The four-volume Library of Chinese Classics bilingual edition of Creation/Investiture of the Gods (Fengshen yanyi, c. 1620) published in 2000 is the only full-length translation of the story available in English. I've had a PDF of the entire set archived on my external blog since May of 2020. It is serviceable for the general reader, but it is not great for hobbyist researchers like myself.
I'd like to provide an example showing how it is not very accurate and/or comprehensive. Chapter 12 describes how young Nezha inadvertently causes havoc in the underwater realm when washing himself in a river with a powerful magic sash. This eventually leads to Li Gen (李艮), a yaksha water-spirit soldier, to attack him with an ax. Gu Zhizhong's (2000) translation reads:
Nezha, naked and empty-handed, dodged the vicious blow, raised his Universal Ring and struck Li Gen on the head. How could the Yaksha withstand the magic weapon from Fairy Primordial! His skull broke open and he fell dead on the river bank (Gu, 2000, vol. 1, p. 239).
However, the full Chinese reads:
Standing there naked, Nezha dodged the advancing warrior's attack and upraised the Universal Ring in his right hand. This treasure was originally bestowed by the Jade Emptiness Palace of Mt. Kunlun to the Perfected Man of the Grand Monad to secure the items of his Golden Light Cave. How could the yaksha withstand the magic weapon as it struck downward on his head? His brains exploded from the blow, and he fell dead on the shore.
哪吒正赤身站立，見夜叉來得勇猛，將身躲過，把右手套的乾坤圈望空中一舉。此寶原係崑崙山玉虛宮所賜太乙真人鎮金光洞之物，夜叉那裏經得起，那寶打將下來，正落在夜叉頭上，只打的腦漿迸流，即死於岸上。
(I don't consider myself a translator, so please forgive any errors.)
You can see that quite a bit of information was left out. This happens throughout the entire novel. This makes me angrier the more that I think about. Why even bother to translate something if you are only going to paraphrase or even skip over passages? It seems like a pointless enterprise.
Source:
Gu, Z. (2000). Creation of the Gods (Vols. 1-4). Beijing: New World Press.
This is just speculation on my part, but it might be because the translator/publisher wanted to have that format of alternating pages in hanzi and English. Because Chinese (especially the old style FSYY is written in) is much more compact than English, they would have to trim the translation down in order to fit it in the same number of pages as the original. It's actually been helpful for when I see something in the translation I want to investigate further, because then I don't need to search as much for the specific word/passage in the og---I know it'll be in the corresponding page.
It's still frustrating that this is one of the only English options out there, but it does have its uses ig.
I can't be the only one who noticed Nezha 's Phoenix motifs. Association with fire, belt resembling tail feathers and being paired with a dragon. I don't see anyone else make their own phoenix!Nezha design, so here's mine😊
do you know why i've been slacking on the fsyy stuff ?
tomodachi life happened. and yin hong is a yandere in it.
okay lemme explain :')
what happened was miis can fall pretty easily in this game, and somehow huang tianhua ended up as the island's playboy. and by that i mean pretty every boy and enbys fell very quickly for him even without my intervention. (oddly enough there wasn't any girl who fell for him. foreshadowing)
one of his victims was yin hong. and like at first i was like "oh okay could be fun."
bro got rejected by tianhua and crushed over him 5 times in total. By the third time, there was a narrative in a discord server where yin hong was secretly a yandere (and muzha was a fanfic writer who witnessed everything). but what solidified it was tianhua himself. bro knew yin hong had a crush on him and he enjoyed seeing him suffer.
so i fully embraced the narrative, ruined huang tianhua's relationships until he goes out with yin hong. that's called karma and karma doesn't like bitches, bitch.
and now that it is the case, i have exhausted my options :')
anyway aside from that, i have other doodles related to the game
how tianhua first met ji fa
ji fa and yin jiao agressivily complimenting each other (they were bff back then)
longji crushes over chanyu who crushes over yang jian
Putting my hanfu/textile cheat sheet here so more people can reference it. Disclaimer my Chinese is mid. I made this so I could browse Taobao better. Will probably update this as I learn more.
Happy 10 years to this blog! So much has happened and changed in just a decade. I hope I have improved in those past 10 years, and I hope I can continue to improve in the following decade.
