Tian Guan Cifu
Heaven Official's Blessing: Tian Guan Ci Fu

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Spoiler free review (besides mentioning arcs if that counts for you)
Preface: Before I start, I read this book in my first year of having chronic pain and it really helped me with the hardest months. So it’s going to be a fairly rose tinted review.

Story:
It’s a character focused story, which I do have a liking for. But even I could see in retrospect, worldbuilding was lacking. I funnily liked the lack of any character development (maybe if you count the flashback arcs). Because it reads like you’re being put at the end of their whole life journeys even though they’re immortals. Romance takes a BIG ... center place over a lot and I’m not that ashamed to admit that I liked it. I’ve seen too many sad, short lived and out of focuse gay romance. It’s a enormous book, luckily I like big books but that has a lot of drawbacks for this particular story. Because there where many chances to make place for more established worldbuilding, unresolved character journeys. Looking at YOU black water arc! We were this close to perfection but no, we just got a impactful scene and none of the characters got a single moment to even reflect or process? Still one of the best arcs which stands out because the side characters and their journeys are a great selling point for this novel.

But you may ask me if have so many gripes with the story; why give it such a high score? Mainly because I like spending time with idealized depictions of romance and men in love with each other. The setting in ancient fantasy China. Their fluff and domestic moments are just so sweet and over top weird in an endearing way. I just couldn’t stop giggling. So hence the big score

Characters:
I touched upon this one in the story part. XL and HC are not the best main characters, let’s be honest. XL is, sometimes, a bumbling buffoon who is ‘written’ as sharp, badly executed. I still kind of related with him, especially during book 2 & 4. Having that talented good (and privileged) start in life and beautiful ideals, only to fall miserably and try and fail a lot to get on the good path again and be a more humble person. And HC is annoying to everyone except XL for some reason, you can be neutral and have friends at least it. That doesn’t help him with seeming obsessed in a weird way, when you read it outside of context. But in my view the story makes it so it’s mostly justified. XL and HC are kind of overpowered, which is fine, but please have them struggle or have some flaws that get really in the way. Not just ‘haha I’m so bad at cooking look at me!’.

However, I love the insights in the second, 4th book and side stories we get. They have enough dept for a blooming romance and being cute together. But for a novel like this drags it down in the other departments of MXTX’s storytelling here. The side characters are better written and fleshed out. Which is great! But when romance time is upon us, they get booted out. Shout out to Ling Wen and the Wind master. Just exceptional, we got some depth over here. Which XL and HC really need. Especially HC, I love the dude and his romantic gestures and quips. But… who are you and what do you contribute to the story besides being handsome and knowing really specific things when XL gets send on a mission. Would have loved some POV or even the man explaining himself some more.

Overall:

Despite many gripes, I loved the shit out of it and devoured it as if I haven’t eaten something all day. The characters should’ve gotten more fleshed out. I did love the romance so much! I enjoy big books so that’s always a win for me despite the flaws it can contribute to overall narrative. I like spending time with my cast of characters. That’s my justification. I’m making my way sort of backwards and am currently in book 3 of scum villain and I’ll read MDZS after. I can already see that her other work(s) have a more balanced narrative. Still TGCF will hold a special place in my heart for being some goofy fluff with some angst and helping me through my chronic pain and severe mental health issues I had back when I read it. I’d recommend this book to people who value a cute romance with cast of well written side characters. And for people who won’t take worldbuilding and background(stories) at a high level. Thumbs up from the hopeless romantic here!

This book is long. Very long. It clocks in at around 1,000,000 words in the English translation, including all of the extras. It is formatted a lot more like a road or adventure novel, or even a narrative within a narrative akin to the Mahābhārata than a stereotypical romance novel, and while it's core IS about the romantic relationship between the protagonist Xie Lian and the love interest Hua Cheng, the romance serves a thematic function that carries through the novel: the love of one person, the belief of one person, the care of one person is enough to make life worth living. In a ... narrative where the failings and foibles of literal gods expose them to be as petty, corrupt, foolish, and fallible as humans, where the weight of expectation and self-denial for "the good of everyone else" can LITERALLY be crushing and soul destroying, the idea that it's the small actions and willingness to try and help the person next to you is enough is pretty impactful imo. That small moments can change your life forever, for good or ill, and can have a profound affect on someone else. It's about desire vs expectation, letting people follow their own paths, for good or ill, vs trying to take responsibility for fixing the whole world, and committing to the illusion of righteousness and importance vs doing things that materially help other people's lives.

