#admirableadmiranda

What are your least favorite canons in TGCF and why? I’m curious just what’s been inspired by the translation choices as done by the watermelon and what’s born out of whole cloth.

(Correction: this is meant to read “least favorite fanons.) This list is already so long and I feel like a lot of it is self-explanatory, so I'm gonna skip explanations unless someone asks for clarity on a specific one. The only one that I can chalk up to translation issues is #8, though I'll say that the stuff about Xie Lian's relationship with Jun Wu can be chalked up to the deference Xie Lian shows to Jun Wu in the draft that has since been deleted in the final (though it's still overblown in fandom). In no particular order:

1.) Grooming pedophile!Jun Wu or Ex-abusive romantic partner!Jun Wu

2.) Guoshi Mei Nianqing was “sooooo in looooove” with Jun Wu and now resents Xie Lian for defeating him at the end of the novel.

3.) Xie Lian’s abusive father who not-so-secretly hates him and, concurrently, Xie Lian’s “daddy issues” where he just really wants Jun Wu’s approval (🙄).

4.) “Mu Qing and Feng Xin were right” about any situation.

5.) “Mu Qing and Feng Xin were totally looking for Xie Lian for all those 800 years!” and, concurrently, “Xie Lian is upset to discover that neither of his former friends reached out to him during his second banishment despite having the means to.”

6.) Mu Qing and Feng Xin, Xie Lian’s virginity guards*

7.) Mu Qing and Feng Xin, Xie Lian’s bestest friends in the whole wide world that he spends centuries trying to figure out how to get back into their good graces.

8.) Mu Qing the Lowly Servant who somehow also runs the entirety of Xie Lian’s household and personally decides who has access to the crown prince and, concurrently, Mu Qing as a cultivator alongside Xie Lian being erased to push some sort of weird "independent woman" archetype on him as the sole "powerless" man who must rely only on his words for defense while every other man around him knows how to fight.**

9.) Feng Xin the Loyal and Obedient Bodyguard who somehow never listens to a single wish, order, or boundary given by Xie Lian until Xie Lian tells him to “go away forever,” if the fic includes the friendship breakup.

10.) Hua Cheng being close friends with any of the gods outside of Yushi Huang, particularly being forced to "befriend" the idiot duo "for Xie Lian's sake."

11.) “Hua Cheng is such a dork loser, it’s a wonder anyone takes him seriously when all he does is cry over Dianxia.”

12.) "Dianxia! Dianxia! Dianxia!" like "gege" has just been excised from Hua Cheng's vocabulary.

13.) Wuming the Doll, "I am not a person with free will, thoughts, and desires. I only exist to serve Dianxia and obey his every command without question."

14.) Hua Cheng the Bad Boy who is a certified terrible person who makes life on earth worse, but it's ok because "Xie Lian finds evilness attractive 🤪" (unless he's being mean to the idiot brigade, in which case: "San-lang, be nicer to my friends 🥺").

15.) Hua Cheng the Slut who's slept with everyone and everything in order to "practice" for Xie Lian and, concurrently, Xie Lian the Super Virgin who must have even the concept of sex explained to him because he's that virginal.

16.) "That cave was definitely Hua Cheng's creepy porn stash/those statues were his Dianxia sex dolls, and the only reason Xie Lian's ok with that is because he's a freak/has stockholm syndrome."

17.) Xie Lian the Martyr, or “I’m gonna stab myself with every sword I find in every situation because my solution to all problems is self-harm!” and, concurrently, Xie Lian the Martyr who believes he deserves to live in eternal suffering because of what happened to Wuming, which self-harming will atone for, or something.

18.) Xie Lian the Plague God whose mere presence kills people and, concurrently, "Xie Lian spent all 800 of those years of his second banishment dying gruesomely every 20 years and avoiding human contact."

19.) Xie Lian the Maiden who can't defend himself against anything because of his cursed shackles.

20.) "Xie Lian totally would've been evil had the rice man not given him that hat."

21.) Xie Lian the Perpetually Afraid who doesn't want to initiate any action, make any decision, or form any opinion because "everything I do is wrong."

22.) Xie Lian thinks the only reason Hua Cheng loves him is because he saved him as a child during the parade, and if Hua Cheng doesn't remember having fallen off the tower, then there'd be no chance of Hua Cheng falling in love with him again.

