imonoyte

[imonoyte]

Hello! I'm really sorry to bother you with some stupid questions but I'm a little bit confused. Can you tell me about the TGCF revised version and what to expect from it? I made my research a little bit but I'm not sure I get the full picture. I just finished reading all the novels in official EN translation and it bugs me a little that I just got everything settled in my brain and now...smth will be changed in the revised version? What does it mean for canon?

I'm sorry it I make no sense, just a little bit disoriented. Thank you for answering in advance!

Hello Anon!

I totally understand how confusing it could be! I'll try to help clear it up, so no worries!

There are two main versions of TGCF now:

Original/Serialized

Revised

The original webnovel was released in a serialized manner, and this is the one all existing printed translations are based on. Including the official EN translation! This is also what the manhua and donghua are adapting. It was never released as a printed version in mainland China.

The revised version was released in early 2023, in mainland China only (thus far). It has significant changes here and there such as: removal of some minor characters, revision of certain characters' backstories, fleshing out of some inter-character relationships, expansion of existing Hualian-centric scenes, several additional scenes (mainly Hualian-centric), modification of some arcs/plots (e.g. the Bloody Banquet is quite different -- all the way from the lead-up to the ending -- though the broad strokes of it remain similar to the original). Plus just a lot of general streamlining! However, the overall structure of the story and the main plot remains the same.

The printed revised version that was released in China is also a censored edition (for obvious reasons). There is no publicly available uncensored edition available for us to read. That being said... the audio drama is actually working on the uncensored revised version (which they got from MXTX directly, it seems)!

The AD is absolutely fantastic, and if you're interested in checking out the revised version, I HIGHLY recommend it. It's easily my favorite adaptation, by far. This is an old guide on how to purchase + listen, but it still mostly works (you can purchase the entire season with google pay now too). Follow this for enabling EN subs (MTL). There are folks doing fanTLs, but those are not yet complete and still in the very early episodes as of now.

Additionally, there is a fan translation for a few select chapters from the printed revised version, done by Clearnoodle256. Though while yes, it's censored, the plot stuff and extra scenes are absolutely amazing. There's a lot of extra insight into Hualian especially, but also other characters like Lang Qianqiu! Check it out here!

If you'd like more information, I also made a twitter thread about the different versions, but it's similar to what I have already outlined here!

MXTX has said that both versions are just as "canonical" as each other, and fans are welcome to pick-and-choose aspects of both. Personally, I adore what I have seen and heard of the revised version thus far (though there are a few parts where I prefer the original ver). It doesn't feel like a whole new story, but more like seeing the same story with fresh eyes and getting a lot more details! It's very exciting to be able to somehow experience TGCF all over again! 💖

[imonoyte]

i'm devastated to say this but i realized none of the children xie lian took care of got a happy life. ban yue dies after being horribly treated, living war and betrayals and suffers as a ghost too, guzi got kidnapped numerous times and adopted by a cannibal and lost his dad TWICE, quan yizhen (yes he's a child) lost his shixiong, and we're not even going to develop the lang ying phenomenon and lan qianqiu under his care got betrayed, family murdered, buries his own teacher so yeah that didn't went well either

i mean at least ban yue got a redemption arc i guess and pei su's better outside pei ming's direct supervision but he gets poisoned at some point near the end and that happens under xl's watch

and HUA CHENG of freaking course i almost forgot, they met when they were children and his life was hell until they meet again 800 years later, but i guess at least it got better??

my point is that it's just super sad xie lian always does his best to take care of the kids he meets on his way but they end up hurting no matter how hard he tries

#tgcf #xie lian does his best #sad tgcf hours #hurt no comfort

[imonoyte]

life's a mind play between you and your health. you either fuck it up early in the game of it will fuck you up later and unannounced, maybe fuck your family over first and betray you last or take you down first so they can see it coming too. a real historical drama.