It's also about how embracing your romantic and sexual desires can set you free and be a source of strength, rather than being something you must repress in order to gain standing and power. The romance isn't meant to be realistic, or ideal -- tbh, none of MXTX's relationships are. They're about what works for two particular people, and how their weirdness lines up with each other's to settle down in compatible cringe for the rest of their lives. In the case of HuaLian, the inherent aspect of worship in their dynamic and their codependency would be bonkers for a real couple. In this case, they're a God and a Ghost, the "rest of their lives" is pretty much forever, and the all-consuming devotion doesn't feel out of place when working on that kind of a timescale. I also found it pretty refreshing that most of the conflict wasn't between the main lovers -- they have their misunderstandings, but the core conflicts in the novel are about the personal internal beliefs that hold someone back or hurt them in order to live up to the expectations of others (or those they've imposed on themselves to be A Good God/Son/Prince/Leader/etc). Love gives the strength to set someone free!

The present - flashback - present - flashback - present nature of the story I found makes for an impactful narrative, because things introduced early on in the narrative become more poignant and are given new context as the story unfolds. I also tend to like in media res starts, so YMMV. Are there parts that could have been cut that would have left the core themes intact? Probably. As a webnovel, there are very different pacing norms than in typical western published novels, and if you havent read very many of them, its a definite adjustment. There's also a lot of Chinese folklore and references to Daoism in the novel that aren't obvious to a non-Chinese audience automatically. (Associations of yin and yang energies, many festivals, monsters and supernatural elements). There's also some narrative elements that are more typical to chinese works (i.e., Xie Lian has a lot of interior asides that are more snarky and comedic, and that's an intentional narrative framing device common to chinese media in order to point out ridiculous/absurd things, rather than the author intentionally portraying "judginess" as part of XL's character. see more here: https://www.tumblr.com/elberlight/682322476548620288/hi-i-hope-youre-feeling-alright-i-just-wanted)

There has been a LOT of discussion about the orientalism/racism in the novel, especially in the Banyue arc, and the artist for the Manhua (the comic adaptation) has come under fire for colorism. (Banyue means crescent moon, if the implied association isn't clear). YMMV on whether or not that is enough to keep you away, particularly considering the CCP's detention of Uyghur people in Western China.

I loved this book, and I know many people who felt similarly. However, it's not for everyone. The narrative structure is even different than MXTX's other works, and can be offputting. Additionally, it was written for a mainland chinese audience, and it shows. I think if you're willing to do a little research and keep an open mind, it's a great story.

I really wanted to like this book.

As a bisexual man starved for representation where a gay romance is the focus, and the gay characters aren't the sexless parents of a side character or an issue episode, when I saw the author of MDZS and SVSSS had made another story, I was cautiously optimistic, is the thing. BL anime and manga had been letting me down pretty bad at the time, and I kept hearing people talking online about how good TGCF was. That it was a sweet and pure romantic epic, with a deep, twisty core mystery like MDZS. I want to be clear. I ... don't want to be 'that guy' invading womens' spaces, which the TGCF fandom overwhelmingly feels to be. It's just that, as a queer man, TGCF's romance is nominally about, and representative of, people like me, so I feel I have room to comment on the execution.

On paper this sounded great and I was pretty excited, I won't lie. I was ready and willing to be sold a romantic fantasy mystery epic that would knock my rainbow socks off and make me proclaim that 'Hualian invented love' like those mystifying people over on the TGCF subreddit. I should maybe have taken the lack of gay men talking about TGCF online as a warning sign. And now, I can't even say I'm not mad like the cliche line. I am mad. Mad and disappointed, and it feels like I'm pretty alone in this one.

