#tgcf is my reason to live tbh | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

sophia-sol · 6 months

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I started my reread of Heaven Official's Blessing in September and have been working my way steadily through it ever since. This time I posted my as-it-happened thoughts to mastodon as I went, because there's just SO much book in this book that there's no way I'd remember everything by the end! So now I'm copying all those thoughts over to here for posterity.

Warning, this is like 22,000 words of thoughts. But this book is so GOOD it's worth every one of those words and so many more besides! I could talk about this book forever it feels like.

Anyway. On with the liveblog! (originally posted to: https://federatedfandom.net/@soph_sol/tagged/tgcfthoughts)

thanks to a hero on youtube I have a (so far incomplete) tgcf fan-recorded audiobook to listen to, and I started this morning and still have have 72 more hours of tgcf to listen to and I am LIVING

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[after villainousfriend provided some info about gold foil] ooh, folded gold foil as a form of currency specifically, rather than just general "gold = wealth", gives somewhat different vibes to the gold foil palaces! so rich that high-denomination money is a toy for children

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hang on it suddenly occurs to me that the details we get about Xuan Ji (breaking her own legs, volunteering information to the opposing side in war, etc) are all second-hand from the very biased source of pei jr. why should we trust what he says about her??

I think the true answer to the Pei Ming/Xuan Ji situation is ESH, even though both of them think the other is entirely to blame! sigh both this arc and the next one have..... things I don't love

I just double checked the text and the conversation between xie lian and pei jr is after xuan ji is dragged off by the guards, so she's not present to comment. and then this is the conclusion! so I think there's a lot of massaging of the story from both sides and the truth could be all sorts of things, and I'm standing by my ESH, but one's perspective can be changed by the framing of things!

Xie Lian also cupped his hands and sent them off. Nan Feng commented, "Weirdos." Xie Lian thought, he himself was the laughingstock of the three realms, an infamous weirdo, so he'd best not comment on anyone else. This was something between General Pei and Xuan Ji, so for bystanders, there was no point in discussing who was right or wrong. Their sympathies only went out to all seventeen of those innocent brides, and the military officials and sedan drivers who escorted them but suffered a terrible fate for no reason.

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who's the child spirit who warns Xie Lian during the Mount Yujun arc? he asks the other heavenly officials afterwards but doesn't get an answer. is it just also Hua Cheng?

[villainousfriend replies that it was cuocuo under jun wu's direction]

oh fascinating! I'm very curious as to why! just to try to make sure xie lian didn't actually die on this errand, perhaps?

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in the tomb of the general, on the way to banyue, hua cheng absolutely knows the general was xie lian, from the way he immediately makes efforts to get the other people in the tomb to think well of the general. he must have discovered this after xie lian had already left banyue though, since he made no attempt to meet then. but an early sign of how long hua cheng has been trying to find xie lian!

update on these thoughts, later there are indications that maybe hua cheng DIDN'T know for sure? so possibly it's instead that hua cheng was paying such close attention to xie lian that he could see how uncomfortable xie lian was with how that general was being talked about, and immediately decided he needed to change that.

not entirely convinced either way though! could still be my first thought tbh!

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hmmmm it's weird isn't it that both of the first two arcs in tgcf are about a female general betraying her people :/ do not love that

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almost through listening to the Banyue arc, thank goodness. there are some fun bits in it but the racism is a lot.

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when shi qingxuan and xie lian first meet, she tells him "I've heard so much about you" and I'm just giggling at the thought that:

1. hua cheng obviously can't NOT talk about dianxia, and so he xuan can't help but hear all about him

2. he xuan is friends* with shi qingxuan and has all these unfortunate xie lian facts hanging out unwillingly in his head, and at least occasionally some of them slip out

*don't ask he xuan to define what the shi qingxuan-he xuan relationship is

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I am drawing parallels between hua cheng and the boy with human face disease in the first arc. both worry about how xie lian will react if xie lian sees their true face, that it will be scary or ugly

(also both of them wear bandages on their face as a child, and xie lian saves them both)

the boy with human face disease triggers xie lian's trauma reaction and he DOESN'T react well in the moment, but when xie lian will see hua cheng's true face for the first time, eventually, xie lian is in fact super into it immediately

not quite sure I have an understanding of exactly what this parallel is doing, just yet, but I don't think this can be accidental!

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for all the talk of jun wu as a mentor figure for xie lian, xie lian really resists ever talking to him or being in his presence if he can at all avoid it or put it off

I know that jun wu is creepy and horrible because I've read the rest of the book before, but clearly xie lian is better at picking up on jun wu's weird vibes than I was on my first read. because jun wu definitely does have weird vibes if you're paying attention! and xie lian is clearly not here for it, even though he talks and makes decisions from a basis of an assumption of trust for the heavenly emperor

to me it feels like.... he knows he SHOULD trust jun wu, both as the role and more personally, and over the course of his banishment the number one thing he's learned really is to ignore it when things feel bad to him, so he acts the way he thinks he ought to feel - but he still can't stop his subconscious from being like, NOPE

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roland's fic infected me, I read it and was immediately taking pei ming seriously as a character, and now I can't stop paying attention to him on this relisten. somehow ending up on Team Three Tumors Are Interesting is not something I would have expected when I first read tgcf but I have no regrets

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ok I have not done enough research on the history of fabric dyes to answer my own question here! many people in this book are referred to as wearing black clothes. I know from European history that before the invention of aniline dyes, black was an extremely difficult colour to achieve in clothes, but I don't know anything about the relative difficulty in other historic cultures. is it that wool and linen didn't dye black well, but other fibres are better? is it that there was no good source of black dye available in Europe but it was available elsewhere? was there a technique that simply wasn't developed?

I don't have the time to do research right now but I want to know how historically plausible (or implausible) it is for characters in historical cnovels to wear black all the time!

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Update I found a source discussing 17th century fabric dyes in China and there are two different approaches discussed! One of them involves iron gall, which corrodes the fibres fairly rapidly and thus isn't a great long-term solution, and I know iron gall is one of the best-of-a-bad-lot options Europeans had available. But the other method, which is the first listed and thus probably the more used, relies on starting with a dark indigo dye - which wasn't a ready option in Europe at that time and the times preceding.

I am interested in the recipe provided for the black dye, which involves venetian sumac and a plant from the myricaceae family along with the indigo. From what I can find, the other two plants are both generally used for a yellow dye, and I wonder how those interacted with the dark blue from the indigo to get something black! I also wonder how much this black dye faded over time, and what shade it would generally fade to.

Black. It is first dyed a deep blue with liquid indigo then soaked in the liquids of boiled Venetian sumach wood and afterwards [in those of boiled] myricaeceae bark. According to another method, the tender indigo leaves are first soaked in water; next, green vitriol and gallnuts are added, and [with the cloth] are soaked together in this liquid. Cloth dyed in this fashion, however, will deteriorate rapidly.

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I had first thought that the reason shi qingxuan is more powerful in her female form is because that's the form she's most often worshipped in - but according to the wiki, ling wen is NOT more powerful in her male form even though she's mostly worshipped in her male form. which makes me wonder if it's actually that shi qingxuan is more powerful when she's in the form she feels prettiest in? or do women in general have more spiritual power?

The wiki citation for this fact about ling wen: Novel, Book 5, Chapter 215: The Path Shan't Go Astray But the Mandates Are All the Same

having checked it, it's a bit inconclusive really - if the amount of power she has to expend to be in that form is less than the hypothetical increase in power from being in her most-worshipped form, she could still be more powerful in that form, but it could also be that there's no such increase, and so being in her male form leaves her with less power. I'm wondering what implications might be given elsewhere in the text, then!

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[in response to a comment about an expectation of what form to show up in to the mid-autumn banquet] I would interpret that as being about shi wudu's feelings about the whole business with shi qingxuan's gender. like, it would be more correct to show up in her most worshipped form, but he hates that it's her most worshipped form and wants to be able to pretend that's not the case, and push her as much as possible into his image of what kind of person shi qingxuan is? lessening her power wouldn't even be a drawback to him I think; he wants to be able to keep her under his thumb.

also I am willing to bet that ling wen is committed to doing whatever it takes to keep her worshippers on her side, so it may be less that it's an expectation to show up in your most worshipped form, and more that ling wen is extra.

god shi wudu is SUCH a possessive creep

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xie lian practiced abstinence for "most" of his mortal life, huh??? that leaves some room for him to have gotten up to things during a certain rulebreaking era of his life!!

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is hua cheng able to track xie lian's presence via the ring of his ashes? I feel vaguely as though I remember that being a thing. anyway I wonder if on some subconscious level, the contact with the ashes allows xie lian to sense hua cheng's presence, and that's why he's drawn to the Gambling Den

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there's a brief sequence of notes in the song that's used in the tgcf fan audiobook which bears something in common with the opening notes of a christian hymn I know, and every now and then my ear catches on it - but the hymn in question goes "you alone are my heart's desire and I long to worship you" so like, not inappropriate!

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uh oh in my relisten I have now made it beyond the point of what I've read for the group read-along and things are unfamiliar again! helpppp I liked listening to stuff I'd already read within the last few months! I no longer know what to expect! I remember so little from my first read last November!

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holy shit hua cheng drags he xuan for filth in the armory after xie lian and shi qingxuan free him

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oh goddddd I knew this was coming but the story of lang qianqiu and the guoshi fangxin is so upsetting :((( and I'm only in the very beginning stages of it!

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I may be continuing to grimly work on canning my endless pears but SPIRITUALLY I am lying on the floor staring up at the ceiling as I continue listening to the arc about the gilded banquet

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for the first time I understand the point of music at the beginning/end of audio chapters - to give you time for mental/emotional processing before moving on to the next bit

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going from spiritually lying down on the floor to spiritually lying down underneath the floor

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the lang qianqiu & xie lian relationship is a parallel to the xie lian & jun wu relationship, just with xie lian on the other side of the equation

😭😭😭😭😭😭

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I wish my audiobook app provided listening stats, the way my podcast app does. I'm curious just how many hours of tgcf I listened to yesterday!

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just thinking about the politics and social maneuvering that are inextricably entwined with being part of the heavenly court. it's now come up multiple times that various heavenly officials think to themselves that they'd better be careful about how they speak about xie lian, because jun wu has shown him marked leniency, so being nasty about or to xie lian is no longer a good idea. and shi qingxuan, for all her flightiness, clearly has a strong grasp on the importance of appearances and of controlling the narrative to keep in good standing in th that social environment

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what a toxic workplace culture. ....and I was about to say that it's a problem that you can't just quit and get a different job. but. you CAN. multiple different gods prove that in a variety of ways over the course of the book. you just can't quit and still maintain the same power and prestige!

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ahhhh I wonder how many other times xie lian went to visit his parents' tomb after the end of some particularly emotionally gruelling sequence of events in his life - and how many times he wanted to but was unable to get there, because he didn't have the means to travel that far

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ohhhh I bet while he was skewered through the heart stuck in a coffin for 100 years he thought about his parents' final resting place a LOT

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a couple of shi qingxuan thoughts from yesterday's listening session that I forgot to note down:

first, from what we see of how accusations of bad behaviour go in the upper court, shi qingxuan is the only god willing to speak up on behalf of an accused who doesn't have a high social standing. she's bearing the burden of keeping trials from being COMPLETE jokes all on her own shoulders!

second, with hua cheng's dice-controlled distance shortening arrays, is it that specifically rolling 4 takes you to whatever you fear most, or that rolling anything other than the correct thing does? if the latter, what does that mean about shi qingxuan's greatest fears, from the adventures in paradise manor - I suppose that it's first a place where she can't use her wind powers, and second a place where her beauty is threatened?

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also more about Themes and Parallels:

guoshi fangxin refuses to teach lang qianqiu the technique for stopping a fight by getting between the two blades, because it requires hurting yourself, and hurting yourself is almost never the best option. HELLO XIE LIAN AND ALMOST ALL YOUR CHOICES.

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let me make a more explicit stating of the jun wu:xie lian::xie lian:lang qianqiu parallels- the jaded older mentor who makes the young earnest crown prince suffer horrible things, but the crown prince refuses to be turned to hatred by it

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xie lian kills Anle, the last remaining of the Xianle royal family, so he's also a person who betrays his country, depending on how you look at it. so that's probably the intended connection with the first two arcs which feature people betraying their countries

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and now some more hualian thoughts:

in the entire trial scene when the gilded banquet accusation is made, we don't get any reporting of xie lian's thoughts or feelings - it's as if he's absent from the scene, except on the rare occasions he says something. dissociation :((((((((

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at what point did xie lian stop using a sword, I wonder? was it right after the gilded banquet? he goes to banyue after that and he was a general there so presumably he did use a sword. so what happened after banyue that made him give up the sword for good?

