Repost of my massive review of Lost in Secular Love
I ended up singificantly expanding on some of the stuff I’ve written here about Lost in Secular Love for a reddit post, but never crossposted that post back here. Amending that now while the game’s still on sale! This post focuses on the higher-level themes and relationship dynamics of the game, but probably don't read this if you want to go into the game completely blind!
I actually first heard about Lost in Secular Love a couple years ago, on Chinese social media, as "that game where you date sexy Buddhist monks and you can toggle whether they're bald or have anime hair." It sounded entertaining, but more in the way of a parody game than a game you actually play for the romance. I didn't think about it again until recently, after I played My Vow to My Liege, fell for it hard, looked up the devs to see what else they'd made...and found out that they were the same people behind LiSL. Which got me intrigued!
The basic premise is pretty romcom: in a setting based on historical China, where the primary religion is basically Buddhism but the head monk of a temple is allowed to marry, Cui Qiye, the daughter of an impoverished gentry family, is handed a shot at marrying the heir to their local temple. She knows jack all about religion or spirituality--she's too busy being the sole breadwinner for her younger siblings and sickly widowed mother to think past the next meal, let alone wonder about the future of her soul--and she's not actually interested in the whole marrying thing. But temples own a lot of property and get a lot of charitable contributions! This marriage is her chance to provide for her family and eat three square meals of white rice a day! She'll do it for the white rice!
But the Chief Parishoner of the temple refuses to just let some ignorant laywoman marry a holy man--Qiye will first have to prove she's capable of at least a spark of enlightenment. So now this earthy snarky pragmatic girl who's gold-digging at a temple has to figure out this whole spiritual elevation thing in three months, or the engagement is off.
As she spends time at the temple and bangs her head against scripture, she gets to know three monk LIs:
ZhiKong, the temple heir, a revered holy man who seems to be above all earthly ties, also a spacey weirdo with an unsettlingly inhuman side
HuiHai, ZhiKong's younger brother, an adorable cinnamon roll who helps run the temple, the friends to lovers option
ZiQing, once Qiye's childhood friend, now a nearly unrecognizable rude salty tsundere and the temple's glorified janitor-in-chief
The game starts out with a lot of great lighthearted comedy, but a major turn in the story comes around the time her family discovers a previously lost land deed that solves all their financial problems. Qiye no longer needs to marry for the sake of her family! They no longer have to depend on her for survival! That's supposed to be a good thing! But instead, it opens a whole can of emotional worms for herself. For years, her life has been defined by doing whatever it takes to keep her family afloat. She didn't have time to worry about her own dignity or desires or long-term future--or perhaps, she was using her family as an excuse to not look too closely at herself. But now she's suddenly left adrift, her own life in her hands for the first time, and faced with some daunting, long-overdue questions. What the hell is she doing with her life? What does she actually want? Can she be honest about her own desires after dismissing and suppressing them for other people's sake for so long? Does she have the strength to stand up for her own happiness?
Qiye might not go on adventures determining the fate of the land, but she has agency and surprising depth, and all the routes revolve around her self-discovery. In a genre that's full of incredibly self-sacrificial heroines, I have mad respect for a game where the key to a HE is always being facing up to your own desires without fear, hesitancy, or shame. I really liked that generally the active/honest choices are better than the passive/polite choices, unlike so many other games where you’ve gotta just go along with the asshole. (Also she has some great sprite expressions.)
(Also, this is a surprisingly sexy game--all the LIs have a R-15 sex scene. I do wish that the consent were more enthusiastic outside the BEs than in them--there's an association of promiscuity with loss of self-respect that's not...period atypical, but definitely not my favorite thing, sigh. So if you're not a fan of dubcon, be warned. The game is otherwise good about emotionally equal relationships, though.)
I'll go through the routes in ascending order of how much I liked them. Ziqing's route is an interesting take on the separated childhood friends trope, where he and Qiye remember each other fondly from years ago...which is why they're so angry and disappointed by each other in their current incarnations. He thinks she's a money-grubber who's lost her self-respect; she thinks he's a sanctimonious prick with no right to judge her.
