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xie lian soft-launches his bf hua cheng and the internet loses it

Heaven Official's Blessing, or Tiān Guān Cì Fú, is my favorite danmei novel.

Heaven Official's Blessing, or Tiān Guān Cì Fú, is my favorite danmei novel. Here's why:

WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! BELOW ARE SPOILERS FOR ARC 4, OR BOOK 6 FROM THE SEVEN SEAS TRANSLATION.

Ok, the reason this is my favorite danmei novel, is directly tied into Hua Cheng and his complete and utter devotion to Xie Lian. In the hundred sword piercing scene in Arc 4, or Book 6, the scene is built up So Well, with Xie Lian and Bai Wuxiang and all of the sheer mindfuckery that happens with the people. And yeah, Xie Lian's pain and heartache and despair is absolutely Heart wrenching, but Hua Cheng. Hua Cheng is who Sells that scene for me. Because he Loves this man, this GOD, he is devoted and faithful and as close to everlasting as he can get, and he has had to Watch as the man he loves goes through Literal Hell while Hua Cheng is literally an incorporeal Ghost Fire. He is almost entirely powerless, and he is unable to help or even alleviate some of Xie Lian's pain. And you can Feel that So Keenly in the hundred sword piercing scene, when Xie Lian is screaming, and in Such Pain, and he just it's to Stop, he is Finally asking for help and No One Hears Him, and Hua Cheng the helpless incorporeal Ghost Fire who loves this man can only Watch. He can do NOTHING to help. And it tears him apart. And their combined but separate agony is what makes this scene get to me So Deeply every. Single. Time. That I read it. I break down crying every time, because their feelings are so visceral, and they feel like they're both alone with this but they're not, and it all just combines into this wonderful terrible amazing heartrending scene, and I just. I love this novel so much. Because it let me experience that depth of emotion. It's so good. It's amazing. And absolutely everyone should read it, because it is catharsis and heartbreak and angst and validation all in one place.

Sillies

My new favorite gremlin

Hua Cheng finally came in sept. I was getting so antsy waiting for him lol. And I kept seeing people on twitter already getting him sob. But I'm so happy, I love the design of this figure so much, his foot on the skull all the bling and bangles, his hair, I love his hair so much. And the attitude vibes lmao. Now it looks so complete with the Dianxia figure, like a married couple lmao ❤️

I can't believe it's over sob. I'm gonna miss getting these books throughout the year. Can't wait for her next series ❤️

signups have slowed down for the tgcf gotcha for congo!! the moderators are super cool, and the deadline for finished products isn't until january!! if you're going to create fan content between now and then anyway, why not do it for a good cause?

my three cats 🐈

a redraw of one of my older works! i lav these three sm

post-canon fics where hua cheng gets amnesia'd back into wuming, who inevitably finds out His Beloved Is Married always read like the meme "I'll be his second husband." (what happened to the first?) "Nothing you can prove."

jump to xie lian, who knows exactly what mental contortions the love of his life would go to rather than recognize that xie lian loves him, deciding to humor wuming's murder fantasy for shits and giggles. 'you want to murder my husband, wuming? hm, i dont know... he is nice. except for the time he proposed to me and then immediately walked it back as a joke- oh, you'd treat me better than that? you'd never do something so cruel? well... im listening.'

cue hua cheng getting his memories back like "gege i thought we were over this. gege. gege stop laughing. gege please. i said sorry!"

Really love their potential post-canon dynamic 

Don't let anyone make you feel bad for being a virgin in your 20s, Hua Cheng was a proud virgin for 800+ years and feared among gods

Yet Another MXTX Trio:

Hualian's red thread is a great symbol of Hua Cheng's love. It's reminiscent of the red thread of fate, but Hualian weren't exactly fated--actually quite the opposite, they were kept apart. By putting the red thread himself, Hua Cheng forces fate to never separate them again. It symbolizes all the hard work he's put in to search for and find Xie Lian. He literally creates his own fate, their own fate, with pure will, just like he doesn't pass away out of pure will. It's his love and immeasurable strength and will power.

I don't like when people try to make hua cheng all cool and chill like no he's not. He's a pathetic loser. He probably cried himself to sleep after leaving that mountain. He probably passed out after seeing xie lian's ankles for the first time.

Y'know, forget the top-bottom or the redblack/coolwhite divide, I think the two who would get along best out of all the MXTX mains would be Shen Yuan and Hua Cheng

Shen Yuan: I was revived into my second life by virtue of my fanatical devotion to my favorite person and my seething hatred of the oceans of unworthy people around him who failed to properly respect how awesome he is

Hua Cheng: You. You get it.

