Right Up His Alley Indeed, He Didn’t Even Have A Chance To Come To Terms With Feng Xins Departure Yet.

Yessss

He gave GODS a phobia of butterflies.

He jingles when he walks, like a literal fairy. He’s unapologetically, flamboyantly, gloriously extra. He’s a walking opera.

And I love him.

Listen, I love that Hua Cheng is revered as such a terrifying dude when this man is an 800-year-old virgin who named himself Flower, uses butterflies of all things to fight with, carries around an umbrella his crush gave him that one time, has his crush’s name tattooed on his damn arm, and made rain an important part of his character all because it was so Pivotal to Xie Lian’s downfall and rebirth. He gave no fucks. He’s in love with his gege, and everyone should know it.

I want to post a rant about Mei Nianqing but I’m holding myself back and I don’t know why. 🤔

The correct answer is: Time is a construct. Pain is eternal.

There are many clues that suggest this is year 1, such as his first wake up scene where he’s surprised he has the shackle, the fact that he’d only had one incident of forgetting to eat which suggests he’s still freshly mortal, the displaced citizens. Then the more telling events like it being the first Zhongyuan to pass Xie Lian without him noticing. (Maybe he’d just been doing good with eating for a couple years and suddenly slipped, maybe the nightmare was so disorienting he forgot he has a shackle, maybe nobody was celebrating Zhongyuan during the wars aftermath.)

Conversely, there are things like the day his parents die is the day Yong’an completes construction of their palace in Yong’an (did they start building before Xianle fell? Or are they construction wizards? Or was it just remodeling?) and the fact that Lang Ying has a seriously progressed case of Human Face Disease. (Although there might be a time skip between the palace being built and the Xie Lian attacking)

And the fact that it says “a few years ago when Xianle fell” during the interaction with white no-face on the mountain (but define “fall” was it when the gates were sieged, was it the pagoda, the disease, or when the last soldier died on the battlefield?”

All this to say. Fuck it, I don’t care anymore.

Also, thank you @quetzalpapalotl for helping me sort through this

Why is it common knowledge that the flashbacks in Volume 6 (7s) take place starting 4+ years after the fall of Xianle? As in, they’ve been on the run for 4+ years. I can’t find anything to support this in the text, and there’s a lot of context clues that suggest it hasn’t even been a full year.

Please point me in the right direction to confirm this.

Is that timeline fanon or canon?

“How could we? People made statues of him kneeling solely for the purpose of stepping on him!” Feng Xin said. “You’re not the one whose face is being stepped on, so of course you can dismiss it.”

“It’s not the first time that something like this has happened since the war was lost,” Mu Qing said. “And it surely won’t be the last. If he can’t get used to it soon, he might as well just die.”

This. Coming from the guy who literally appears in people’s dreams if he doesn’t think his statues are pretty enough..

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

I can’t stop watching this 😂😭💀

Ppl out here doin’ mental gymnastics to make Jun Wu seem more palatable 👀 I’m sorry bro but he is actually not just a MisunderstoodSadboi™

He is a monster incarnate.

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.

Mu Qing and Feng Xins overall immaturity, petty passive-aggression, and lack of personal growth over an 800 year span always blew my mind. But I’m starting to really consider that they had someone whispering in their ears about one another.

“Don’t mind him, Mu Qing. You know he always looked down on you and it’s only got worse since you left his highnesses side first. Feng Xin will never let that go.”

And vise-versa. Or even more insidiously, casually playing one another’s insecurities off each other in seemingly unrelated ways.

We all know Jun Wu love psychological games. Immortalizing everyone around Xie Lian not only physically but keeping them all emotionally stunted. (CoughLQQcoughcough)

And this also further serves to isolate Xie Lian, since if the three of them were able to co-exist then they could present a problem and possibly figure things out faster.

Too bad none of them could tread their own paths.

This is all just

Pure Speculation