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Notes -
I, for some reason, tend to relate to female characters more than male characters. Kusanagi Motoko is legitimately just badass, Youko from Twelve Kingdoms is a relatable character with kingship thrust upon her, the lead women in Dreams of the Red Chamber outshine the ostensible protagonist of the novel. I could go on.
They’re just not recent Anglosphere works.
Oh, definitely in Dream of the Red Chamber, all the men are idiots. There's a competent daughter-in-law trying to hold it all together as the family fortune is declining, but between the family spending money like water because they assume they're rich, and the "keeping up face" that is necessary in order to maintain their position, as well as the court officials and eunuchs 'borrowing' money they're never going to repay, the family is underwater and it's only a matter of time before it all collapses.
The viewpoint character narrating it all is a wealthy young son of the family who has neither the interest nor the capability to manage things or help retrieve their fortunes or cut down spending. It's the inevitable decline of a noble house over several generations, the pattern that we see repeated in all the Gilded Age American fortunes where the head of the dynasty made a huge fortune, then the kids and grandkids divided the inheritance between them, leaving it smaller to each inheritor, and squandered it or were only able to manage to hang on to part of it instead of making huge fortunes in their turn.
I can only say that I wish more people read it.
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