#im just a little more emotionally attached to ban yue for some reason

[hualianisms]

Hi..... If you don't mind me asking (again), who are your top 5 favorite characters from TGCF novel? And why do you like them? Sorry if you've answered this question before.....Thanks so much....

hello im so sorry for answering this so late!! ive been busy with a lot of things and it took me a long time to figure out how to explain my thoughts on my fav characters. thanks for sending this ask, i love talking about tgcf characters and i don't mind at all!

my top 5 fav tgcf characters are:

xie lian & hua cheng (i refuse to choose)

feng xin

yin yu

ban yue

the explanation got extremely long so i put it below a readmore:

1) xie lian 

why do i love xie lian? god where do i even begin... from the start of book 1 i really liked him already bc he was so eccentric and funny in an endearing way, and compassionate and gentle. i love his kindness, his ideals, his dream to save the common people that was the reason for everything he did and that he never truly gave up on despite his disillusionment. i love his courage and his selflessness and how he is both incredibly gentle and incredibly fierce with a will of iron. i love his sharp wit and perceptiveness and his determination and his terrible cooking and nerdy love of swords and how easily and adorably flustered he gets by hua cheng and how fiercely protective he gets of hua cheng and i love his absolute refusal to give up on his ideals no matter what and would literally rather die than change who he is and above all, i love his heart.

it’s that heart that loved his people so deeply and believed so wholeheartedly in the inherent worth of the life of one commoner child that everyone else had believed was cursed and monstrous and worthless, that led him to save hong hong-er and attract jun wu’s attention and help that demon pass on to the next life and inadvertently attract jun wu’s wrath, that led him to attempt to help the people from yong’an in book 2 which indirectly ended with the collapse of xie lian’s own kingdom and xie lian’s own fall from grace. he was punished for that heart by the world, by jun wu, and he came so close to losing that inherent kindness that made him who he is, but still he clung stubbornly to it and fought with tooth and nail to retain his beliefs and his dream and his ideals. 

xie lian’s arc in books 2 and 4 were deeply moving and powerful and impactful for me and will stay with me for a long time - his disillusionment and pain and utter misery and becoming the worst version of himself but then returning to himself again because of one stranger’s kindness that he remembered and lived by for the rest of his long, immortal life. how he is so complex and incredibly human and has had the darkest of thoughts and is deeply flawed but still fights to rise above it and chooses to be better, chooses the kindness that in the end, even a hundred swords couldn’t bleed dry.  

1) hua cheng 

oh boy again where do i begin. firstly he is just so... mxtx really just set out to write the hottest and most devoted love interest ever and she absolutely succeeded. a supreme ghost king borne out of love, surrounded by imagery of crimson blood and flowers and ghostly butterflies... conceptually, crimson rain sought flower is just. so captivating. and hua cheng is also a character who goes through so much change and metamorphosis - we see so many sides of him, from hong hong-er to wu ming to xue yu tan hua to san lang. i love every side of him and i love all his traits, how he is calm and composed and clever and arrogant and confident and playful and spontaneous and teasing and fierce and determined and all-or-nothing and tender and devoted and loving.

hua cheng’s past is so heartbreaking to me, the fact that from the moment he was born he spent every single waking moment suffering, how much trauma and abuse he suffered yet blamed himself for it, hating himself for being “weak” and “ugly” in a way that is so deeply ingrained that we still see how strong his self loathing is 800 years later. i also deeply admire how all-or-nothing hua cheng is, how he set out to do everything he wanted to do - becoming supreme ghost king, becoming the strongest to protect his beloved, building a city on his own, teaching himself how to paint and carve, bending fate to his own will, defying the cursed fate he was condemned to at birth - and all with his own hands, through 800 years of painstaking effort. i have so much admiration for hua cheng and how much resolve and willpower he has, and the unimaginable strength of spirit it must have taken to go through even a fraction of the things he did and not simply collapse but instead triumph above them.

an integral part of hua cheng’s character is also his love for xie lian. i just think that the overwhelming, all-consuming, fierce depth and intensity of his love and devotion for xie lian is just so moving, powerful and romantic. the fact that he loves more intensely and fiercely and devotedly than any other character i've ever read about, despite the fact that he was starved of love all his life. the way his story is about religion and devotion and love and ache and desire and how all of those things intertwine...

3) feng xin

i adored him from the start bc he is so funny, i loved his dialogue and all the scenes he appeared in and i think all the little things about him are so endearing - how he cusses so much and is hotheaded and laughs at everything and hums off-key when he’s happy and has such strong emotional reactions which were actually pretty relatable (also i like himbos)... later on as they showed more of his past in book 2 and his relationship with xie lian, i was very moved by how loyal he was to xie lian, how besides hua cheng, feng xin was arguably the one who believed in and stayed by xie lian’s side the longest, even when their lives got so awful and hard. and at the same time feng xin was also trying to provide for jian lan too and treat her well… he is just someone who gives his all to his loved ones and does his best to do right by them, even at cost to himself, yet he does it in such a quiet way that could end up being overlooked or taken for granted. 

i also love that feng xin has strong principles of his own that he remains steadfast to. he was loyal to xie lian because xie lian was his best friend and prince, but also because he genuinely believed in the same things that xie lian stood for and admired and stood by him for that (which is also why he reacted so strongly to book 4 xie lian stealing and trying to punish a stranger for disrespect). feng xin is just so steadfast and dependable and honest and true on top of being extremely endearing and funny as all hell and i just adore him lots and think he’s pretty underrated.

4) yin yu 

i just love yin yu’s fanon character design and the moon imagery associated with him and i think that yin yu is a very funny character in a very endearing way (the running gag about his face being so plain xie lian thought it must be fake, and yin yu’s long-suffering exhaustion, and being something like hua cheng’s overworked burnt out secretary). but what hits me hardest about yin yu is that speech he gave right before he died in bk 5. "If I was already destined to be no one remarkable, then at the very least, I... wanted to be a kind and perfect person. But... I couldn't even do that." it was just something that felt very relatable and human to me - desiring to be someone and achieve great things yet being just Average no matter how much you try, and wanting to at least be kind and virtuous yet realising with shame and guilt that you've fallen short of even that. 

to me, yin yu's story was about the pain of mediocrity, of being un-special, un-chosen, of being Just Average, no matter how hard you work, how much you try. it's a very sympathizable situation to be in. despite several fans' love for him, yin yu was meant to represent the background character in a cast full of exceptional characters - easily forgettable and unnoticed, always outshone, always standing in someone's shadow. and that makes him one of the most relatable and painfully human, mortal characters in a cast full of flashy and outstanding immortals. most of us readers are likely yin yus instead of hua chengs or xie lians. 

another reason why yin yu is very human to me is his emotions of exhaustion, repression, envy, bitterness, resentment, guilt and self-loathing, and yet despite all his flaws and darker emotions, he still strives to live by his principles of kindness and avoid giving in to his jealousy of quan yizhen, which makes him admirable to me, and proves that he does ultimately have that kind heart that he wanted so badly to have and beat himself up for being unable to live up to.

5) ban yue 

i have a soft spot for ban yue because i think she’s a cute/endearing character and i really liked the bond she formed with xie lian who took her in, and was even so moved and impacted by him that she wanted to save the common people too, just like him, although she didn’t understand how to do it. i find her past sad, how she was bullied and shunned by others, yet it was very touching how “She remembered no one who beat her; but the ones who had saved her once, she remembered for a lifetime.” 

im so sorry this got so long!! thanks again for the ask, i enjoyed answering it <3