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it's easy to think of hua cheng as someone who will do anything xie lian tells him, because of his devotion - but hua cheng insists on making lang qianqiu hear everything from qi rong without letting xie lian stop him, even though xie lian vehemently wants anything but this. hua cheng's priority is always xie lian, but that doesn't always actually look like him doing whatever xie lian wants! sometimes it involves making xie lian very mad!

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oh also there was finally a clear indication that one can generally interpret eming's response to things as being indicative of how hua cheng feels! I figured this was likely the case but it's nice to get some data to back that up.

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and there was the most hilariously not-actually-subtle moment yet of the narrative eliding the things xie lian doesn't want to think about: "due to a reason somehow not worth mentioning" XIE LIAN YOUR PROBLEMS

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whoooo, teen xie lian is super oblivious to what it might be like for someone (... like mu qing) to not be rich and not be of a well respected background. he might want to save the common people but he doesn't know or understand anything about them!

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actually now that I think about it there are some echoes here of the story of the buddha - growing up rich and happy and wealthy and extremely sheltered prince, then becoming exposed to the suffering of the world and finding it a transformative experience. obviously not a totally parallel story but does some interesting riffs on the basic idea I think

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[in response to a comment from ryfulets] mu qing DID need a contract and a union, you are so incredibly correct! employer-employee relationships always have a power imbalance, and if the employer tries to act otherwise, all they're doing is making "pretend the power imbalance doesn't exist" a constant high-stakes job task for the employee!

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I can't think much of the Xianle king and queen's parenting of qi rong. that kid is completely out of control, cruel and dangerous, and the queen merely looks sad and says qi rong will only listen to xie lian

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hang on I'm in the pre-ascension backstory right now and we just had a moment where xie lian didn't know whether to laugh or BE CONCERNED. does.... does he perhaps only start not knowing whether to laugh or cry after being terrorized by white no-face with his crying/laughing mask, maybe????? something worth investigating

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all I want to do is shove tgcf at everyone going "read it read it read it it's so good" but I think everyone in my life who's likely to enjoy it either has already read it or already is interested in finding time for it someday, so I don't have anyone to bring with me in my ever further descent into obsession! it is a TRIAL. I appreciate everyone here on mastodon who talks with me about this book because all I want to do is talk about it endlessly

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tfw yin yu becomes your holotype specimen for guys with "just some guy" energy

compare all "just some guy" guys to yin yu to see if they measure up

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just had a thought about how qi rong and xie lian both typify two very different but very common reactions to extremely bad parenting: qi rong by acting out constantly, and xie lian by feeling like it is his personal responsibility to make anything and everything be okay, and if he ever fails it is the end of the world

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I think on my first read of the book I assumed that the king and the queen of xianle were supposed to be good, or at least to be inoffensively bland, because of the veneration with which Xie Lian regards them even by the time of canon. but no. they are problems, on so many different fronts! and a lot of things make so much more sense when I let them be bad!

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xie lian is a master of misdirection. love me an unreliable narrator who would never ever admit to being unreliable, including to himself <3

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the queen just wrings her hands and worries and does literally nothing useful ever, resulting in many other people doing objectively bad-for-themselves things because otherwise the queen would be Sad at them, and the king is big into the whole business of royalty being inherently better, more worthy, more admirable, untouchable, etc as compared to other people, and is absolutely willing to uphold that viewpoint via harming other people. it's awful to watch!!

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teen xie lian’s thoughts on the appropriate attitude to gods - spoken in a temple to jun wu - are both excellent and very much not what jun wu would want!! view gods with respect and admiration but not with fear and not as if the gods are your masters!

oh and this means he is absolutely willing to tell gods that they're wrong, if he thinks he's right about something :)

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ok it's immediately after xie lian says he'd defy the gods if the gods are wrong that all the malicious spirits trapped on the mountain are suddenly freed and immediately head for xie lian's pavilion and for honghong-er, this cannot be a coincidence, but I cannot remember WHAT it's about!

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tfw you're rereading a book but it's like you're reading it for the first time because your memory is so bad

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xie lian's answer to the kobayashi maru would be the same as kirk's. neither of them believe in no-win scenarios!

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this time around I actually have a handle on the two different characters named Lang Ying! They're both from Yong'an, which is why they both have the name Lang, and if I could read Chinese they have different characters for Ying so this wouldn't be a problem; but as it is, one Lang Ying is from the early days when Xie Lian was first ascended, and the other is from after Xie Lian ascends the third time, so they won't ever appear in the narrative at the same time.

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unbelievable to me that I used to be unable to tell feng xin and mu qing apart; they're so obviously different to me now!

so far from what I see of their squabbling in their younger days, in general it goes like so:

1. feng xin says something that contains an implicit insult to mu qing, and usually means it to be so

2. mu qing is highly sensitive to slights because he is aware of how many people resent his position due to his background as a servant and overreacts to the insult

3. feng xin is fully ready to respond in kind

4. xie lian says feng xin didn't mean it and orders both of them to calm down and stop fighting, because he can't emotionally handle it when they fight and he doesn't have the conflict resolution skills to actually address what's happening and so the best solution he can come up with is to try to pretend nothing's wrong

what a toxic dynamic, oh boy!

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the way there are systemic barriers in place to keep gods from hearing the prayers from their poorer followers - and to keep gods from speaking to anybody but the religious elites - just expedites the process by which the gods become out of touch with the realities of mortal life. I'm at the beginning of the Yong'an drought arc and everything about it is so upsetting

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after xie lian finds out the depth of the seriousness of the drought, and he's kind of dazedly hanging out in the Xianle capital city in the rain, a random citizen gives him an umbrella when they see him getting wet. just making note of this because I feel like when I get there, it might be instructive to compare this to the eventual scene where he's given his bamboo hat

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I saw someone posting on tumblr something like "thank god it's finally raining," about their personal irl circumstances, and my instinctive interpretation was "oh good, Yong'an is saved!!"

can you tell I am deep in my tgcf feels at this time despite having not listened to any of it since last night

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kicking my feet in delight - when young, beaten down hua cheng is at the run down little shrine to the crown prince, xie lian leaves out an umbrella for him so he'll be able to leave in the rain. and it's the same umbrella xie lian was given by the passers-by earlier when he was feeling awful. AND. it is a red umbrella described as looking like a crimson flower.

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even back then at this time, when xie lian is a powerful martial god and hua cheng is an abused young teenager, they both were helping each other. hua cheng needed something to live for, and xie lian needed to know that he could do something useful for someone at least <3

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oh I also want to mention, in this section we get a brief run-down of what a martial god's responsibilities are supposed to be: ward off evil ghosts and bring protection and peace. but given things like feng xin being worshipped as ju yang (tremendous masculinity) it's clear there isn't exactly an expectation of keeping strictly to the stated responsibilities. I wonder what the heavenly norms are, about how far and in what directions you can diverge from your godly role without it being seen as inappropriate?

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visiting yushi huang's territory is young xie lian's first exposure to the idea of a god NOT living in luxury, and living instead in a small tumbledown cottage. also an important introduction to the idea of shamelessly doing things that other people see as embarrassing.

also it's the first time xie lian is given a bamboo hat in a meaningful way! because the rain master's spiritual device is a bamboo hat

also, and unrelated to anything - her black ox can turn into a man!! I love him

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one more thought before I take myself to an early bed: I had completely forgotten that xie lian meets ling wen during his first ascension, back when she was merely an overworked middle court official (instead of an overworked upper court official)! under the name nangong jie, she does a lot to help xie lian! HI LING WEN MY BELOVED

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aughfhhhh the way the Xianle royal capital treats the Yong'an refugees is SO upsetting and so..... recognizable.

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how does it work, with the middle court officials who are deputies of upper court - it seems clear you get to choose your own deputies, as a heavenly official, but is there any limit on number? can you just decide "everyone I like is immortal now, plus none of us have to do much work because there's so many to split the work between?" it seems there must be some kind of guidelines or limits, I think, because heaven seems really into separating new gods from their previous support systems - but I want to know what they are!

(we do know there's nothing to stop a heavenly official from being an abusive boss to their deputies.....)

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the queen of Xianle tells xie lian that the king is doing his best with the whole Yong'an situation, it's just that he's not a very good king

but xie lian ALSO does his best about the whole Yong'an situation, and it also doesn't fix things

sometimes doing your best isn't good enough to achieve good results. but I don't think the book is arguing that you shouldn't try! but the book definitely sees the king as less heroic than xie lian , despite both of them trying. hmm I'm going to have to think on this one more.

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lang ying as a parallel for and reflection of the young Xie Lian right back at himself. xie lian seeing in ly the same determination, the dedication to righteousness no matter who stands against you, the self-assured confidence that you know what's best to do - and they're fighting on opposite sides of a war, a war that is giving xie lian a crisis of confidence and breaking down all his pre-conceived ideas of how to know that to do

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lang ying is such an important character actually.

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OH FUCK this confrontation between xie lian and lang ying is the first appearance of the white-clothed calamity 😭😭😭😭

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ok it's probably also important that qi rong is present for this entire scene but. I continue to struggle to care about him as a character. which makes it harder to think about his thematic importance

I think I would be able to enjoy him more tbh if his young human self were less, like, the epitome of everything I hate about asshole high-status people getting away with anything they want, and in a way that feels to me more parallel with real life horrible amoral rich people, and thus less enjoyable for me personally

and probably I would be able to put that aside if there were other aspects of the character that spoke to me, but unfortunately he's not my type of weird little freak!

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xie lian is SUCH a nerd about martial arts I love him so much. he justttt finished an hour-long battle to destroy a mountain full of binu and he's all excited to talk at length about sword vs saber with the young soldier who's been following him (who's definitely not someone we've seen before and will see again 😛 )

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oh interesting.... in the land of the tender scene, it's discussed how/why a god whose cultivation method involves purity will lose strength if they lose that purity - it's about losing the faith of your followers. so 800 years later when xie lian finally gets together with hua cheng, I don't think it actually IS a big deal if he breaks the rules of his cultivation path. it's not like he has a lot of followers anyway at that point, and the followers of the scrap god are not, I think, particularly invested in their god's purity! you don't worship a scrap god because you think he's super pure!

[in response to a comment about mu qing also following a celibate cultivation path, and how this would apply to him] I propose that mu qing needs to engage in some very deliberate public relations messaging with his followers to convince them to take a different understanding of their god, and only after the success of this communication campaign does he get to have sex :D

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hmmm the twisted junlian vibes are strong from the first appearance of the white clothed calamity, aren't they. his first move against xie lian is on one hand to sabotage his cultivation and his power, but on the other hand is also to stage a second-hand sexual assault. jun wu your problems!!! wow

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oh holy shit but then because hua cheng is there, HUA CHENG'S SWORD is the first sword to stab xie lian. his literal sword obviously but like, the sword related sexual violence overtones are strong in tgcf. hua cheng refuses to stab xie lian though, xie lian has to do it to himself. ahhhhhhhhhhhhh

the land of the tender scene is sure a rich text to mine for details

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the cave xie lian is in for this whole thing.... it is "long and narrow, warm and humid" and he doesn't want anyone coming into it, EHHH

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oh the scene gets very explicit actually about the link between violence and sexual desire. setting us up well for what's to come in the rest of tgcf!

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ok I've reached the start of the human face disease and.... as far as I can tell, the ONLY thing it does is create the freaky faces on your skin? it doesn't hurt, it's not uncomfortable or itchy, it doesn't cause other deeper systemic issues, it doesn't kill you. but people die anyway because they'd rather die than live like that. pretty ableist imo? the idea that the results of an illness are considered to obviously be a fate worse than death

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oh boy, xie lian actually goes to ask for help after he figures out what makes someone susceptible to human face disease, and what does he get for it? the xianle guoshi telling him that everything bad that's happening is all his fault because he tried to interfere. including the coming of the white clothed calamity. GUOSHI!!

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update, I have now reached a part where the part of the body that's infected has its normal function impaired, and the faces have started moving and acting like they're alive and screaming and are eating grass for some reason. but it's clear that these are new developments of the disease progression, so I maintain my frustration with the idea that people were killing themselves just back when it was only a cosmetic impact from the disease

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so on the one hand I am still pro mu qing unionizing, but on the other hand, he suggests casting the human face disease curse right back on yong'an in order to destroy them, so like. I don't want him to be a union leader or anything. because WOW. my guy. maybe chill for a moment.