#good morning #I've been thinking

[imonoyte]

A longer, alternative ending for THINGS HAVE GOTTEN WORSE SINCE WE LAST SPOKE

[SPOILER for the whole book]

I imagine it to go like this :

Agnes mind navigates between wanting more babies, her everlasting love for zoe, thinking it's just a phase and that she'll come back to her eventually and brief, quickly forgotten moments of lucidity full of self loathing for what she's doing to herself for someone who doesn't even want her anymore

After the break up, she would abandon all notion of hygiene, making herself even sicker each passing days, her roomate noticing the change little by little. Agnes becomes superprotecrive of her own space, locking her bedroom door with a key each times and refusing any food normally cooked. Her roomate also had to bring her several times to the hospital. She' s afraid to confront her about it at first then when she does it's too late, she's to far gone into her maddness and they have a kind of friendship break up that leads to her roomate leaving her

Soon she becomes financially unable to keep up since she doesn't have a job anymore and zoe isn't sending her money, the gaze is cut off, the electricity follows but she still lives in a inhuman unsanitary state

Later, one day, she falls unconcious in the streets where someone calls the ambulance and they bring her into observation. The doctors find several issues in her body as well as another parasite

After reading her hospital records, they notice it's not the first time and call her urgence number. It's zoe's and she has to come to bring her home. Given the situation, she can't quite refuse. When she arrives she doesn't reveal her identity and just affirm she's here to help her go back home.

When they arrive, we can assume that because of being to tired both mentally and physically, agnes isn't so careful and she opens the door without thinking much about the other's presence.

Inside, it's a disastrous sight that welcome zoe. Now living alone, her lack of hygiene extended to the whole appartement. There's morcel of meat onto the floor, dryied blood at some side, mud, and most important, worms. Worms on the couch, worms on the kitchen that is in a horrible state. But like in any unhealthy places, worms aren't the only insects that took up residence inside her house. And the smell of the place, the smell. As zoe walks in further she sees a cradle. A cradle with worms in it. Viscous, huge, hideous worms.

In the middle of her mental breakdown she hears agnes talking to her.

" i knew you would come, i knew you never did give up on me, on us "

"how did you know" zoe asks in a daze, seconds away from throwing up

"don't you see ?" She points to the cradle with at least four worms in it

"They have your eyes" she says softly, smiling

From here zoe throws up, is mentally in a spiral, regretting all her life. More nausea, she cant' stand the smell anymore, the sight, the place, what she started by selfishness, what the woman she may have loved once did because of her influence. (Because manipulating people is always easier than dealing with the consequences.) She steps back in her panic, wanting to leave but she accidentally she steps on a worm laying on the floor, now a puddle of gluant liquid squished under her boot. And agnes screams to death at the lost of her baby. Soon, too soon to be a good thing, her tears stops and she seems to get over it. She sits on the floor, a smile on her lips, with dead eyes, metodically reach for the rest of the worm. ( How many time did she have to do that ?) and it's only when she brings the morcel to her lips, to eat it, that zoe remember the story of the rabbit agnes used to love to watch that ate her newborn babies when she knew they wouldn't be able to make it.

Uncapable of watching anymore, zoe in a moment of disgusted maddness goes for something, hopefully a knife and tries to dug her own eyes out. However what she grabbed is the apple peeler on the wall and the task isn't easy. It's bloody, it's gory, it's disgusting, blood is gushing out and she screams and cries and howls. She still can see from one eyes and the sight of agnes eating the worm makes her sicker. She didn't even budge when zoe was bleeding out.

Too much noise, the neighbors call the police on them. Zoe is brought at the hospital where she keeps bleedind out some more, horribly, and painfully. Agnes is forcefully brought to a mental hospital, the tasks of separating her from her babies made her irrevocably mad and she dies at the hospital soon after. Her maddness that just worsened her physical state.

Zoe kills herself after leaving the hospital, mentally unable to keep up.

What did you today do to deserve your eyes ?

Poorly written but that's what i had in mind if the story went on further :)

#What did you do to deserve your eyes? #things have gotten worse since we last spoke #Things have gotten worse since we last spoke : alternative ending #That was one hell of a ride

[imonoyte]

What if dazai is stuck in the book since like an early age and he tries to save everyone but everytime the situation slightly evolve and everyone dies and it all start again and he's stuck and he keeps on trying and failing but from the start he wasn't even that much of a genius it's just the parterns of the book he memorized that made him prepared to all kind of situations and he's kinda numbed by all the deaths he's just damage controlling at this point and that 's why he wishes to die so much because everyone does but him

