skygiants

Reading on your phone on the beach is not ideal, but nonetheless I did in fact spend much of my time in Hawaii reading through the entirety of Heaven's Official Blessings, the third and longest web novel by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu of Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation fame.

This is definitely the most ambitious of the three books she's finished; on the one hand I don't entirely think it lives up to the scope of those ambitions, but on the other hand that's partly because my expectations were raised quite high by the ways in which it appeals directly to my interests.

On the first page we are introduced to our protagonist, Xie Lian, crown prince of Xian Le, who interrupts an important religious ceremony in order to rescue a small child falling off a building.

ADVISORS: You must show your repentance to the gods!
XIE LIAN: Saving people isn’t something bad. How could the gods fault me because I did the right thing?
ADVISORS: And if the gods do decide to blame you?
XIE LIAN: Then the Heavens would be the ones who are wrong. Why should the people who are right apologize to the ones who are wrong?
ME: oh no ... defiance of the heavens via Extreme Ethics is my greatest narrative weakness .... and I love him .....

FAST FORWARD EIGHT HUNDRED YEARS

Xie Lian, Theological Prodigy, has now ascended to godhood, descended in unbelievably tragic circumstances, ascended, descended, spent several centuries as a trash collector, re-ascended, and is now an absolute divine embarrassment. He has no spiritual power or money. When he enters the divine groupchat (of course the gods have a groupchat) he texts like a grandpa. He is almost completely beyond being embarrassed by anything in this world and spends a lot of his time encouraging everyone around him to just chill out; he's spent eight hundred years collecting trash, we can all have a little perspective and understanding!

ME: oh no ... I love him even more now ....

Shortly after his third ascension, Xie Lan meets San Lang, a mysterious and mysteriously powerful young man who - it turns out, in short order - is also Hua Cheng, the world's most prominent demonic ghost, who - it is revealed to the reader, in relatively short order - was one of Xie Lan's worshippers during his first bout of godhood eight hundred years ago. The rest of the gods are, naturally, concerned that the king of Hell City appears to be stalking Xie Lan. Xie Lan is just happy to have made a new friend! San Lang may be a sinister ghost but he's always been very helpful to him, so why should he judge? It's very awkward when Heaven sends him to break a prisoner out of Hua Cheng's dungeon, he really feels bad about it, of course he's going to do his duty but it's an unfortunately rude way to treat a friend and he hopes his pal will forgive him!

(The romance in this one is fascinating because on Xie Lan's side it's a pleasant low-key friends-to-lovers, while on Hua Cheng's side it is passionate religious fervor of 800 years' standing; the weird and intense line between worship and love is not a direct line to my id but I feel fairly sure it is a direct line to someone's!)

Other important characters include (but are not limited to):
- Shi Qing Xuan, a cheerful, generous, gender-shifting wind god, whose good luck is about to run out
- Ling Wen, the heaven's most important female god, a hyper-competent bureaucrat with a permanent stress headache
- Mu Qing, Xie Lan's former manservant, now a divine general with a chip on his shoulder, who (as Xie Lan earnestly explains) might spit in someone's drink but probably wouldn't poison it
- Feng Xin, Xie Lan's other former assistant, an earnest and forthright soul with a bad guilt complex who can't go ten words without dropping an F-bomb
- Quan Yi Zhen, essentially Fei Lu from Nirvana in Fire if someone had had the bad judgment to make him divine
- Ban Yue, an unfortunate ghost whom Xie Lan used to babysit when she was a little girl; spends much of the book in a pickle jar
- Qi Rong, who combines all the worst qualities of a mass-murdering demon and your incredibly embarrassing little cousin
- several small children whom Xie Lan does his best to care for over the course of the novel, except when plot interrupts and he forgets for a little bit.

(

alias_sqbr has a much more thorough cast list as well as content warnings and extensive and enjoyable recaps. I will note that a.) there are probably about twice the characters as in Grandmaster, but b.) like three times the female characters! and not only is the ratio better but they pretty much all make it to the end of the story! ... admittedly some of them are already dead at the time the story begins but they're not going to let that stop them, ask me about my favorite angry prostitute ghost and her terrible demon baby.)

Over the course of the next many chapters, the head god, Jun Wu, asks Xie Lan to investigate a series of unfortunate-for-the-heavens events; somehow, Xie Lan's investigations always end up exposing embarrassing behavior from the other powerful gods, each new incident more dramatic and ethically complicated than the last. From the beginning, the narrative is concerned with questions of ethics, divinity, violence and necessity: in a situation where the survival of one party seems to require violence to another, is a third solution possible, or will attempting to save everyone just end up harming everyone? What is the responsibility of a god to their people, or of people to their god? Is there any inherent justice to the divine cosmology, or is the entire system fundamentally flawed?