I didn't like Ziqing as much as I hoped given he's voiced by the same VA as Wu Zixu from My Vow to My Liege whom I'm absolutely feral for, but it was mostly a matter of personal taste. I just don't like dudes who get away with sniping pettily at you and putting you down, even if he has pretty valid reasons--she's gold-digging at a temple that basically raised him and, in his eyes, taking advantage of people he sees as family, even if she's doing it for the sake of her loved ones. But most of all, he wants her to think about what she wants out of life, because the spirited, strong-willed girl he knew would not have been content with spending the rest of her days in a loveless marriage.
One thing about this game is that it has fascinating BEs, more interesting than the HEs. In Ziqing's route, the diverging point is whether Qiye cares enough to run after him to apologize after their big argument. He passed out in the rain after leaving her room, and this determines whether someone finds him before his illness worsens to a fatal level from lying out there unconscious for an entire night.
Maybe it was just that I didn't like Ziqing very much, but my first reaction to the BE was...it's not actually that sad. Ziqing dies, leaving Qiye a prosperous widow with a young son. She has money! Freedom! Family! Who needs Ziqing! But the writing is good enough that I can buy that my reaction was intended. A big theme in his route is Qiye figuring out what she wants for herself rather than just going along with what her family needs and what other people want. And she gets the BE by...basically not finding it in herself to care enough. She doesn’t care enough to save him and she doesn’t care enough to be that devastated by his death, and maybe that’s the tragedy.
I enjoyed the other two routes with the monk brothers a lot more. Qiye hits it off easily with Huihai, the dorky, good-hearted younger brother who does the actual running of the temple that his older brother can't be bothered with. They bond over finding bargains in the marketplace!
But also, she's engaged to his brother, they live in a world where reputations matter, and both of them are too used to repressing their own wants for the sake of others. It's up to Qiye to acknowledge her desires honestly, even if they seem contemptibly unclean in the sanctity of a temple, even if she doesn't want to hurt him (or suffer more pain herself)... or else both of them cling to lies and denial for each other's benefit until it warps them beyond repair.
And then there's Zhikong, the eldest brother. Hoo boy, Zhikong. The easiest category to put him in would probably be yandere, but really he's in a class of his own. He's fascinating, and I did not expect to like him this much.
Zhikong is creepy and domineering and manipulative. He talks about putting her in a golden cage. He sneers down at her for being so mired in her earthly ties and deceptions and self-deceptions. But also, for most of the route, he doesn't hold actual power over her. After roughly the midpoint of the game, she doesn't need to marry for money anymore! All the authority figures are reasonable! If she wanted to break off the engagement, his grandma might be sad, but she'd understand!
This is what makes him creepy-as-in-psychological instead of creepy-as-in-gross to me: he has very limited ability to actually force anything on Qiye, and he repeatedly reminds her of this. When she compares him to a snake hunting a bird, he tells her that the only one who can eat the bird is the bird itself. She has multiple chances to walk away, but the real cage is in her mind. The game compares him to an asura, a divine punisher, and there's probably layers of theological stuff that I can only vaguely grasp due to my lack of knowledge of Buddhism. He doesn't destroy her so much as...affectionately personify her demons. He'll play whatever role she assigns him.
If Qiye actually challenges him, he's surprisingly receptive, and he'll even realize that he wasn't as above it all as he thought and has a lot to learn from her. But if she allows herself to believe that he's some kind of superhuman untouchable puppeteer, while she's hopeless and unclean and chained rather than strengthened by her earthly ties...it ends badly.
Seriously, the monk brothers' BEs are so good. No one dies, she fulfills her original goal, but she descends into a hell of her own making. I know basically nothing about Buddhism but there’s definitely Theology there. The crux is that she allows herself to lose her self-respect, to believe herself tainted, inferior, and incapable of enlightenment. To fall into black and white thinking, with the pure holy untouchable monks beyond earthly ties on one side and herself on the other. To cut herself off from salvation.
While in the monk bro HEs and associated good options--I feel like Zhikong’s route is more about understanding that he’s not actually so high and mighty, while Huihai’s route is more about understanding that she’s not so unclean and lowly. Either way, they’re where she stands up for herself and what she wants, respects her own feelings, and relates to her LI as human being to human being. They’re not beyond earthly ties, and she’s not beyond spiritual freedom.
