skygiants

If you happen to have thought to yourself 'skygiants hasn't been posting very much about books recently!', well, a.) that is because life has been quite hectic and I remain very behind but b.) it is ALSO because most of my reading for the last month-approximate has been the FIVE HUNDRED AND FIFTY-ODD chapters of Omniscient Readers Viewpoint, a Korean webnovel that I ... okay, this is very 'person who has only seen Princess Tutu getting real Princess Tutu vibes off this narrative' but I am VERY sorry I CANNOT help it although to be clear that actual experience of this book is almost nothing like the experience of watching Princess Tutu in any respect and is actually much closer to, like, the X-Men.

Okay, so the plot of Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint is that Kim Dokja, a twentysomething underachieving QA professional who has spent the past two decades of his life deeply obsessed with a lengthy and highly mediocre webnovel about the world entering a stage of divine narrative apocalypse where everyone gets superpowers and has to constantly undergo deadly challenges, is taking the subway home when all of a sudden the first scene of the webnovel begins to happen! The divine narrative apocalypse is right here, right now, and Kim Dokja -- the only person who actually read all three thousand chapters all the way to the end, and found it ultimately disappointing -- is not going to miss this opportunity to grab control of the narrative ... the thing is he read the whole book and while the protagonist is of course his boy and he loves him very much, he's pretty sure that given a chance he can do better.

The protagonist of the actual book, by the way, is a regressor -- he's Yoo Jonghyuk, a former pro gamer who after the apocalypse hits gains the power of infinite timeloop, i.e. every time he dies he simply returns to the starting point and gets to try again, thus gaining his own form of semi-omniscient knowledge. By the time the original novel ends, he's done over a thousand runs, seen all his friends and companions die multiple times over, and is incredibly grim and depressed! But at the time the book begins, which is where Kim Dokja enters the story, Yoo Jonghyuk only on regression 3 and is ... still grim and depressed, but hey, not nearly as much as he's going to be in the future!

A fun element for Kim Dokja: he knows that every time something goes terribly wrong Yoo Jonghyuk is going to be tempted to simply die and reset. However, he doesn't know what's going to happen to him if Yoo Jonghyuk dies and resets, so his mission is a.) convince an already-jaded Yoo Jonghyuk to team up with him and stay alive b.) also keep all his other favorite characters alive c.) get the good ending, he's plotted it all out in his head so many times over the years, and before the apocalypse he might just have been Some Guy but with his dedicated fan knowledge and his new narrative apocalypse superpower of Fourth Wall (which protects him by keeping him at a safe emotional distance from otherwise incapacitating things like 'painful wounds' and 'really sad events') he's really sure he can do it.

But of course as soon as Kim Dokja starts messing around with the plot, things start changing in ways even he can't predict -- and also, although originally his plan is to simply keep his favorite characters alive, there are also, like, real people here? Like, his coworker was on the subway with him, and his mom is running around somewhere (and the Fourth Wall gets extremely shaky whenever he interacts with her), and if those people are real what does it mean about the people he thinks of only as characters? What does it mean about his decision to orchestrate his own version of a Correct Ending? Is having a knowledge of somebody's narrative role and character traits the same thing as actually understanding them, as being able to communicate with them on a human level?

... so the thing about this book is that every arc is like '[heartfelt interrogation of the inherent impossibility of interpersonal understanding and the desperate act of faith that is communication] & that's why we need to convince three Monkey King clones to lend us Infinite Power Punch 3000 to use on Poseidon,' like I love the themes enormously but also the whole plot is highly dramatic nonsense and in the back half they end up having to fight every divine being that ever existed in any pantheon in existence 3x over, which is why the thing is five hundred and fifty chapters long.

BUT, ALSO, 'let's get real up our own navels about the role that narrative plays in human interaction and also fight God along the way' is essentially Becca's poison, the poison for Becca, so here we are.

Also the characters are good! Other than Kim Dokja and Yoo Jonghyuk, the other main party members include:

- Kim Dokja's polite and accomplished coworker from HR; she possesses the valuable apocalypse skills of 'studied business Spanish' and 'thinks murder is bad a normal amount'
- a former bartender/waitress turned ferocious avatar of Absolute Good; cool with (and good at) murder if it's for Justice, which does not stop her from feeling somewhat embarrassed that her main attack power requires her to declare 'JUDGMENT TIME'
- the party tank, a former soldier with undefined backstory trauma around his military service who finds specific instructions soothing; his arc involves developing an independent moral center and also learning how to turn into metal
- sad snarky mean teen who is the only apocalypse survivor of her high school class; favored by a famous Korean naval military god and will be super powerful if she ever stops being nervous around water -
- two small children with Talk To Insect Powers and Talk To Monsters Powers respectively; rescued by Kim Dokja at different points in the narrative and constantly up in arms over Who Has Cooler Powers and Who Is Kim Dokja's Favorite Adoptee
- a tired transmigrator who gets acquired from an alternate universe halfway through the narrative; special powers of Divine Internet; she is trans and the narrative/Kim Dokja is pretty weird about it for a while but eventually settles into the correct pronouns etc
- Kim Dokja's Plagiarist Rival who did NOT finish reading the book but DID read the first 100 chapters and promptly plagiarize them in order to write another, better, much more popular webnovel and Kim Dokja was the ONLY one who called her out on it and NOBODY believed him -- anyway now she can perform trope-based fortune-telling, among other things, and good for her
- Kim Dokja's Mom; it's fraught; also it's very important to the narrative that she has a role and a plot and a life separate from being Kim Dokja's Mom and I appreciate that very much

(There is no canon romance, btw; most people ship Kim Dokja/Yoo Jonghyuk, including some of the characters, but other people ship various other configurations and the book itself is primarily interested in Various Forms of Complicated Friendship.)

And although the plot goes on too long many of the plot points are also extremely good! Some of my favorites ( are spoilery )

Anyway! This post has gotten very long, but I beg you to forgive me, because 550 chapters is simply so many chapters to try and discuss. Am I going to also read the webtoon? Yes, God help me, but there's only 100 chapters of that at present, so presumably it won't take up quite as much of my life.

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! )

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.)