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

[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.