TL;DR: Lost in Secular Love is a surprisingly deep game that I enjoyed way more than I expected! Go check it out, it's on sale for six bucks! Also definitely check out My Vow to My Liege by the same devs if you haven't already! I adore My Vow to My Liege! The only reason I haven't written a similar wall of analysis for My Vow to My Liege is that I plan to write at least three walls of analysis for My Vow to My Liege! The devs are auto-buy for me by now and I eagerly await their next game and/or the Zheng Dan DLC.
Thinking about a soulmate-identifying mark AU where Tengyu has Yiguang’s mark...but it disappears around the time of the failed attempt to kill the dragon god. She thinks it’s because Yiguang died, but really, it’s because she's becoming Fuchai.
(It seems right that Fuchai has no mark, which adds to her general sense of grim resignation, but I could use suggestions.)
And then:
Wu Zixu, who’s gone 30+ years without a soulmate mark and accepts it just fine, his life has no room for anything but vengeance anyway, starts developing a soulmate mark for Tengyu-as-Fuchai, who did not exist until he created her. Naturally he plans to take this fact to the grave.
Goujian’s mark is innocuously about Ah-Yu and gives him no end of grief. The one-sidedness of the mark sends his paranoia into overdrive.
Yiguang’s mark also disappears after Tengyu becomes Fuchai, which adds to his fears that she’s truly become someone else, but it returns after she kills off “Fuchai” and starts living as Tengyu again.
Chenfeng has no mark and therefore expected nothing, but in a way this makes him match her?
My conflicted feelings on Jimo Shenming de Xinyuan Shouji (寂寞神明的心愿手记/”The Lonely Divinity’s Journal of Wishes“)
I’ve played to the end of one route now and decided I’d rather just spoil myself instead of playing the rest. A TL;DR of my feelings:
Is it worth the asking price? Yes.
Is it enjoyable? Uhhhhh
The long version, with spoilers:
The Good
The CGs are consistently beautiful and they are many. Most of them would make perfectly good desktop wallpapers.
The game is surprisingly sexy. There’s suggestive CGs for everybody and plenty of taking advantage of stereo sound for “moaning/kissing next to your ear” effects. There’s definitely sexual harass-y bits and love interests being possessive, but the one sex scene I got to was actually good about consent--”I’ll stop if you tell me to, but until then >:]“
The heroine is quite good. Unfortunately she still has the common heroine traits of absurd levels of self-sacrifice and blushing a lot at sexually harassing dudes, but she’s capable, emotionally mature, and at least gets to snark back now and then. By the standard of otome games I’ve played, she’s definitely up there.
On a high level the story of the game is pretty interesting. I liked how there aren’t good/bad endings, but sun/moon endings that more represent whether the heroine is willful or passive. From what I’ve been spoiled on regarding the endings, this seems to map to endings that are harder but honest and...honorable, and endings that are more romantic, yet with the underlying uneasiness of some level of self-surrender.
The Mixed
The voice acting is extremely uneven. A bunch of the LIs’ VAs try way too hard to do this seductive louche mumbly drawl and it makes them sound ridiculous, though they actually sounded much better in the serious dramatic scenes where they weren’t desperate to sound sexy. Out of the five LIs, I’d say that two are consistently good, one sounds decent normally but lowkey unhinged when he’s trying to be emotional, and two sounded awful when they were trying to be sexy but honestly were pretty good when they weren’t.
You absolutely get your money’s worth in terms of playtime. This is mixed because...
The Bad
The best way I can describe it is...this game is just consistently less than the sum of its parts.
The individual art assets are beautiful. But in the game itself, you have these really stylized Chinese-influenced backgrounds next to realistic-side-of-anime character sprites next to cartoony animals/spirits, and some of the CGs are clearly drawn by different artists, who are consistently skilled, but aren’t always consistent with the finer points of the character designs.
The love interests feel like five sexy character traits stapled together. This dude is a doctor and a master chef and an imperial uncle and a rake and a sword! And so on. That’s not to say they can’t be charming at times, and it gets a bit better later in the game (hours and hours and hours later in the game) with more time spent on developing the character, but there’s no dude I’d say I particularly liked. (Well, there was the evil sexy mentor, who’s appealing maybe precisely because he doesn’t overstay his welcome, but he’s not an LI.) I ended up picking a LI to do the route of solely because he looked like decent replacement meal for my beloved Wu Zixu (it didn’t really work.)
