Tian Guan Ci Fu
Just want to wish everyone a happy holiday season. It's snowing where I live, and we are getting a white Christmas this year.
I had a bit of time these past few days, so I read Heaven Official's Blessing (Tian Guan Ci Fu).
It's an epic and a good one at that. It's also very long and very much plot-driven. The word count is way over a million words, which sounds about right for a novel inspired by the wuxia and ancient Chinese fantasy genre. Unlike the author's previous work Mo Dao Zu Shi, this one has no smut. The BL romance element is very much slow burn, and if you are only here for the romance, reading through this novel will require some patience. The story really takes its time in setting up everything.
It gets heavy and depressing in the arcs that took place in the past; by comparison, the present timeline is more relaxing to read, though I wouldn't call it light-hearted per se. The humour works well to balance out the heavier elements; some of the humour comes from the author taking modern concepts and tropes and giving them an ancient coat of paint. They don't feel out of place since the Chinese fantasy genre is basically anything goes.
The novel is an interesting mix of the modern and the ancient. The story takes place in ancient time, and it's very much inspired by the "do good and never do evil" spirit of traditional wuxia novels. At the same time, it's presented through a more modern and cynical lens. It challenges traditional values, and at the same time it also challenges modern-day cynicism towards the idea of kindness, self-sacrifice, love, etc.
Some parts of the story remind me of Fate/Zero and Fate/stay night: the notion of sacrificing a few to save many, what it means to be a hero (or a god in this case) and so on. Other parts remind me of Noragami.
There's a Chinese idiom: a single turn of thought can mean heaven or hell. There's a line between wanting to kill someone and acting on it. Do you cross that line or do you not? This is the turning point that would determine how you lead your life from now on.
By the time we met Xie Lian, the main character, he's made peace with his past mistakes, regrets, hate and powerlessness. He tried to do good only to make everything worse for everyone involved, including himself and the people close to him. He had saved people; he had also killed a lot of people, sometimes out of revenge. He's more kind-hearted than most people, but he's not flawless in any way.
He knows a lot more than he lets on within the narration itself. He keeps his cards very close to his chest, even from the readers. I wouldn't call him an unreliable narrator per se. It's more like he doesn't want to think about certain things, or there's no need to emphasise on something he already knows.
An epic story demands an epic romance, and this one has it. While the love story in Mo Dao Zu Shi spans for more than a decade, this one spans for centuries, and the novel did a good job in depicting how and why they fall in love.
One thing I like about the writing is that there are details and throwaway lines that at first seem random or unimportant, only to get a callback later on and you realise its significance. The feeling is even stronger now that I've read the novel and is currently watching the animated series.
On a side note, the animated series is quite good, and it brings the novel to animated life. There are some wonky moments and shoddily animated scenes, but as a whole it's quite good. The art direction is very pretty. The donghua sticks very close to the novel, and all the suggestive scenes and lines between the main couple are there. The one downside is that the animated series only has 2 seasons so far, and it's nowhere close to adapting the entire novel. But I think fans of the novel would be quite satisfied with this adaptation. I'm quite satisfied with it myself. Hua Cheng's domain is more or less how I imagined it to be.
Ultimately the outlook of the novel is relatively positive. There's a sense of cynicism, yes, but I wouldn't call it a deconstruction of martyrdom and chivalry per se. At its heart Heaven Official's Blessing is not a cynical story. Not everyone can be a saint. We get frustrated, we get angry, we hate and curse, we want certain people to suffer. At the same time, an act of kindness as simple as giving someone a hat to shield them from the rain can go a long way. Whether or not you give the hat to that person can spell a difference between saving someone's life or dooming them. You never know.
I had a bit of time these past few days, so I read Heaven Official's Blessing (Tian Guan Ci Fu).
It's an epic and a good one at that. It's also very long and very much plot-driven. The word count is way over a million words, which sounds about right for a novel inspired by the wuxia and ancient Chinese fantasy genre. Unlike the author's previous work Mo Dao Zu Shi, this one has no smut. The BL romance element is very much slow burn, and if you are only here for the romance, reading through this novel will require some patience. The story really takes its time in setting up everything.
It gets heavy and depressing in the arcs that took place in the past; by comparison, the present timeline is more relaxing to read, though I wouldn't call it light-hearted per se. The humour works well to balance out the heavier elements; some of the humour comes from the author taking modern concepts and tropes and giving them an ancient coat of paint. They don't feel out of place since the Chinese fantasy genre is basically anything goes.
The novel is an interesting mix of the modern and the ancient. The story takes place in ancient time, and it's very much inspired by the "do good and never do evil" spirit of traditional wuxia novels. At the same time, it's presented through a more modern and cynical lens. It challenges traditional values, and at the same time it also challenges modern-day cynicism towards the idea of kindness, self-sacrifice, love, etc.
Some parts of the story remind me of Fate/Zero and Fate/stay night: the notion of sacrificing a few to save many, what it means to be a hero (or a god in this case) and so on. Other parts remind me of Noragami.
There's a Chinese idiom: a single turn of thought can mean heaven or hell. There's a line between wanting to kill someone and acting on it. Do you cross that line or do you not? This is the turning point that would determine how you lead your life from now on.
By the time we met Xie Lian, the main character, he's made peace with his past mistakes, regrets, hate and powerlessness. He tried to do good only to make everything worse for everyone involved, including himself and the people close to him. He had saved people; he had also killed a lot of people, sometimes out of revenge. He's more kind-hearted than most people, but he's not flawless in any way.
He knows a lot more than he lets on within the narration itself. He keeps his cards very close to his chest, even from the readers. I wouldn't call him an unreliable narrator per se. It's more like he doesn't want to think about certain things, or there's no need to emphasise on something he already knows.
An epic story demands an epic romance, and this one has it. While the love story in Mo Dao Zu Shi spans for more than a decade, this one spans for centuries, and the novel did a good job in depicting how and why they fall in love.
One thing I like about the writing is that there are details and throwaway lines that at first seem random or unimportant, only to get a callback later on and you realise its significance. The feeling is even stronger now that I've read the novel and is currently watching the animated series.
On a side note, the animated series is quite good, and it brings the novel to animated life. There are some wonky moments and shoddily animated scenes, but as a whole it's quite good. The art direction is very pretty. The donghua sticks very close to the novel, and all the suggestive scenes and lines between the main couple are there. The one downside is that the animated series only has 2 seasons so far, and it's nowhere close to adapting the entire novel. But I think fans of the novel would be quite satisfied with this adaptation. I'm quite satisfied with it myself. Hua Cheng's domain is more or less how I imagined it to be.
Ultimately the outlook of the novel is relatively positive. There's a sense of cynicism, yes, but I wouldn't call it a deconstruction of martyrdom and chivalry per se. At its heart Heaven Official's Blessing is not a cynical story. Not everyone can be a saint. We get frustrated, we get angry, we hate and curse, we want certain people to suffer. At the same time, an act of kindness as simple as giving someone a hat to shield them from the rain can go a long way. Whether or not you give the hat to that person can spell a difference between saving someone's life or dooming them. You never know.