Thank you to any and all who have found my unmitigated chaos (or at least a piece of it) worth your time!
Questions never asked but I’ll answer them here
Q: why is your art tag ‘illia draws’?
A: I had a dnd character named illia at the time I was working on making my blog more organized, so I went back and retagged everything after creating that art tag. There’s a post about her on the blog
Q: why is ur blog called darkflierazura
A: Fire Emblem. to be clear though it’s not named after the fe character, I made a FE:13 avatar named Azura like a month before the FE:14 trailers dropped. (I wonder if I have a post about her design on my blog. Maybe idk, I’m not checking)
Q: why doesn’t your art tag, your blog name, or your blog header match eachother?
A: because I’m bad at branding
Q: What will you be doing in the future
A: idk, whatever catches my flights of fancy next I suppose.
So you can avoid them stealing things from you, the artist/writer, etc.
Pro GenAI websites/Programs:
Facebook
Instagram
X/Twitter (Remember, Grok gives people cancer)
Threads
Pro Writing Aid
Grammarly
Duolingo
Google Docs
Microsoft Word/all Microsoft products Takes from and will feed their machine.
Youtube (taking advantage of people who are hearing impaired. ==;;)
Adobe Products. All of them. If you HAVE to use them (Some businesses require it), save offline because there is a film of at least some privacy protections there, so if you have to sue, you can say it violates US privacy law. Remember, contracts do not circumvent US law.
Corel won't feed the machines, but still uses AI stolen from other artists. Which sucks since Corel Draw is the second best overall for vector programs. (Plus I love Painter, but I bought the offline version to avoid AI). (Canadian company)
Canva Takes and feeds their machine.
Deviant Art Not only supports AI, but put a tool in and said they are going to steal your work if you like it or not for their machine.
Sketchup went Pro-GenAI. The thing is that you can do the same thing in Blender these days with precise measurements.
Autodesk has stated they are Pro-Gen AI here. It is not clear if they will use your models to feed their machine. But be on guard. They make Maya and 3Dmax. You can replace it with Blender.
Neutral ground:
Tumblr (there is a way to opt out [Link] and they don't have an active AI machine.) https://www.tumblr.com/dookins/743519550598987776/heres-how-to-disable-third-parties-like-ai
Etsy allows GenAI, but still has some (minor) restrictions. I'd still be cautious. (Also be cautious of drop shippers). Complaints about too much AI and AI images+patterns made by Ai still exist on the website. They lean slightly more pro-AI, but still won't let it run completely amok, say like Facebook. They won't feed your work into a machine, but also don't ban it through robots.txt.
Bluesky They don't use an AI algorithm except for in the "Discover" section of their website, but while they are anti-GenAI strongly, they don't seem to block the Gen AI bots from entry, so you'd still have to use Nightshade or Glaze (links below). There is no opt-out because they don't need an opt out. (Leaning towards strong position on AI, but I wish they would block GenAI bots).
Searxng- If you super want to screw over Google, in general, and have some tech savvy, you can set up your own search engine through searxng. It's easier on Windows and Linux than it is on a Mac. (Mac you need Docker), but if you're determined on privacy, Searxng adds a layer of privacy. Some of it sometimes uses bits of AI, but most of it doesn't and you can fuss with the settings so it doesn't spit out AI results. At sheer minimum Google will stop spitting out weird videos on Youtube at you because in your private browsing, you searched for the origin of ball bearings while not logged in for a book and Google likes to break privacy laws.
Strong positions against AI:
Scrivener (Creator vowed against AI) Writing program. There is an active forum, and versions for Mac, Linux and PC. It is paid, but at ~60 USD, it's cheaper than most programs. There is usually a holiday sale around Christmas. It has a learning curve, but with an active forum with the programmer of it there to ask obscure questions it's not a dead zone. They often take suggestions and implement them over time. (Especially if you rank the importance, applications, etc) US company.
