Luka aka LuxiaoBuenos dias!! Algo de danmei para empezar el dia xD
#tgcfthoughts #mdzs #svsss #danmei #heavensofficialsblessing
Soph (they/them)another important takeaway from rereading my #TGCFThoughts liveblog: how many fics I need that don't seem to be extant in the fandom as it is.
ONE
the fic where for personal reasons ling wen quietly manages to take out jun wu and take his place and impersonate him, and because she knows so much about everyone and everything, nobody notices. (except Pei Ming, but he takes the opportunity to dunk on her rather than reveal her)
TWO
the fic where after the xianle parade derailment where xie lian got jun wu's attention, jun wu did end up appointing xie lian as a junior official in the heavenly emperor's palace, and that's the context in which xie lian ends up in heaven instead of as a god in his own right
THREE
the fic about he xuan's relationship with the water and land and plants and fish of his lair in canon
FOUR
the fic about the junior officials in heaven unionising
but even when xie lian lives into his powerlessness in a far more encompassing way than jun wu ever did or ever had to, xie lian is able to just roll with it. and he does still have power! just....not the personal might of a martial god. he has the power of caring about people and influencing people and that DOES change the world in various ways! THE POWER OF TEAMWORK.
I'm rereading my whole #TGCFThoughts liveblogging of my reread of tgcf and there are so many, like, interesting thematic and character conclusions I drew in there that I don't even remember! because there's just SO MUCH in this book that you can lose track of even really important thoughts
and actually, this time going through it all I was able to piece together some bits about one theme's overarching relevance! and it’s about xie lian’s relative experience of power/powerlessness
in arc four you find out that one of bai wuxiang’s explicit goals with xie lian is to teach him that he’s powerless in the face of many things.... and in arc two, with the whole story of the yong’an drought and everything that followed, I’d had the thought that at the time of xl’s second banishment when he deliberately asks for his cursed shackles, in that moment he wants to not have the power to do anything, so that nobody (himself included) will EXPECT him to do things that are beyond his power --
ok I just crossposted all my #tgcfthoughts toots to dw and tumblr to have them saved in a way that's easier to backread, including important bits that came up in conversation rather than the main toots, and fixing a few typos and things as I went too. SO MUCH extra formatting to do. but it's done!
oh god. turns out I have over 22,000 words of toots from my #tgcfthoughts reread that I need to finish formatting to crosspost to my dreamwidth. how did I write SO MANY WORDS about it!
(easy answer. I know exactly how.)
okay also probably I will reread the extras WITH pauses to note down thoughts in the very near future too. because obviously one read is insufficient. But not tonight!
*happy sigh*
tgcf may not be a perfect book in every way but gosh I just love it SO MUCH. It's hard to believe I'm actually done this reread!!!!!!!!!! what will I even do now?
(before you say to read the extras, dummy, I must admit that yesterday I read ahead and read through all the extras on speed-mode without stopping to write down any thoughts because they were all brand new to me and I was so interested to see where they each were going!)
(the actual answer: catch up on the TGCFReadAlong lol)
(also, collate all my many toots about this reread and post them to my dreamwidth in one post so that I can more easily refer to them together.)
the book ends with the recounting of a folk legend about a god and a ghost, and of course I am an enormous sucker for it, folk stories were my first obsession and I've never gotten over my love for them. I love getting to see a wee glimpse into the post-canon lives of xl and hc through the eyes of ordinary people's experiences of them and interpretations of those experiences!
and all the mortal human beggars who had helped with the array back during the fighting come by the shrine too to enjoy a good meal! they've seen that gods aren't so impressive after all and are cheerfully friendly and cheerfully willing to eat as much as they possibly can. I love them.