been rereading tgcf and I wanna talk about it.
Ultimately it is a tale of resilience and perseverance and the strength and power of actively choosing kindness, breaking out of trauma cycles and of course forging your own, third path.
Just before arc 4 you get this whole xianle trio reunion and hc chase shenanigans. The cave of ten thousand gods is great because finally xie lian knows the truth (or half of it), hua cheng is embarassed, scared and vulnerable but he still won’t just cower in the corner. He takes care of xie lian even if his old friends think he’s nuts and want to protect xl from hc. But they never even listen to what he thinks or wants. (Ofcourse sometimes people don’t recognize it themselves if they’re being harmed.)
Anyways everything’s out in the open and feelings and care get returned, hooray!
Then in the flashback we see the trio again and their dynamic, their positions, the hierarchy between them, even as theyre facing poverty together, Xls leftover naïveté and ignorance and what formed the dynamics of their present.
„Xie Lian had always believed in "forever" —friends would always be friends forever, with no betrayal, no deception, no breaking up. Perhaps there would come a time when they had to part, but it wouldn't be for a reason like "things got too horrible."”
The absolute heartbreak of friendship breakups. And yet even though he truly saw them as friends how could it be when there is such a clear hierarchy between them? Mu Qing had to take care of his own mother along with Xie Lians parents and the three of them. Feng Xin couldn’t even tell him about Jian Lan. He was trying to earn money for them and for her at the same time. And he stayed unwaveringly beside him until he could not recognize xie lian anymore.
In arc 2 we saw who xie lian was 800 years ago and some of what knocked him down. But now we see he’s still a (defeated) crown prince and newly fallen god. He has to adjust to his new life. He’s proud. He’s humbled but still far away from his present day personality.
We see how much more he had to endure. Trauma he had to go through that no one even sees. That time when white no face/bai wuxiang would show himself to him but no one else could see?
He was (left) alone in his suffering, (besides a ghost that he couldn’t even recognize), but how could anyone support him if they did not know or understand what was going on? So with there being no one left to comfort xl beside white no face after everything, xl even feels touched by it in a corner of his heart. But still clearly and continuously sees and rejects him for and fights against the monster he is.
This is where the choosing kindness and overcoming trauma part comes.
To seek out and recover goodness and your own heart.
And how significant one act of kindness can be, how much it can move.
“One person. Just one. Really. Just one person was enough.”
Him choosing to wait for just one person to show and prove their humanity, proving with all his effort white no face still could not simply turn him into a copy, make him turn against his own humanity in the long term.
We also see the contrast of true harmful of obsession and stalking and true but not unseeing love and devotion. The little ghost fire and Wu Ming loving and wishing to protect him without even letting him know who he is.
Removing themselves when xie lian tells him to and yet also having a mind of his own and doing things against what he’s told. (The wall of ghost fires, the flower, the end.)
He sees xl but he doesn’t stop believing in or loving him. And the tragedy is that it is exactly what xl needs in that time but he can’t recognize it because of his trauma.
Is Hua Cheng boring and slightly codependent because of that? Because he is focused so much on Xie Lian? Maybe but I think because he does have so much of his own mind and makes his own decisions, against what xl tells him to or makes him look good, like in the beginning of the volume too, I think he’s interesting and sometimes seeing your loved one go through the worst will just do that with you. (Also he has his very own ideas about heaven and the systems in place and built up ghost city on his own. He doesn’t even agree with or want to follow xls path for himself. But what we also always see is their mutual respect for one another, never trying to change the other or force them.)