And truely the one he keeps on trying to save is odasaku but somehow no matter what he does he always dies, and akutagawa dies too in all universes that 's why he stopped caring at some point and just persecuted him but it proved to work since he lived longer than the other times and as said from the early beginning of the book atsushi is linked to the book that' s why he managed to spot him and keeps him close early before the conlicts start

Also dazai must have tried to kill mori at some point but it didn't turned out well no matter how he killed him so he stopped trying for the sake of the rest of the people and ango must have been linked to odasaku's death everytime for dazai to never move on from his betrayal

And dazai could be limited to some extend, if he goes too far from the reality from the book the world dissolves and he has to start again

Also chuuya must play some role in it too, like maybe he's the permanent one in the book because despite officially hating each other they can join back after years and act like there hasn't been a four year gap between their two last encounters

AND and and Fyodor 's playing in parallele with dazai. At some point he enters the paralleling universes and tries to reach his goal and that involve getting most of them killed that' s why he knows as much as dazai and they meet several times during different timelines that's why they're used to each other and meet up sometimes

Or maybe they've always been playing against each other but it took them both some times and universes to realise there was someone purposefully destroying their ideal reality

Could make sense, right ?

#bsd #dazai osamu #bsd theories #the book #fyodor dostoyevsky bsd #dazai pov #parallele universes

[imonoyte]

"I can't fight back because you're a woman " dude if the fact that the person you're fighting has boobs distract you from the axe in their hands maybe you indeed deserve to perish right here and then, i'll support women's wrong on this one

#he didn't want to fight back so she killed him #i hate when they do that especially when the woman 's stronger #it's an assassin against assassin situation #into the red fog #fanfic #literature

[imonoyte]

So i wanted to read something a lil sad that could bring a lil tear to the side of my eyes so i searched for hualian whumptober 2020 hoping for some sadness so long story short the description of the stories were enough to make me want to scream, vomit, cry, writers'mind scare me

#writers'mind scare me #how i discovered i was weak #hualian whumptober discovery #fanfic

[imonoyte]

if you love food we can like buy two different meals for us so we can eat both of them together and then spill the bill in equal part so it's still fair and i dont mind if we share drinks also do you want a bit from this chocolate cake and oh wait can i taste your cramberry flavored one but to be honest i dont like cramberry that much but i'm curious about how it taste since you have it in your hands chewing bites after bites with a satisfied glint in your eyes and also yeah we did dress up to come to this restaurant what about we go to a coffee next it's smaller and calmer at this hour and maybe we can talk together for hours about pretty nothing but also about our latest watched shows and our most recent read stories or the movies we went to see together last week and the next we could go see at the theater or maybe watch together on the bus on your phone or on my laptop on my couch and discuss about the support characters and the cruelty of the moral of the movie and oh what could we go taste next week and also can you see how much i like these moments spent together cause just thinking about them makes me happy and giggly i can't wait for you and them to actually exist not that i'm unhappy now but, you know, i'm thinking about you and wishing you were here already

#craving romantic relationship #my writing #orginally written to be the tram of a hualian fanfic but it's hard to write while crying so let's not

[imonoyte]

I do not make basic grammatical mistakes when i write, i juste reinvent the language until it satisfies me, it's revolutional art thank you very much

#english language #no mistakes only happy accidents

[imonoyte]

When i fell for you i fell so hard and fast i broke my nose. I didn't notice it right away as you quickly became the new first thing i noticed in me while staring back at myself. I couldn't notice either when you took my very whole heart with no intention of giving me yours to fulfill the gap created. And slowly the whole world around us disappeared and when you left i could only fall on the harsh ground again and the fall hurted oh so much without anything to grab onto. If only the earth did swallow me then. But it didn't and i'm laying in eternal darkness, deprived of all senses, a void in my chest and wondering how am i not dead yet.

