#sorry he xuan I know Shi Wudu deserved it but did you have to make Shi Qingxuan cry?? that was a line too far my dude he’s to precious

[happypeachsludgeflower]

I’ll never understand why He Xuan had to go through with his elaborate revenge plot against Shi Wudu the way he did. He already had the perfect revenge set up. Murdering Shi Wudu might have brought He Xuan momentary satisfaction, but seducing the man’s precious little brother and rubbing the relationship in the water tyrants face every single day is eternal.

[kanonavi]

hello tumblr user kanonavi who is 1/3rd of the reason i started rereading tgcf. i have come to collect my personal apology for the emotional damages inflicted upon me for the past 5 days. and i have also come with THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS (mostly feelings)

- icb i put off this reread so long hualian are so romance. theyre jsut Romance......... absolutely floored by every throwaway bit of dialogue they had....... in shambles forever....,

- sqx arc was not as painful as the first few times i read it bc i now stand with my cancelled wife (he xuan) I STILL LOVE SQX AND THEY DESERVE EVERYTHING GOOD. BUT HX WAS REAL FOR ALL OF THAT. i love revenge

- i wanna know your thoughts on ling wen bc u mentioned having mixed feelings on her but i loved her so bad all the way to the end so im curious ljdkdjf

- i am not immune to backstory arc pt2. read it last last (?) night at like 3am and cried myself to sleep its just so gutting every timeeeeeee.... the hc plot that builds in that arc is ofc one of my favorites in the entire novel though :')

- the chapter w the cave of statues took me like 2+ hours to get through because i was feeling so insane abt it

i feel bad dropping this block of text in ur askbox sorry. will leave it there for now LOL

Omg hiiiii tumblr user stardust-make-a-wish welcome back from the yaoi cocaine pit :3 I know you're here to collect emotional damages, but I must make it known that I'm not even remotely sorry <3

Also you should feel bad for yourself instead of for me because I can only respond to huge blocks of text with even bigger blocks of text, so (TGCF Spoilers Ahead) and also I am so sorry lmaooooo

UGH you're so right that hualian is the most romance forever they are just so *clenches fists and sobs*....... They're always there for each other and they're so in love and they've been through so much and I just want them to be able to rest because it's what they deserve.

I will never once say that Hu Xuan wasn't justified in everything he did cuz like. Shi Wudu had it coming what a piece of shit. But at the same time Qingxuan is my wife and I will not tolerate my wife being harmed. So like revenge slay yes but also I am still cancelling He Xuan and spraying him with the water bottle (even though he is already very very damp).

Yesyesyes Ling Wen. So my thought about Ling Wen is that she kinda girlbossed a little too close to the sun, but at the same time you look at her circumstances both past and present and have to understand why she did all of that. It already would have been hard enough for her to gain any kind of recognition as a woman, much less in the Heavenly Court, so her ruthlessness is completely understandable. But at the same time, I don't really think the Brocade Immortal deserved what she did to him nor was taking Bai Wuxiang's side in the final conflict a real cool thing of her to do. I can't fully be a hater though because her own thoughts about everything are clearly so nuanced (See: The final convo she had with Xie Lian about the Brocade Immortal, which I am still thinking so incredibly hard about to this day).

I think that Ling Wen is interesting in the same way that I find other characters like Mu Qing, He Xuan, and Yin Yu interesting. It's in the sense that even if I don't really agree with all of the actions that they took, it's very easy to look at them and come to an understanding of why they did what they did. And I have varying degrees of like for all of the characters I just listed, but that doesn't change the fact that they're all Compelling. So it's almost like a begrudging respect that I feel for Ling Wen, if I were to boil it down into simple terms.

aaaaaaaaaa The Horrors(tm) :sob: Even though I could talk about Xie Lian's arc through that part of his backstory for a million years, you're so right that Hua Cheng's arc through it is also so interesting to watch. It really goes to prove that Hua Cheng is different from everyone else in Xie Lian's life up until this point, because yes there's the very obvious throughline of Hua Cheng wanting to protect Xie Lian (rather than expecting his protection), but even more importantly that feeling never changes even when Xie Lian has his mini corruption arc.

Like, Hua Cheng fell in love with the pure and virtuous Crown Prince of Xianle but not for that quality. Instead of being ashamed and looking at Xie Lian with scorn when he was like "What if I kill everyone actually" Hua Cheng is like "Then let me be your sword". There's the element of not wanting Xie Lian to dirty himself that Hua Cheng carries for the entire story but the point is in that he is not a voice who would tell Xie Lian to stop having those thoughts if it's truly what he wants (Unlike what his parents or Feng Xin and Mu Qing would probably say).