The game tries to use a whole bunch of mobile gacha game elements in a standalone game and it just doesn’t work. You have all these chapters that are more like case-of-the-week episodes with their own self-contained subplots, and you win resources for doing well at the investigation in the episodes, and you spend those resources on this gacha system for gifts to give to raise relationship values with a particular dude. But that means you spend like half the game stuck with 1-2 out of the 5 LIs while focusing on side characters that range from boring to obnoxious to wtf, and even though the game tries to give you moments of fluffy interaction with your dude of choice starting from the second chapter, it’s structurally more limited in its ability to do so than a mobile game, and those moments aren’t that satisfying either.
The script is so long that all the actually kind of interesting stuff is buried after hours and hours of boredom. That exciting ending system? Is designed so that you have to replay the game from basically the opening chapters to get both a character’s endings. The route split was more than a dozen hours in for me, btw. And the process is filled with mechanics like timed choices and the aforementioned gacha rolls that drag out the replay even with a skip option. And I don’t think it’s possible, or at least it’s very difficult, to fill out more than two LIs’ relationship bars in a single run (which is necessary to have them as an option at the route split), so you can’t even be more efficient with your ending-getting. The ending I got to was actually conceptually interesting...and I’m curious about the endings I’ve been spoiled on...but the thought of going through that entire common route 3-4 more times to see all ten endings kills my brain cells.
The above issues would largely be forgivable if the actual scene-level writing were good, but it’s not. I guessed a whole bunch of character reveals ages before the game actually revealed them. The case-of-the-week sideplots that were supposed to be touching made me cringe. The route I picked’s idea of romance is the dude throwing jewelry and dresses and limited edition shaomai at me. I did not enjoy sitting through the vast majority of this game.
I got spoiled that the entire game is all secretly just a dream world created by two of the characters, which was maybe fresh the first time the twist was done...but here I’m so unimpressed that it’s just like “yeah, this entire route plays like fictional bullshit, sounds about right.” I don’t care about how epic the truth might be when it requires me to sit through 20 hours of boredom and then basically invalidates those 20 hours of boredom. Also the true true endings aren’t actually in the game--they’re in a free DLC that hasn’t been released yet.
So, like...I can acknowledge this game is ambitious. It’s certainly very pretty. I get why someone might consider this a good or even great game. As for me, I can’t say I regret buying it, but it did not remotely bring me enjoyment proportional to the amount of time I spent on it, and I don’t think any amount of ultimate payoff is going to make it worth sitting through more of this. I’ll watch the endings on bilibili and call it a day.
Goujian’s this time to complete the set! (Previously: Yiguang, Wu Zixu, Chenfeng. With thanks again to @bamboocounting!)
Translation
*walking*
Great King, this humble criminal is here to wake you as you commanded!
*rustles* Great King? Great King? Tsk, sleeping like the dead, don’t you have any fear of enemy ambush--
Uu--What are you doing?! You scared me all of a sudden...
*awkward laughter*
This humble criminal would not dare rebuke his king. If you don’t believe me and insist on claiming I was ambushing you, I have no choice but to confess to it. But...
*rustle*
*kiss*
If I ambushed you this way, o Great King, would you be satisfied?
Thinking about how on the routes where Wu Zixu dies early on, Tengyu loses it so badly at his death that she nearly kills the actual love interests for those routes.
Yep, and that’s for the LI that doesn’t directly Involve in Wu Zixu’s death. I think Goujian survives in his BE/Goujian still has Tengyu’s love in his BE only because he doesn’t come at Wu Zixu but at Tengyu instead. He’d be dead (likely by Tengyu’s hand) if he kills Wu Zixu in his line.
Yeah, I’ve thought that Wu Zixu basically had to die offscreen in Goujian’s BE for it to work. Goujian’s hostilities have be targeted to her personally.
...Dang it, thinking about this has made me think about protective/possessive Tengyu and I’m into it, is Wu Zixu’s HE not 金屋藏娇
Here’s Chenfeng’s ringtone! This one was actually hardest to decipher--my thanks to @bamboocounting for a good chunk of that middle part!
(Links to Yiguang’s and Wu Zixu’s ringtones which I’ve translated previously.)
Translation:
My liege, the day’s tasks will be difficult and dangerous. I wish I could do them in your stead.
