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The lack of pessimism in Peerless Cucumber’s comments is something you might not immediately take note off, but something you can't unsee once you do.
Peerless Cucumber, also known by the name of Shen Yuan, here referred to as Cucumber, is a prolific fan of the Chinese web novel Proud Immortal Demon Way. This work, written by author Airplane Shooting Towards The Sky, is famous for its many weaknesses, but has attained great success regardless. In the words of Cucumber, it is “… a plothole ridden mess, that reads like a fungus growing in someone’s bathtub that has only seen papapa¹ from the perspective of the floor it happens on has suddenly achieved the ability to write…” and “ … the only reason you can be sure this wasn’t written by a child is the surprising attention to spelling and grammar. I have no idea how the author has prevented ever misusing punctuation, all the while getting the love interest’s name wrong not once, not twice, but an astounding seven times in this chapter.”²
You might find it interesting that the second of these comments was left on chapter 4322. No, that is not a typo. Chapter four thousand three hundred twenty-two. From all this, you might assume Cucumber to be a remarkably dedicated masochist.
I am here to argue otherwise.
An average man unfamiliar with PIDW has likely come across about ten to twenty of his comments. These have been disseminated throughout the internet in various mediums, from copypasta, to reaction images, to satirical imitations. His clear derisive tone leans itself well to being pulled from its context, remaining singularly entertaining even without knowing what it was initially referring to.
I, on the other hand, have read through his entire comments history. All 173 pages of it. (Perhaps I am the true masochist here.)
I must admit, purely for the sake of scientific transparency, that I first set out to write a piece about the role of hate-readers in an author’s comment section. It quickly became very clear that Peerless Cucumber was not a hate-reader at all.
The first comment left by Peerless Cucumber was on Chapter 8, three weeks after the story had started getting uploaded. He expanded on all his thoughts up to that point in a comment that delicately balances its criticism with its compliments, at one point even saying: “Though the actions of that master were over the top to the point of hilarity, you genuinely managed to move me with the description of Luo Binghe’s grief at his mother’s death. The foreshadowing to Luo Binghe entering a Cultivator’s Sect -- at least I assume that you were referring to that -- is introduced in a seamless manner, and the beginning steps of worldbuilding are admittedly captivating…”
Of course, he immediately followed this up with: “Though this might well be a fluke. It is far easier to hint at great things than it is to actually write them, and from what I have seen until now I am uncertain if you possess the skills needed for weaving a complex web of character interactions, as so far you have only shown us the relationship between Binghe and his mother, foregoing developing his connections to the world around him to the point it sometimes almost seems he lives in a vacuum. Get better, and do it soon.”
One might even call him optimistic.
Though Cucumber acknowledges the story’s faults, the trust that Airplane can, in fact, get better is implicit. He keeps this balance up until the story hits the Endless Abyss Arc around chapter two hundred. To quote him in the only livestream he has ever done: “…descending into the darker depths of the world, where monsters lurk and plot holes are closing in on us from every corner…”
Here we start to see the cracks appear. Up until this point, Peerless Cucumber had been the only person that has commented on the flaws of this story in a constructive manner, the sparse comments by other people consistently either fully positive or hate without substance. From then on, however, other people slowly but surely started acknowledging the narrative issues in the story.
One must note that while the upload rate nearly tripled, no doubt contributing to the lack of care by the author, readership grew twentyfold. For every person calling attention to the lack of consistency that led to Luo Binghe having sex with yet another busty lady, a hundred others stood salivating at this development.
People were quickly dividing into two camps, each viciously certain that Proud Immortal Demon Way was either “…a masterpiece in writing the masculine attraction present in each of us,” or a “…bucket of vomit and semen.”³
In the midst stood Peerless Cucumber, who though still unrelenting in his detailed evaluation of every mistake Airplane made, never failed to point out at least one semi-positive observation.
Ceaseless, unending. Even in the famous trash fest of chapter 1870 he still managed to mention that he thought: “While I sincerely doubt your sanity after this (no person needs this many descriptions of pearly liquid. Also, you described the breastmilk in the exact same terms as Luo Binghe’s come, leading to some very uncomfortable moments of uncertainty), I have no doubt that you remain outstandingly creative with your punishments for us readers.”
Truly a greater man than me. I don’t think I could have managed that.⁴
And from that point I could only think, why? How?
How on earth does Cucumber keep this unyielding ability to see the best in Airplane, when even I wanted to curse that man to hell and back for forcing me to read the words: “His beef missile made its way into her warm cave”?