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something something xie lian piloting a giant statue of himself both in the period of his life when he is losing faith in himself, and also when he has found new peace with being who he is at the end of the novel

and the first statue is made of pure gold, sculpted to be as perfect and as expensive as possible, but the second one is made of stone carved with pure devotion by someone who sees him and knows him for everything he is. the first one fails but with the second one he achieves his goals!

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I had brought up the man who gives xie lian an umbrella a while back, in order to potentially compare him to the situation where xie lian is given a hat, later on. but I hadn't remembered at the time that the young man with the umbrella then becomes relevant in the ensuing human face disease arc! he's the one whose leg xie lian tries amputating, and is subsequently furious after the illness recurs because it means he lost his leg for nothing, and he blames xie lian.

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ahhhhh this whole arc is just so sad, it's an arc of xie lian discovering that actually he doesn't have the strength and ability do everything he wants to do, over and over and over again, as everyone around him berates him for not doing enough

***

oh. oh shit I just had a Thought about his second banishment when he asks for the cursed shackles. maybe in that moment he wants to not have power to do anything, so that nobody (himself included) will EXPECT him to do things that are beyond him

***

the narrative voice from xie lian's pov calling a young teen "still very much a child" - Xie Lian you are barely 20 yourself!!!

***

omg the bit with shi qingxuan bursting unexpectedly out of the pickle pot to thwart pei ming is GOLD. I love them.

***

oh boy I'd totally forgotten that pei su wasn't pei ming's first ascended descendant!! he likes to have a descendant around to have under his thumb

the previous one is just mentioned briefly offhand, not even named, but he also got into trouble and was banished to the mortal realm for a hundred years, but within 50 years he had no more followers left and was gone. so this is why pei ming felt so strongly about pei su NOT being banished - he was worried this might happen again!

***

OHO! at some point a while back I was chatting with some folks about the relative power of various heavenly officials in their male vs female forms, and now at the mid-autumn banquet ling wen's male form is referred to as her "most powerful form!" even though earlier in the book it's said that it takes her a lot of power to maintain her male form. so this is interesting! anyone have thoughts on how best to reconcile these two things?

[in reply to a comment analogizing it to a high horsepower engine, capable of producing a lot of power but demanding a lot of fuel] ahh that makes some sense I think! gotta make sure your worshippers are giving you enough merits!

***

I'm appreciating the mid-autumn banquet scene so much more this time, now that I'm able to keep track of who's who. and I'm so delighted to have quan yizhen appear in the narrative! love that guy.

(also love that xie lian's instinct upon seeing an upset young god who he knows ABSOLUTELY nothing about is to help him out even if it interrupts a major social occasion)

***

it occurs to me just HOW often, when jun wu is in a scene, he's described as having his head resting on one of his hands in some way. a signal intending to show how much the ~burdens of leadership~ weigh upon him?

***

how is it decided what play about the various gods gets revealed during the game at the mid-autumn banquet? the text elides over this, and it definitely does make a difference, given the widely varying types of plays that could be presented to the audience, to very different effects!

on another note: hua cheng absolutely commissioned the play about xie lian in banyue, didn't he

***

I am not (yet?) a noted beefleaf scholar so maybe this is addressed elsewhere, but how seriously does he xuan take the role of Earth Master? he xuan must spend at least some time answering prayers and doing earth mastery things, given that he xuan makes it into the top ten ranking in the lantern competition, but to what extent? and what kind of relationship does he xuan have with ming yi's followers?

***

holy shit I'd forgotten just HOW extra hua cheng went in terms of lanterns for xie lian. 3,000 lanterns, when jun wu himself was only in the 900's! hua cheng does NOT know how to be anything but radically committed

***

ah bless, of course it's pei ming who first puts together that hua cheng is the reason for all the lanterns. he is well familiar with what obsessive devoted love looks like in other people!

***

ahhh the version of me who first read this book would be SO surprised by how much I genuinely enjoy the three tumours these days. they're just so terrible (affectionate)

***

just got to the beginning of the fetus spirit introduction, and ok I know this doesn't end up being the actual problem but I still don't like that one of the suggested explanations for what happened to the rich merchant's wife's pregnancy is that her previous abortion resulted in an angry spirit that disrupted her current pregnancy. smacks too much of those myths that if you ever get an abortion it means you'll have more trouble getting pregnant and having kids in the future.

***

oh a belated thought from the mid-autumn festival banquet - earlier in the chapter xie lian is busy thinking about how he's being too familiar in how he talks about hua cheng, and meanwhile hua cheng is busy planning the most over the top show of devotion possible. xie lian! you can talk about hua cheng HOWEVER you want, and hua cheng will be happy! especially since when xie lian is talking to familiarly about hua cheng, it's to threaten qi rong with hua cheng on xie lian's behalf, and we KNOW hua cheng would be delighted to beat up anyone who talks shit abou xie lian!

***

BUDDY BREATHING SCENE!!!

***

throughout the whole book there keep on being little references to xie lian's bamboo hat and the way he always prioritizes making sure he has it. it's done in ways that are pretty invisible on first read, but in my current listen, every time it comes up again I'm just like 🥺🥺🥺

***

ohhh the temple hua cheng built to xie lian in ghost city was built a long time ago but kept hidden until recently - so it hasn't been visible this whole time as a public statement of his obsession. people (ghosts) could only find out about the temple after the mid-autumn festival, when he revealed it to do the lantern thing!

***

ok going back a bunch, I had made a note briefly in my notes app, wondering about why teen hua cheng was kicked out of the xianle army, because he'd been about to tell xie lian but their conversation got cut short. I didn't post about it here because I assumed it was going to come up again! but we're back into the present day now with it having not been returned to. so. WILL it ever get addressed? or is it left to be a lingering point of curiosity about hua cheng's past?

***

the more sense I get of exactly who mu qing and feng xin are as characters, and why they have the beef with each other that they do, the more I worry that if I try reading fengqing fic, I'll have to trawl through a lot of generic bicker-couple fics to find ones that engage with the actual issues between them to the degree that I would be interested in.

they're really interesting characters! I think it would be very hard to get them to a place of actually having a relationship with each other!

any recs? :D

***

I have gotten to the fetus spirit plotline and...oh right.....I am just not personally moved by stories about parenthood and reproduction

[in response to a comment] hmmm yeah I could see it being tied to the whole celibacy thing! And it does make sense for tgcf to have a plot like this in it I think, given how much the book is about sublimated sexual violence. it's about people's choices being taken away from them, I think - the mother doesn't get to actually birth her son and raise him like she wanted to, and the father doesn't even get to know he has a son in order to make a choice on how to respond. but my heartstrings are simply never tugged by babies or anything about them!

***

lmao at pei ming criticising the irresponsibility of whichever heavenly official fathered the fetus spirit. lmao at every single other official in the hall staring at him in silence after he says this.

***

the general habit of the crowd of heavenly officials throughout the book to be more interested in what kind of juicy drama might be stirred up than in the impacts on anyone's lives - well it's very characteristic of what we see of the scumminess of heaven, isn't it

***

holy shit I forgot that jun wu has a magic virgin-detecting sword. that is extremely jun wu of him. even the rest of the court, who know he collects swords, think it's extra weird of him to have a sword like this! BECAUSE IT IS.

***

my sister is well used to listening to me talk about my obsessions. she and I used to live together in the days when I was heavily into Les Miserables the book, and she got the main brunt of it

today she and I went for a walk and I tried to tell her about tgcf and I kept having to backtrack and explain something else so that the next thing that happened would actually make sense; it was like my explanation was a series of expanding circles instead of a linear description. and it just kept going!!!

apparently I am capable of the two sentence explanation or the two hour explanation of tgcf and there is no in between option

I did cut myself off before I finished explaining though, because I want to make sure she's willing to keep listening to me in the future :P I gave her the basics of the hualian backstory and relationship, and told her she would get to hear about Jun Wu and beefleaf next time!

***

oh!!!!! I've reached shi qingxuan backstory time! YESSSS

***

growing up constantly afraid, the way shi qingxuan must have with the reverend of empty words after them.... gosh. kind of impressive honestly that they manage to determinedly live in such a carefree manner in their adult life

***

I had completely forgotten shi qingxuan's private communication array password? a four line poem in praise of Lord Wind Master's looks and skills! iconic.

***

we only get to find out the communication passwords for people who are uhhhh not your typical heavenly officials. I wonder what kinds of passwords more normal gods use?

***

oh boy the bloody fire social, and the "stabbing ecstasy" that it inspires, we return to sexual violence once again! it's amazing that I failed to pick up on all these thematic clues on my first read, that tell you how to understand xie lian's story

***

tfw you have to google for spoilers for a book YOU ALREADY READ

***

hua cheng answering the question of what is the worst suffering in the world makes me think of the dinner party in The Blue Castle where all the relatives go around and answer the question is what is the greatest happiness. now I want to force all the tgcf characters to have to go to a polite and dreary dinner party and answer the question of greatest happiness

otoh I think that Barney Snaith would absolutely agree with Hua Cheng about the greatest suffering!

actually now that I think about it there are more parallels between The Blue Castle and tgcf than I thought - both are about a protagonist who's being kept miserable by someone controlling, who figures out a way to be free, who falls in love with a man who all of polite society agrees is alarming and dangerous.

ghost king Barney Snaith is a pretty fun image to contemplate actually

***

😭😭😭😭BEEFLEAF.

I mean I haven't even gotten to any of the truly awful bits yet! but. shi qingxuan's declaration of the extent they will go to, to protect their brother as he prepares for his next heavenly calamity, and he xuan's reaction to it! he xuan is so hoping that maybe shi qingxuan won't tie themself to their brother, that maybe he xuan won't have to include them in the revenge plans. but shi qingxuan is committed, without knowing what they're committing to!

***

for the first time a venerable of empty words is capable of saying something that xie lian is actually afraid of..... because there's something that MATTERS to him to lose, for the first time in centuries! his lack of care for his own self gives him a lot of power to do things tbh, but it's also truly tragic

***

xie lian's thoughts: shi qingxuan is my friend and I want to help them in their time of trial!

hua cheng's thoughts: he xuan had better not involve dianxia in any of the plotted downfall of the Shi siblings, or else.

meanwhile. the two of them are cuddling in a small carriage that fits about 1.5 people in it, getting flustered over a joke about marriage.

what a scene!

***

oh also I continue to be horrified by Shi Wudu's casually possessive way of treating shi qingxuan and acting like he knows what's best for them at all times. what a guy!

***

hang on what happened, this morning I voluntarily enjoyed having a thought about qi rong, guess I AM learning how to appreciate him as a character after all

***

1. wow the narrative really uses the word "languidly" a lot to describe the manner in which hua cheng does things

2. when out working in the rice fields, xie lian worries about hua cheng in the sun for the second time, but this time he manages to successfully give him the bamboo hat, after being turned down in the banyue desert!

***

awwww he xuan also tries to convince xie lian to not get involved in the black water arc! possible motivations:

1. doesn't want anyone to be hurt other than his targets

2. likes xie lian personally from what he knows of him and doesn't want him hurt

3. his friend hua cheng asked him not to let xie lian get hurt

4. knows that if xie lian is hurt, hua cheng's revenge on him would be formidable

I feel like #4 is by far the most likely but it would be fun if there's some bits of the others mixed in too!

***

lolll I had totally forgotten that he xuan has tunnels dug beneath all sorts of places in the heavenly realm, including right beneath the palaces of other gods!

also: emerging from beneath shi qingxuan's bed. monster under the bed out to get you!!!

***

I'm personally offended that heaven thinks it's embarrassing to use any kind of device that isn't suitably beautiful, and that nobody would have the face to carry a shovel around. first: there are many practical and useful things in this world that aren't beautiful and yet are valuable. second: there are extremely attractive aesthetics that aren't going for ethereal beauty; eg butch lesbian earth master with the equivalent of a soft lumberjack aesthetic would be Very Good Actually

***

I love quan yizhen. napping in the middle of the day, even though heavenly officials don't need to sleep! staring in bewilderment when four people crawl out of a hole into his bedroom! taking decisive action once he figures he understands what's going on, by hurling an entire bed at pei ming! a true sage, living according to his instincts in the moment.

***

I just...!!! HUALIAN. I am endlessly charmed

- xie lian getting enormously flustered seeing hua cheng labouring half-naked in his shrine

- hua cheng using his sabre to do woodworking

- hua cheng being supportive of whatever xie lian decides to do, and xie lian not knowing what to do with the feelings he gets as a result

- xie lian fixing hua cheng's collar!