These are obviously difficult questions to answer! ( I have some spoilery thoughts about the way in which the book doesn't answer them! )

The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System is (I think) the first gay wuxia web novel by the author of Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation; it is definitely not as good as the latter but it is for sure much wackier ....

So the premise is that our hero, Shen Yuan, is just a long-suffering reader of bad web novels who, upon his tragic and accidental death, immediately gets transmigrated into the role of Shen Qingqiu, the villain of the bad harem web novel he was hate-reading on the day that he died.

My understanding is that 'portal fantasy transmigration specifically into the story of a web novel' is a not uncommon trend in contemporary Chinese fantasy. I don't know how many of them are, specifically, frustratingly mediocre-to-bad novels -- this could also be a very common trend and I'm just not aware of it -- but either way it's kind of amazing. Shen Qingqiu as an evil character in the original book projects a serenely competent image; Shen Yuan does his best to keep this up on the outside while fuming internally about the constant assault of nonsense plot points, and his wildly frustrated sarcastic running commentary is extremely funny.

There's also a deus ex machina system in Shen Yuan's head that prevents him from going dramatically OOC and hands out points for a.) staying in character and b.) fixing plot holes or filling out significant backstory in the original novel. There's absolutely no explanation for any of this, much to Shen Yuan's frustration, but it's all very meta!

Anyway! Shen Yuan's main concern is to alter the plot enough to prevent himself from being murdered in the future by Luo Binghe, the novel's original protagonist: at the point Shen Yuan has entered the novel, Luo Binghe is a cluelessly powerful half-demon sweetheart who's one of Shen Qingqiu's students, but Shen Yuan knows that after several years of Shen Qingqiu's bullying and sabotage, Luo Binghe will fall into the underworld and come out a cold revenge-driven antihero!

Although the deus ex machina system in Shen Yuan's head forces him to subsequently hand out several of Shen Qingqiu's plot-relevant betrayals, Shen Yuan's genre-savviness means that he's perfectly aware that Luo Binghe's plot armor is going to protect him from everything he throws at him, which results in a lot of early scenes like this:

PERIL: [threatens]
SHEN YUAN: oh Luo Binghe can take care of that
OTHER CHARACTERS: how can you let that hapless youth fight that peril, he'll die
SHEN YUAN: oh no, trust me, he'll be absolutely fine
LUO BINGHE: omg teacher no one's ever believed in me like you *__*
SHEN YUAN: what?
LUO BINGHE: nothing! oh hey teacher look I killed the peril!

It takes about half the book for Shen Yuan to realize the inevitable-to-the-reader fact that the various small ways he's been changing the plot have resulted in Luo Binghe completely ignoring all the other love interests scattered around the novel in favor of becoming absolutely fixated on Shen Qingqiu -- and once Shen Yuan does figure it out, he's more chagrined than anything else. He ruined a perfectly good harem novel protagonist, is what he did! Look at him, he's got gay obsession!

And, I mean, one of the stranger things about the structure of the book is that the romance never really ... like, Shen Qingqiu doesn't so much 'fall in love' with Luo Binghe as accept, with a mildly inconvenienced sigh, that if the genre of the novel has well and truly changed to 'gay romance' then he might as well get with the program. Oh, we've come to the bit of the plot when it's time to save the protagonist with the power of love? Ah, well, he always more or less knew this day would come, if we must have the magical healing sex then I suppose we must. It's wildly unromantic but it did make me laugh, so points for you, I guess, Mo Xiang Tong Xiu ...

Like The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, it looks like this book is going to be made into a Chinese tv series. I am if possible even more curious about this than I was the other, because there's enough plot in The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation that it's really not that difficult to sieve a workable non-gay storyline out of it (not that the live-action show that we've been watching has tried very hard -- more on this anon) but the entire point of The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System is "protagonist accidentally turns harem novel into gay romance" so how do you censor that?!

This Sunday was my only weekend day this month that was even partially free, and I intended to do all kinds of useful things with it, but instead I tripped and fell into reading all 100+ chapters of the gay wuxia web novel Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation. SOMETIMES THESE THINGS HAPPEN.