#writing my own dramatic poetry because i love it #unrequited love #my wrtitng #i kinda love this one

[imonoyte]

Why NO PATHS ARE BOUNDS is the best fic ever, an essay

First of all, the author made everything so much more twisted and painful, of course my love for the original story, plot and characters remain unchanged it's just insanely satisfying to see it all exacerbated

×the amount of pain xie lian had to go through is astronomical and the consequences on his personality and punctual dissociating is really well depicted

×all the "perfect" sides of the characters are deconstrustructed like hua cheng's selfless behavior toward xl, his tendency to let him do what he wants all the times but in the fic he opposed him a few times over his own safety but still; lan chang is not the perfect mother that loves his son despite what he came out to be, she's resentfull and did harm,

×in contrary, all the hatefull sides of the bad characters who have few little chances to be appreciated have explaination arc if not redemption, for exemple shi wudu from my impression from the original tgcf is a family-first but piece of shit type with the water tyrant title and what happened to he xuan but there in npab it's clearly more complicated than that and oh my day i absolutly love the progress in relationship between he sheng and shi wudu excuse me i almost could've started shipping them both it bring so much comfort to witness them having each other's back and omg THE HUG !! THE PROTECRIVENESS !! THE TALKS !! please i love them;

the developement of bai wuxian story just fall right into the plot, what happened for jun wu to be that way

there's also qi rong's character who is despicable even more than he was and lovable, even more than he was, his humility toward mu qing brought tears to my eyes

Pursuing with Mu qing, the absolute love of my life that i would defend against all who is so so so sooo... I just love him and his progress and ouch his backstory was hard take but also it makes more sense in a way that he hadn't moved on after 800years, i'm not saying the original back story's lacking but it feels like some things were kept unsaid because i believe mu qing and his good heart must have been pushed in a corner way more painfully repeatedly for him to be so deeply wounded like we dont really know the extend of his past bullying

It's so well written and makes so much sense sometimes some elements could just fit right into the original story like why pei ming and hua cheng are the only one xie lian ever found attractive in the story, it just makes so much sense to me now like ?? pein ming being the zeus of tgcf and hua cheng being powerful fatherless makes it all possible plus that makes he xuan and hua cheng family by extend and that's just *intense screaming*

- he xuan coming back as the water master and the story FINALLY finally introduce us to a Thunder master

-hua cheng offering the armory to xl for him to profect himself and all of them being made by hc himself just feels right

(There's probably way more but i can't find them at the moment send help)

And the new original characters reng song the absolute perfection also i loved how lan qianqiu became a more central characters than he was in the original and their bickering was the epithom of cute, huz cheng's past and all the story around the forge i say it shortly but yk how much this weights in the story

Of course the additional nsfw scenes that we've all been craving for and everyone falling in love it's just too cute and ling wen and the rain master ? Absolute chef kiss

On a personal note i love depictions of body horror and monstruous behaviour and body changes and i was SPOILED on this side

%starting with the shackles, on the ankle, neck and eyes, constricting him, his breathing, his sight, his life. Plus blind are characters and stories from the point of view of blind characters are one of my favorite this days thanks to another kind white clothed cultivator; when they started thinking of a way to destroy the shackles it was horrible omg and just basically xie lian's level of pain tolerence and vision of normalcy and casually almost saying he got his eyed gouged out several times

%the animalistic/ bestial traits of the ghost kings like fangs, long nails, snarling, baring their teeth, please when he sheng brought shu wudu behind him to protest against to punishment almost turning feral i loved it.

That's it, that's the word, i love when they turn feral, when they embrace insanity and great amount of pain bring that out of them and this fic was perfect in this very aspect i think

And EXCUSE ME dragon hua cheng was the cherry on top of the cake it's one of my absolute favorite and it was beautifully described

Continuing on body horror and gory stuffs xie lian being hanged from his shackled, the pain, the screaming scenes, mu qing's qi deviation, yin yu's death... so well written

Let's not forget the perfect addition of the mdzs elements that fitted so naturally in the story, so fluid and logical in the telling, I love Zidian btw

On a more joyfull note, the growth of the characters, the humour, most of them were lovable, despite all the angst it's easy to just fall into it and enjoy the ride (then the angst is back and you just cry but oh well).

It's still followed the tram and order of the story and it's really pleasant to read your tgcf favorite scenes incorporated in a new not so divergent plot

In short y'all need to read no paths are bound on ao3 by CataclysmicEvent

#Tgcf #no paths are bound #The best fic ever fight me #Spoilers for the fic cause i'm fangirling and i have no limits #But seriously dont read if you don't want spoilers #ao3 link