[discourse] in defiance of the author’s wishes (re: mxtx fandom)

table of contents : context  : moral arguments : addressing the legal side of things  : closing remarks

Context

on March 17, 2018, mxtx posted:

“As long as you don't split or reverse the top/bottom positions of the main couple, I won't mind what you ship. I myself have a lot of fun shipping couples in mainstream shows, and isn't reading all about finding joy? You can imagine freely or ship whoever you like, just don't break up or reverse the top/bottom positions of the main couple.”

(I realise that the 不拆不逆 “no splitting or reversing” rule might be implicit within the entire Chinese danmei fandom, so i do not wish to single mxtx out. for example, i know that Chinese 2ha fans also go around policing people who ship, say, chu wanning with shi mei — so this isn’t just a mxtx thing. although i do not know if other danmei authors have explicitly stated “no splitting or reversing” since i have not been a part of other danmei fandoms.)

Nevertheless, “no splitting or reversing” became the constitution in Chinese mxtx fandom. Fans parade around with the slogan “拆逆死“ which means “kill yourself if you split or reverse”. Since the pronunciation of 拆逆死 (chai-ni-si) sounds like “chinese”, some fans on the Chinese internet have been putting “chinese” in their bios to mean “kill yourself if you split or reverse”.

From now on I will be referring to split/reverse ships as cult ships, as Chinese fans like to call them.

There are two main consequences of the “no splitting or reversing” rule (on the Chinese internet):

You will receive permanent bans with no option for appeal if you post cult ship fanworks in the novel communities on Weibo

It is implicitly agreed upon that you are not allowed to use individual character tags, the novel tag, or the author tag when posting cult ship content on any platform. So, for example, if you write Wei Wuxian x Jiang Cheng, you are not allowed to use #weiwuxian #jiangcheng #mdzs #mxtx. The name given to this conduct of tagging only your cult ship is 圈地自萌, which means “enclose a piece of land and amuse oneself within it”. You are not allowed to step out of your land. 

However, not everyone agrees with the practice of “don’t step out of your land” — this includes people from both sides of the debate. Some official shippers believe that cult shippers should not have any land to begin with, and purposefully leave the cult ship tag unblocked so they can police cult shippers at every opportunity. Some cult shippers believe that because their ship involves the individual characters, originate from the novel written by the author, they are in the right to use the individual character tags, the novel tag, and the author tag, and that people who dislike their ship should just use the block function. 

-

Moral Arguments

There are two main types of moral arguments that Chinese official shippers make.

1. If you split the official ship, you condone cheating behaviour and that makes you a bad person.

The first argument is too trivial so I will leave the refutation as an exercise for the reader to do at home /j

2. You are not respecting the author's wishes and that makes you a bad person.

The author has wished many different things. For example:

Screenshot 1 translation: I strictly forbid any crowdfunding or fundraising related to me, my works, or my characters, regardless of the purpose, whether it be for celebration, group buying, rankings, charity, or any other named activities.

Screenshot 2 translation: Once again, I emphasize: No new social media pages related to my works are allowed, nor organizing readers in a roundabout way, whether it be for celebrations, group buying, rankings, charity, or any other named activities. Please also refrain from flamboyantly organizing any collective birthday events.

Screenshot 3 translation: I've repeated many things many times and do not wish to repeat myself. Could everyone please just listen to my words occasionally.

(A brief aside before I address the second argument, something I used to say when debating Chinese fans: “I don’t think people who violate the author's wishes mean any disrespect. I don’t think they’re shipping or hosting charity events or birthday parties out of spite, but rather, it just so happens that the author prohibits a ship they enjoy or an event they organise. Just because I cult ship, for example, doesn’t mean I hate the author.” And they would respond: “if you really liked the author, you wouldn’t go against her wishes. You do not deserve to like the author. You are a mxtx anti.” And I would say, “I like my mom a lot, but I won’t listen to everything she says, simply because I don’t think everything she says is right. Plus, I don’t think the world can simply be explained by like vs. dislike. Also, Xie Lian said this: [For instance, if you admire or like someone, you won't always treat them well, no matter what happens.]” But then the most hilarious thing happened, in the revised version, a rebuttal for that scene was added:

【”For instance, if you admire or like someone, it doesn't mean you will always treat them well, regardless of what happens."