The plot: in backstory-land, Wei WuXian was a smug and annoying but good-hearted young prodigy with a promising future as the foster son of a leading sect of magical demon-fighting warriors and a couple of adopted siblings that he loved very much. Lan WangJi was his frenemy, an intensely stoic lawful good young prodigy in the same class at demon-fighting school, and together they had various demon-fighting adventures and a lot of UST!

Then at some point there was a war, and various terrible things happened, and instead of going down standard magical demon-fighting routes Wei WuXian decided to invent dark zombie magic, and Lan WangJi was like "I suspect this will end poorly?" and Wei WuXian was like "EH IT'LL BE FINE."

Unfortunately: it ended poorly! Many people died! Including -- at the hands of an army led by his adopted brother -- Wei WuXian, who at the time the story begins has been dead for thirteen years and is posthumously known throughout the land as a legendarily evil zombie master, which is why a depressed queer lad decides to commit the most goth suicide possible and invite Wei WuXian's demonic undead spirit to possess his body and get revenge on his behalf!

WEI WUXIAN, NOW AN UNDEAD SPIRIT IN A BRAND NEW BODY: ... well, this is awkward ... since I don't really want to get revenge on anybody .... and being considered a demonic spirit is honestly kind of insulting ......

Inevitably, Wei WuXian bumps into Lan WangJi in fairly short order --

WEI WUXIAN: well, since I'm now a universally hated figure, it's probably a good idea my old pal doesn't know who I really am! maybe I should just be as flirtatious and annoying as possible so he'll send me away again before he figures it out!
LAN WANGJI, WHO MAY OR MAY NOT HAVE SPENT THE PAST THIRTEEN YEARS IN DEEP GAY MOURNING: [loud silence]

-- and they end up on a long road trip together to investigate sinister demonic happenings that may all be part of a complex conspiracy, while also working through a series of flashbacks highlighting the ramifications of the choices they made in the past and what that means for the people they are in the present.

In my absolute favorite aspect of the plot, they also end up mentoring a collection of earnest but hapless teen trainees who keep accidentally stumbling into their monster investigation, including Wei WuXian's sulky nephew Jin Ling, and every one of these interactions is gold:

WEI WUXIAN: Yep. Congratulations. You're under corpse poisoning.
JIN LING: How is that something to congratulate someone for?!
WEI WUXIAN: It's another life experience. It'd be a conversation starter when you grow older.

There is definitely a version of this story that's a shonen manga from Jin Ling's POV, in which he's the hotheaded teen protagonist with a dog sidekick, and Wei WuXian and Lan WangJi are the ambiguously codependent adults with a mysteriously tragic backstory a la Mustang and Hawkeye who occasionally bail him and his Trainee Rivals out of trouble, and the dramatic reveal that the weird gay uncle Jin Ling has come to know and trust is in fact possessed by the undead spirit of his even weirder, even gayer zombie-summoning murder uncle who's widely blamed for the death of Jin Ling's parents becomes a major plot point two-thirds of the way in! I really enjoyed this version of the story but I might have liked that version even better, I'm so fond of bratty Jin Ling.

(For clarification, the body that Wei WuXian has been invited to possess is also Jin Ling's uncle. Jin Ling has no parents, but he is vastly overburdened with uncles.)

I also like: all the very intense wuxia loyalty stuff; the extreme competence that's largely on display by everyone except the teens, who are teens and can be forgiven; the sibling dynamics and the relationship between Wei WuXian and his adopted brother, which makes it through some classic pitfalls only to fall apart in more interesting ways later on; Wei WuXian's very endearing zombie general friend; the 2.5 female characters who get to do interesting things besides "be an angry mom"; the way the pacing of the flashbacks and the contrast of the backstory with the present-story emphasizes opportunities for growth and change; relatedly, the moments when current!Wei WuXian looks at his smug teen zombie master past self and is like "wow, I was such an edgelord"

Caveats: in a vast sea of dudes, there are 2.5 female characters who get to do interesting things besides "be an angry mom"; the first few chapters involve some moderately cringy queerphobic stuff that gets much better after the intro arc; the romance in the main novel itself mostly avoids Classic Yaoi Dynamics and is very much a partnership of equals, but there's some sexy bonus materials at the end that lean into the uke/seme stuff quite a bit more, so heads-up on that score if that is not your jam as it is not really mine ....

The novel has also been turned into an animated series that recently finished its first season, which I've seen the first episode of -- it's very pretty, but I'm curious to see how it goes, since apparently it dumps the flashbacks all at once, which will probably make for a very different story experience! (And also, due to censorship, I expect will probably be at least a little less gay. Plausibly deniable gay only.)