- the two of them flirting so ourageously that he xuan is no longer able to draw a tidy circle for his array

***

the story of Scholar He truly is upsetting and tragic! getting a lil teary while biking to work, listening to it

(and also dang xie lian does an impressive job deducing what happened with Scholar He and shi qingxuan!)

***

the comedy duo of hua cheng and he xuan makes me cackle every time, the way they constantly needle each other with the truth in front of other people

***

shi qingxuan on hearing more about Scholar He: "I really am nothing compared to this man." 😭

***

WAIT the possibility is brought up that maybe other people also ascended by stealing someone else's fate - I can't remember if this is addressed later but other heavenly officials are definitely the sort who would do something like this if they could! I'm now looking suspiciously at pei ming's ascended descendants

[in response to a comment wondering whether shi wudu came up with this on his own or asked around] GREAT point. is shi wudu really an innovator? he doesn't strike me as one!

***

how do heavenly calamities work? do you get to choose whether you want to undergo such a trial for greater power, or does it just happen to all gods in their time? Are they a natural force or does someone specific (eg jun wu) set what it's going to be? how often are they possible/required? many questions!

I'm at the point of shi wudu's tribulation and we're told it's unexpectedly months early; I was wondering if he xuan had any ability to manipulate when it was, so it would happen at a time that would be helpful for him to judge what shi qingxuan will do about it. but if he xuan actually wanted multiple more months and jun wu triggered it early that would be REAL interesting bc then maybe he xuan wanted to be able to have more time to see if shi qingxuan might actually decide not to prioritize shi wudu for once

the way that xie lian will just casually drop information about past miseries of his life like it's no big deal, just constantly! and plenty of them never even come up again! oh yeah no big deal, plenty of times in the past he's been stranded out of sea for half a month at a time, isn't that just to be expected

***

"Xie Lian always felt that he was light as a feather, like if he didn’t pay attention, Hua Cheng would disappear." 😭 xie lian has never had a good thing in his life actually stick around before and so he cannot quite believe hua cheng isn't going to go anywhere!

***

ooh I had forgotten that in the black water demon lair there really are skeleton fish, it's not just a fun thing the fanartists came up with! I love the skeleton fish

***

REPAYMENT FOR THE BUDDY BREATHING!!!

***

at first i was like, it is so CUTE how flustered both xie lian and hua cheng are after xie lian kisses hua cheng in an attempt at resuscitation, but then xie lian runs away wishing for death and I'm reminded of the entire heaps and gobs of sexual trauma this guy has ahhhhh

***

the conversation hua cheng and xie lian have over the campfire on the island in black water demon lair, about hua cheng's special someone...... it's so GOOD. both of them reassuring each other about the depth to which they want to know and accept the other, able to be articulated because they're not actually talking directly about being interested in each other. the careful steps of the dance of their relationship, growing closer and closer over the course of the book! it's so beautifully done

***

he xuan is SUCH a theatre kid. his drama levels are off the charts. the ambience! the hiding of an iron prison in the reflection of a lake! the choreography of everything he plans!

I feel like at least half the theatricality is just because he doesn't know any other way to be, and there's no intended audience. beyond that... I do think the main audience is shi qingxuan, but with a sideline in "anyone else along for the ride" and "people telling stories about it afterwards." this is after all the guy whose previous vengeance and death got a town to do yearly theatre about it ever after because it was so good!

also I do think that there's at least a little of the theatricality that's for shi wudu as well, even if perhaps he xuan doesn't consciously recognize that

***

I love how he xuan, despite having killed the original ming yi and taken over his life, won't actually stand for anyone talking about ming yi without respect. he has LINES you know.

***

I adore the whole sequence where xie lian is sharing shi qingxuan's body and they talk back and forth to each other with the same mouth and share control over the actions they take. it's so much fun! and also demonstrates a lot of trust from shi qingxuan tbh. good thing xie lian can be trusted, unlike certain other people in this part of the story :P

***

damn the real ming yi was kept alive and imprisoned for HOW long? how long ago were all the main players of the black water arc born? it was several hundred years at least, iirc. what a life. sucks to be him!

also there is a pleasing/horrible parallel in that he xuan, in order to get revenge on someone for stealing his fate and his life as a god... does the same thing to someone else

***

as xie lian reviews past events in light of new information, there's also the fun parallel that while xie lian was busy feeling guilty for sneaking around paradise manor to find the missing heavenly official, I'm sure hua cheng was busy feeling guilty about manipulating xie lian into finding the fake ming yi

***

the confrontation between he xuan and shi wudu!!! shi wudu has NO idea how much danger he's in, all "we can agree to mind our own business as water colleagues, right? :)))"

and then -

shi wudu: "you're still alive?"

he xuan: "I'm dead."

I'M DYING.

***

trying to decide if shi wudu is the Actual Worst, or if he's saying the most horrifying things he can think of to try to egg he xuan into killing him so that shi qingxuan won't be in a position to have to kill their own brother. both options seem plausible tbh

***

hualian kiss count: 3!

***

yessss the first narrative mention of the idea that Someone is stirring up trouble with all these cases of late, thank you hua cheng!

***

awww it is nice to see that the three tumours stick together even in death, even when everyone else decides it's not worth the social ramifications of continuing to admire shi wudu. pei ming collects shi wudu's corpse and ling wen attends the funeral. they may all three be terrible but they are terrible TOGETHER. <3

(and of course xie lian comes to the funeral too.)

***

HUALIAN KISS COUNT: 4

***

in this kissing session xie lian thinks about how it's unfair that he can't let his hands roam anywhere "dangerous" which, (recognising the flaws in reading into specific word choices in a translated text) oh boy, way to have only negative associations with sex at this point in your life xie lian 😭

***

BUT. he's finally able to recognize consciously that there has been an element of desire in himself in each instance of kissing. proud of u xie lian!!

***

I love how much the villagers around puqi shrine are accepting of xie lian as their local daozhang. not afraid of him or in awe of him or disdainful of him, they're happy to spend time with him and bug him about his cute relative xiao-hua and treat him like he belongs in the community

***

ok so like I ENJOY the through line of xie lian being extremely bad at cooking, and the heartbreaking backstory reasons why he cooks the way he does.... but also it's a little over-exaggerated for me? like it's not just unpleasant, it's outright dangerous, it makes people feel like they're poisoned, it can knock people out. It's just a bit much imo!

***

aha we are getting multiple hints that Something Is Up with the kid lang ying, with him suddenly behaving in ways that are completely atypical for him

***

OH NO.... lang ying being Weird about xie lian bathing in sight of other men......lang ying having been taken over by jun wu.........jun wu you are being sexually creepy about xie lian again!!

***

WAIT I never realized until this moment that puqi shrine is like. IN the village. cozy neighbours with the villagers. I thought it was a bit set apart! but while xie lian is bathing inside the shrine, a knock on the next-door house sounds close enough that he at first thinks it's his own door!! this revolutionizes my understanding of everything that happens while he lives at the shrine holy shit.

and when he's not busy with other things, xie lian hosts "how not to get scammed" talks for the local old folks in the village! I adore xie lian more and more with every passing moment

***

xie lian is so surprised that quan yizhen doesn't have any junior officials, even though xie lian doesn't have any either. qyz is a lone wolf! xie lian just can't afford any! (what does that mean?? do you need to expend merits or spiritual energy to maintain your deputies? how does it work? Tell me more!)

***

the POLITENESS of the confrontation between xie lian and ling wen over the brocade immortal! it is extremely them and it's so fun

***

ling wen and pei ming running into each other in the street: they're described as making snide comments to each other. but pei ming genuinely worries for ling wen's well being at the same time. just three tumours things!! their friendship requires saying mean things to each other :P

***

throwback to the time i said jun wu was being sexually creepy via lang ying https://federatedfandom.net/@soph_sol/111168690897913240 ......... it's actually hua cheng pretending to be lang ying WHOOPS. the vibes of "lang ying" not wanting anyone to see xie lian bathing do change when you change who it is - it comes across more as protective instead of possessive imo

it IS very funny how differently the same actions can be perceived depending on the assumed motivations. something something this is how jun wu can get away with so much as the heavenly emperor? also this is how unreliable narrators who don't understand their own motivations can trick unwary readers

***

xie lian to hua cheng: "Only after having met you did I rediscover that it’s such a simple thing to be happy" 🥺

of course this is said in a very silly context but isn't that the point? he's able to laugh himself sick over silly things! it's so important to me

***

the juxtaposition of my thoughts about the three tumours friendship involving snide remarks, and the xie lian-ling wen collegial relationship involving endless politeness....you know ling wen is really your friend when she's willing to be mean to you

***

OH. ling wen asked for time by herself with the brocade immortal and xie lian thought that would be fine because her hands were bound by ruoye. then when she comes out later the text casually mentions that her hands are at her side. but xie lian doesn't notice! a) what did she do with the brocade immortal and b) what did she do with RUOYE

***

by hua cheng's estimation, shi wudu acts entirely based on loyalty and friendship, helping his people no matter what. but pei ming "might not choose to aid corruption." this sounds about right to me!

***

oh I forgot to note while I was listening this morning! ling wen was mean to xie lian about his cooking, instead of being endlessly polite - friendship overture from her? 😂

***

returning to the ling wen watch, maybe that mention of her hands by her side was an accident? because now in the fight against the cultivators and monks who come to the shrine, when xie lian calls for Ruoye, it is on ling wen's hands and it needs to leave her! or maybe the brocade immortal is pretending to be ruoye?? genuinely do not know what to think anymore and do not remember nearly enough about this whole plotline!

well i think it must have been an accident after all. she only decides to take her leave after xie lian calls ruoye away, and then she gets the brocade immortal from inside the shrine. sigh. oh well!

***

ling wen has the politest way of breaking out! thanks for your hospitality but I'll be taking my leave now, she says conversationally, after having made sure xie lian is too busy with an extremely inconvenient fight with other people to be able to stop her. I love her so much.

***

SWORD NERDS 🤩 xie lian and qian yizhen both have an instinctive reaction upon seeing ling wen suddenly being really good at fighting, and it's to admire her beautiful move - even though she used it against them!

***

noooo puqi shrine actually collapsed?! oh I'm feeling emotional about that. it's really been something like a home for xie lian, a place where he's been able to have some fun and build some good memories, despite everything!

***

I still love the moment where xie lian, by habit, starts to report the latest incident to ling wen - who of course was there for the whole thing, as xie lian's opponent.

***

I just! love ling wen so much! EVERYONE relies on her for everything in ways they don't even think about or realise. how do you fight against her when she controls even your means of communication with each other?

***

lollll qi rong's most well known and vulgar traits were because he was trying to imitate the other two ghost kings. can't even come up with his own thing! no wonder he's the afterthought of the four calamities! c'mon qi rong you can do better than that

***

I might not love the thing where xie lian's cooking is so exaggeratedly bad that it's like poison, but it is a fun little detail that something with "incorruptible chastity" in the name is specifically bad for one's wellbeing

***

the scene where there's all sorts of disparate people showing up to run into each other on the same night at the same random out-of-the-way inn to run into each other reminds me a great deal of the climax of a Georgette Heyer novel!

of course, this isn't anywhere near the climax of tgcf; I don't think I'm even 2/3 of the way through. have I mentioned before that there's just so much book in this book?

anyway, the count so far is: Hua Cheng & Xie Lian, Heaven's Eye and the rest of his mob, Lang Cheng and the fetus spirit, Qi Rong, and another random cultivator. Would not be surprised at this point if even more named characters show up!

***

lollll xie lian really taking the opportunity provided to him by mu qing's disguise as "fu yao" to insult mu qing extensively to his face with all appearance of innocence. amazing tbh that mu qing is still attempting to keep up the disguise at this point in the story!

***

also - feng xin for the first time making overtures to xie lian under his own name and face! connecting to his private communication array, and then actually coming down to find him when xie lian suddenly stopped responding!

***

there's only about a hundred or so Upper Court officials but we only get to know the names and roles of a small fraction of that number. I want to know the specifics of more of them! Especially the civil gods - I can't remember ever getting even the name of any current civil god beyond Ling Wen. Who's the one who takes over her job in her absence, for example?

And what's the approximate ratio of civil gods to martial gods, as well?

***

known martial gods:

Jun Wu

Xie Lian

Pei Ming

Pei Su | Pei Xiu (unless he's a middle court official? unclear.)