LibreOffice Open source and free Spreadsheet and Word processor program that can replace Microsoft Word. Some people might have seen older versions where it was called Neo Office (now extinct) and Open Office. LibreOffice is still populated, plus the forums are super helpful if you get stuck. The UX is pretty intuitive if you've used Microsoft Word. Scrivener, BTW, supports exporting to odt (the native file) as well as .doc, and this can open both. The slight thing is that sometimes it doesn't export to .doc smoothly. And I DO wish more magazines, and agent (big clue here) supported .odt files since it is free. Part of the reason .odt isn't as supported is because Microsoft and Adobe have a deal with the devil with each other, so Adobe's Book formatting program InDesign doesn't support ODT. (BTW, if you have a good open source replacement for InDesign that supports ODT, let me know.)
Dabble (as suggested by SF stories, see reblog) is a writing program. Similar to Scrivener. Has vowed against AI and to resist it. 108 dollars a year for Basic. It is almost twice the price of Scrivener who lets you update for fairly cheap. 29 dollars a month, v. 59 dollars for the whole program (Scrivener) for the same features of Premium. You choose.
yWriter is a free Writing program and like Scrivener, and has vowed against AI Last I looked it had some UX issues, but some people swear by it. The learning curve is higher than Scrivener which is saying something.
Ellipsus is an online writing program and vowed against AI. The main feature I like (which Scrivener doesn't have) is the ability to change spellcheck based on region/language. It is a requested feature of Scrivener, but lower priority. So if you have a Brit, you can get the spelling for the character. They are a British-based company.
Cara.app (The creator of the website sued GenAI there is no chance they'll convert) is an artist website. Cara is trying to institute an auto Glaze/Nightshade into the website if given enough funds. People see it as a soft replacement for deviant art. (which went fully AI) If you believe in human art, please donate if you can. Zhang Jingna, the Creator,is Chinese-Singporean. She lives in Singapore.
Clip Studio Paint added AI, but saw the light and decided to protect artists instead because of protest and removed it. There are tutorials and a good forum if you get super stuck. Based in Japan, so the UI and UX is really clean.
Davinci Resolve Pro is a film editing software that's super good. There is a free version and a paid version. The forums are responsive. The programmers aren't always present. There is a healthy group of tutorials. US company. Clean UX. It does take a little bit of time to remember the shortcuts.
Tahoma2D is anti-AI and open source animation program. Takes a little getting used to, but is good for animations and doesn't crash as often as Animate. Programmers are in the forums and some bugs are fixed within hours. The forums are super responsive and helpful.
Krita open source and free, no AI. I'd rank it secondary to Clip Studio Paint (which is paid) I haven't tried the forums, but it's pretty intuitive and can stand for a lower level replacement for Painter, and do a lot of the basics of Photoshop. It's usually ranked higher than the equally open source Gimp.
Writer P AKA Writer+ (app for when you're on the go) is a simple word processor app for your phone that doesn't use AI. The original programmer stopped updating, so Writer+ person took over and isn't out to make a profit since it's free in the spirit of the original app. It has subfolders you can use. Since it was programmed before GenAI it doesn't have AI. Intuitive, easy to use. Fairly easy to upload the files through three dots->share. The files can save to your card or phone with some settings fussing. Simple word processor.
Inkscape is a free vector program and no AI. It is harder to use than illustrator and has less features. But if you're doing smaller vectors for one-offs with less complexity, it'll do you after some learning curve. Best of the lot. I hate Affinity Designer which is the same thing, only paid. (Neither Affinity program was worth the money paid)
Affinity (Designer, etc) swore to be AI-free and does Vector and Photos. The UX is messy, I dislike the program and regret paying for it. Inkscape and Krita are better UX and do the same thing. The forums aren't as friendly since there has been an onslaught of people seeing it's supposed to be a replacement for Photoshop and Illustrator, but the programmers aren't present. The people on the forums are often on edge about this assertion. And the capabilities of the program don't outshine basically Krita or Inkscape capabilities (both free). What is usually intuitive is not. UK company. If you're going to pay for a program, go for Clip Studio Paint which rivals Corel Painter.
Blender is a 3D art program and does not use GenAI. It can do 2D animation, but Tahoma is easier to use in this regard. It's open source and free. Plus there are plenty of tutorials. The forums can be touch and go sometimes, but there are plenty of sub Blender communities that might be responsive. It can also do animation.
Handmade vowed against AI and promised to never sell itself for stock prices to prevent AI (as a replacement for Etsy.)