But I understand, too, that my liege is tenacious in temperament, and views every challenge as a foe to take on with your own hands. I am limited in ability, and can only protect my liege in silence.
Ah, let’s make a deal, once you return victorious, we’ll go eat some tasty treats. Don’t worry, I’ll leave them all to my liege.
Thinking about how on the routes where Wu Zixu dies early on, Tengyu loses it so badly at his death that she nearly kills the actual love interests for those routes.
*Wu Zixu’s bonus voice clip! (I’ve also translated Yiguang‘s.) Thanks again to @bamboocounting for supplementing my woeful Chinese listening comprehension.
Translation:
My liege, it's well into the night. Time to rest.
My liege should've done the day’s work during the day; it's your lack of focus and planning ahead that has you still working now. If you continue to punish yourself by staying up late to catch up, the benefit would hardly exceed the cost. To the kingdom and to me, my liege's well-being is of the foremost importance.
*Rustles*
Tsk, don't pull on my clothes.
*Struggles*
Fine, fine, fine, I'll say no more. I will naturally accompany my liege. If you do not disdain me, I will enter the realm of dreams with you as well.
So for Chinese New Year this year, the My Vow to My Liege devs released bonus downloadable ringtone voice clips for the four LIs, all of them adorable and flirty. Here’s Yiguang’s, which I translated below with the help of @bamboocounting!
Translation:
A pallor in the face, severe abdominal pain...oh my oh my, what a terrible illness.
Pff--hahaha! Of course I'm joking! Right now, you just need to drink a cup of hot water, take care to stay warm, and lie down and get some proper rest.
*Rustle*
Don't worry, as a doctor, I would naturally stay with my patient. Especially with a patient both adorable and resilient whom I mind very much.
The third part of the game, following Sun Wu’s time-traveling adventures, is completely batshit. And it’s my favorite, if I’m being honest. It’s so completely out there that I have to kind of respect it.
We’re back to Sun Wu’s storyline after he was thrown into a time rift along with the war orphan he adopted as a sort of little sister figure and the assassin Zhuan Zhu’s orphaned son who’s been kind of adopted by the Wu court. In the rift he gets separated from the kids and lands, alone, over 100 years later, in the Warring States period, on the border between Zhao and Wei.
His main priority is to find the kids, but he gets caught up in the ongoing war between Wei and Zhao when he kills a Zhao soldier in self-defense and needs to save the surrounding village from being blamed for it. He ends up fighting for Wei alongside Gongsun Yang (the future Lord Shang, currently still a relatively minor official in Wei) and Pang Juan, who in this game is a hot lady, a beast on the battlefield, and followed by dark rumors of cruelty.
Sun Wu gets along well enough with both of them, but his priorities lie elsewhere. Gongsun Yang leaves after his boss dies, and Sun Wu also tells Pang Juan that he’ll be leaving so he can keep looking for the kids. Pang Juan is shocked and tries to persuade him to stay, but when that fails, asks him to run one last mission for her.
So he agrees to go where she asks to take care of a bandit problem. Only, it’s not bandits he encounters there. It’s Wei soldiers, who accuse him of trespassing on royal burial grounds and plotting tomb robbery. Despite his protests that this is all a misunderstanding, they take him prisoner, tattoo his face, and cut off his feet.
[There’s a CG for this bit. No, I'm not posting it here.]
Then Pang Juan swoops in, horrified at what’s happened. She sends the prison guards packing and saves Sun Wu and brings him to her own home to recover and gives him medicine...
...And reveals she’s the little sister he’s looking for. She and Zhuan Zhu’s son landed in this era over a decade before he did without anyone to protect them. And now he waltzes in more than a decade late, not even recognizing her, declaring that he’ll leave her to save the kids he abandoned. She calls him a liar but he doesn’t understand why.
But that’s okay! She set him up at the royal tombs to leave him a helpless immobile prisoner in her home! She made sure he can never leave her again!
Also, she’s harbored romantic feelings for him from the start. He’s going to be her plaything from now on. The medicine contained roofies and she rapes him.
After a lot of this, he manages to escape with the help of the Qi general Tian Ji (which in this game is another hot anime girl). People know Sun Wu as the name of a historical figure these days; he starts calling himself Sun Bin, for his mutilations, instead.
Yeah. We’re now at the start of the Sun Bin vs. Pang Juan historical story.
