#i have no idea what your knowledge level is for xianxia so i explained a fair chunk of stuff that perhaps you already know

[illuminatedferret]

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Are we sure gods in TGCF actually die if they're just forgotten? I mean, all of the worldbuilding I've seen thus far comes with the heavy addendum of being made after Jun Wu's genocide against the old Heavenly Court, who might have pruned the bush of withered gods who perhaps got sick of his shit. I'm just saying, Jun Wu might have had a dog in the fight about keeping his court (relatively) young and naive. Probably with some heavy aid from the world being a vast and deadly place, people do still seem to die if they are killed in heaven.

Perhaps I'm just bitter about immortality always being bemoaned as this horrific thing. Sure it is, if you want to look at it like that, but the entirety of human existence falls within a 300,000 year timeframe. I think I could make it from the age of the Khan to the age of cocaine and still be eager to watch two people fall in love for my entertainment.

The short answer: no, being forgotten does not kill gods in TGCF!

The long answer: Generally speaking, in xianxia, immortal cultivators become immortal by relying on their own talents and skill- they put in the hard work over decades, if not centuries, to develop their inner cultivation to a point where they can functionally live forever. In TGCF, though... not only is it possible to ascend to godhood, but the prayers you receive as a god give you spiritual energy. Can you see where I'm going with this?

Godhood is basically a boost to your cultivation. Once you've ascended, if you seek immortality, you no longer need to worry about your own inner cultivation- you can use the power of your prayer base to sustain you. You can even use it to sustain your subordinates! In TGCF, immortality and godhood are by and large conflated, but they are still two different things. Who knows if having the potential to ascend even means they have the skill to cultivate to immortality, anyway. It's not like it's exclusive to them- Mei Nianqing presumably never ascended, but he's still alive and kicking and pushing 2000+.

All things considered, I would not be surprised if many gods simply aren't capable of sustaining themselves without the help of their followers. So if they lose their follower base, if they're forgotten, or otherwise lose their godhood... then it's inevitable that they'd die. They may end up living for longer than the average human, but unless they've got some stellar cultivation (or a life-preserving cursed shackle), old age is going to get them eventually, if nothing else. They're only human, after all.

I do find the fact that all of the top gods in the Heavenly Court (sans Jun Wu himself) are at most 800 years old very interesting. I find that very interesting and incredibly suspect. I 100% don't think it's beneath Jun Wu to do some murders if he feels the need. But I also don't think he's responsible for the fall of every single god before Xie Lian's generation. He's capable of it, but I don't think he'd need to be that involved. Gods rise and fall all the time.

Re: your feelings on how immortality gets portrayed... People like to play around with what-ifs. If you like the sound of immortality, that's great! TGCF doesn't particularly suggest immortality is a horrible thing. Absolute immortality like what Xie Lian has is definitely scary when you think about it, but conditional immortality isn't so bad. It just depends on what your limits are, I think.

[spockandawe]

HEY THERE, you have me interested in The Untamed but I'm a little lost as to where to start, there's both a 50 episode normal version and a 20 episode special edition, which should I watch/start with? Also WHAT does your svsss tag stand for? I'm seeing "The Untamed" and "Chén Qíng Lìng" and "Mo Dao Zu Shi" and "Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation" thrown around as synonyms or related pieces of media, but nothing with svsss!

Sure thing!!

Okay, to start with, I’d definitely go with the 50-episode version. It’s a Lot, and there is some padding added to the story compared to the original book, but twenty episodes seems really, really short to do justice to the central plot 

(a quick skim of google tells me that the special edition leans harder into the original novel’s gayness, which the show has to be coy about, because china. i think there are expanded scenes featuring the two leads, which is awesome, because their acting is AMAZING, but that just means the plot scenes are even more compressed. I saw at least one person recommend that you not do the special edition unless you’ve consumed the story in at least one other more standard format already)

Also! Iirc, the show is available on youtube and netflix, among other platforms, though those two are wonderfully accessible. However, comma, I do hear from people fluent in chinese that the subtitles sometimes are inaccurate in unnecessary/unfortunate ways. From what I hear, viki has the best complete set of subtitles (I think there may be fansub projects in progress, but I am not at all in touch with those. I still haven’t watched the show myself).

And the general summary of my current webnovel fixation! There’s this webnovel author who goes by mxtx, who currently has three complete books out, which have all been translated into english. Then after I finished those, I started branching out into other authors and webnovels, though I’m not too deep into that end of the pool yet. I’ll break each book into a separate paragraph for clarity. 

Oh, and. Each of these books is explicitly gay, and set in ancient fantasy china, in a wuxia/xianxia setting, which I’m not too familiar with myself, but I believe it functions a lot like how authors will use ‘ancient fantasy europe’ as a playground where they don’t necessarily need to match up to established countries/cities/etc, but they expect readers to recognize certain conventions, like I’d be able to recognize a western author writing a basic feudal setting, or recognize witches and wizards, without them explaining the whole thing from the bottom up. Since I’m not familiar, it raised the difficulty level a little for me to get into the genre, but the webnovel translators tend to use footnotes and I picked up a lot as I went on.

