I think one of the reasons why we get so many "Xie Lian needed to learn a lesson and the fall of the kingdom of Xianle was that for him" takes is that a lot of people do not deconstruct the prologue of the first book after the first read.
Because those takes are very similar to it and the prologue is the legend perpetuated by the Heavens. It's the propaganda. It's people perpetuating it going:" Here is what happens when people try to change things, they get punished...", even though he was right and if they had helped, none of this would have happened.
Xie Lian is a similar scapegoat to Wei Wuxian but Wei Wuxian died and Xie Lian became the persona non grata so that other people, heavenly official and sects can perpetuate the system without challenge.
Oh 100% yes! It’s a big deal that the prologue is blatantly misleading, by the time you’ve heard the details of the real story.
One of my CLEAREST memories of the many, many “oh shit we are doing things with that” moments — in which we realize that a recurring detail or “joke” actually does have backstory and thematic relevance — I had reading TGCF books (arcs) 1 and 2 was in book 2 when we reach the scene where Xie Lian refuses to apologize for saving a child’s life, and we see exactly how much he’s been reduced in the retelling.
The prologue/propaganda version reduces his thoughtful, well-reasoned discussions to these pithy one-liners that are easy to repeat as part of a story and present as naïve, unfounded opinions.
And years later, I still remember the feeling of reading book two and realizing, for the first time, that all of his kindness, his consideration for the feelings of others of any class, his consciousness of his own power and the effect that kind of thing had on people? He ALWAYS HAD THAT. Everyone, even the narration, would have you believe so many of his fantastic, thoughtful, insightful qualities, were the result of “learning something” where he used to be naïve.
Meeting a young Xie Lian who was not only less naïve than anyone else had told you, but also not nearly as naïve as even Xie Lian has been indicating himself? Narrative-shaping right there.
There had already been implications in book 1 that Xie Lian wasn’t ok and that not reacting to pain was ultimately going to be more about trauma than the comedy Xie Lian has learned to try and make it, but realizing that he’s learned to make fun of himself on an ideological level? In addition to on a physical one?
THAT was the point I sat up and went “oh, something is going to go WRONG wrong here in this flashback. There is SOMETHING ELSE going on here.”
And then the whole flashback and major portions of book 3 and basically the rest of the novel was more or less about the disconnect between the official story/the version of you known to the public, and the true/private you. For our main characters both, and many, many side characters as well.
We even do this in BOTH FLASHBACKS. The contrast is even more stark, in the second, between the actual circumstances and motivations behind Xie Lian’s banishment, and the neat, comfortable, easily-digested version that most of heaven accepted for centuries.
And then after everything, we END the novel on “what legend says about these characters/gods” as in, the story commonly told by people who don’t know all the details. You know, a parallel bookend to the prologue. In case it wasn’t already clear that that’s the type of unreliable version of the story the introduction was.
The fact that learning the *real* story via flashback so dramatically overturns our initial impressions and operating understanding of the story — learning that we also, the reader, have been susceptible to the in-narrative propaganda and the simplest assumptions — is such a huge part of this book, structurally and thematically, to me.
One of the best examples of this is that the fandom insists that Xie Lian's lesson to learn was that he 'couldn't save everyone' and I kid you not like- The prologue goes:
And the actual scene goes:
the absolute difference in sentiment and tone and theme and message in both of these scenes are the biggest clue in on the fact that.... you really should put any stock in the prologue as a real indicator of Xie Lian's actions and the course of the fall of Xianle at all.