I'm going to write an essay about their character dynamic one day istg I am chewing through the drywall

The cave statues chapter......... *passes away*. Like on one hand that chapter is so funny because yes Hua Cheng is just an absolute certified freak (POV my roommate telling me earlier on in my reading that HC is a porn addict and me being like "pssht noooo" but then getting to this chapter several months later and being like "O h.") but on the other hand THE CONFESSION??????? Like. All I can do is gesture wildly at the storyboard animatic that someone made of that scene on YouTube while absolutely fucking sobbing. There is a reason why the cover of volume 6 felt somehow more intimate than the cover of volume 4 where they're literally making out.

Anyway I'm patting Hua Cheng on the head like It's okay buddy Xie Lian loves you because you're a certified freak, he's seen too much of this world to be weirded out even a little bit. Which is why those two are perfect for each other <3

I'm glad you had so much fun on your reread, have fun with the brainworms :3

[docmanda]

im very sorry to bother you but i had the idea for it rn and i can't get over it so: what are your thoughts on the potential for he xuan and ling wen being/having been friends? ming yi era. post canon. idk. just. the three realm's most powerful lit nerds figuring out that they both think a certain poet is Trash and flexing the full strength of their acerbic, razor wit and desert dry senses of humor. i know they are probably Enemies but like, im so amused by the idea i had to ask

oh PLEASE ask me things, I LOVE discussing head canons and talking to people (tumblr usually is like a void that you scream into and nothing comes back so...)

and I can see the appeal in a He Xuan/Ling Wen interactions yeah, there would totally have been instances of Ming Yi and Ling Wen having whole, derisive conversations consisting solely of raised eyebrows and smarmy mouth twitches, JUDGING :-)

But I honestly can´t see them being something I´d call friends, at least not in a way that i would define the word. 

Ling Wen simply doens´t DO friends, they´re a liability and she is way to practical and ruthless for that (She kinda has to be to keep her position as a female literature god, misogynie is a bitch after all)...I mean she barely twitched an eyebrow when Shi Wudu got himself beheaded, didn´t give much of a crap about Pei Ming all through the books and the Three Tumors were meant to be friends. And she is ruthless to the point of injustice (she knew smth was fishy about Shi Wudu and his little brother, she knew about little Pei´s machinations and I am pretty sure she had an inkling that Jun Wu might be smth else too, she is CLEVER after all) as long as it helps her along, for her the end justifies the means, no matter who might be left in the dust on the way. (don´t get me wrong, I LIKE Ling Wen, it´s so nice to see a female character being more then a damsel in distress, we have Xie Lian for that... but she is not a NICE person behind her usual customer service fassade :-))

Meanwhile He Xuan can be ruthless yes, and goal-oriented, he would not have been able to get his revenge if he was not. But, and here comes the main reason i think why they´d never be actual friends: He Xuan cannot stand injustice. Everything that happened to him -the switch of fate, his denied ascension, the deaths of his loved ones and his death- was injustice, he didn´t deserve that and neither did his family. (and I can´t remember if that´s canon or just in my head: when XL, HC, HX/MY and windmaster visit that one village during the reverend-arc where they´re having that weird halloween like parade and we get told the story of a man killing people who did him wrong, thus cleaning the village of bad™ people and having that parade held in his honor that got stuck as HX´s background for me, him taking out all the people who had wronged him and his family before dying and coming back as a ghost). And even though the whole Black Water arc surely was a very traumatic experience for SQX they DID survive. He Xuan could have killed them easily or given them a way worse fate then what actually happened,. without any repercussions...and yet he didn´t. Because even though SQX profited from Shi Wudu´s machinations they had no active part in them (and would have been horrified if theyhad knows what his brother was planning i´m sure)

He would hate people like Ling Wen (at least the one version of him in living in my head would) who don´t give a flying shit about other people as long as they can reach their goal. it hits way to close to what Shi Wudu did to him. he´d tolerate her as long as he was still disguising himself as Ming Yi, she is a valuable source of information after all and close to the water tyrant...but if I were Ling Wen I´d make a BIG detour around He Xuan afterwards whe he has no reason to keep her around anymore (and I very very definitely would not even look at Xie Lian or HC, he might find that worrisome...and you don´t want a Devastation Class Ghost King who has already gone through to losing his loved ones once worry about the same thing happening again)

(and now I really need to go back to work...)