Now, I found book one to be alright. I enjoyed the wedding march, the dice rolling scene in gambler's den and stuff, but for the most part, the worldbuilding and plot didn't leave much of an impression on me (apart from select parts of Ban Yue, but oh boy, we'll get to those). It felt very barebones, but I was willing to see where this went, because MDZS was pretty generic in its worldbuilding, and I enjoyed that one for the most part. Book two, on the other hand, felt like a completely different novel. I can see why it being a flashback might irk some people, but book two just had an energy, a dynamism to it that honestly shocked me after reading the first part. 'Where the hell was this fifty thousand words ago?' I wondered aloud. And then, while I was vibing with the Xie Lian misery hour, book three kicked the door down, shot me six times, and as I lay dying on the carpet, one thought was clear to me… ‘I could have spent this time reading Nabokov instead.’

Yeah… TGCF has a pacing issue. The author’s notes make it very clear that MXTX never planned to write more than 36K words, and what we got was… considerably larger than the entirety of The Lord of the Rings. Any longtime reader of fantasy will tell you that book size is not an indicator of quality. TGCF never uses ten words when a hundred will do. And the annoying thing is that really important plot points are sandwiched in the middle of huge blocks of unimportant information. The book meanders from chapter to chapter, and the frequent infodumps serve to dilute the impact of the information we’re being given about the world. Nothing feels purposeful. TGCF never shows when it can tell, and it tells a lot. I’m always hearing about things that already happened, or happened to other people. That could even have been a cool theme, of only hearing about things after they happen from different unreliable narrators. It would really fit the 800 years of worldbuilding we’re meant to be getting, with the world changing so much the details are forgotten, or written by the victors, but then TGCF would be even more similar to MDZS thematically. When combined with the fast travel system, it ends up feeling like the world is a series of disconnected boxes. Then Hualian sometimes hear something interesting happening in the box next door, HC checks it out with one of his butterflies, and gives us an infodump about how whatever was going on was ‘very cool, we promise’.

Even when we do get to see things happen on page, we often don’t see the resolution of important plot points like the end of the Black Water arc because the protagonist wanders off in the middle of it? It’s unsatisfying, and undercuts the genuinely poignant moments that occasionally happen, seemingly by accident. Combined with the edge factor, it really feels like a first draft of a debut novel, and I really hate to have to say that about an established writer.

What book three made painfully apparent about my TGCF reading experience is that I honestly cannot stand the main characters. It feels like the undercutting of poignant moments to people who aren’t Hualian happen because the author is almost afraid that, say, Wind Master would end up being more likeable than her lead. So Wind Master gets the chop, and we get domestic fluff… while wondering the whole time what happened to that cool character Xie Lian just abandoned to their fate.

Now, it's a little difficult to talk about HC and XL because really, their defining character traits are 'loves the other one' and everything else is largely incidental, but I'll try my best. HC is a textbook example of a character the author thinks is perfect and infallible, and thinks you should too, but has written to be a morally ambiguous, childish asshole. The dissonance between what HC says and how people around him react is intense. The side characters treat him like the abrasive, petty dickhead he is, but the narrative insists that HC is perfect and they’re just wrong for saying anything when he taunts them and openly calls people trash. And then XL excuses him, blames everyone around him for HC’s actions, and it just makes my blood boil.

It’s ugly, but not in the way HC’s face is ‘ugly’. HC’s flaws take the same form as those of a YA protagonist. He’s insecure about his face (but it’s really stunning) and his handwriting is bad. This is on the same level as saying ‘my protagonist isn’t perfect, she’s really clumsy!’ and then writing a story where her clumsiness causes her to fall out of danger, or into the ML’s arms. And can we talk about MXTX and ugliness? At one point in chapter 156, she devotes several entire paragraphs to mocking a single character for his ‘plain’ looks. Is this supposed to be funny? It’s so mean spirited it’s practically a vengeful ghost! HC is meant to feel he’s hideous, but he’s fine with XL mocking a man for his looks, while that man sadly mumbles that he’s used to it? He doesn’t feel anything upon learning how much looks matter to his beloved? It’s just so spiteful I’m at a loss for words, and this kind of prejudice absolutely permeates the narration whenever a character is anything less than a perfect, chiseled, ethnically Chinese Adonis.

