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What is Water Margin?

Shui Hu Zhuan (Or Water Margin, or All Men Are Brothers, or Outlaws of the Marsh. or The Marshes of Mount Liang) is one of the four classic Chinese novels. It is a long, meandering, highly enjoyable action novel about what happens when putting unqualified people in charge of a nation causes it to slowly fall apart. In this time of monsters, a large number of dissidents, bandits, and respectable men nonetheless outcasted from society by bad luck or unfair judgements slowly becoming an outlaw army in a marsh on the edges of Chinese society. At first merely trying to survive, as their numbers grow, so does their will to change the conditions of their lives. The outcast army becomes heaven's tool to oust a ruling class that have misused their positions and no longer deserve them.

Click on that image next to the text for a website with a lot of good info about the novel! I tend to keep up its character guide while I'm reading it, ha ha.

I have been slowly reading Water Margin for some time; it's quite good, though quite long. I've been reading the version by Sidney Shapiro, which I was able to find all in one big document. I started with the Dent-Young version but didn't love their translation ethos.

I initially started reading this classic novel, however, because I really, really love a video game series named 'Suikoden.'

What is Suikoden?

Suikoden was a video game series that began with the release of the initial title in 1995. Meant to be a stand-alone game--indeed, the studio was going bankrupt and thought it would be the last game they ever made--Suikoden 1 was based on the plot of Water Margin but played out in a half-eastern, half-western fantasy setting that adds elves, dragons, kobolds, and magicians while keeping the Chinese worldview and moral philosphy of its source materal (as well as a Chinese visual aesthetic in much of the game). The second game, Suikoden 2, was released in 1998 after Suikoden 1 proved so popular it saved the studio. Both games are considered and deserve to be considered classics of the JRPG genre.

They are incredibly fun to play, funny, smart, subtle, both great fun mechanically and full of moments that will have you thinking long after you power down the console. (Suikoden 2, especially, has a haunting quality that comes from some honestly grim subplots that sneak up on the POV character as you go.) Each game has regular turn-based combat but also features 'war game' battles and duels, all with their own mechanics, 108 character to collect (about a third of which are distinct party characters you can swap in and out of your 6-person main party), multiple endings based on how much of a completionist you are, and just endless castle-building in an army base that levels up as you go.

There were five mainline games total. After the first two, people's opinions about quality vary. For what it's worth, I've played the first four and agree that S2 is the best but S1 is nearly as good (the limitations of making a video game in 1995 held it back), S3 is a very mixed experience wrt quality but I nonetheless love it to pieces, and I cannot play S4, are you fucking serious with the boat, I can't drive the stupid thing and the encounter rate is five fucking seconds long who in their right goddamn mind

Oh jeeze Anyway, Suikoden is genuinely one of my favorite series ever made. I am a sucker for the 90s JRPG, but even so, with very laconic but complex storytelling and a fascinating world map full of peoples, cultures, and history, Suikoden is just something special.

My Fic

One time, my younger sister told me that, while she was in a BDSM dungeon, she showed a fellow pervert my Archive of Our Own page. I don't remember why my nerdery came up in conversation. At the time, I had recently completed Mercenary Motives, so it was at the top of my page. My sisters says the person looked at the screen and then shouted "SUIKODEN??" for the whole dungeon to hear because despite everything they had surely seen that day, it was that shocking to them that someone was actively writing Suikoden fanfiction in 2025.

I've been writing Suikoden fanfiction for a long time. The quality of my output has varied depending on how old I was and what else was going on in my life. MY longest fic, a game 1 rewrite that only got a fourth of the way throught he game but is the length of two novels, varies wildly in quality because I was at a low point in my life while I was writing it.

For the record, the two fics I still consider to be high-quality are Mercenary Motives and Wild for the Hold, and even WftH is old enough that I see things I sure would have done differently now. But even old fic I'm no longer as proud of I will include here.

Finished Works

Gap Year: A Viktor/Flik post-S1 oneshot ruminating on gender and the nature of work, while setting aside time to let Viktor be sleazy. This one's older, and I feel its flaws when I look at it, but it's still not bad.

Get Away With It: A Lazlo/Snowe S4 oneshot I wrote in a fit of madness while watching my spouse play the game. Not technically game-accurate, but perhaps the POV of a Punishment-addled and nearly murderous Lazlo will make up for it.

Mercenary Motives: A S1 fic about the party members that get trapped in Soniere and the consequences of the dire actions they took while inside. Viktor/Flik, but Viktor/Valeria and kind of Viktor/Flik/Valeria as well, featuring Sylvina/Kirkis and Tir being his odd self.

Wild for to Hold: S2 fic with Jowy as the POV character. Jowy, trying to destroy his homeland from the inside as an act of vengence for how it betrayed him, is willing to do ruthless deeds to accomplish his grim goals. He is willing to put up with some awful things as well, though each increases the amount of vengence he will wreak in the scoreboard hidden in his heart. Luca/Jowy, rapefic, dead dove.

Unfinished Works

S2 Viktor/Flik/Sierra Snippet: Lol. Ficlet about Flik popping a boner while Sierra drinks his blood. Viktor watches, Knowing.

S3 Tir/Luc Snippet: The very beginnings of a S3 fic about Luc balancing an on/off romantic relationship with Tir and his dreams of ending the world.

We Belong with the Dead: My dear, sweet, middling-quality rewrite of S1. This thing is 165K and had only gotten to GARAN. Tir's POV, a bad-end version of the first game complicated by Tir's uncomfortable gay awakening, brought on by someone who used to be a parental figure (Gremio) and his inability to fully reconcile his love for his homeland and the atrocities it has commited.

Get Into Suikoden

Partly because it is that important to me, partly because I think it is criminally underrated in the Anglophone world, I am a one-woman Suikoden Propoganda machine.

While it was once fiendishly difficult to find English-language copies of the first two games, Suikoden One and Two are finally, officially available on Steam for anyone to play. I prefer the old graphics--because of course I do--but reviews suggest that the updates really don't change much (good). I really do have twenty-year-old compact disk copies of nearly all of the games, and I think nothing beats the games as they were first made, but you know what, not being worried about the disc suddenly snapping when it reaches the end of its natural life is good too.

Since the games have some easy-to-miss moments and occasional bugs (they're old), I reccomend Suikosource for the discerning completionist. Suikosource is an old-school gaming website with comprehensive walkthroughs, maps, upgrade and leveling information, character bios; though I've played the first two games several times each, I still follow Suikosource's full 108 stars guides because otherwise I'd forget something or other that would lock me out of the true ending. If you want a stress-free playing experience where you aren't worried about missing something dumb, Suikosource is indespensible.

I dislike wikis hosted on Fandom Wiki in general, but I have spent so many real hours staring at this page. It's just so beautiful.