"Why not?" San Lang questioned. "If that's not possible, it only shows that this so-called 'liking' isn't anything significant."

Xie Lian shifted the conversation, asking, "Then... does it mean that aside from liking someone, the only other option is to dislike them? Are these the only two attitudes one can choose from?"

San Lang chuckled and retorted, "Why not? Right is right, wrong is wrong. To love is to love, to hate is to hate. Why can't things be clear and straightforward?”】

… ah.)

To address the second argument for real, i believe that producers retain no moral authority over the methods by which consumers engage with their products. for instance, i believe that choosing not to follow the official “twist, lick, and dunk” method when eating oreos does not constitute disrespect towards the oreo brand. Or to use another analogy, suppose a farmer selling apples insist that you peel the apples before eating them. I believe that it does not make you a bad person if you choose to eat the apples unpeeled, despite the farmer being the one who watered and harvested the apples from their trees.

I am thinking of potential counterarguments, and the strongest one I came up with is: “but products like oreos and apples are fundamentally different from intellectual property.” And I think the main issue here is that, to employ economics terminology, the content of novels like tgcf is a non-rivalrous good (not the novels themselves but the abstract content), which means that my consumption of it does not reduce availability to others. In other words, unlike Oreos or apples wherein after I purchase them, the specific items I bought are no longer physically in the hands of the vendor; after encountering characters like Shen Qingqiu, Shen Qingqiu still exists abstractly in MXTX’s head. This gives the illusion of ownership on the author’s part. I want to be very careful here because I think it’s easy to equivocate between different uses of the word “ownership”. I am not arguing that the author fails to retain ownership in negation of all the blood, sweat, and tears that went into the creative process, i.e. their copyright. Instead, I am contending that, just as I paid for my Oreos and apples, upon my purchasing of the Seven Seas version, the paperback Chinese version, and the revised uncensored version of TGCF on JJWXC, the author does not own the ways by which I choose to engage with these fictional entities. Once a work is made public, its ontology becomes independent of the author’s intent, and in all its readers’ heads exist distinct versions of the characters, in effect making them belong to all of us.

(There. As a bonus I have also resolved the issue of not being “chinese” enough. Ah, is this a bad place to make a communism joke?)

Addressing the legal side of things

In 2022 I wrote to the legal team at AO3, and here is their response:

Regarding the “moral rights”, that’s actually a thing. Upon receiving lots of spam from 12-yr-old readers that “you are breaking the law”, I did a quick Baidu search (China’s Google) concerning the legality of splitting/reversing ships. Surprisingly, the search results yield “yes, it’s illegal”, and hence the 12-yr-olds' confidence. But that is akin to getting a cancer diagnosis from searching symptoms on Google. So I dug deeper. 

After reading tens of published papers and court cases, here are the key takeaways of what I found:

Given that intellectual property rights are a bit behind in China, they have largely based their laws on US copyright law. As organizations like OTW continue to fight for the rights of transformative works in the US, China probably will just follow suit.

The semantics of “distort, mutilate, or otherwise harm the integrity of their works in a way that harms the author’s reputation” is very vague and debatable. There are at least three ways to interpret it (I think one of the papers I read offered four). The first is that they only have to prove that you distorted the integrity of the work. The second is that you satisfy the condition of harming the author’s reputation. The third is that you satisfy both conditions (integrity of work and author’s reputation). It depends on the court. 

None of the court cases pertained to unserious, just-for-fun fan works. Usually what happens is someone makes a film out canon, for example, and sell it for profit, or someone publishes their own novel which contains characters from another published work. 

And that is for China only^ if you live outside of China, you are under another country's jurisdiction.

-

Closing remarks

I am addressing this issue because it has impacted me and my friends in many ways. "kill yourself if you split/reverse the official ship" is probably the least of our concerns, mainly because it is such a popular phrase that we've become desensitized to it. @/Eleven receives private messages on Lofter on a weekly basis of people wishing her entire family to get murdered. A hualian main friend of mine has been posted to Weibo for following me; and I had to pull a Shi Qingxuan with "hey let's not be friends anymore if being associated with me is gonna get you cancelled".

mxtx has been through a lot and i understand where she's coming from. and maybe, the people who identify as "kill yourself if you split/reverse the official ship" don't truly mean it -- maybe they're just expressing their love for the official ship.