Feng Xin

Mu Qing

Lang Qianqiu

Quan Yizhen

Yin Yu (previously)

known elemental gods:

Shi Wudu

Shi Qingxuan

Yushi Huang

Ming Yi (... sort of)

known civil gods:

Ling Wen

Jing Wen (previously)

and that's it, as far as I can remember! 15 gods out of at least a hundred! TELL ME MORE.

***

it's so 🥺 how much more xie lian laughs at this point in the story than he did earlier! "such a simple thing to be happy" strikes again!

actually I wonder. if one were to do a count of when and how often xie lian laughs in each part of the story. what kind of graphical depiction of his state of mind could you derive from the data.

***

I love xie lian & hua cheng's whole routine of puppet master and puppet at the entrance to mount tonglu, and they're clearly having fun with it too!

also. PEI MING. he sure has nerve, making fun of hua cheng when he's a small child, even though he knows this is a powerful and feared ghost king!

***

I had forgotten that the powerful demon Swift Life-Extinguishing Blade is Pei Ming's sword! 😆 I'm so delighted. that's right buddy. you have to fight YOUR OWN SWORD, WHO YOU SNAPPED, in order to fulfil your mission!

***

ok in this three wayfight between kemo and pei ming and pei ming's sword ming guang, I'm actually having trouble keeping track of who's who, because at this point I'm so used to thinking of pei ming when I hear ming guang that I don't even notice which of the two names is being used!

***

first mention of the crown prince of wuyong :) and of the xianle guoshi being old enough to remember kingdoms from before anyone else's time :) finally jun wu backstory time is approaching!

love that the xianle guoshi wanted xie lian to be more like the crown prince of wuyong btw. guoshi and jun wu of one mind :)))

***

wait, in this discussion of the dynasties of heaven, it's mentioned that there are hundreds in the upper court. much earlier in the book I clearly remember it saying that there are something like a hundred. which is it? how many unnamed gods of the upper court are there?

and I suppose - how much does that number change between dynasties and eras? is the number fairly consistent, between gods rising and falling? or are there some times with far more gods than other times?

***

ling wen to pei ming: do you remember anyone who might have a grudge against both of us?

pei ming: not specifically. there's too many.

I love my terrible tumours 🥰

***

"There is no such thing as number one in literature, it’s all subjective." You said it, Xie Lian!

***

every now and then there's a brief reference to gods who are in charge of specific things, and seem to therefore not be civil gods, martial gods, or elemental gods. This rather implies there's a whole other framework of what godhood might be like that we simply never see in the book because the only gods named or described are ones who fit in those three categories! how narrow our view of heaven is!

me: @ Betty yes I think that does make sense! but in the section I was listening to this evening, it was talking about how in Jing Wen's time there used to be even fewer female heavenly officials than there are today, and that mostly they had roles like being the gods of dancing or cooking or things like that, and that there were almost no female civil gods. and I'm pretty sure they wouldn't have been martial gods either! so if those female gods weren't civil or martial gods, and certainly aren't elemental gods either, then they must fit into another category, I think!

Betty: @ soph_sol imagine getting to heaven because of your martial prowess and being made the god of dancing or cooking :/

me: @ Betty okay that is actually incredible though. like, sucks for the god in question, but it ABSOLUTELY seems like something this heaven would do.

***

ah yes, Jing Wen is SUCH an ass. I'd forgotten how much! but he quickly and easily sorted me out on that one.

***

even after all this time xie lian is still worried about making gestures towards hua cheng that are too intimate! XIE LIAN. brush those petals off his shoulders for him! he'll like it!!

also, wow hua cheng, way to go for the wildly over the top romantic gesture there with the rain of flower petals just for xie lian

but then wildly over the top gestures is kind of hua cheng's thing <3

***

the temple of the crown prince of wuyong in the valley between two mountain spirits which are coming closer and closer, with our heroes trapped between: the trash compactor scene on a much larger scale?

***

the narration says that when it comes to martial gods there's no need to mention their strength, but I do need to give a shoutout here to pei ming, singlehandedly holding two entire mountains apart from each other

***

poor yin yu..... having a face SO unremarkable and boring that you look at him and assume he must be someone more distinctive who's in disguise, because how could a real person have a face that forgettably dull

***

he xuan may be an excellent scholar and a powerful supreme but there are some things in which yin yu can totally show him up

he xuan, ghost king, bearer of the earth master shovel for centuries: can barely control it, digs wild tunnels

yin yu, consummate professional assistant, bearer of the earth master shovel for a few hours: digs quick and careful tunnels, and can even create tidy mud steps in moments

***

pei ming is SO pei ming that he's capable of being interested in the dry femur of someone he suspected to be a beautiful woman before death. it's a bone! it's just a bone! but pei ming totally willing to get a boner for it.

this man can see beautiful women in ANYTHING

***

yesssss it's time for chekhov's red string to be activated!!! the string that's been tied around hua cheng's finger since book one is now attached to xie lian!

***

wait he xuan has over FIFTY clones in heaven in various roles to monitor things?! that is commitment. how much of his mental energy does he need to engage at all times to keep track of and control them all?

***

"This is no heaven. I don't like it here." 😭 quan yizhen, throwing truths everyone else is too cowardly to say!

***

quan yizhen pointing out yin yu's sunk cost fallacy.... what's so great about ascension? if you don't like it here, then why stay just because you worked hard for it and it was a major achievement??

***

Hua Cheng sure does intensive background checks on his trusted subordinates to have all these recorded memories of Yin Yu's history with Quan Yizhen

***

me listening to the yin yu & quan yizhen backstory:

Xie Lian couldn't bear to watch anymore and he buried his face in Hua Cheng's arms. "This...this, this, this, is too tragic to watch."

***

ok but real question, CAN I manage to keep listening to the yin yu & quan yizhen backstory. yy just learned that he gave qyz the brocade immortal without realising it and it's agonizing

***

I'm actually listening to a podcast tonight as I do evening chores instead of the tgcf audiobook. maybe I need to really quickly skim-read this section in the actual book and skip forward in the audio.

***

The thing about narrative themes that you really struggle with and narrative themes that are the most interesting for you to engage with, is that I wouldn't be surprised if it's common for those things to actually occupy space quite near to each other. Because they're both circling around a thing that you have strong emotions about.

I keep rotating in my head the issues I'm having with the yin yu & quan yizhen & brocade immortal plot, and wanting to say that it's because it's a story about people making bad decisions because the information they need in order to make better decisions is being deliberately withheld from them...... but that's literally shi qingxuan's story in the black water arc and I LOVE that arc.

(see also yi city vs xiyao, which both also have that same dynamic. one of them I can't bear and the other I'm fascinated by.)

shrug emoji. idk! it's different!!

***

yin yu not told by jian yu that what was in the gift box was the brocade immortal, until days after it was given.... then quan yizhen not told by yin yu that the armour he's wearing is a danger to him and everyone around him.... secrets compounding on each other!

I got a few more minutes into my listen but then I got to the part where yin yu doesn't tell qyz and had to nope out again

***

ok I did it I read through it in my paper copy and survived the experience and can go to bed in peace!

***

Xie Lian says that the guoshi of xianle was a good teacher, and he clearly thinks highly of him.... but from everything we see of the guoshi in book 2 I do NOT agree with Xie Lian

***

my understanding of the reason they all came to mt tonglu was to take out any reasonably powerful ghosts before they could kill too many others and get more powerful. but now they're all acting like it's helpful to go straight to the kiln with the help of the mountain spirit. this doesn't quite make sense to me! anyone have an explanation?

***

seeing yin yu calmly and capably working in the context of being hua cheng's subordinate is quite the contrast to how all over the place he is when dealing with quan yizhen, even today - so it's not that he's grown up and matured and settled into his skills, it's that he can't manage to be that person around his shidi

***

tfw u have so little care for your own well being that your love interest has to sit you down for a talk about how just because nothing can kill you doesn't mean you should just let yourself get hurt willy-nilly

***

*pedant voice* Well Actually, when people die due to a pyroclastic flow like in wuyong, the shell of ash leaves a mostly-empty hollow inside where the person was, rather than creating a stone effigy of the dead. this misconception is due to the findings at Pompeii where the hollows were used as casts to create statue-like impressions of what the hollows were shaped as, and people see the images without hearing the full context

EMBARRASSING. Local Nerd Pontificates Before Listening To The Rest Of The Scene

(I still have some questions though)

***

when hua cheng was in mount tonglu for like a decade or whatever it was, he really made a hobby of trying to figure out the history of the place, didn't he! well I guess he couldn't spend ALL of his time carving statues and killing other ghosts!

***

ohhhh I think I really did not catch the first time through that the way the crown prince of wuyong was going to take all his mortal followers to heaven to save them from the volcano was to like, temporarily appoint them all as his deputies. that's so fun! and like, interesting commentary on the whole system too tbh, where basically the gods get to pick and choose who gets to experience immortal life as the middle court deputy of a god and who dies on earth

anyway this also answers my questions about how many deputies a god is allowed to appoint, and the answer is: as many as they have power to sustain

***

it kind of feels like all the hints in mt tonglu are supposed to make the reader wonder if perhaps xie lian somehow used to be the crown prince of wuyong, in order to later pull a surprise move when showing who it actually was, and why the parallels are relevant.

I can't remember though, whether I was tricked by this on my first read or not. I don't actually remember, even, what all I already knew about the story from fandom before going in! dear Past Soph: why didn't you write down all your thoughts in excruciating detail for Current Soph to enjoy?!

***

as I continue to listen, I keep on looking at the decreasing hours left in my tgcf audiobook with dismay, like "oh no I ONLY have 13 more hours to go until I've listened to all the chapters that have been released so far"

I started listening to this fan audiobook over a month ago, on September 7, and it has just so thoroughly become a part of my daily routine. like who was I even before I spent all my time listening to and thinking about this book?

***

awww the silver wraith butterflies are a part of hua cheng's vambraces! I wonder how they were created?

***

sigh I continue to not love the whole plotline where Xuan Ji is a highly capable female general who then goes mad out of love for Pei Ming and doesn't care about literally anything else ever again and becomes someone to look down on

***

what was the ecosystem of gods and demons in tgcf like, prior to the destruction of wuyong and the creation of tonglu and the kiln? were ghost kings even a thing? or was the creation of the very idea of calamities a part of what happened when everything went down?

(and is this addressed later in the book?? I don't remember!)

[a comment tells me that bai wuxiang was the first calamity] a) that must have been a real surprise for the heavens, when the first calamity appeared! b) ....was it also a surprise for bai wuxiang when the SECOND calamity appeared?

***

a university librarian I know told me once about noticing that east asian students would often hand things over to other people using both hands, and the librarian looked it up and apparently in some cultures it is rude to give an item to someone else with only one hand

anyway I've been noticing on this read-through that every now and then it will be specified whether someone is giving someone with one hand or two, and that gesture seems to be encoding information! I'm very sure that there are many other culturally-normative details in this book that I don't happen to have context for and I bet plenty of it is like this, where if you don't know it means something then it doesn't even look like something relevant, so you don't even know to look it up

at any rate, yushi huang offers her sword to pei ming with two hands, because she's classy like that

***

I really hope we're going to move beyond banyue and little pei being present in nearly every scene sometime soon. the whole banyue arc is really unpleasant with its racist depiction of that people-group, plus then somehow the narrative doesn't see anything weird about developing what looks to be a background romance arc between banyue and little pei despite everything little pei did to the people/city/country of banyue

***

when yushi huang ascended, "the black ox ascended with her" - does that mean he's actually a god in his own right too, not just a middle court deputy of yushi huang?!

***

I love how petty the black ox is, throwing pei ming off his back 7 or 8 times during the journey where he's carrying 4 people, even though that inevitably must impede the progress of the whole group. WORTH IT.

***

"Even if this won’t kill them, if no one can help dig them out, it still doesn’t feel great to be buried for a few decades."

definitely not speaking from experience here, xie lian. who's survived being buried for a few decades? not him!!

***

relatedly, a few moments earlier xie lian was saying “Nothing is ever the matter with me” ahahahaha

***

hua cheng, sweating with anxiety: haha I definitely don't know anything about this cave filled with divine statues even though I know everything else there is to know about mt tonglu. I'm completely ignorant about clothing styles despite being obviously into fashion. I know nothing about art or about the symbology used to depict gods. don't touch anything, whoever made these statues is weird and we should leave immediately

(I love the cave of 10,000 gods so much)

***

now that Feng Xin and Fangxin are in a scene together with Feng Xin under his real name, it's a problem when listening to distinguish the two names!

