Heaven Official's Blessing, No Paths Are Bound

[momijizukamori]

Someone: Got any good reading recs?
Me, appearing out of nowhere: Have you heard the good news of His Highness the Crown Prince of Xianle?

AKA the donghua made me impatient, so I read the Tian Guan Ci Fu novel in a week, and enjoyed it immensely. My only nitpicky criticism is that literally every chapter ends with a cliffhanger, which I suspect is an artifact of the fact that it was published serialized, but made finding good stopping points hard (and this is absolutely not a 'read in one sitting' novel purely in terms of length. Stuff I liked (spoiler-free):

- Loyalty kink cranked to 11. Or possibly higher than 11.
- Superpowered people + domestic fluff (someday someone will give me the Summers family trying to be a normal family. SOMEDAY)
-Very few hatesink villains (one of my few frustrations with MDZS - too many villains who have no personality beyond 'being as awful as possible')
- Actually pretty good communication between people when it counts?
- As befitting a tale of immortals, everything is Epic As Fuck
- Gender shenanigans! Both crossdressing and physical shape changing, because gods.
- I love Xie Lian and Hua Cheng both so much. And kind of want to be Hua Cheng a little (but like, without the horrific traumatic backstory). What a suave motherfucker.

Comments

[rekishi]

Your last line is such a Mood.

The thing is on my kindle (along with the MDZS novel). I haven't gotten round to it yet.

[momijizukamori]

Yeah that's me and like.... most fictional characters lol

I need to dig up the epub I made of MDZS and throw it on my kobo for when I can put down fanfic for more than five minutes.

[rekishi]

I also made an epub and recently cleaned it up a little (Wei WuXian to Wei Wuxian, GusuLan to Gusu Lan etc). I'm thinking about replacing the first three chapters with the Yunmei translation, but they're just doing it for kicks so progress is understandably slow over there.

[momijizukamori]

Yeah there's like.... three or four different translations of the early chapters, and I'm not sure which version is best. I need to add in the secondary translation of chapter 73+ that I found linked somewhere, because I think that set is supposed to be better than Exiled Rebel's? But.... effort. Having a really nicely formatted epub already for TGCF was very nice.

[rekishi]

ooph, which one is that? Is that pre- or post last edit by MXTX? Because both seem to exist.

I came upon translations masterlist recently, but have no clue how complete that really is.

How's the TGCF translation? I've heard mixed things about one of them but don't know if that's the one that you liked (which is also the one I have). I also have a shortcut to a google drive folder which has translations, but those are copy protected and extracting them is probably not welcome (and a pita, tbh). Thoughts?

[momijizukamori]

My understanding with TGCF is that there's only one set of complete English translations online - it's the epub I have, and is probably also the protected gdrive folder you have (both are linked on the carrd site). There's another set of partial translations - one group did up to chapter 26 or so, and another group picked up where they left off and is currently up to... somewhere around chapter 40? I can't comment on translation accuracy, but the version I read was definitely solid in terms of readability - I felt like they made good decisions on what things to translate and what to merely romanize and explain in footnotes. They also seemed to put a good amount of effort into translating puns/idioms, and explaining their choices in footnotes, which I know is a tricky thing to do. The prose is a tiny bit stilted in spots, but at a level I expect for prose translations from Japanese and Chinese, and which I think is more a function of differences in style and the way those languages encode waaaaay more information into a single sentence than English does. (and I should say, I have an English Lit minor and have been a voracious reader since I was really little, so I'm more attuned to noticing flaws in prose than the average reader)

That masterlist looks pretty complete to the translations I know of, though some of the chapter numbers may be a little off for some of the ongoing translation projects. I think all of them are post-edits, basically?

[rekishi]

Well that sounds encouraging! ...for if I ever get around to it. -_-

I need to spend some tome on the different translations, if I get the motivation for it and see what to replace with what and when. But that was a chunk of work and are now a loooot of words to read. hrm

I did finally spend the time to get the translated audio drama at least.