Discover a world of creativity and craftsmanship through Handmade, an innovative platform connecting passionate artisans with discerning buy
Proton (to replace Google Suite) as suggested by SF Stories (see reblog) Vowed against AI. They are missing a spreadsheet, but have online and offline capabilities, plus a built-in VPN.
But you need a pro website...
Look up robots.txt and AI bots: https://www.cyberciti.biz/web-developer/block-openai-bard-bing-ai-crawler-bots-using-robots-txt-file/
Use cloudflare:
Use Nightshade:
https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/whatis.html
which will poison the algorithm
Use Glaze:
Take Away:
The thing is you think you doing it alone will do nothing, but the more AI feeds on itself, AI images, the worse they become, and the less detailed so, denying it the images, adding poison or not being able to read the human text is eventually going to lead to an AI collapse.
Analysis shows that indiscriminately training generative artificial intelligence on real and generated content, usually done by scrapi
And why not help that along?
I don't want to give cancer to poor people [Link] or make the planet burn faster [Link]. So GenAI collapse is everything I dream of. GenAI apocalypse is not.
Happy 10 years to this blog! So much has happened and changed in just a decade. I hope I have improved in those past 10 years, and I hope I can continue to improve in the following decade.
Thank you to any and all who have found my unmitigated chaos (or at least a piece of it) worth your time!
Questions never asked but I’ll answer them here
Q: why is your art tag ‘illia draws’?
A: I had a dnd character named illia at the time I was working on making my blog more organized, so I went back and retagged everything after creating that art tag. There’s a post about her on the blog
Q: why is ur blog called darkflierazura
A: Fire Emblem. to be clear though it’s not named after the fe character, I made a FE:13 avatar named Azura like a month before the FE:14 trailers dropped. (I wonder if I have a post about her design on my blog. Maybe idk, I’m not checking)
Q: why doesn’t your art tag, your blog name, or your blog header match eachother?
A: because I’m bad at branding
Q: What will you be doing in the future
A: idk, whatever catches my flights of fancy next I suppose.
It's been a year ! Holy fuck it's been a year and ideas keep on flowing :D
Okay okay okay ! So, I have things to share and say and wow i need to calm down, let's keep things organized here :')
In honor of the 1st anniversary of whatever this project is called, i will organize some things and share some new infos since i've been quiet lately (only because school needs my attentiion also). Everything will be down below !
But in short, Thank you SO MUCH for the support ! Seeing that people are interested in this or any other things that i do on this blog means so much to me !
Here's a plan of what's to come in the following days for the event :
Voiceclaims are coming ! A compilation of voices for some characters will come and with that, a special animatic :)
Comics are coming ! And I don't mean separate individual stories, I mean multiple comic strips with an overarching plot !
QnA ! Interaction with characters. I highly encourage you to use the ask box, either for characters or for me hehe
More characters, concept and infos ! Of course :) But, I'll tell you right away on who I've been working on : Ji Fa (Wu Wang), Deng Chanyu, Jiang Ziya, Shen Gongbao, etc... And here are some sneak peak :)
I'm also working on documenting about all that I made so far, making charater pages and a timeline too :)
I don't want to plan something big yet, like a DTIYS or merch as it is something time consuming, and i need time for school now :')
But lemme know if you would be interested in this or suggest something else.
Anyway, thank you again and see you very soon :D
I had this idea, that Yi Jiang goes to the palace to offer her talents in defense of the city. In the novel, this would be during chapter 37, while Jiang Ziya is visiting Mt. Kunlun.
Yi Jiang intro here
…Because when you are trying to procrastinate an assignment, you'll focus your attention on anything that isn't the assignment, no matter how strange the subject matter is.
So here is a list of the individual Chan juniors' body count during the course of the FSYY novel. Fantastic creatures (non-sapient, not yaoguais that have cultivated a human form, but aren't regular animals either) are listed separately.