***

what is with the pit full of spider silk that attacks anyone who enters the area, that feng xin & mu qing & xie lian get stuck in? it seems rather out of character from the rest of the cave system which is mostly just an endless shrine to the flower crowned martial god. is it part of a set of traps hua cheng set up to keep others out of his space, and we just don't see anything else like it because hua cheng has been directing their route to avoid such things?

***

[in a response to a comment about the origin of the wraith butterflies, and the spider silk actually being butterfly cocoon silk] mxtx should care more about insect life imo, because insects are fascinating. but the wraith butterflies are mentioned as coming from hc's silver vambraces, so I had thought they were more like eming, inanimate objects that gained life, rather than being real butterflies/moths

I wonder if hc can summon the larval form as well and it's just that there is no use to summoning them until they can fly!

***

honestly props to mu qing and feng xin for working together to abscond with xie lian; from their perspective xl is weirdly pliant about just doing whatever a dangerous ghost king is telling him to do, and the ghost king seems intent on separating xl from any kind of protection or support from other gods. that's worrying!! and they manage to put aside their mutual grievances and team up because they both care more about xl's safety than about their hatred for each other.

***

oh my god

a) hua cheng has the coral pearl earring in his hair!!!!

b) mu qing did not stop looking for the lost earring for 800 years!!!!

***

I love the detail that mu qing is able to instantly recognize all of the clothing and accessories on the statues as being xie lian's, because mq had been so closely involved in caring for xl's wardrobe, whereas xl doesn't recognize any of it, because he had been a rich and privileged crown prince who probably never paid attention to what he was wearing at all

***

oof this bit where hua keeps the command talisman on xie lian and then looms over him untying xie lian's belt.... the sexual assault vibes are very present from xie lian's pov. hello friend your TRAUMA.

***

oof oof oof this is all just SO clearly about the trauma and xie lian is having a BAD TIME even though all hua cheng is doing is healing his frostbite injuries :((((

***

how AM I going to survive listening to Book Four though, when I get there. and it's coming up fast!

***

xie lian is so brave for speaking up and actually addressing the question of how he and hc feel about each other, so that the two of them can be in harmony again as they continue to face the trials they're experiencing here! I know how hard that was for xie lian 😭

***

also, belatedly, bai wuxiang must have been soooooooooo mad to see hc with a partially-clad xie lian under his hands. that's for bai wuxiang only!!

***

aha! confirmation that bai wuxiang was the first ever supreme ghost king! the previous generations of gods and ghosts must have had a very different experience with no ghost kings

***

xie lian and hua cheng are finally alone again after sharing that there are Feelings between them, and it's awkward because they both feel SHY! 🥺 I love them so much

also extremely accurate. how DO you manage to restart an emotionally vulnerable conversation after it's been interrupted by other things.

***

I love how the narration confidently states things about supreme ghost kings as if they're facts, when there have only ever been 3 in all of history. and you can't take the Black Water and Crimson Rain relationship as the standard by which to compare ghost king relationships! it's so funny

"I simply MUST finish creating a new archival cataloguing system that will be objectively superior to all previous systems" (https://xkcd.com/927/)

***

a mortal who dies can stick around as a ghost due to an obsessive attachment, though usually the strongest of such attachments is resentment. I wonder if there are any autistic people who remain as ghosts due to their fixation on their special interests? :D

***

hang on, a thought is occuring to me, we're told that you can't permanently destroy/kill a ghost unless you have access to their ashes, but there's been a bunch of killing of ghosts in this whole mt tonglu arc without any mention of ashes. is there a way this is reconciled anywhere? like maybe the less powerful ghosts can be destroyed even without their ashes?

ghosts are categorized by the palace of ling wen according to their danger levels, like how many they can kill. but it's a taxonomy they made up for categorization. I hope the ashes threshold [of when a ghost is powerful enough that you need to access their ashes to kill them] falls awkwardly in the middle of one of these categories

***

anyway I feel very verklempt about xie lian still remembering xiao ying from all the way back in the ghost brides arc and wanting her caring for lang ying to be justified

***

ooh when hua cheng was becoming a ghost king, he was able to ask the kiln to close without any other ghosts inside to have to fight, because the kiln could sense he had a high potential! definitely changes the vibes of what his experience must have been

***

xie lian is SO flustered after he and hua cheng kiss for the first time with no excuses, and realises what flimsy excuses they were all the other times as well. it's adorable

***

I've made it to Book Four time, it's time for 7.5 hrs of suffering as I listen through it!

***

mu qing is SO reasonable, leaving! he keeps on trying to get it into the others' heads that actually when you're impoverished and starving, doing whatever you have to do to make money is more important than pride and sense of position. and they will NOT listen. he doesn't need to keep on hanging around them if they won't listen to the advice of the only one among the group who has any experience in how to live when not rich! oh my god.

***

the king and queen of xianle continuing to just unquestioningly accept that it's their role to be taken care of by other people, simply because they're the king and queen.........

also: the queen is wasting SO much food with her cooking adventures! when xie lian and feng xin work so hard to try and keep them fed!!

***

what kind of god would xie lian have ended up being if he'd never been banished, never experienced any hardship or poverty, just went from success to success? he has always had a good heart but he's just so oblivious to so much! would he have, without noticing, slowly been corrupted by heaven's influence to become a god more like all the others, or would he have found a way to hang onto his compassion for the powerless regardless?

with all the talk earlier about how he was such a young god and that's why he was so eager to over-involve himself in the yong'an drought and famine, it really implies that at least some of the other current heavenly officials also started out very promisingly interested in actually doing good, but were influenced by the culture of the heavenly court to become less and less focused on such things.

if you're not determined, then the values of the people you spend all your time with will very easily affect the way you think about things!

***

oh boy, mu qing had personally been doing ALL of the actual work of caring for and maintaining a household of four useless nobles, for the sweet sweet pay of zero money and lots of criticism. and xie lian didn't even notice until he was gone!

***

basically right after mu qing leaves, xie lian and feng xin come across a fight in the streets between a servant and a master who had overworked the servant with no pay, and xie lian is HEARTBROKEN at the parallels with what he'd done to mu qing, even if he's not able to think it in so many words. especially when feng xin fails to notice the parallels and merely cheers on the servant while insulting the master!

I missed this entire thing on first read due to not being able to keep feng xin & mu qing straight and thus not remembering any of the relevant character notes

***

you know, feng xin and xie lian are so embarrassed and upset at the thought of busking for money, because it's putting yourself in front of a crowd for nothing but entertainment.... but back when xie lian was crown prince, one of the most notable things we're shown about him is him playing a role in a piece of theatre as he travels through the city in a parade. like yes it's a ritual that's supposed to help keep the city safe but ALSO it is absolutely entertainment for the common people. being a performer is exactly what xie lian was raised to be tbh!

***

HOLD THE PRESSES halfway through writing that last post it suddenly struck me - xie lian ruins the ritual that was supposed to keep xianle safe, because he felt it was more important to save the child who fell.... and then xianle falls shortly after

would completing the ritual have kept all this from happening? but then if he had ignored the falling child he would be an entirely different person so everything would have happened differently anyway!

[someone in comments points out that this is Omelas and IT IS.]

***

I had to skip forward a bit to make it through the part where feng xin and xie lian fail in their first efforts at busking, but now I have to make it through the part where xie lian fails in his first effort at stealing!

***

the sheer amount of pressure on xie lian during this period, wherein if he can only cultivate hard enough then he can re-ascend, and as a god he'll have the resources to care for and protect his parents and feng xin. and they're all looking at him with eager expectation, while xie lian is struggling with depression and shame and feels like he can't do anything right but also can't admit his struggles to anyone because they only people he has to talk to are the people who are relying on him to be okay. WHEW IT'S A LOT.

***

"this hand had reached out too late" 😭 😭 😭

(context: when xie lian gets kicked off the mountain by the 33 gods, runs down and falls, then sits in a blank daze, and mu qing follows after him and offers him a hand up)

***

the xianle trio is so bad at communicating and xie lian has been pushed to his limits and the fight when mu qing brings them rice is just SO much, with all of them pushing each other's buttons in the worst way 😭

***

the way bai wuxiang is tormenting xie lian by making him think he's seeing bai wuxiang's accoutrements on himself, only to have that vision disappear when he tells someone else.... making him feel like he's going mad AND making it look to other people like he's going mad! disconnecting him more and more from what few people he has left in his life.

his emotional support system is already basically nothing - his mom requires emotional support from everyone else, his dad is guaranteed to yell at him, he can't admit failures to feng xin, and even if mu qing were still around he's not the kind of person it's easy to be vulnerable with

that moment back on the mountain when he cried and bai wuxiang was there for him and it actually felt weirdly COMFORTING despite it being bai wuxiang!!!! he has nobody else he could cry on!

bai wuxiang is so good at what he does, and what he does is the worst

***

I'm back to more listening and more thoughts!

"Xie Lian was filled with rage and resentment, but he couldn’t tell who it was directed at; to White No-Face, to Feng Xin, to everyone, or to himself."

that is SUCH a mood, in terms of how things can feel when everything sucks

***

I'm approaching the Stabbing Incident (oh no!!!!) and yikes I'd forgotten that this happened directly in response to xie lian deciding he had to go confront bai wuxiang directly. I bet that means there are dimensions of xie lian feeling like it's his own fault, then, making the whole thing even worse!!

***

I love to see how much agency and intention the reader is able to see in the little ghost fire, through xie lian's eyes. baby ghost hua cheng is doing EVERYTHING he possibly can even though he is basically powerless, and xie lian sees him as exceptional, even then!

***

tomorrow as I bike in to work I will get to listen to xie lian being stabbed repeatedly! that'll wake you up in the morning

***

bai wuxiang has absolutely noticed that there's a particular ghost fire that's been hanging around xie lian, and of course doesn't think there's anything to worry about. just imagine how shocked and appalled he must have been when that little ghost fire managed to become a ghost king

***

ah of course it's the noble-looking couple who are the first to stab xie lian. the THEMES.

***

ahhhh the buff street performer who was badly injured by trying to beat xie lian in breaking rocks on his chest!!!! he actually rejects the premise of it being okay to kill a god repeatedly to save yourself! I love him

***

am I doing a play-by-play here? maybe a little. but the way the scene is constructed so that lots of different people keep needing to make a decision to make things worse again!

***

why have I been calling White No-Face bai wuxiang, when I call the other calamities by the English translations of their titles? (at least, when I refer to their titles instead of their names)

a strange affectation for me to have picked up

***

oh I had noted this down but forgot to post it here! when bai wuxiang is talking to xie lian about teaching him things, bai wuxiang says: "The first thing I taught you was: you are powerless in the face of many things in this world."

still need to rotate in my mind some of the things about this, but I wanted to put it here so I don't forget to keep thinking about it!

***

oof the Stabbening is intense. but then when xie lian is not able to scream his pain, the ghost fire screams for him, in a way that feels to xie lian like it's expressing the exact same pain. it's not like it helps or anything, but at least in that moment he is not alone in his agony and misery <3

***

okay Actually listening to the next morning is even worse. the dissociation, the blank and accepting way he simply moves through the world, and then he and I are both brought sharply to miserable reality by the corpse of the street performer, oh goddddd

***

this is the worstttttt 😭 😭 😭

***

you know how it is, tears rolling down your face as you bike along public roads because you're listening to the fight xie lian picks to drive feng xin off

***

xie lian is so! fucked! up! but feng xin is so reasonable to leave, actually, given the information he has available to him

and the queen doesn't have any practice at addressing hard things head on but she does her very best tbh!

xie lian was in a very bad state already prior to the stabbening and now he has just no faith left in other people anymore and it's heartbreaking to watch

***

the thing about currently being in a particularly emotionally challenging part of the story is that it means it's challenging for me to just listen to it in bits and pieces, because every time I put it in my ears, I'm committing to having an intense experience, and dipping in and out of that headspace is simply a lot to handle! so I only want to do it when I know I've got a good long chunk of time to dedicate to it

***

OKAY we have now heard from bai wuxiang a list of the three things he wanted to teach xie lian!

thing one: he's powerless in the face of many things

thing two: the common people aren't worthy of being saved by xie lian

thing three: if you cannot save the common people then destroy them. only after stepping on them will they revere you.

WHAT a worldview. combining thing one with the other two is just like....a lot. the three don't actually come together into a coherent thesis tbh, it's all just like a messed up lashing out that bai wuxiang goes all in on after discovering that he doesn't actually have the strength to do literally anything he wants.