Sun Bin helps Qi fend off Pang Juan’s aggression as he works his way toward revenge. In Qi, he also finds Zhuan Zhu’s son, all grown up as Bai Gui (the name of a famous historical merchant of this era). He and the sister were separated early on when she was taken by human traffickers, and he’s shocked at hearing what she’s become. He insists there can be reconciliation, but Sun Bin is adamant. The sister he knew is dead; Pang Juan must die. And he does kill her, as per history, at Maling, trapping her in an ambush of arrows while she screams that she was so close to succeeding at her mission and finding happiness, that she loves him, that he’d made her a promise.
It’s at the victory feast that Bai Gui meets Zou Ji, the prime minister of Qi, for the first time...and recognizes him as the dude behind her kidnapping...and that of many other young girls throughout China.
So they realize that he’s the reason she changed so drastically, and the reason she was so ruthlessly trying to invade Qi. Also, the Five Emperors squad and their pals show up and genderbent Guiguzi chews out Sun Bin for not even trying to understand Pang Juan because he was afraid to accept her love, and for failing her so utterly. That promise Pang Juan mentioned? He once told her that he’d never let go of her hand. He’d completely forgotten, but it had meant everything to her. And Sun Bin, who’s orchestrated countless battles in the name of a greater good, doesn’t have a leg to stand on when it comes to someone else’s readiness to do anything to accomplish their goals.
Which, kinda fair. Sun Wu did kill Helu’s palace women to make a point way back when, and now he has literally zero legs to stand on. Anyway he repents and resolves to finish what she started and take down Zou Ji. He and the rest of the gang attack Zou Ji’s secret lair, where they discover that he’s a sadistic immortal follower of Nuwa who’s been kidnapping thousands of girls throughout the years to raise as brainwashed cultists, including Pang Juan, who managed to escape his brutal abuse. A grueling boss battle ensues, which is basically only winnable because Sun Bin channels Pang Juan’s memory to lend him mad strength.
A defeated Zou Ji reveals his backstory before dying: he’s actually Ji Zha--Helu’s famously virtuous uncle, who declined the throne to avoid succession violence only to watch helplessly as Helu rose to power (with Sun Bin’s help) through assassinations and invasion anyway. In his despair, he’d made a devil’s bargain with Nuwa.
And that leaves Team Humanity headed to their ultimate destination: the juncture between the Zhou and Shang Dynasties, where they hope to stop Nuwa once and for all with the help of Jiang Ziya. If they can fix things at their source, all the history downstream will become unfucked too, which would save Pang Juan. With hope in their hearts and Gan Jiang and Mo Ye’s final sword in their possession, the game ends.
Apparently there’s supposed to be 4 games in this series (this is the second) and it really shows. Wu Zixu doesn’t appear again for the entire final third act. Plot threads are left dangling left and right. Some of the sideplots were pretty dumb and I didn’t go into those in this post because it’s already long enough...but you know what, I’m forced to respect the main storyline of this act, because it’s so out there and yet it...kinda works. The identities of the immortals/time travelers after the time skip. The batshit Pang Juan twist. And, fine, I grudgingly teared up a little at the Guiguzi/Shenyin Shu romance at the very end. I can respect unwashed 俺-using hermit lady/buff manry himbo even if some of the writing made me lose brain cells.
Anyway, if you really like these characters or this era, I guess I would recommend this game. All your faves are hot anime people and this game isn’t afraid to play with the source material in ways that are sometimes dubious but generally interesting. I’m gonna totally ignore the omakes, though, because there’s too many boobs in the CG gallery for them and they seem like they’d be 90% obnoxious pervy humor.
Hmm, what’s the etiquette on sharing MVTML-related things the devs created but then deleted? Because I have the Valentine’s Day Wu Zixu bonus story and I kind of want to translate it into English, but given it’s gone from the writer’s weibo...
Well. That sure went places. Part 2 of the game covers the Wu-Yue storyline and is where things start getting really weird.
Fuchai and Bo Pi
The Wu Zixu getting dunked on parts are basically what you’d expect, with the odd bit of cringey anime humor mixed in. It also felt like there were more chapters of just pure cutscenes without any fun battles to break up waiting for my phone app to translate the dialogue. It took me forever to get through those chapters.