23.) Perpetually ashamed!Xie Lian who’s ashamed of:

his background as a crown prince.

his current status as a scrap god.

his lack of worshipers.

his shrine.

his belief system.

his actions during the Xianle civil war.

his cooking skills (despite them being an homage to his mother).

his bad luck (despite him ASKING FOR HIS LUCK TO BE DISPERSED!!!).

"having disappointed Jun Wu."

24.) Catholic Guilt the Novel

Sinner!Hua Cheng who feels his very existence “defiles his god” and being attracted to him "taints Xie Lian's lily white purity."

Hua Cheng the Literal Christian Demon

“Xie Lian was taught that sex, sexual desire, and sexual attraction are dirty and make you a bad person,” so now he has to be coached by [insert character]*** to not have a panic attack at the thought of anything past kissing. Only Xie Lian has this problem, somehow, despite almost every other character also being Daoists.

"Daoism is just Catholicism if you think about it, and if you break any of the rules, you go to Chinese Hell, which is why Xie Lian is reluctant to stray from his cultivation path."

Bonus 1: He Xuan gives up his revenge against Shi Wudu because he's "soooo in loooooove" with Shi Qingxuan, or if he doesn't, then it's because he's "sooooo in loooooove" with Shi Qingxuan that he manipulate him into a relationship while forcing everyone else to keep Shi Qingxuan in the dark about what really happened to his brother.

Bonus 2: Stalker!Jian Lan who won't leave Feng Xin alone while pretending that it's Feng Xin who won't leave her alone.**

*Usually paired with "Xie Lian's abusive dad" because abusive dad is tryna force the son "he hates" into an arranged marriage, and Feng Xin and Mu Qing for some reason take it upon themselves to block any contact Xie Lian has with "strange men" (Hua Cheng). There is a not small amount of stories with this exact plotline.

**Usually, but not always, comes with the inclusion of fengqing as a ship.

If that is the case, then really SY is doing a far better job taking care of his own peak and its reputation than SJ ever did.

You are correct. Each peak has a theme, and Qing Jing Peak's theme is the scholarly arts:

Shen Qingqiu’s Qing Jing Peak wasn’t the tallest, but it was the most tranquil, heavily forested with tall bamboo. On top of that, as basically all of Shen Qingqiu’s disciples needed to learn the four scholarly arts of guqin playing, Go, calligraphy, and painting, from time to time the clear sounds of reading and the murmur of the guqin would drift on the breeze. It was an excellent destination for scholarly youths, steeped in ancient arts and literature, and perfectly aligned with the needs of the original Shen Qingqiu—that poser.

—Vol. 1, Chapt. 1: Scum, 7seas

Though Shang Qinghua, specifically, considers the peak "ruined" for the fact that the disciples are now excitable and happy vs. the miserable assholes putting on airs that they were under Shen Jiu:

[Shang Qinghua] remembered the last time he’d come, every disciple had worn a face full of great bitterness and deep resentment. They’d stood like pines or sat like clocks, each with an old text in hand, reciting wherever they went like they were chanting curses, quoting chapter and verse when they spoke, a musical cadence to their voices. When he looked at them today... Was this still that renowned Qing Jing Peak that produced countless poser youths full of literary airs? This place had become a daycare center for ADHD children.

MDZS has elements of a mystery novel, none of the mystery novels I’ve ever read have focused on having the lead deal with their own flaws while trying to solve the crime, that gets in the way of the crime solving. I’ve read a decent amount of romances, while some of them have the P&P angle of both people must improve for a romance to exist, plenty of them are more on the lines of their love is being fought by society or outside forces and the triumph is not that they change but that they stay steadfast in their trials to come together.

And really it’s just lazy that they’re showing up and acting like this, because if I, a woman who never went to school and whose main teacher felt that the best way to teach things was to have me read preselected books on my own without even having the benefit of a discussion about them afterwards, can figure that out, surely they can too.

Thinking about what you read and what it’s saying can in fact be done and grasped even by those who were never formally taught.

Ahh… yes… because shipping Lan Wangji with the guy who burned down his home and (in cql) broke his leg personally… is better than the love of his life… because the love of his life is apparently not devoted enough…

Truly, the mind boggles.

That alone is deserving of criticism.

The tragedy is that they are characters deliberately kept in shadows because their elder son refused to try and learn more about what happened so that he could pretend there was some options where nobody was wrong and everyone was right despite knowing that there was no way that could be true.

The burial mounds isn’t a permanent settlement, its Helm’s Deep, it’s a fortress where their protector can keep them safe more easily. They don’t need extra stuff for long term livelihood because the goal is not to be there long term.