Come hell or high water, Cucumber still manages to go into every update presuming it is going to be a good one, no matter how often he has been disappointed. He still talks about having “…more hope for [wife] when you introduced her,” and Airplane “butchering someone who could genuinely have been an interesting character.”
Everyone else has either long settled into despair or simply given up on the story. Cucumber hasn’t. He somehow, impossibly, still trusts in Airplane’s ability to write a good story, even if the past years should have disabused him of that notion.
At this point you’d almost think Airplane was doing it intentionally.
Haha, just kidding… Unless?
No, I really am just kidding. If we, for instance, made spreadsheets matching the positive/negative ratio of Cucumber’s comments to the progression of PIDW’s Arcs, we’d see something fascinating, I think. Unfortunately, nobody is mad enough to do that.⁵
In other news, I came across this ready-made spreadsheet that looks like someone spent thirty hours on making exactly that! How strange.⁶
What quickly became clear was that Cucumber became vastly more positive at the beginning of the Arcs, at one point even reaching a marvellous thirty-two percent positivity rate in a chapter focused almost solely on worldbuilding. And this wasn’t at the beginning, this was four thousand chapters in!
We see a constant rate of Cucumber being most positive at the start, dropping a whopping average eight percent when the wife of the week gets introduced, flatlining when we finally get to the porn, then consistently raising back to its highest point when we move on to the next adventure.
Of course, while you could argue that Cucumber just doesn’t like the sex, I wouldn’t do so -- not that you’d be wrong, just that I feel like something else is responsible.
If that same person that made the spreadsheet set up a data collector that downloaded every chapter and analysed the metadata to determine when it was posted, wouldn’t that be handy?⁷
In that hypothetical data set, you’d be able to see a clear trend, surprisingly not centred around an average amount of chapters of plot before Airplane would get bored and just start writing porn, but something far more sinister.
Payday.
Yes, I’m willing to say it. Capitalism is responsible for the words “Throbbing man rod of heavenly cum dispenser,” being inflicted on us.
Every month, after the fourteenth (coincidentally exactly when Zhongdian sends out its monthly bonus checks) Airplane wraps up the last arc in one chapter filled with the wiping away of whatever plot was left over after he butchered it in order to provide us with copious descriptions of heaving breasts, before setting everything up for his next plot.
His upload schedule drops to an average of one or two chapters per day, he introduces complex characters and sets up captivating problems for the protagonist to solve, everything is sunshine and rainbows and Cucumber almost seems like someone who won’t die an early death from rage…
Until two or three weeks go by, Airplane’s money presumably runs out, we get a boom of VIP chapters, and so many updates at once that at one point he posted thirty thousand words of bad hetero porn in one day.
This continues until, you guessed it, next payday. Then the cycle repeats, for better and for worse, in sickness and in health, for now and for eternity.
You may now kiss the bride.
I almost feel bad for Airplane Shooting Towards The Sky. Almost. He is, after all, still the person who wrote the words: “Her fuckhole tightened around his meaty impaler.”
That kind of stuff makes it hard for someone to sympathise with you.
So, just so sum it all up: Peerless Cucumber has no sense of when to quit, Airplane Shooting Towards The Sky actually has potential, and capitalism kills creativity, which is very bad -- even when we wish it killed it a little more, to avoid having to read: “Battering ram-shaped baby maker."
In conclusion, everything would have been solved if Airplane had a sugar daddy.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.⁸
[1] Papapa or 啪啪啪 is popular Chinese slang for sexual acts, derived from the noise one might make during it.
[2] English translations were provided by me. Liberties were taken by translating slang through intent rather than literal definition.
[3] These are both by an anonymous commenter on Chapter 573.
[4] In fact, I even left a comment of my own. At that moment it didn’t matter that it would get buried between hundreds of identical expressions of disgust, nor that Airplane was long gone and unable to read it. It simply had to be told. Dear god.
[8] Reading through everything again, I think you can see how I slowly gave up on using fancy language. It’s really late. I have exams in two days and have barely studied anything. This is the result of procrastination in its purest form. I don’t regret making this though. Airplane doesn't deserve the flack he gets.⁹
[9] Except when discussing his choice of words. "His mighty clit tickler," sounds like a cheap knockoff toy you'd buy for ten dollars at a shady adult store. No matter what other people say, "Playing the flesh flute," is not a good euphemism for a blow job! Then we have the… [EDITOR'S NOTE: I had to cut it off here to preserve the T rating.]