I Finished Reading TGCF

I am here to talk about my tgcf faves and ships AKA recap my liveblogging thread. Because mxtx was genius for making this juicy stuff and I want to go kyaa and ramble

I guess I should say something about the story overall LMAO

I read the official Seven Seas translation. I enjoyed it a huge amount and would happily recommend it to anyone else who likes comedy, ensemble cast of mostly handsome guys having intense relationships, and some gender fuckery happening in the background. The plot was exciting enough to keep me reading. The writing quality was very patchy, but who cares? If I needed to go back in time to explain it to myself, this book has all the nutritional value of a bishie gacha game (high praise) or even more.

Anyway onto faves and ships. CW fictional incest

Mu Qing.

Crazy how I liked him from his first appearance in chapter 1 and he never left the #1 spot in my heart since. Why? Because he’s always doing, saying and thinking ugly things. He has a bitter little heart. Later I found out he’s actually an upstanding good person with a touching backstory but it’s okay, I still love him because he’s NEVER graceful about it.

Also because his character is very much about dealing with The Horrors of being a social creature and being perceived. Not in a particularly relatable way, but it’s always a topic which I can get invested in. And he deals with said horrors by being incredibly bitchy and never compromising or giving in, which is like… some kind of power fantasy.

Of course he is very shippable. I’m actually the most excited for Mu Qing->Xie Lian because I just want to see the contrast between MQ’s pure feelings of friendship, admiration, love and protectiveness for XL and all the other very ugly ones that are also there, conflicting and raising his blood pressure to unbearable levels.

Feng Xin/Mu Qing is great too. Their relationship is funny, hits a thousand tropes that I’m weak for and I love how they never hold back and say the ugliest things to each other. I think I probably wouldn’t ship them romantically if not for the Feng Xin wife and child subplot though… I don’t know why that really piqued my interest (it’s because you want to see mu qing being envious of his wife) yes it’s because of that

edit: in the months since finishing the books I have been busy getting my degree in FengQing simply because this is the ship that maximises Mu Qing’s happiness (source: it was revealed to me in a dream). So I guess that is now the more important reason I ship them romantically. The Feng Xin’s wife and child subplot is still important because it’s the thing that makes him into an actually interesting character. This was such an important correction I needed to make

Gender fuckery.

I love that gods can sometimes just become a different gender against their will, sometimes transform for business purposes and sometimes for pleasure. Or sometimes because Shi Qingxuan talked them into it. It’s also a part of the canon worldbuilding that gods are meant to have androgynous traits.

Everyone is called Lord/Master regardless of gender. And pronouns (I assume only in the English translation) get changed with a transformation, to the point where it feels like playing pronoun lottery every time Ling Wen or Shi Qingxuan appears. This is so gratifying to me, perfectly aligns with my recent tastes and fantasies. Thank you Seven Seas translation team! Big love!

Shi Qingxuan.

What a sunshine and queen of the gender fuckery!!! I love characters whose superpower is being a lovely person with lots of charisma. I kind of fantasise that the entire black water demon arc could have been split into a separate book series and we’d somehow get all the juicy details between him, his big brother and He Xuan.

I am looking forward to shipping him with both of those two and seeing what messed up dynamics the fandom invented for them. Especially with He Xuan… I love that their dynamic is grounded in being best friends in a way that was cute and fun to read about. Certain kinds of fictional friendships really make me happy, I don’t know how to predict it.

(Side note but it is hard to pick a default pronoun for SQX. Part of me is like ‘duh, she has mega girl vibes’ and part of me is like ‘he gets he/himmed in a greater percentage of the book so let’s use that’ and… I hope there aren’t fandom fights about this.)

Qi Rong.

Look, it’s just interesting to see a guy whose father was abusive and mom died protecting her sister the queen from assassination, going on to commit a royal massacre and accidentally adopt a son of his own. He sucks but somehow in a way where I want to read his entire life story humanising him and explaining his actions.

He brings out Xie Lian’s cruel, violent and coldhearted side which is really sexy to me. I love how Xie Lian hates him but never knows how to deal with him for good and ended up keeping him as a pet for weeks. And he repeatedly begs Xie Lian to hurt and kill him, also sexy… At some point his obsession with XL went from ‘okay, this is repetitive and boring’ to ‘this is so insanely repetitive that I need to read fanfic about it’. Do not judge my tastes.

Everyone else

EVERYONE ELSE IS GREAT. Especially when they are being funny. Actually I like Xie Lian as much as the other faves but there’s nothing in particular I want to say after reading 8 volumes of webnovel about him.