***

actually now that I've written this, I feel like there are interesting thoughts to think about what it means to have the power to achieve the things you want to do

because that's something hua cheng ALSO sincerely desires, and goes after, and achieves, and uses it keep his beloved safe

whereas jun wu manages to become the emperor of all heaven, and what does he do with that power. he does NOT go back to the goals he had pre-immense-power, to the reasons he wanted to have extra lots of power in the first place! he goes all in instead on his tantrumy "well I never WANTED to save them all anyway so THERE" response

***

I love that the man who gives xie lian his bamboo hat isn't even NICE about how he does it. Like obviously it's a very kind gesture and a very meaningful one and kind of saves the world a little bit, but also the bamboo hat man was real mad at xie lian and thoroughly cursed him out for a while, and was upset at spilling his basket of rice which he needed, and then straight up left, and didn't seem at all the kind of person who would do something kind for a stranger. but then he comes BACK. and he still doesn't actually behave politely or anything! but the GESTURE of kindness is so meaningful! this man sees the humanity of another person in a crappy situation and does something to make that other person's experience a little less awful, because he too knows how much things suck sometimes. It's so perfect.

***

tbh I'd forgotten how short a time xie lien actually spends being bitter, angry, and lashing out. Things happen so RAPIDLY.

he comes back immediately post-stabbening and that same night feng xin leaves, and then the next morning he finds his parents dead, and then there's like, maybe a couple days at most of him being devastated and angry and raising the vengeful spirits of the battlefield ghosts. and then he spends 3 days in a hole in the road doing absolutely nothing, and then he rejects bai wuxiang.

xie lian really didn't want to become that person! he kept straining against it, even as he was overwhelmed with everything awful that had happened. He regularly has to reject things that intrude on his determination for revenge - like the little white flower in the ruined statue's hand, that makes him so upset. and then even when it seems like he's committed to revenge, he instead does his level best to find a reason to NOT go through with it!

***

like yes xie lian in his brief time dressing up as a twin of bai wuxiang is terrifying! this guy is DANGEROUS and a total loose cannon. but even though he thinks his whole heart's in it....he cannot commit. he does not have what it takes to truly be a calamity.

***

omgggg the PARALLELS, wu ming is penetrated by the huge cloud of vengeful spirits as he holds the black sword, and xie lian and wu ming have a kinship of screams as wu ming experiences the agony

***

godddd FUCK YOU jun wu. seeing you're not going to convince xie lian this time around, since xie lian is managing to ascend again, so showing up as the heavenly emperor to "destroy" bai wuxiang for xie lian so you can bide your time and hopefully come back again later to finish the job

***

the end of Book Four, and the end of the extant recorded audiobook! 😭 I'll pick up the physical for the remainder tomorrow

***

the scene where xie lian and hua cheng come to find and pick up the rest of their adventuring party by piloting an enormous statue of xie lian is iconic tbh. and one of the few things about the final arc of tgcf that I actually remember! I don't have anything deep to say about it, but it's so much fun.

if I tried I could probably make something out of the idea that xie lian is getting to control himself, instead of following bai wuxiang's teachings like bai wuxiang was trying so hard to make happen in the whole previous arc? that's a good one actually.

***

lol all the martial gods are so fighting-brained that none of them think to get in touch with the heavens once the barrier around mt tonglu is broken, but just try to fight everyone themselves. good thing they have the rain master with them to do the sensible things!

***

I love shi qingxuan so MUCH 😭

he's resurfaced as ol' feng, part of a group of homeless beggars, but when we first see him, he's actively working to help others in the group, despite his own significant injuries. and he seems pretty at peace with his lot. and is a fully accepted part of the social group, with the others in the group of homeless people all seeming to accept him for who he is, and like him, and make fun of him fondly and knowingly.

he has a lot less to give than he's ever had before in his life, but I think he also might have more actual friends then he's ever had before. in heaven he was generally respected and treated well, but mostly from a combo of people being afraid of his brother and desiring of what shi qingxuan could give them. But now his brother is dead, nobody in this group is afraid of him, and he can't give them much of anything - and yet they easily accept him and care about him!

***

xie lian meeting the xianle guoshi again! getting to have that weird foundation-rocking experience of reconceptualising someone who you saw in your youth as being so old and wise and above you.... who now seems more like your peer.

***

xie lian kissing hua cheng goodbye is so CUTE!

***

jun wu is just so effectively menacing and so powerful! the idea of trying to move against him and succeeding seems unthinkable. he's the emperor of heaven, the number one martial god! amazing to think that xie lian is actually going to defy him and win

***

the temporary initiation of the fight between feng xin and mu qing, and then promptly cutting it off and putting the issue aside for later after having gotten them both super worked up and not resolving anything, is super funny.

***

I want to get back to my reread! but now that I'm reading a physical book instead of listening to the audiobook it doesn't fit into my life in quite the same way because I can't read it WHILE doing other things. I miss you tgcf! I want to return!! but mostly I am either being Productive or I need time when I can relax without my brain being too involved

***

thinking about people's reactions when mei nianqing accuses jun wu of being bai wuxiang

I love that it's so unthinkable in the heavenly court that the gods don't even parse what mei nianqing is trying to say, and mu qing assumes he means that bai wuxiang is impersonating jun wu

but then xie lian thinks about the impossibility of an imposter at some point taking over the Heavenly Emperor without being noticed, since the role is so much more prominent than the Earth Master

which is so valid actually. but makes me instantly want to know who COULD take over with nobody noticing

and I just really want a fic where for some reason ling wen needs to take over, idk, for schemes or something, not even because jun wu is the worst. she knows so much about everyone and everything that she can impersonate jun wu no problem and almost nobody notices

(pei ming notices. because that's the power of ~FRIENDSHIP~. but he takes the opportunity to dunk on her rather than to reveal or betray her.)

***

the reveal scene goes on to show how easily and thoroughly jun wu can beat up and control all the other martial gods, because he's just that powerful. and I'm just saying! this is why I think it would take a civil god, actually, to be able to quietly and thoroughly take him out and take his place! someone who plans ahead and arranges situations rather than relying solely on physical power like the martial gods do!

#LingWenForHeavenlyEmperor

***

people who care more than me about themes of reproduction and babies, could you tell me what the thematic importance of the fetus spirit is, beyond just a signifier of feng xin's relationship with jian lan? I would like to be able to understand the fetus spirit better so as to appreciate its role in the story

***

shi qingxuan is so accustomed to homosocial behaviour that they don't even notice that it could have other dimensions to it. why would it matter if both shi qingxuan and he xuan see xie lian bathing? "we're all men here"!

***

I NEED to know hua cheng's verbal password for his spiritual communication array

***

upon realising he's been terrorized by jun wu, xie lian's considered response is: "... You have such awful hobbies." XIE LIAN ILU

***

I'm back! I return! I have not given up on my reread, and I got re-energised by the knowledge that the last volume of tgcf will soon be in my hands!

I had to reread the last couple chapters to remind myself where I was but now I'm into content where I can have New Thoughts again

***

and ahhhhh I love Yin Yu. Jun Wu offers him a place in the upper court, renown, all of quan yizhen's power, everything he has ever striven for.... and he rejects it because he doesn't actually want to harm quan yizhen: "I do resent him! He is annoying! But so what?! [...] I only wanted to hate him. That doesn't mean I want to hurt him."

This is honestly such a mature way to approach resentment! hating someone but knowing the other person doesn't actually deserve anything bad, so keeping yourself just to private hatred.

***

nooooooo I forgot that in canon yin yu actually dies, murdered by jun wu :( fandom is so on board with pretending that never happened that it slipped my mind!!!!

the whole conversation yin yu has with xie lian as he's dying is so interesting though

***

and then the chapter ends with the return to the theme of HEAVEN SUCKS ACTUALLY. what are gods but just people with extra power. "this world has no true gods" as xie lian tells yin yu.

***

jun wu has control of the cursed shackle around xie lian's neck, jun wu knows that threatening other people's well-being if he misbehaves will be an effective threat to ensure xie lian's good behaviour.... god jun wu is such an asshole

***

roland reminded me a while back that he xuan had a whole pile of clones disseminated throughout the whole of the heavens to help spy, and it's come up again, and I'm just impressed all over again tbh with how much he xuan managed to get up to, how thoroughly the heavens were infiltrated

***

hua cheng manages to get into the heavens secretly to help, and the glomp with which xie lian greets him immediately is SO cute 🥺

Before Hua Cheng could even walk over, Xie Lian had pounced. It was a powerful hug indeed, but Hua Cheng wasn't pushed back by the force at all; he didn't even wobble. He only placed his hands on Xie Lian's back, chuckling lightly without saying a word.

***

damn, the explanation of Yushi Huang's vital position as the only current god of agriculture is so good. if anything happens to her, "it might cause the kind of riots that topple gods."

***

jian lan 😭 referring to herself as "this bitch," back in the day sending off the man she loved for his own good because she knew she could be nothing but a burden for him in an already untenable situation!

she's so angry at feng xin now for not having ever understood or appreciated the lack of options the two of them had had back then, and although her decisions around all this might not have been the most emotionally healthy, her anger is still so valid tbh

despite that period of having to busk to make barely money to care for the royal family, feng xin /didn't/ understand what it meant to be poor or lower class, cf everything about how he relates to mu qing, and although he loved jian lan he didn't understand her position.

***

"With the Brocade Immortal on her, Ling Wen is currently considered both a civil god and a martial god."

who else is doing it like Ling Wen!

***

ling wen and the brocade immortal tricking xie lian into wearing it! hua cheng and xie lian both telling each other off for choosing problem-solving methods that mean getting beat up! so much fun stuff in this scene

***

why does xie lian keep wearing the brocade immortal even after ling wen takes her turn as a budaoweng doll? is there something that prevents him taking it off?

***

if the guoshi has been sneaking into mt tonglu every time it opens in order to prevent any new ghost kings from being born, how did hua cheng and he xuan manage? or did guoshi only start these efforts after all three current ghost kings had emerged?

***

it occurs to me that I do know another series of fantasy books involving dreams of a kingdom destroyed by volcano, and gods who wish to prevent anyone from being harmed. but Jun Wu and the story of Wuyong is VERY different from the queen's thief books! (and there are many good things about the queen's thief books but I much prefer the firmly anti-monarchy stance of tgcf)

***

ohhhh damn, after the parade when xie lian caught the child, and got jun wu's attention, jun wu wanted to appoint xie lian as a junior official in his palace, instead of leaving him alone to ascend in his own right. it's only through guoshi's efforts that he didn't.

has anyone written that canon divergence fic? where a younger xie lian finds himself in heaven as a junior official directly beneath the heavenly emperor?? that would have been a pretty different experience for him I think!

***

I'm not understanding what it is about the phrase "body in the abyss, heart in paradise" that specifically made jun wu so provoked! I mean, guoshi is still talking at length so maybe he'll explain further but rn it is not clear to me at all what the significance of the phrase is, over just the things that xie lian was doing

I had the vague feeling that there was something about the phrase in particular, rather than only the meaning behind it, that got jun wu so upset. but maybe I am overthinking it and it really is just about the meaning and nothing else!

***

guoshi, discussing a young child: yeah that kid was totally evil, better off dead, made the world worse for everybody.

IMPRESSIVELY nasty of you, guoshi!

anyway it IS very funny that apparently hua cheng's hour of birth destined him to be either the most fortunate or the most unfortunate. I think he kind of managed to get to be both at once.

***

... did xl grow up without one single decent adult role model? his parents were both terrible in their own way, guoshi is worse, and the other three subordinate guoshi were all just puppets controlled by guoshi mei nianqing. and then of course there's bai wuxiang. and that's IT in terms of adults in his childhood and teenage life we hear about, iirc!

***

it's interesting to me that guoshi frames the things bai wuxiang did to xie lian as a series of tests; I agree about what bai wuxiang would have done differently if xie lian had responded differently, but to my mind it's more.... bai wuxiang just wanting to do enough bad things to xie lian to make xie lian give up his previous approach to life, to prove that bai wuxiang himself giving up was the only possible choice and he doesn't need to feel bad about it. it's not a bunch of tests, it's an ongoing campaign of torture with a particular goal in mind. and a goal that I really do think bai wuxiang thought he would achieve eventually, that there was no way xie lian wouldn't have SOME kind of limit to how much he could take and continue on as he was!

trick's on bai wuxiang though, it's true that xie lian couldn't continue on as he was before (naive arrogant prince who wanted to help everyone below him), but xie lian got to choose who he became in response to bai wuxiang's abuse and he didn't choose to align with bai wuxiang!