Speaking of XL, he’s inexcusably bland for how much time we spend in his head. It’s not an issue of it being Chinese, or translated, or even translated by Suika and co. I’ve read their 2ha translation and no, XL really just is a petty, bitchy and painfully average self-insert YA protagonist. He has this perfect, gorgeous man vying for his attention, literally worshipping the ground he walks on. A man who is rich and powerful and whose affections cannot be taken away from him. XL just is a wish fulfilment vehicle. Part of what made book two enjoyable was how XL was allowed to face the consequences of his actions, but once we return to the present, anytime XL is criticized, HC will enable him by saying something along the lines of 'it's okay gege, don't listen to them, you only need listen to me...' and thus XL never has to face consequences again, or learn, or grow. Despite his monumental humbling in the flashbacks, he’s quite willing to abandon people who are inconvenient to him, or get in the way of his attachment to HC.

Meanwhile, the other characters around them are allowed to be flawed, and interesting, and fun in a way that the ‘perfect’ couple in the corner could never be. For example, SQX(Wind Master) is excellent, and a far more enjoyable time to read about than the main pair, although what HC and XL allow to happen to SQX is absolutely reprehensible. Ling Wen’s prickly, tired sarcasm is a breath of fresh air whenever she appears, regardless of her faults. Qi Rong's entire character is bent to be worse than HC in order to make HC look better, but if you ignore his tendency to speak in ALL CAPS his nasty gremlin energy brings a life to him that invincible ghost king HC could never emulate for all his purported power. At some point he started roasting XL and I was kind of shocked because once I got past the capslock of death, he was making a lot of sense to me? Like… yes, QR, XL is a giant hypocrite, thank you! Apparently, it's fine to physically abuse him for being 'unrefined' though. Nothing troubling about the undercurrent of classism in this book.

Even if we ignore the above, and pretend XL and HC are as perfect as the narrative assumes, HC still causes huge structural issues for the plot. He is given new powers as the plot demands, is monstrously powerful, utterly devoted to XL, and I would argue the book fails at providing tension as a result. HC is so devoted, and the author so blind to his flaws, that the couple cannot have internal tension. The characters outside Hualian aren’t allowed to breathe, because the author likes Hualian, and they clearly don’t. Thus, all tension must be provided externally, where HC presented as so invincible that it murders the story’s tension in its crib. And that’s not even getting into the way the romance is, or rather isn’t, woven into those scenes that are meant to be tense.

Whenever Hualian are in the same room together (most of the story in the present), regardless of how serious and tense a scene is meant to be (and is for their hapless friends), it’s like MXTX is physically assaulting me through the page, shaking me by the shoulders and asking me over and over ‘is this romantic enough yet? Let me add more red string of fate!’ as I cry and beg her to stop. By the time I’m able to pry myself loose of her cold, dead grasp, any tension that might have survived HC’s vast array of powers (butterfly listening devices!) has long since evaporated. Maybe to someone reading this in Chinese, this imagery is the most beautiful/romantic thing ever and not obnoxious, like heart confetti being blasted into your face with a leaf blower. But whatever makes it special in Chinese was clearly butchered by the fan translation.

So much of TGCF is spent trying to make me feel like Hualian is the most epic romance yet conceived, but it’s aesthetics. Smoke and mirrors. These are two people who have known each other for less than a month, total, and yet I’m bombarded with wedding robes, the red string of fate, butterflies and flowers and poetry. But I never got the feeling that HC and XL know each other. HC flip-flops between ‘viewing XL as his god’ and ‘seeing XL for who he is’ and MXTX decides she can just have both… somehow, despite them never seeming to get beyond teen infatuation with a fellow hot person in terms of personal connection. As an adult, I just find the idea that this is meant to represent ‘love’ pretty gross. It reads like a teenager’s idea of love, where the ‘deep meaning’ of the romance is in pining away for hundreds of years for your single, true love whom you are fated to be with.

Sometimes love is telling the person ‘you’re wrong.’ Sometimes love is a deep understanding of a personal philosophy, brought about by years of knowing a person. HC does not emulate XL’s philosophy, nor does he disagree with it, nor does he have a coherent one of his own. He doesn’t seem to understand what XL even likes in a person, beyond having an attractive face. He seemingly has no understanding of XL beyond the most superficial things he could find out using his butterfly powers. XL, likewise, does not understand HC because MXTX needs to keep him mysterious for the plot to go on. And HC is so underdeveloped beyond that I don’t know if there even is more for XL to know at points. For someone raised in royalty, XL is obsessive over money, fawning over HC’s wealth and stature. This is… not a rich person’s perception of wealth. It’s MXTX’s fantasy of being well off. It’s a ‘wealthy criminal sweeps you away’ story with a bullshit fantasy minecraft skin over the top. Love Never Dies but somehow all the worse for the lack of Andrew Lloyd Webber.

