OMG DAMN HANDSOME NEW OFFICIAL HUA CHENG ART BY GEAROUS FOR HUA CHENG’S BIRTHDAY!!!

Ohhh. I see, you were talking about the initial accusation of why he got the shackle my bad. It gets so hard to unravel via conversation because things get tangled.

And are we off topic? I can’t tell cus when tgcf is the topic everything’s on the table for me 😂 no sah.

But really, I could go on a tailspin about tgcf and I have to stop myself. It’s just so incredibly fascinating! Things like..

The Entire Narrative is Propaganda: How Jun Wu used bureaucracy for control. He usurped the heavens centuries before anyone present ascended. He created the rules, the division of territories and the “divine laws” we thought were above him. Everything we knew was a lie.

Jun Wu, or Nah? A study on how many pies his fingers were actually in: what does he get blamed for that he didn’t do. What did he do that he doesn’t get blamed for? Part 1: Xie Lians parents were actually murdered, here’s why..

The astounding amount of foreshadowing and symbology in the God Pleasing Parade: 16 white horses and 16 named officials?! What does it mean?

“You are what they believe you are.” And how much that actually impacts their lives, relationships and abilities..(like some theories on why the Shi brothers relationship is pseudo-incestuous, cus I don’t think mxtx accidentally made them coded that way. No, I don’t think they’re actually incestuous. )

The Clown Show: but why are they really like that 800 years later? What could have happened?

Is Jun Wu the Missing Fire Master? The volcano and his seat of power.

And… some spicy takes on the Black Water arc that I usually keep to myself because they tend to ruffle feathers. 😅

All that to say, I totally relate to falling headfirst into this story and needing to untangle every thread. I really appreciate conversations like this, ones that don’t turn into arguments but actually let us question things and share interpretations. I made a Tumblr just to find alternative takes and dig into things with people who care as much as I do. So thank you— this has been such a pleasant and thought-provoking exchange. Doors always open.

Why do so many fans think Jun Wu has no control over who ascends? Like, yes.. people ascend without his permission because there really is a cosmic order in this universe but he literally only needs to fill the slot to prevent randos from ascending.

And YES he CAN artificially ascend people and he DOES. I’m fr about to write up a whole essay on ascension this weekend istg.

The man literally says:

“Even fates can be swapped. Why not spiritual power?” Jun Wu said. “There are many things that are hardly as difficult as you assume. It is only a matter of a few words and a few brush strokes from a few great heavenly officials.”

Right after he sucks out one homies spiritual power and injects it into another.

And let’s be real.. Do y’all really think Jun Wu actually ascended a second time using his own power?

The dude who has the suffering souls of his first attempt at human sacrifice plastered on his own face and.. screaming?

Hell nah. This dude became the grandmaster of demonic cultivation. He experimented on fetus spirits like some mad scientist interested in unethical stem cell research. He probs invented the damn fate swapping ritual himself.

He has an entire fucking Burial Mound volcano where he vents his resentful energy. You think all that energy is accumulating just cus he’s mad? Or from just the three faces?

No way fam. This man is actively cultivating the dark arts and probs needs so many followers just to help balance the yang to his yin.

I mean.. c’mon. You fr think Feng Xin and Mu Qing ascended back to back naturally? And just after they left Xie Lian? There’s a whole damn arc about how unusual it is for two people so close to ascend so fast and so young

Jun Wu gifts Feng Xin a bow called Fengshen which is a homophone for the name of an entire Chinese myth about appointing mortals to godhood for political reasons.

Blows my mind to see that so many collectively deny the possibility when the narration is screaming clues from every digital and physical page.

Hua Cheng is Actually a God.

Just because he rejected heaven, doesn’t mean he rejected godhood. What he rejected was Jun Wu’s reign. And since he never gave that psycho a chance to shackle him, he couldn’t be considered anything less than a god. He passed the heavenly tribulation.

His first few believers were the people he sacrificed his eyeball for. Then, his first order of business was to slap 33 gods out of their posts and nab their followers. 2 birds, one stone.. or.. 33 birds?

The reason Jun Wu left him alone was probs not only because of his power (this dude was a Supreme Ghost King and an actual fricken God) but because Hua Cheng knew heaven was a scam. Hua Cheng was walking proof that Jun Wu was a fraud. Proof that Jun Wu’s “laws” weren’t divine laws.

