Hello!
I’m currently reading your fic “Shanshen” and I cannot get over the designs you choose for some characters - like the “potbellied, blue-skinned” wardens. Are they actually designs from the Chinese mythology? They are so creative!
Also: Did such terrible thing (silencing him forcefully) happened to Wukong in the original poem? I cannot get to that point fast enough in my reading and I was wondering.
As always: love your fics! Thank you for any answers!
He was indeed fed molten copper and iron pellets while under the mountain! However, in the novel, it said he was given these to eat and drink because the Buddha was compassionate toward him, so on my first read-through I sort of shrugged and thought, okay, stone monkey can eat metal...he's for sure done wackier things!
But when you get into the allegory, the time under the mountain represented a death/ stint in hell, and Wukong was "reborn" as an enlightenment-seeking monk afterward. So Buddha might actually have been showing compassion by making the imprisonment more hellish, thereby burning through Wukong's massive negative karma faster. There is after all a "Hell of the Hungry" in Buddhism where sinners are fed molten copper and red-hot iron pellets! The illustrations are accompanied by a lot of graphic...steaming.
Honestly it makes sense to me that Wukong would prefer short-term pain to long-term isolation/ boredom? Still, it's exceedingly grim.
As for the wardens, I honestly just searched up a whole bunch of pictures of the Buddhist Hells and picked a design I liked! (Also, YEESH. I mean, I read Dante's Inferno at a formative age, and I was still pretty taken aback by some of those creative torments.)
