ピ　オ (AKA LBH getting pushed into the abyss)

so many punchlines in this fandom boil down to "haha airplane shitty author" and i feel like it's important to remember that SQH was writing pure porn because it literally paid his rent and mister NEET third son of wealthy family-Shen Yuan actually had no business criticising him for it as harshly as he did, especially considering that, you know, nobody was forcing him to read PIDW. obviously SQH had no way of knowing that his little fictional world would come to life - he wrote tragic backstories because, again, it paid his rent. in the end SY literally got to marry his ultimate blorbo and still dares complain??

idk i'm just feeling emotional over airplane today :')

"It’s just that he really, truly loved this story he’d written." (airplane extras)

For clarity since some people are discussing in the notes: the good tragic backstories - like Qi-Ge and Xiao Jiu - did not pay the rent. The super ridiculous how-many-parents-has-Binghe-lost-now nonesense tragedies for wives backstories did.

But yeah, ultimately, if you read SY's POV and go "Well this silver spoon sucker must be absolutely right about the quality this poor person can produce based entirely off what they're doing just to scrape by must be accurate" ...you're classist and I worry about how you view irl people who put out less than their best because it's all that they have the time and energy for while struggling to stay housed.

SY's narration does the equivalent of a jerk pointing at a fast food worker struggling to carry the jerk's giant order of junk food and saying "you must be a terrible cook, I'm so glad I'm better than you" while said fast food worker seethes because they do, in fact, have a culinary degree but the economy means they can't get a job at a better restaurant. And also because minimum wage fast food employees are still skilled workers no matter what richer people think.

I agree with the root of this but I do think it's missing some nuance in Shen Yuan's specific unique brand of haterism and why he caught Airplane's interest so much. PIDW was pretty widely panned by all of its readership, as we know from the Airplane extras:

PIDW was regarded as objectively bad writing, even by Airplane himself, and regularly attracted vitriol even harsher than what Peerless Cucumber would write. Shen Yuan wasn't a notable hater in that he was the most vitriolic, though his criticisms were definitely numerous and harsh, but because he specifically was a hater WHILE undeniably loving PIDW:

Shen Yuan's haterism stems from the fact that he, against all odds, genuinely believes Airplane is at his core a good writer with good ideas. His frustration comes from the multilayered issue that from his POV, Airplane is choosing to be a bad writer. Of course, we as the readers know that he didn't have much of a choice because unfortunately artistic merit doesn't always pay, but Shen Yuan never actually interacted with Airplane in their first lives, so he is admittedly working on incomplete information there. This is expressed in his typical tsundere way, but it comes across plainly in his hyper fixation on the setting and characters of PIDW, the parts he deems untainted by the later spiraling into constant porn without plot. In essence, he's not mad because he ordered fast food from a fast food worker and is complaining about the quality, he's mad because he knows the fast food worker has a culinary degree and could be working at a 5 star restaurant yet is making fast food regardless.

this is a really good point! but, he still didn't even consider that there might be a deeper cause for airplane's "shitty writing" than greed - which is different than "selling out" so you can afford to live. so, at least part of his criticism came from a place of extreme privilege. i don't have the books on hand right now but does it say anywhere that SY liked *the writing*? wasn't he mostly into the worldbuilding (and binghe ofc)? idk both SY and airplane had their reasons but if i was a struggling writer and some rich asshole criticised my work that they are CHOOSING to read despite "hating" it i would be furious lol. like it would be one thing if PIDW was a published book that he paid for but idk hating on an online novel that was mostly (? correct me if i'm wrong) available for free kind of makes me think more of someone writing intense hatred about like... fanfiction. (yes i know that he paid for bonus chapters but iirc that was just a fraction of the entirety of PIDW)

but i guess that's where the whole "you can you up no can no bb" thing comes in i guess, getting put into pidw was the retribution he got for being such a hater lol.

bottom line: i think that the statements "SY's assumption that Airplane wrote shitty stories out of greed comes from a place of privilege" and "SY was frustrated because he knew Airplane had it in him to write something really good" can and should coexist! my original post was mainly me expressing my frustration not at SY himself but at people who write/joke about airplane being a shitty writer, blindly trusting SY's opinion; he lacks insight into airplane's life but we don't, and I think it's important to acknowledge that his writing suffered because of his circumstances, not because of laziness or lack of talent. i could have expressed myself better but i really didn't expect this to get so much attention D:

Ahh no don't worry no one's mad at you!! I'm just so cumplane pilled at this point I've memorized and dissected every time they've talked to each other like they're specimens on my lab table

What you consider "writing" is kind of up in the air I suppose-- he does critique Airplane's word choices and phrasing a lot (usually when it comes to his r/menwritingwomen prowess), but he does say:

So there's an acknowledgement that Airplane is skilled in setting up complex plot points and foreshadowing, just that he never follows through with solving them (which is explicitly why Shen Yuan keeps reading). PIDW was published on a subscription model (which is common for web novels), so actually Shen Yuan didn't just pay for a full published book (which it's also suggested he might have since at one point he mentions PIDW having like 50 volumes, though it's unknown whether this is hyperbole/a figure of speech or if he actually did buy paper copies of the whole book), but paid basically every single day for every single chapter published, probably as soon as Airplane posted them:

Backed up in Airplane's narration:

Now however much of Peerless Cucumber's money Airplane actually saw is up in the air depending on his contract and platform, etc, but from a consumer perspective webnovel subscriptions tend to be fairly expensive so considering how many chapters PIDW had I don't think it would be out of the realm of possibility that he genuinely did pay Airplane's rent at some point