What god was he? God of Luck, probably. Seems legit that the cosmic order would see fit to add a God of Luck since a God of Misfortune suddenly manifested due to belief

Speculative: You have to worship the God of Luck and the God of Misfortune together since if you only pray to the god of luck he won’t listen, and if you only pray to the god of misfortune.. well.. results may vary.

Since the shackles were man-made and not part of heaven.. then Xie Lian didn’t ascend 3 times, he went through 3 heavenly tribulations.

And he did the last one in his sleep and had the nerve to describe it as “having weird dreams.”

Legendary.

Some beautiful soul out there did the thing 🥹

Pure Donghua Battle Beats «— YouTube link to Yiling Patriarch shredding it on the ghost flute. 15 mins of unadulterated spook that only gets more intense as it goes.

ALSO. I’d like to say I think it’s a crime that the donghua flutist didn’t get credit. I could not find any information about who the actual musician was. However Qiu Niu who did the audio drama flute sounds a lot like the donghua flute so imma just put that out there.

And it’s a further crime they didn’t put the flute in the ost

Wei Wuxian flute battle soundtrack when? I need that haunting, heart pounding donghua music 🥺 no dialogue, zombie moans dimmed, just straight up spectral rage and melody and battle beats.

I swear if I could blast that while cleaning, laundry would become a moral reckoning. Mopping? A battle for the soul of my household. Dishes? Consider them exorcised.

It’s definitely a real possibility that Xie Lian’s first ascension wasn’t fully natural, and I’m not sold on either/or. The situation is muddy for a reason. Jun Wu had both the motive and the power to manipulate the outcome from the beginning. Xie Lian had the willpower and the talent to have ascended himself.

You’re also right that Jun Wu took an interest in Xie Lian early. One of his favorite tactics was humiliation, and what better way to humiliate someone than to make their subordinates surpass them? Putting Mu Qing and Feng Xin in positions Xie Lian once held, while keeping him ‘rolling in the mud’, is exactly the kind of longterm power play he specialized in.

We already know Mu Qing was assisted by Jun Wu, and Feng Xin’s ascension is hella murky but the bow Fengshen is an lol level clue. (but they’re not the strongest, they’re weakest of the named martial gods excluding Yin Yu and maybe Pei Xiu.. which is weird since they’re the oldest.. except Pei Ming but he ascended around the same time as them)

Editing to add in: just because they were assisted in ascension doesn’t mean they couldn’t have ascended themselves at some point and it doesn’t they’re bad people, it means Jun Wu is.

Why do so many fans think Jun Wu has no control over who ascends? Like, yes.. people ascend without his permission because there really is a cosmic order in this universe but he literally only needs to fill the slot to prevent randos from ascending.

And YES he CAN artificially ascend people and he DOES. I’m fr about to write up a whole essay on ascension this weekend istg.

The man literally says:

“Even fates can be swapped. Why not spiritual power?” Jun Wu said. “There are many things that are hardly as difficult as you assume. It is only a matter of a few words and a few brush strokes from a few great heavenly officials.”

Right after he sucks out one homies spiritual power and injects it into another.

And let’s be real.. Do y’all really think Jun Wu actually ascended a second time using his own power?

The dude who has the suffering souls of his first attempt at human sacrifice plastered on his own face and.. screaming?

Hell nah. This dude became the grandmaster of demonic cultivation. He experimented on fetus spirits like some mad scientist interested in unethical stem cell research. He probs invented the damn fate swapping ritual himself.

He has an entire fucking Burial Mound volcano where he vents his resentful energy. You think all that energy is accumulating just cus he’s mad? Or from just the three faces?

No way fam. This man is actively cultivating the dark arts and probs needs so many followers just to help balance the yang to his yin.

I mean.. c’mon. You fr think Feng Xin and Mu Qing ascended back to back naturally? And just after they left Xie Lian? There’s a whole damn arc about how unusual it is for two people so close to ascend so fast and so young

Jun Wu gifts Feng Xin a bow called Fengshen which is a homophone for the name of an entire Chinese myth about appointing mortals to godhood for political reasons.

Blows my mind to see that so many collectively deny the possibility when the narration is screaming clues from every digital and physical page.

The fact that Quan Yizhen regularly descended just to beat up his own worshippers, and this only resulted in gaining a larger following… is probably the most realistic thing in this whole high fantasy series.

THANK YOU!