Recently i've been seeing the sentiments I used to only witness in Chinese fandom surface on Twitter and sometimes I worry that western mxtx fandom is going to turn into Chinese mxtx fandom, with the in-group/out-group mentality -- you're either with us or against us. At the end of the day, I do like mxtx, I admire her tenacity and I think she's a brilliant author, I love her works and the characters in them. I simply do not want to be backed into the corner of "anti" due to not following every order she gives.

祝墨香和她的粉丝们平安。

my one and only contribution to the fandom

Anyone ever think of the comparison between yanshen and hualian, coz idk why but I've always thought that if HC never met xl and still became a supreme ghost king and then met xl he'd be exactly like yan wushi coz (I believe) part of the reason why hc had to meet xl when he was younger was that children are much more open to being helped without ulterior motives.

Part of the reason why hc doesn't have many people close to him (again it's simply my belief) coz he grew up only having xl as a source of kindness and was very cynical towards everyone else around him so much so that just at the age of 10 he decided to commit suicide and even at a place where people held the belief that if he disturbed the ceremony then the whole kingdom would collapse.

That sort of resentment is soo hard for a 10 year old boy. If hc wasn't rescued by xl on time and then met him 800 years then he'd also be like yan wushi testing xl again and again to see if he's actually genuine. There is a reason that most fanfiction authors have xl and hc meet when they were much younger, a grown person is so much harder to help since they are so adverse to it suspecting it to be with ulterior motive.

As much as people like to think that if hc met xl in canon timeline and would just be poof in love that won't happen, in fact hc would just bother xl all the time (like yan wushi did with Shen Qiao) and push him to his limits. Likewise sq and xl are also very similar, say xl hadn't met hc as Wu Ming and took the curses wouldn't he also end up like sq? With all the I deserve punishment and the punishment he'll take for who knows how long (given wm dispersed and xl can't as he's a god.)

( I'll shut up now sorry I just write too much sorry)

Hua Cheng, after Wu Ming: "When faced with any problem, I only have to ask myself 'What would Second White No-Face Xie Lian do?' I will completely base my personality and moral code on this question, as an act of devotion. When next I meet Dianxia, we will be a perfect match."

Hua Cheng: becomes the Great Feared Calamity Ghost King

Hua Cheng: meets regular Xie Lian, just a very nice guy

Hua Cheng:

Hua Cheng: "Shit"

wealthy, gifted, loved and admired guys that need a lesson in humility to earn their comforting big-dick boyfriend xD

now i’m not denying the fact that these characters were privileged at at least some point in their life (xl being born into it as royalty, sy being a second-generation rich kid and wwx being adopted by the jiangs), but saying that they ‘need a lesson in humility to earn their comforting big-dick boyfriend’, in my opinion, is a gross misrepresentation of their characters.

from the way you phrase it, you make it seem like the advantages that these characters’ possess is an inherently bad thing. privilege is no one’s sin. none of these characters asked to be born with talent and/or riches, it’s simply just the circumstances they happened to find themselves in, and there’s nothing they could have done about it.

being privileged in and of itself is neither inherently good nor bad, and the deciding factor lies in whether privileged individuals choose to acknowledge this privilege, and how they choose to use it.

some choose to use it in a way that is harmful due to perceived superiority and arrogance. this is when there is a need for ‘a lesson in humility’ in order for there to be character growth.

now do kindly elaborate and provide some concrete examples rooted in fact to illustrate your point. how do these three characters choose to use their own privilege to harm? i would be more than happy to hear you out provided you can give valid proof.

I dunno, I think that post-Scum villain MXTX wants to write a poor mistreated Cinderella protagonist, but somehow keeps ending up with these wealthy, gifted, loved and admired guys that need a lesson in humility to earn their comforting big-dick boyfriend xD (Hard work, who? Don't know her, I was born better/wealthier!)

Like, the boyfriend is universally a dick to the protagonist's family members/friends who in any other story would be terrible abusive faithless monsters - but somehow MXTX cannot write them as anything else than decent, upright, complicated and dedicated people who only leave the protagonist's side when faced with insurmountable odds, and yet still try to support them.

Dunno, it's like we're trapped in the genre and can't get out :0

Holy trinity of buffoonery

”Hua Cheng would never bottom” are you high. Are you on drugs. What is it you smoke. Is it crack? Weed? Coke? Are you huffing glue? Are you on mushrooms? Xie Lian could politely go ‘I think I wanna top tonight’ in passing conversation and that man (ghost?) would go ‘Ok Gege :D I love you’ and then he’d happily get his back blown out, and he’d be arching the whole time. I know him personally so I can vouch. Get your act together.