#Crack theory is that Wukong thought the world couldn't handle his tragic gay love story at the time so he censored his own life

[alastair-1205]

You know what I just thought of tho? Why does nobody in the LMK universe know what happened to Macaque?

Becasue IRL we know it's Very likely that Wukong killed him (Or at the very least severely maimed him) in the show becasue we know the events of the Actual Real Life Book "Journey to the West". But we also know that the same book exists in the LMK universe since both Tang and Macaque himself have made reference to it. So like. Why isn't what happened to Macaque common knowledge?

MK apparently hasn't read it and never found out through any other means (we see him ask Macaque outright about it). Hell, Macaque is so unknown to him, MK gets deceived by him in the first season. But he does still know the stories becasue of media about it in the show universe (Monkey King the Animated Series tm) and from Tang who presumably did read the book, and while I can imagine an in universe show omitting something like their main character killing their bestie, I can't think of any reason why Tang wouldn't have told MK if Tang had known.

All that to basically say, yea MK apparently is lowkey uneducated outside of pop culture - which is really funny to me - but even their resident scholar seems to have no idea so what gives? Who the hell wrote Macaque out of the history books? Was it Wukong? Was he so guilt ridden and angry that he made sure that was the one major event that didn't get preserved? Was it some of the other original JTTW gang, knowing Wukong would hate the general public knowing anything about it? Those are literally the only two theories I can think of - and the first is the one that I think is most likely.

And on top of that, imagine how Macaque felt when he realized this. That his death and even existence at all was the one thing that wasn't remembered. Idk it's just a really interesting bit of accidental world building that I don't think will ever get explained, but it'd be really cool if it did.