Nezha: 15 characters
-Li Gen the Yaksha (Qiankun Ring to the head)
-Ao Bing (pulled off steed with sash, Qiankun Ring to the head, tendons pulled out)
-Verdant Cloud Boy (archery accident)
-Yao Shaosi (speared)
-Colored Cloud Immortal (speared)
-Deng Zhong (knocked off steed with Qiankun Ring, then speared)
-Ji Li (speared)
-Li Qi (knocked down with ring, speared)
-Pong Hong (knocked down with ring, speared)
-Wang Bao (knocked off steed with ring, speared)
-Ma Zhong (incinerated by the Nine Fire Dragon Bell Cover)
-Long Anji (knocked down by a ring better than his, speared)
-Gao Lanying (didn't get her needles out in time, knocked down, speared)
-Ding Ce (killed by the Qiankun Ring)
-Lu Renjie (knocked off his steed by the Qiankun Ring in a fatal blow)
Note: I didn't count the Colored Cloud Boy, Lady Shiji's other disciple that gets bonked by the Qiankun Ring, because his death is never confirmed, even though he was already "struggling for his life on the ground" when Shiji comes out of the cave.
Yang Jian: 13 characters, 2 creatures
-Chen Jiugong (speared)
-Zhou Xin (Skyhowler'ed, then chopped in half)
-Bi Huan (Skyhowler'ed, then speared)
-Wen Liang (tried to escape after being bricked by Nezha, got hit in the shoulder by Yang Jian's slingshot, fell off his horse, and died)
-Yu Hua (Leizhen Zi knocked him off his steed, Yang Jian finished him off with his polearm)
-Zhang Kui's mom (indirectly, he tricked Zhang Kui into killing her via transformation arts)
-Chang Hao (Yang Jian transformed into a flying centipede, snipped its head off, reverted to his true form, chopped up the snake, then incinerated it with Five Thunder Arts)
-Wu Long (Yang Jian turned into a golden rooster and pecked it to pieces)
-Yang Xian (tried to flee after seeing Yang Jian turn into a tiger, chopped in half)
-Dai Li (Skyhowler'ed, then speared)
-Guo Chen (speared)
-Lei Kun (speared)
-The Nine-headed Pheasant Demoness (indirectly: Skyhowler'ed, then decapitated by Zhou soldiers on the execution ground under Yang Jian's watch)
Creatures:
The Flower Fox Ferret, Mo Lishou's monstrous pet (Yang Jian burst out of its body after being eaten, tearing it into two halves in the process)
The One-horned Black Smoke Beast, Zhang Kui's magical steed (indirectly, same as Zhang Kui's mom)
Huang Tianhua: 7 characters
Chen Tong (Fire Dragon Dart sucked into Tianhua's flower basket, then decapitated by the beam of the Moye Sword)
The Four Mo Brothers (killed by the Heart-piercing Nail)
Yu Qin (killed by the Fire Dragon Dart)
Chen Geng (knocked off steed by the Fire Dragon Dart, then decapitated)
Yang Ren: 6 characters
Fang Yizhen (incinerated by the Five Fire Fan)
Li Ping (caught in the fan's AOE while trying to persuade Lv Yue)
Chen Geng (incinerated by the fan)
Lv Yue (incinerated by the fan)
Yu Xian & Yu Zhao (incinerated together)
Leizhen Zi: 5 characters
Xin Huan (Skyhowler'ed, then finished off by Leizhen Zi with a staff to the head)
Zhou Xin (Staff to the head)
Peng Zun (knocked off his steed via a staff to the shoulder, then decapitated)
Yu Guang (staff to the head)
Lei Peng (KO'ed with staff)
Huang Tianxiang: 4 characters
Feng Lin (speared)
Tao Rong (speared)
Gou Zhang (speared)
Gao Gui (speared)
Wei Hu: 4 characters
Yang Wenhui (Demon-subduing Club to the head)
Yu Da (clubbed)
Zhang Kui (clubbed)
Jade Pipa Demoness (indirectly: decapitated by soldiers under his supervision)
Jinzha: 3 characters
Wang Mo (immobilized by the Dragon Stake, then killed with a sword)
Yang Sen (immobilized by Dragon Stake, killed with sword)
Dou Rong (indirectly: Jinzha immobilized him with the Dragon Stake, but Jiang Wenhuan made the killing blow)
Muzha: 2 characters
Li Xingba (killed with one of Muzha's twin flying swords)
Lady Chedi (killed with twin flying sword)
...
Final Thoughts
-If you count the creatures, Nezha and Yang Jian's kill counts will be equal, though several of Yang Jian's kills are indirect.