The thing is, I would have enjoyed this romance if it was a Phantom of the Opera situation, with XL having this socially maladjusted, obsessive man complicating his love life! Or a beauty and the beast situation where XL really just needs to learn to understand HC and accept his genuinely ugly appearance and HC needs to learn to let XL go and grow into his own person, and thereby be able to love him! If HC was nervous, his hands shaking as he helps XL down from the sedan, suddenly not an immortal ghost king badass but an antisocial man putting on a show of suaveness for his crush. If the two of them had flaws that mattered, had relationships that mattered, had anything to their romance other than a confetti cannon going off in my face constantly… if, if, if.


Phew… I never even got to talk about Ban Yue. TGCF is an absolute monster of a book, and all of this stuff is so intertwined over its bloated length it’s kind of hard to cover everything with enough depth. But Ban Yue. Chapter 43 contains the following:
“The two only just gotten out of the hole in the tree, and not even a few steps after a number of red skinned naked people suddenly poured out from the nearby bushes and surrounded them. They started jumping, howling as they did so, “OOOooooHHHOooHHooohhhh!!”

He steadied himself to look at those savages, and they weren’t truly naked, but were wearing animal skins and leaves, looking like they were ready to drink blood. They had long branch spears and sharp stoned axes in hand, and when they smiled at the two, their teeth were jaggedly sharp like saws.

Shi Qing Xuan shouted as he ran, “My brother used to always tell me! That deep in the southern mountains are many savage cannibals that live off of human flesh! He told me not to ever come to such a place on my own! Is that what those are?!”

Can we agree that’s a yikes? That’s a yikes. Literal red-skinned, spear wielding, pointy toothed ‘savages’. They live in the desert, and invented suicide bombing. Holy fuck, I feel, is the only appropriate response to that one.

Going back to the point about how spiteful this book is about appearances, and the bit about XL being a self insert, I’m just going to put it out there. XL is written as someone socialized as a woman. BL often does this. The bottom of a pairing acts as a stand-in for a woman, using a heteronormative framework of tropes present in straight stories. We can see this at work with how HC is a dark, mysterious protector figure whom XL is unsure of, but intensely attracted to based on his masculine qualities like strength and lack of emotional vulnerability. The noncon nature of the temple scene further underlines this trend (while also devaluing the romantic payoff of their first consensual kiss). There are other vaguely yikes ideas around gender in this book, like how women apparently can’t produce as much resentful energy as men for some reason, and generally MXTX seems to have some trouble with using her protagonists to cut down and devalue the female characters in TGCF. They’re not fuck dolls, like you might see in a stallion novel, but to a western reader it comes off as very socially conservative, and maybe a bit regressive.

Look… I’m not discounting that this book is probably immensely helpful for people in China who have little in the way of positive m/m representation, but I just feel alienated by the amount of hype, and the amount of bile slung at anyone who dares to criticize it. Everything that’s good about it comes in flashbacks, side stories or infodump tales people tell each other in random shacks in the woods. For all it’s claimed to be about gay men, this book is for women, and the author’s understanding of men is minimal at best. It presents a woman’s perspective of men; men from the outside. Arrogant, emotionally cold, and not overly concerned with consent. Men often suck at writing women too, I know, but it needs to be said. I just don’t understand why an English speaker would slog through it when they could be reading As Meat Loves Salt or Song of Achilles instead? Both and more, likely, in the time it takes to read TGCF? I could have respected TGCF if it was fun and didn’t take itself so seriously all the time, and wasn’t a pretentious thing that’s declared to be ‘classy and mature and the most romantic thing ever.’ It arguably fails at everything I would want in a romance, in a mystery, and in a fantasy adventure. It tries to do everything, proclaims itself to be the most refined story in the history of fiction, and after dropping it… I’m just left confused, holding a handful of likeable side characters the author apparently hates for not being as ‘good’ as the main couple?

The really sad thing is, if you look at SVSSS, as rough as it is, you can tell MXTX as a teen would have mocked this book ruthlessly for being a bloated, self-indulgent power fantasy. And if it’s all the same to you guys, I’d want to join her.