Alright, so I have good news and bad news: the bad news is that I’m gonna be pausing the comparison posts for a bit, possibly a week if not longer to work on a Hua Cheng bday thing. The good news is that the ghost bridegroom arc edits have a twist that I absolutely think y’all should actually read, so I’m thinking about putting it up for y’all!

Ive said it before, Xie Lian as Heavenly Emperor isnt an idea im really excited about, but if he were to become heavenly emperor, i think he would be exactly like the stereotype of the chill boss that's never around and lets everyone do whatever they want on the condition that the work gets done in the end

Feng Xin and Mu Qing are fighting over who gets to kill monster of the week? Thats fine, as long as you kill it. Roll dice or smth idc just help the villagers.

You can have 34 girlfriends at the same time, I guess, Pei Ming, but make sure you deal with whatever has been causing unrest in your territory meanwhile.

Everyone leave Ling Wen alone. Just leave her be.

Rain Master is allowed to bring in her farm animals to the great hall if she wants to i guess

Yes you can play music in the heavens but keep it low during night time

If you have any complaints, too bad. If nobody is dead or dying, I don't need to know. If you do disturb me, you may have to deal with my husband so just figure it out.

The TGCF Appendix is Bunk

If I’m going to look at an appendix, I want facts. Not conjecture, and definitely not someone injecting their own thoughts and feelings into someone else’s work and presenting it as fact.

Using Vol.8 seven seas since it’s complete, let’s take a brief look at some of the character descriptions I personally found the most galling:

Pei Xiu: “…His ascension to godhood occurred because he led the charge to slaughter the Kingdom of Banyue, and his exile from godhood occurred because of his morally dubious attempts to save his childhood friend Banyue from her fate of eternal punishment.” —Appendix: Characters. Vol.8

Morally dubious? Since when is slaughtering an immeasurable amount of innocents over the course of 150+ years considered “dubious” by moral standards? And that’s assuming that he was actually trying to “save his childhood friend”

Let’s look at the facts. Pei Xiu, although he cared for Ban Yue, sent her to infiltrate Banyue which directly caused her death.

After succeeding in his scheme, he ascended. But he had a mess of resentful ghosts that were unliving proof of his war crimes.

In order to maintain his squeaky clean image, he routinely fed living people to the ghosts in an attempt to disburse their resentment.. quietly.

Did this help Banyue? No. It actually did the opposite. She spent 200 years being hunted down and hung over the sinners pit in an endless cycle of pain and suffering. Not only that, but Pei Xiu used her snakes, which further dragged her name into the mud and (ironically) fueled the ghosts anger and hatred for her.

So how.. just how.. does the Official Appendix Character Description get away with saying “…because of his morally dubious attempts to save his childhood friend Banyue from her fate of eternal punishment.”??

[I didn’t use quotes from the story because it would make this post congested, but the details are in Vol.1 Ch.10 about 86%]

You know what? I was going to continue ranting, like how He Xuan has almost no factual content or backstory yet practically ships him with Shi Qingxuan like “maybe he likes her idk 🤷‍♀️” and his unknown relationship with Hua Cheng. Instead it could have said at least something about Scholar He..

It’s a reoccurring thing that sometimes comes off as absolute fanon and sometimes comes off like they’re trying spin a picture or soften a character to a more sympathetic light.

Just give me the facts.

That’s the only reason I’d ever look at an appendix, I’m not here to read your drivel!

\rant

Yes, thank you you beautiful beautiful person. I was fr torn between going offline or making myself not be lazy. I still chose the latter, but it was cus the task became less dauting haha so in the 7seas version it's the same except we seem to be interpreting it completely differently.

"This was the cruelest way gods declined because the process could not be reversed. A heavenly official in that situation was destined to watch their own decline until they disappeared entirely—unless they jumped down from the heavens, returned to being mortal, re-cultivated a new path, and then ascended once more as a brand-new god."

Vol. 5 Ch. 79 7s

This part in particular. "Could not be reversed," Returned to being mortal," and "Brand-new god." in particular.

This is not a supplementation, a continuation, or a top-up. It is starting fresh. from ground 0, with nothing. And if they don't, then they die.

So I'm gunna have to hard disagree with the idea that "gods are always gods" especially since that passage is pretty explicit with saying they are not gods anymore once they lose their followers.

If they ascended again it would be a 1st tribulation.

Since the shackles were man-made and not part of heaven.. then Xie Lian didn’t ascend 3 times, he went through 3 heavenly tribulations.

And he did the last one in his sleep and had the nerve to describe it as “having weird dreams.”

Legendary.