-Jiang Ziya: tfw your logistic guy, responsible for overseeing the supply line, has a body count as high as your designated army vanguard.
-Yeah, Yang Jian's official job in the Zhou army is the Grain Transport Officer. I think it really fits his personality——the clever, ruthless trickster who's also a mature, polite disciple.
-Though Leizhen Zi's kill counts can't match Nezha and Yang Jian, there are multiple descriptions of him knocking down whole sections of the city wall with a single staff strike. Maybe he's the anti-fortification specialist of the team or something. /lh
-Huang Tianhua: the ranged attacker who keeps trying to be a melee DPS. /j
-For real though, he seems to rely a lot more on the Fire Dragon Darts from a slain foe, and when the Heart-piercing Nail is used after the Mo brothers' demise, it only ends up going straight through Xin Huan's wing and the Winged Immortal's right arm.
-Yang Ren always gives me the impression of a soft-spoken bureaucrat who gradually discovered his inner pyromaniac after receiving the Five Fire Fan.
-My list is only counting the named characters, but everyone on this list who's still alive during the Ten Thousand Immortal Formation Arc are described as unleashing their might and treasures during the battle.
-Considering the AOE effects of some of these treasures, they probably send a lot more filler NPCs into the Investiture.
-BTW, there are 151 names on the Investiture who are labelled as having died in the Ten Thousand Immortal Formation. 123, if you leave out the 28 Lunar Mansions, who are killed by the 4 Immortal Swords seized from Patriarch Tongtian's previous formation.
-How many percent of those 123 kills each Chan Sect participant is responsible for is up to your imagination.
-Forget about the Nezha age discourse——Huang Tianxiang was probably about 10 when he made his first kill, since the text described his head as "still bald". If I remember correctly, in the Ming dynasty, before 10, most children had their heads shaved completely bald, or leaving only a few patches of hair tied up in a braid/bun.
-He's also 14 when he made his third kill, and 17 when he was executed by Qiu Yin. Four chapters prior, Huang Tianhua died to Gao Jineng.
-Jinzha and Muzha: tfw your total kill counts combined is only a third of your little brother's.
-The one detail I've observed is that Jinzha ends up rescuing/attempting to rescue Nezha, Huang Tianhua, Jiang Ziya, and Tianhua again (together with Muzha) after they get knocked down.
-I feel kinda bad for Muzha when I look at the numbers. He does cut off one of Lv Yue's arms after recovering from his first plague attack, though.
who would have thought i would get attached to yin hong ? anyway here's some design notes !
unlike most characters, Yin Hong is designed as an inactive character, hence why there is no theme (yet). In fact,Yin Hong is designed as a foil first and foremost to certain characters : Yin Jiao, Ji Fa and Huang Tianhua.
Yin Jiao because they are brothers and I wanted to accentuate their differences, for example, Yin Jiao keeps his hair short while Yin Hong decided to let them grow. Yin Jiao seems cold and tense while Yin Hong is more relaxed and approachable. Yin Hong has a strong build while Yin Hong looks more frail.
He is also a contrast to Ji Fa but mostly because Yin Jiao is Ji Fa's foil too X). But aside from that, they are designed in a similar way, not being active for most of their stories, seemingly nice. Yet they have different paths. (I'll show him one day i promise)
Lastly Huang Tianhua, simply because him and yin brothers have a mark on their forehead and I decided that during Yin Hong's arc, Huang Tianhua would be Yin Hong's narrative foil. Yin hong's purple-violet constrast and marries well with Huang Tianhua's yellow-orange. Hm. Complimentary and analogous.
I said the word "foil" way too much. Foil, foil, foilfoilfoil.
Oh yeah, i mentionned hair. Like i said earlier, Yin Hong decided to let his hair grow back unlike his brother. I think it's already enough information to give you a hint of the direction his story is going to. Aside from that, I gave him a wolfcut. I'm not entirely sure why I associate the Yin with wolves but I do and I think it fits. (who am i kidding, i know why i associate them with wolves. peter and the wolf, the ji being rabbits, etc.)
I don't have much to say but only because it is not the only design he'll have for sure. Yin Hong is also one of the most expressive characters I drew so far, and the one i changed the story the most. And I am excited to show it to you :)