***

lmao guoshi says that when xie lian ascended the third time he was the same as he always was, completely unchanged. guoshi is not particularly perceptive!

***

hmmm hua cheng also uses the framework of tests that guoshi does. I respect hua cheng's ability to analyse jun wu more than guoshi so maybe I need to take the thought seriously after all?

***

guoshi's attempts at romantic advice to xie lian are so inadequate yet so assured, lol. I love hua cheng butting in to knock him off balance!

***

it's a trial to be invested in pei ming as a character when his storyline is so tied up in those of xuan ji and banyue

***

"Xianle, you dared to have an affair with the ghost king right under my nose. What audacity." Wow jun wu way to make it sound like xie lian is cheating on you with hua cheng!

***

this exchange:

"Qianqiu! Xie Lian yelled. "Go free the other heavenly officials first!" "Yes, Master!" Lang Qianqiu answered on reflex. They both paused. Lang Qianqiu gave Xie Lian a look before dashing out.

like, holy shit, what complexity of emotions for both of them is just quickly skimmed over in "they both paused"! but despite the difficulties in their relationship, lang qianqiu sees that xie lian is right in what he asks lang qianqiu to do, and goes to do it

***

lang qianqiu taking his dead shixiong's corpse with him when the heavenly officials all have to flee the burning heavens 😭

the heavenly officials all having to flee on a giant statue of xie lian, piloted by crimson rain sought flower 🥰

***

I don't know anything about transformers but jun wu turning the on-fire heavenly city into a fiery, massive giant by moving pieces of the city around to realign differently sure feels like transformers to me

***

GIANT MECHA BATTLE TIME. that's what this is!!

***

quan yizhen just yeeting yin yu's body at guoshi in order to go personally fight an entire city-sized mecha is just peak quan yizhen I love him

(also: guoshi calling him "fluffy child" while being confused about being given custody of a corpse lol)

***

I'm so sad about black water's bone dragons being destroyed though!!

***

oh nvm the bone fish are putting the bone dragons back together, this rules actually

***

I want to know more of the history of the bone dragons! are they fossilized bones of long-dead extinct creatures? are they more recently-deceased dragons? are dragons still around in the present-day of tgcf - we don't see or hear about any living ones, iirc! how did black water gain their alliance?

I want them to be a part of the world that he connected with! he thinks of himself as a brooding loner but he loves his pet fish (of all sizes) and they love him back imo. that's a real emotional connection he has made, whatever he might think

I have many feelings about this!!!!! I'm going to make ME cry

***

damn. now I want the fic about he xuan's relationship with the water and land and plants and fish of his lair. I don't know what this fic would look like but I want it

***

hmmm am I sqq-posting here. WELP. look, I am but a humble paleontology nerd, it's not my fault that water-themed bone monsters are super cool!

***

I love rereading this book with an actual handle on who all the characters are because it means when a character is offhand referred to in a scene I can contextualize what they're doing and feel things about them in the course of a single sentence!

(the reference that inspired this thought: awwww of course it's lang qianqiu who is the one to take action to help with the human array when all the other heavenly officials are hesitating! ilu lang qianqiu!)

***

pei ming is back, with the best possible entrance! he knows how to put on a show and present himself! exploding a leg of the giant mecha, emerging through the fireworks, and upon landing his "hair remained perfect and his charm unruffled."

***

also: pei ming manages to bring himself to apologize to rong guang and team up, but maintaining an antagonistic relationship while working together beautifully as sword and master, I love this, I can't wait to see if this gets any further screentime so I can judge exactly how shippable it is

***

lord rain master!!! god I love her. showing up just in time to save an embarrassed pei ming's life, while rong guang rages

***

the first time I read the extended giant mecha fight scene a year ago, I was bored and confused, but this time I am having so much fun with it

***

how do ghost clones work? do you split your consciousness between multiple bodies and can see through all the different eyes at once and have to hold it all together in your mind? or does each body become entirely independent after creation, and you can only know what they know via communication, and then you can integrate the memories etc upon reabsorbing the clone? both of these options seem to have some significant flaws! or is there somewhere some kind of middle ground, or alternate direction for this to go?

we don't see much of how hua cheng and his clones work, and even less of he xuan's clone network! and of course, like with so much, I want to understand more fully!

***

"This was probably the first time Pei Ming had been so thoroughly humiliated in front of a woman, and it was also the first time a woman had saved him. He couldn't tell if he was angry or if it was simply his pride throwing a fit, but his face went dark red for some reason or other."

ok pei ming absolutely needs to spend some more time experiencing humiliation at the hands of a woman. you know, consensually. maybe tied up.

***

oh.... I'd forgotten that qi rong dies! I'm actually a little sad about that. he's kind of the worst but guzi loves him and qi rong does do his best for guzi, as haphazard as his best is. it's qi rong's first attempt at being decent to someone, he doesn't have a lot of practice!

the supremes are just so narratively interesting as a group. built up as, like, a THING, but there's only ever been three of them and they're all so closely connected to godhood (in a way that absolutely says interesting things about the ongoing theme of "gods: not that great actually") - and also, there's only three of them, so there aren't many inferences you CAN draw about "what supremes are like generally" because the data set is so small

though the connection via the bwxussy (....whoever I can blame for that word, um, thank you I think) is also vital to their identity. which is also connected to godhood because the kiln is created by the emperor of the heavens

***

what WOULD qi rong be like if he were a genuine supreme?

for sure he would be terrifying! I guess I'm wondering, like, what the kiln would refine him into? what would he choose to direct all that additional power into? he has less of a specific goal in mind than the three currently extant supremes, and I kind of get the feeling that you need to be laser-focused on something to be able to survive the kiln experience. how would that change and focus him?

[in response to a comment] I do rather doubt he would actually have managed to learn the history of wuyong tbh. he's never exactly been a scholarly sort or interested in the doings of people he thinks beneath him. I don't think he'd have taught himself to read the wuyong script, or investigated the temples to consider what the art might say about the history!

but I feel like, depending on what he ends up focusing on, he might indeed end up ditching the cannibalism - or at least not focus on it as much. since it's about trying to prove himself to be as scary as the other supremes, and post-kiln he would be able to be more legitimately terrifying in his own right. but he might hang onto it anyway just because he's a nasty little creep lol. and he already has that reputation to build on in getting his name as big as possible

I can't decide which of his resentments he'd focus on though!

***

I think it might also be relevant that the other three supremes didn't have much of a known presence and reputation prior to becoming supremes, whereas qi rong does, so I think that might affect how he goes post-supreming!

***

oh also I am thinking about supremes vs gods in the context of superheroes/supervillains, where a lot of supervillains kind of exist to be enemies of superheroes, rather than actually being interested in attacking the general populace for its own sake

***

and now I'm done volume 7!! only one more to go!

***

xie lian is so sad for all the swords that hua cheng destroys - they're trapped in a room in mt tonglu that's full of hundreds of swords that are all attacking them, but xie lian still mourns them after the swords are defeated. THEY'RE GOOD SWORDS, BRENT.

I love how much and how earnestly xie lian is a swords-and-swordfighting nerd

***

😭 😭 😭 xie lian jokes about being stabbed hundreds of times and hua cheng just immediately bear-hugs him and tells him quietly that it's not funny, actually. I AM MADE OF EMOTIONS.

***

as mu qing hangs over a waterfall of lava desperate for help, he says "you know I'm not lying, right?" and it reminds both him and xie lian of a time when xie lian said those words to mu qing. I couldn't remember the context, but I searched the ebook and found it!

it's from the time with the piece of spiritual land where xie lian wanted to cultivate but the other gods kick him off, with mu qing as part of that group. xie lian says he didn't really want to steal from anyone and wasn't going to take over the spiritual land either, and ends with "You know I'm not lying, right?"

but before mu qing could respond, xie lian was shoved into the ground by one of the other heavenly officials, and mu qing continued to say nothing.

so yes that is a VERY awkward context for mu qing to remind xie lian of, now that mu qing wants help from him!!

(also: xie lian realizes that actually he never forgot anything of the awful past he experienced, he's just been Not Thinking About It 😭)

***

hua cheng tries to convince xie lian to not save mu qing because it'l put xie lian in danger, but he knows that of course xie lian is going to. because that's the kind of person he is, and hua cheng will never try to get in the way of xie lian being his best self!

***

me half an hour ago: oh I can definitely finish the main story before 9pm tonight, I only have like 140 pages to go

me now, having read about 20 pages: RIGHT I forgot how much slower it is to read things when I keep stopping to write down Thoughts about it!!

***

mu qing! being honest and emotionally vulnerable about how he thinks about xie lian! and apologizing to him about the whole spiritual land situation!! it's hard for him but he DOES IT and good for him tbh. (even if it's because he thinks he's gonna die.)

also: mu qing is absolutely right about the young prince relying too much on his status and enjoying doing good deeds because of all the praise and flattery

***

"Your Highness, don't be afraid," [Hua Cheng] said with grave assurance. "Remember? The one basking in infinite glory is you; the one fallen from grace is also you. What matters is you, not the state of you. No matter what happened in the past, I will never leave you. You can tell me anything." To conclude, he added gently, "You told me that yourself."

HUALIAN JUST MEAN SO MUCH TO ME

***

the fight with bai wuxiang | jun wu is great and all, on the level of the personal relationships between the various characters involved, but I was reminded tonight of @skygiants 2019 tgcf review talking about how turning the climax into a personal battle disarms the themes the book is otherwise engaging with of the problems being systemic, and how the collection of human beggars including shi qingxuan being the ones to engage in the ritual needed to save the city SHOULD have been the climax, thematically.....yes.

the thing is I guess that there is the story of the systemic themes and there's the story of xie lian's personal trauma, and the narrative focuses on the latter even though REALLY the reason jun wu could even do all the traumatizing stuff he did to xie lian is because of the systemic issues in heaven.

so I just keep thinking about this instead of enjoying the creepy jun wu content! because becca's right and I DO want it to be a story about revolution in heaven actually!

***

hmmmm I am also not exactly a fan of xie lian's final defeat of jun wu involving him stabbing jun wu through the heart with the sword fangxin. I liked him using the move of shattering boulders on his chest to start with! using the skills he'd learned in his time of banishment, which jun wu couldn't know, in order to defeat him! but then following that up with a move that is a direct parallel to the worst of the miseries that jun wu inflicted on xie lian.....that just doesn't feel right to me

***

lmaoooo pei ming always looks off these days when he's around yushi huang because he feels so emasculated about having been saved by her. and she always just smiles politely at him in greeting. which I'm sure just digs it in even deeper!

the narrative says that the reason she responds this way is that she "had no idea what all the fuss was about" and I am choosing to believe that what this means is that she knows why pei ming is responding this way and just thinks it's silly to make a fuss about it. so she's not going to behave as if it's worth a fuss. and she's totally aware of what her behaviour continues to do to pei ming and is kind of enjoying it.

***

awwww I am SO charmed by the residents of puqi village rebuilding xie lian's shrine for him, and welcoming him back! I love that he really has become part of the community there!

(also I love that the villagers have terrible taste and the newly rebuilt shrine is extremely tacky, and xie lian likes it anyway)

***

and all the mortal human beggars who had helped with the array back during the fighting come by the shrine too to enjoy a good meal! they've seen that gods aren't so impressive after all and are cheerfully friendly and cheerfully willing to eat as much as they possibly can. I love them.

***

the book ends with the recounting of a folk legend about a god and a ghost, and of course I am an enormous sucker for it, folk stories were my first obsession and I've never gotten over my love for them. I love getting to see a wee glimpse into the post-canon lives of xie lian and hua cheng through the eyes of ordinary people's experiences of them and interpretations of those experiences!

***

*happy sigh*

tgcf may not be a perfect book in every way but gosh I just love it SO MUCH. It's hard to believe I'm actually done this reread!!!!!!!!!! what will I even do now?

(before you say to read the extras, dummy, I must admit that yesterday I read ahead and read through all the extras on speed-mode without stopping to write down any thoughts because they were all brand new to me and I was so interested to see where they each were going!)

(the actual answer: catch up on the TGCFReadAlong lol)

(also, collate all my many toots about this reread and post them to my dreamwidth in one post so that I can more easily refer to them together.)

***

okay also probably I will reread the extras WITH pauses to note down thoughts in the very near future too. because obviously one read is insufficient. But not tonight!

***

THE END.

#tgcf #heaven official's blessing #liveblog #mxtx #mo xiang tong xiu #book thoughts #sophpost

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