomasochistic dynamic they mutually engage in. Even starting off, the shou is gangraped by co-workers after being found wearing lingerie under his clothes and the gong is sexually and physically assaulted by politicians that take joy in watching using him as a prostitute and laughing at his agony of having rodents forcefully shoved and trapped inside of his rectum all within the first 5 chapters. The two go through so much shit from the hands of other, but the love between them, even though it's very co-dependent, is actually pure love. The two never fall for anyone else, they place each other's well-being above their own selves (which in turns does lead to issues that could've been resolved had they opened up instead), and the one thing they solely wish for is that the other to not die before them. It's tragic in all sense of the word, but even still they still persist.
The plot itself isn't too complicated. The author, Nicotine, constantly mentions in her author's notes that she mainly wrote this to vent and to write SM smut (which is wild that she finished a 190k word story in 3 months), but you can tell a lot of her frustrations with society are in the work as the narration constantly critiques the hellish landscape for those who have to work paycheck to paycheck, the way that the rich stand at the top and look down on those below as less than them, and a very pessimistic view towards fate taking a stance of it being unchangeable but also having karma dished upon those who wrong others. The story itself is also pretty short, filing in at 28 chapters plus a prologue and epilogue, with the chapters usually averaging around 3-6k words. It's a fun read, but even someone like me who can withstand dark topics found myself wide-eyed in shock at some of the things happening, especially to the gong, I.K, like, holy crap she was not lying about torturing him some more.
For negatives though, the story towards the ending (around ch22 or so) you can tell it's winding down as a lot mainly becomes I.K getting sexually abused by others who don't see him as human, like omg let him get a break PLEASE. There's other stuff going on of course, but by the 4th time you want to see this man take a breather. And as well, the smut I get is BDSM, but it gets a bit too out there at times, like look someone would be dead at this rate with the things being done to their body.
Plus...this story REALLY needed a proofreader. Like, there are a LOT of spelling errors and typos that range from small words using the wrong character to straight up words being misplaced or using the wrong way to refer to something. Plus, there's so many run-on sentences, like when I first began I just thought that was normal in CN for sentences to go on with comma after comma to separate, but then a friend of mine who knows CN plus comments from readers both positive and negative on Zhihu all said that the sentences are way too long and need to be split up. Like you'll have an 8-9 line paragraph and there will be two, maybe three periods in that entire wall of text. Even in the author's notes Nicotine is mentioning that readers on Lucifer's Club were mentioning to her the grammatical and spelling errors to her.
But all in all, I did have a really good time reading TBAID, and am glad to have been able to read. It's dark and depressing, but in the end at least I.K and Er Chun are each other's light in that darkness. I recommend it if you enjoy dark works, but as Nicotine herself says, if you're a pure love/fluff fan, stay CLEAR from TBAID, this is not the type of story you want to just read through unknowingly.
March 16, 2019
一个激情与悲伤的故事。虽然最后是在一起，但更希望他们死去。那才是解脱。
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 1, 2023
多年前读的，踹开了我新世界的大门，xp日益丰富的今天再来重温一下。
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews