xie lian is poorly written (TGCF criticism)
I’ve said that I’ll be making a rant on why I dislike XL, so I’m here to keep that promise because everyone is so looking forward to my next hate post. I honestly found XL and HC to be the worst parts of TGCF, while I think most other parts of the story are actually pretty good, so I don’t hate TGCF like most of you believe I do, I just dislike Hualian. I don’t mean any offense to those of you who liked XL or TGCF in general, and definitely no offense to MXTX. Although I felt like her writing got worse in TGCF, she is still an immensely talented author and I respect her for all that she does, and all of this is just my personal opinion, and probably as far away from true as it can get.Now, just like HC, I have tried very hard to like XL, but I just can’t manage to like him. He is by far the worst MXTX MC in my opinion, and pales in comparison to SQQ and WWX. Now, without further ado, let’s get into why I don’t like Xie Lian.Why XL is a poorly written character in 5 long points;
He is bland and barely has a discernible personality
His character arc is flat and he doesn’t develop as a character and doesn’t learn from his mistakes
Is wildly unlikable in the flashbacks and a lot of bad things that happen is actually his fault
Is overpowered and again, a Mary Sue.
Point one is that he is bland and barely has a discernible personality. He is supposedly “kind, sincere, generous” and other positive traits you would expect a children’s book protagonist to have. But does he really have a personality though? Yes, he does have personality traits, but a lot of those traits are just so, so vanilla. He doesn’t have a personality that can make him easy to tell apart from other characters other than being the “boring one”.
He isn’t funny or outgoing like Shi QingXuan, and he isn’t sarcastic and sassy like Mu Qing. Heck, he has even less of a unique personality than Hua Cheng. Yes, HC’s personality is annoying, but even he has more of a personality than XL does. XL has no motive, goal, or any purpose in the story. He just tags along on missions that have nothing to do with him and just flirts with HC the entire way.He has no standout traits that make him a “unique” protagonist. SQQ is unique because he isn’t there to be heroic, but rather a panicked person forced to commit heroic acts to survive in the twisted world of a bad webnovel. WWX is unique because he is mischievous and laid back to the point of being annoying at first glance, but will actually throw his own life on the line to protect others. I can’t give Xie Lian a specific description of his character because his character is so uninteresting that it really can’t be described. When I think of XL, my brain just comes up with a bundle of words (nice, really dense, doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry) rather than a character as a whole. It felt like MXTX slapped a bunch of traits together and called it a day.
I guess XL is savage sometimes, but that feels so weird and out of character for someone that’s usually supposed to be quite outspoken.
You could argue that he’s been worn down by 800 years of torture and suffering so that he doesn’t really care anymore, and while that does make sense in a literal way, it makes the story less…exiting. I want to see his reactions to new situations, or how he thinks about the amoral or upright acts of the gods and demons, but instead of actually getting to see his thought process and his inner conflict, he’s just like “meh” and lets it pass. This is probably what ruined my investment in the story as XL just feels so bland and we don’t even get to see his personality through his reactions, therefore we’re just told his personality.
Point two is that his character is so inconsistent. For example, as said above, he is usually “nice, sincere, and kind” but then at times he is savage and sarcastic (like when he tells LQQ that he will die if they duel in book 1). It felt like MXTX couldn’t make up her mind and so she just made XL both outspoken and also savage. Another inconsistency is with his intelligence. At times he is extremely smart and can figure things out that other characters can’t, but at other times, he is blatantly dumb. Like with HC. He is so dense that it just doesn’t make sense! He’s an old, 800 year old god that should be good at reading people and can see through a person. But then when it comes to HC, his deliberate obtuseness isn’t really a coherent part of his character, but rather an excuse to put the confession at the end because none of the scenes before were “romantic enough.” And XL never picks up on any of the hints that HC drops, even when they’re blatantly obvious.
Yet another inconsistency is with his so-called “insecurity”. He supposedly doesn’t think he is good enough and thinks that he is a bad god, but then he goes up to LQQ and claims that he’s going to die if they duel with the arrogance of HC? Whenever he makes a decision with it he is stubborn to a fault, which someone who is insecure wouldn’t usually do (I would know). And then besides it being a reason for HC to comfort and baby XL, the insecurity never comes up again? Additionally, some things that someone in his position would think more deeply about, he doesn’t think about at all. For example, when he is told that HC burned down the temple of 33 gods, someone who cares about the common people would think something like “That’s terrible! The time and effort and money of these people all gone to waste, and civilians may have been injured in the fire.” Instead he is just mildly confused and that’s it. Again, you could argue that it’s because of 800 years of suffering, but it just makes the story so much less interesting and…coherent.
One last inconsistency is that how come nobody, absolutely nobody, has been his friend for 800 years. He is supposedly a nice person, but despite his niceness, he has not even TRIED to make friends and nobody has tried to make friends with him? It is shown at the end of book 4 that most people don’t know that he is the trash god, so shouldn’t they be more willing to make friends with him then?
Point three is that his character arc, just like HC’s, is so flat. The entire point of the flashbacks was so readers could throw a pity party for XL and feel bad for him, and so it’s just sad for the sake of being sad. XL doesn’t grow as a character, and what tiny bit of character development we do get is just…not great.
Just like HC, throughout the entire story, XL hasn’t changed a single bit in the present timeline. I don’t find this to be terrible, but as the protagonist, he should at least have some development. However, unlike HC, who’s jump from past to present is far too drastic, XL’s jump from past to present is far too small. He is no different in book 2 than he is in book 1, 3, and 5. You could say that in book 4 he comes to terms with the world and accepts it, but at the same time, in book 4 really all he did was angst, brood, and then suddenly become all sunshine and rainbows again. I do not consider brooding to be character development. This is because at the beginning of book 4, when he lets the other street performer go on and continue performing while he himself goes off and finds a new place shows that he is at least somewhat accepting of his current fate. He does fully accept it by the end of book 4, but going from partly accepting you are a beggar to fully accepting you are a beggar is not enough character development for 800 years. He also repeatedly emphasizes how unlucky he is and how he’s already used to suffering, and honestly at some point it stops being funny and instead just becomes like MXTX wants the reader to feel bad for him so hard.
Point four is that he is wildly unlikable in the flashbacks and he’s barely helped the common people at all. Yes, I find present XL to be bland, but at least he’s nice and likable, but him in the past is stubborn, stupid, and so overly righteous. If he had just listened to people, he would’ve avoided major disasters, and if he could just ask people before doing something stupid, he wouldn’t have been in the place he is today. This would make an extremely interesting plot point and place of conflict, but then the book just never addresses it? Like I don’t think the book registers that a lot of the stuff that happens is XL’s fault more than it is BWX’s. Additionally, XL is so overly righteous. His head is so full of “the common people” that he doesn’t give a second thought to the people around him.
For example, if he had just told the people of Xian Le to kill the people of Yong’an, he would’ve saved his kingdom, his people, his family, and his friends. But no, he had to think about “the common people” and let the people of his kingdom die, resulting in his downfall. Additionally, when he let the other street performers perform and he would leave, yes, that is a nice thing, but to FX, MQ, and his parents, it is just the worst decision. Rather than caring about the people near him and his ill dad, he had to be the white knight and leave.
And then a lot of the stuff in book 4 is his fault, but the book never addresses this. If XL wasn’t so overly righteous, MQ wouldn’t have left. If MQ didn’t leave, they would have one more person to make end’s meet. If they made end’s meet, then XL wouldn’t have to resort to robbery. Even if they didn’t make end’s meet, if he just listened to FX, he would still be fine. If he hadn’t committed robbery, he wouldn’t have been humiliated as hard in front of the 33 gods. If he wasn’t humiliated, then he wouldn’t be stabbed 100 times and he wouldn’t burn the Yong’an capital and have FX leave him and his parents wouldn’t have committed suicide.
And he says he wants to help the common people, but he hasn’t done that at all. In book 2, he hurt his kingdom and the tons of people that died from the curse, and didn’t lessen the casualties caused in the war at all. In book 4, the people that stabbed him all got burned to death by HC (why does XL in the present not consider this?), he burned the Yong’an palace and likely killed people, and yes, he did stop the human face disease this time, but because he was the one that unleashed it in the first place. When he was general Hua, he had tried to save the common people, but his actions really barely did anything in the future. As the Guoshi of Yong’an, he did more harm than good. So how has he helped the common people?And the book never addresses this? Like after he came back to his senses in book 4, Jun Wu doesn’t punish him and the people don’t hate him or anything. He hates himself instead, which feels like it’s just something that MXTX put in so that the readers and HC could go like “no baby, you’ve done your best, you’re amazing.” He is presented as an underprivileged angel and deserves all the love in the world because he’s such a nice person, but at the same time….no? He isn’t as great as the book makes him out to be and the fact that the book insists on him being a selfless martyr annoys me to no end.
And point five is that he is also an overpowered Mary Sue. Yes, just like HC, he has flaws, but these flaws never actually get addressed in the book and also are never used against him, and so the book treats him like he’s perfect. WWX has a very similar build to him, where they are both people that try to save people, but WWX has very obvious flaws that lead to his downfall and people call him out for such as his arrogance. But XL never gets called out for being stupid or stubborn, except for by HC to be “cute” (like as in “you’re so stupid because you never consider yourself.”)
He is much less a Mary Sue than HC because he isn’t “rich” or “renowned” like HC is, but in most other aspects he is just as bad as HC.First of all, he is basically just as powerful as Jun Wu even thought JW trained just as hard as him but for 800 years. Why? (Besides his plot armor and protagonist’s golden halo). He ends the book respected, loved, and super powerful and is also smarter than everyone else and is able to figure things out super fast, but is for some reason still collecting trash? Even though he has basically destroyed the entire status quo of the heavens just because he has suffered while nobody else actually suffered under the rule of Jun Wu, everyone still loves him. However, he is much better than HC in terms of being a Mary Sue because at least he isn’t crazy good at carving statues and can’t figure out dead languages, but he is still overpowered as heck and is either hated for no reason or unconditionally loved.
About the hated for no reason, why? Why is it that after the fall of Xian Le, everyone hates him? Like the logic that the people have for hating him is so convoluted and so weird that I just don’t understand. Just because the human face disease appeared during the civil war does not make it “his fault”. It’s correlation, not causation! Look, I don’t like XL, but having people hate on him for such a stupid reason feels so forced to me. I mean, I guess it kind of makes sense, but at the same time, it’s so exaggerated that I stopped caring. It feels like MXTX first thought that XL needed to go through literally everything bad for angst and so that when HC takes care of him it’s fluffier, but it felt like she wrote the angst first and rushed the reasoning.
Again, I respect MXTX for her hard work that she put into TGCF and by no means do I want to disrespect her for that. I don’t mean any offense to anyone who likes XL as well. Don’t worry, I’m not biased, SVSSS and MDZS will have their turn on the chopping block as well. As always, feel free to attack me in the comments, but be sure to stay respectful to each other and MXTX.
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