The one divergence is a budding romance between Wu Zixu and Ling Gufu (the guy who killed Helu), who, in this ‘verse, is a buff lady. She’s taken prisoner with Goujian and ends up working as a servant for Wu Zixu, who is really goin’ through it right now. She ends up sympathizing with him and he ends up finding comfort in her company while his relationships with Fuchai and Bo Pi are going increasingly badly with the help of (genderflipped) Wen Zhong’s plotting. That’s not to say the romance is particularly good. The game makes some...questionable choices writing women.
Anyway all this is to say that when Fuchai finally decided to kill Wu Zixu I was like, thank god.
In this version Bo Pi comes after Wu Zixu with an army. Wu Zixu originally intends to break through the enemy lines and go to Fuchai with what Bo Pi’s done...but Bo Pi tells him that he comes on Fuchai’s orders. Lin Gufu chooses to stay and fight with him, and gets killed. Cornered, Wu Zixu rips out his own eyes and tells Bo Pi that they’ll witness the fall of Wu...but before he can die, Nuwa’s minion swoops in. She offers him dark power if he’ll serve her goddess and create prosperity under absolute divine rule, a deal she can make anyone who’s been driven into despair.
So yeah. He goes over to the dark side to avenge Ling Gufu and make Fuchai pay for his betrayal. He commandeered Yue to take advantage of their preparations, and he’s the one who comes up with all their war crime tactics like having prisoners kill themselves on the frontline to intimidate the enemy. Frankly everyone in Yue is kind of terrified of him, but he’s too powerful to go against. Also Nuwa’s minion transforms into Xi Shi to seduce Fuchai and weaken him.
Wu Zixu conquers Wu and kills Bo Pi, but not before he gets to give him a verbal beatdown about how they all scorned Lin Gufu for being muscular when she was strong enough to survive in her harsh upbringing and difficult life...which would land better if the game itself hadn’t made that many jokes about her appearance. Xi Shi eats a screaming Fuchai while Wu Zixu watches.
Caveat that I experienced this entire game through Google Translate, but Nuwa was interested in this era apparently because she wanted to take away the story of Goujian as that of an inspirational human overcoming great odds? And I guess the flip side of that is that Wu Zixu doesn’t die a hero and lives to become a villain.
By this point news of the demonic duo has reached the time-traveling immortal representatives of the Five Emperors on a mission in this era, Shun and Tang. They’ve managed to recruit Shen Yinshu after his supposed death, and Fan Li, Wen Zhong, Gan Jiang, and Mo Ye want to come with them to help fight Nuwa. Goujian tries to cover for them, but Gan Jiang gets mortally wounded by Wu Zixu and Xi Shi as they try to escape, and Mo Ye sacrifices herself to create the ultimate sword for them. Tang opens a time portal and most of the others make it through, but Wen Zhong is captured. Xi Shi wants to eat her; Wu Zixu hold Xi Shi back to give her a worse fate. I’m pretty sure the implication is that Wu Zixu has her raped and Goujian mercy kills her at the end.
And that’s the last we see of Wu Zixu and Xi Shi in the game proper! They’re now the real powers of Yue, rewriting the historical records and governing it on behalf of Nuwa.
And I’m like...hmm. Writing choices were definitely made. Wu Zixu Lives AU is what everyone has wanted for him for 2500 years, but...like this?? I’m not even sure I can say it’s OOC, because when the grand overarching conflict is god vs. man I guess he’s the god of tides, and Wu Yue Chun Qiu already has him do some, uh, highly problematic things. The most OOC thing is probably him betraying Wu like that, but I guess that’s why the game gave him a fridged love interest to take revenge for. I really thought the game was going to go for a parallel with what he says in the prologue about being unable to believe that his father and brother would die to minimize the collateral damage from a king’s misrule, but nope, time for more vengeance!
Anyway I’ve finished the game, so I’ll write up the third act soon. It’s the most batshit of them all.
Inspired by the recent discovery that someone just released a translation of Wu Yue Chun Qiu this year! There’s way more material available than I expected, and I thought it would be useful to collect them in one place for other people. Please let me know if I’ve made any mistakes/omissions!
(I haven’t included the sources that have, like crumbs of content, like the offhand mentions in a bunch of Warring States texts. These are all works that you can get a sense of the overall story from.)