(if you are interested in any of these, novelupdates.com is a good central resource collecting links to various fan translation projects)

So! Mxtx. Her earliest book is The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System (SVSSS), which is also the shortest and most linear of her books. The general premise is that a guy who’s been hate-reading this (straight) stallion harem webnovel with a dark protagonist. He goes to bed, and wakes up in the novel, as the protagonist’s dickbag teacher, who is doomed to eventually die horribly. He wants to not die, and is also a decent human being, so the book follows the “original” novel derailing from its intended path, and accidentally getting super duper gay. This one is about to come out in donghua form, but I think that may be its first non-book adaption.

Her second book, which was adapted into The Untamed/Chen Qing Ling (CQL), is also known as The Grandmaster Of Demonic Cultivation/Mo Dao Zu Shi (MDZS), which really manages to be the hardest of her books to summarize. Wei Wuxian, the grandmaster of demonic cultivation, dies. Thirteen years later, he wakes up in someone else’s body. Most of the world would like him to stay dead, tbh, but he’s a good egg, and he and his old friend(????) go forth and solve a necromantic mystery together, and also there is romance-romance and ten million family feelings. This one gets nonlinear, with several extended flashback sequences, and the story STARTS at about the midway point of the plot. This has been adapted into an audio drama at least once, a manhua, a donghua, and now a live action show, so it goes by a million different names in its various formats.

Her third book, and the LONGEST, is Heaven Official’s Blessing/Tian Guan Ci Fu (TGCF), and oh my god, it’s so long, and I love it so, so much. This gets into high fantasy much  more than the other two, including the idea that as people develop their cultivation and powers, they may eventually achieve immortality and ascend to the heavens. The story follows Xie Lian who achieved immortality and ascended to heaven! And then fell. And then ascended! And fell again. Eight hundred years later, he ascends for the third time. He meets Hua Cheng, the ridiculously powerful ghost king, who most of the other immortals are terrified of. But Hua Cheng seems to like Xie Lian! And Xie Lian thinks Hua Cheng is a sweet boy! (hua cheng is a sweet boy, but only for xie lian). This also has extended flashback sequences, but is a more linear story than MDZS, I think. Also it made me cry, which, wow, rude. I love it so incredibly much. This also exists as a manhua, but I think it’s still being published? I haven’t read it yet.

NOW. Mxtx is working on a fourth book, but it’s not out in chinese yet, never mind english. But I needed More. I was getting some SVSSS vibes from this one other book, which, *wobbly hand motions*, but I am enjoying the hell out of this book purely for its own sake.

Meatbun is an author with other books that I haven’t read yet, but I am currently in the middle of The Husky And His White Cat Shizun/Er Ha He Ta De Bai Mo Shi Zun (Erha/2ha), which is at this moment being adapted to a live action tv show called Immortality. There are MANY warnings that go with this book, though the google docs translation files do a good job of placing warnings at the front of every document and in front of relevant chapters. The general premise! Mo Ran basically conquered the entire world, put down all resistance by force, and was a super powerful but Kinda Dumb emperor. As part of this, he took his old teacher, who he despised with a burning passion, prisoner, and abused him a Lot. The story starts as rebels try to mount an assault on his palace, and Mo Ran’s cousin gets impatient with how slowly things are moving and runs ahead of the group. He finds that (suicide warning:) Mo Ran has... taken poison, and is in the middle of dying. This doesn’t stick. He wakes up as a teenager, apparently having traveled back in time, and starts living through events again, with the knowledge of his past life. It took me a while to warm up to this story, but ohhhh my goodness, it’s so TASTY. The translation for this one is ongoing, and I am in AGONY waiting for further updates.

So those are the ones I’m currently into and mostly blogging about! I also read Dreamer In The Spring Boudoir, mostly because feynite wrote an SVSSS fic set in the universe of that novel, which was good in some ways, left me cold in others (and the original novel is straight, with a society with rigid gender roles, so making it super gay in the fic made the setting much more interesting to me). Meatbun has other writing, which I haven’t sampled yet, but I am definitely interested in doing that sometime soon. 

Sorry, I know this is a LOT, so if you have any other questions feel free to ask me!! I got into these mostly via being interested in the untamed, so I read them as 1) mdzs, 2) svsss, 3) tgcf, 4) erha, which was an order that worked well for me. But if someone was looking for a general order to read them in, independent of that, I might suggest 1) svsss, 2) mdzs, 3) tgcf, 4) erha. They’re all really good, and scratch different emotional itches, and each of them has at least a few characters who sucker-punch me RIGHT in the goddamn heart. They’ve been a HUGE help for me dealing with the restlessness and/or apathy of quarantine, so I’ve been evangelizing them to pretty much anyone who will listen to me, hahaha