For newcomers to the canon, my reading suggestions as an enthusiastic amateur are:
If you prefer history to fiction and/or want something short, read Wu Zixu’s bio in the Shiji
If you want to dive in, read Wu Yue Chun Qiu
In rough chronological order:
Zuozhuan (左传, Zuo Commentaries, Zuo Tradition)
A year-by-year account of the goings-on throughout the Chinese states as perceived by the state of Lu, with extensive commentary by a later author, covering most of the Spring and Autumn Period (771-476BC). The last three portions, covering Duke Zhao to Duke Ai of Lu’s reigns, include the earliest account of the events of Wu and Yue, which are quite interestingly different from later accounts. A lot of famous details don’t appear here. Wu Zixu’s vengeance and death are still pretty gnarly but less gnarly than they are in later adaptations.
Not recommended as your first account, because the bits on Wu and Yue are mixed in with the bits on all the many, many other states, and this version of events is heavily overshadowed in the popular consciousness by later versions. If someone’s making a Wu-Yue adaptation, not a lot of it is going to come from this version.
Translations:
An 1872 translation by James Legge, available free online with Pinyin transliterations here.
A 2016 more readable translation by Stephen Durrant, Wai-yee Li and David Schaberg
Shiji (史记, Records of the Grand Historian)
The work of ancient Chinese history writing. The relevant parts if you’re interested in Wu and Yue would be:
The biography of Wu Zixu (chapter 66). If you only want to read one thing and you want to keep it short, read this. It’s something like the definitive “base” account of his story, which spans the events of the era.
The biographies of Sun Wu (better known as Sun Tzu) and Fan Li, which make up portions of chapters 65 (Biographies of Sun Wu and Wu Qi) and 129 (Biographies of the Usurers/Moneymakers)
The Genealogy chapter for the royal house of Wu (chapter 31), which contains an annal-like accounts of events.
There’s also a Genealogy chapter for the Yue royals (chapter 41), but it doesn’t have an English translation
Translations:
There’s over a dozen piecemeal translations, but as of the present, there is not actually a single complete English translation of the Shiji. William Nienhauser is about 2/3 of the way through his, which will be the first if it’s completed. Fairly sure all the other translations are old enough that they use Wade-Giles rather than Pinyin, unfortunately. Referencing this list somebody compiled:
Volume V.1 of Nienhauser’s translation has the Wu royal house genealogy
Volume VII of Nienhauser’s translation has the Wu Zixu and Sun Wu biographies
Burton Watson has translated Wu Zixu and Fan Li’s biographies in Records of the Historian. Chapters from the Shih chi of Ssu-ma Ch’ien (1958)
I couldn’t find that specific edition on Internet Archives, but I did find a 1969 edition on there that seems to have both bios
I also came across this 1979 translation by Yang & Yang that seems to have all three biographies
Wu Yue Chun Qiu (吴越春秋, Spring and Autumn Annals of Wu and Yue)
We’re now about 500 years after the actual events, and the basic story has picked up more and more flourishes, though this is still regarded as history, if less reliable history than the above. This is the first appearance of Xi Shi, for one, and also the one mention of Princess Tengyu. Whatever actually happened, many of the details in this narrative are now indispensable parts of the story of Wu and Yue in the popular imagination. This is the primary canon that most later adaptations draw from.
Translation:
A 2021 translation by Jianjun He
Yue Jue Shu (越绝书, The Glory of Yue)
Roughly contemporaneous with Wu Yue Chun Qiu, an eclectic compilation of texts on Wu and Yue, some of which may date considerably earlier.
Translation
A 2010 translation by Olivia Milburn
Wu Zixu Bianwen (伍子胥变文, Wu Tsu-Hsu)
From a damaged document discovered in the Dunhuang caves, written about a thousand years after the actual events. This is just straight-up historical fiction now.
There is a lot of Wu Zixu historical fiction, in fact. All sorts of plays and operas and a good-sized chunk of the historical novel Dong Zhou Lie Guo Zhi. But as far as I know none of those are translated, and this is both translated and early!
Translations
The translations are old and you’ll just have to roll with Wade-Giles.
By Arthur Waley
By Victor Mair
(Updated 10/4 with minor edits and more Shiji translations)
origamiaround
jacobvanloon
turnnoffyourmind
blakekathryn
kaledo-art
stormborns
yousharknotpass
