Heaven Official's Blessing

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Name: Heaven Official's Blessing
天官赐福
Tiān Guān Cì Fú
Abbreviation(s): HOB, TGCF
Creator: Mo Xiang Tong Xiu
墨香铜臭 Mòxiāng Tóngxiù
Date(s): August 1, 2017 - June 20, 2018 (webnovel publication)
October 19, 2019 - present (manhua adaptation)
October 31, 2020 – present (animated adaptation)
Medium: Webnovel, Books, Manhua, Donghua
Country of Origin: China
External Links: Novel on JJWXC
Sakhyulations Translation
Manhua on bilibili
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

Heaven Official's Blessing, also known by its Chinese title "Tian Guan Ci Fu" or TGCF, is a danmei cnovel by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu. It was serialised on JJWXC between August 2017 and June 2018.

Canon Background

Eight hundred years ago, Xie Lian was the crown prince of the Xian Le Kingdom and was a beloved and respected leader. He ascended to heaven at a young age, but was cast down a short time later. He ascended for a second time and stayed in the heavens for the same time it takes to burn a stick of incense (about five minutes) before being cast down again. Now, he ascends for the third time as a laughing stock of all three realms.

The story has 244 chapters and 8 extras.

Characters

  • Xie Lian (谢怜) - main character and former crown prince of Xian Le Kingdom
  • Hua Cheng (花城) - romantic interest of Xie Lian and Ghost King (鬼王) of the Heavenly Realm
  • Mu Qing (慕情) - Martial God of the southwest
  • Feng Xin (风信) - Martial God of the southeast

Donghua

On October 26, 2019 multimedia site Bilibili announced a donghua adaptation of the novel would be coming in 2020[1]. The first season was released October 2020 - February 2021. The show became available on Netflix in April 2021.

Manhua

A manhua adaptation is currently ongoing since 2019, with art by popular fanartist Starember and is able to be read on Bilibili in Chinese and English. There are currently four completed volumes.

Live-action TV

A live-action series, titled Eternal Faith, began production in 2021, directed by Chen Jialin. At one point set photos were leaked online, leading to some fans expressing dismay about the quality of the production. (Other fans started using them as photo references. Example)

Shipping

Shipping preferences differ between Chinese and English fandoms, but Hualian is by far the most popular. On AO3 it takes up the majority of fanfiction available. As many fans dislike having the main canon pairing being broken up, other ships featuring Xie Lian and Hua Cheng are not as popular, but are still available. Some examples include shipping Xie Lian with Feng Qin, Mu Qing, Jun Wu, or Shi Qingxuan. Hua Cheng is sometimes shipped with He Xuan, and the Hua Cheng/Mu Qing ship has also been recently been gaining popularity.

Beefleaf

Twitter user cucumberbros

Twitter user cucumberbros drew art of the ship Ming Yi/Shi Qing Xuan and posted it to the website Privatter and locked it with a password. The password was the ship name and they represented each character with an emoji to hint at what the password should be. The emoji was a meatbone and leaves falling in the wind (🍖🍃), which soon circulated as "beefleaf". The ship name in English is now almost exclusively referred to as "Beefleaf".

Fengqing

The international fanbase is largely credited for popularising the slash ship known as "fengqing", a fanon pairing between Feng Xin and Mu Qing, two characters who are very belligerent towards one another in canon. Among Twitter users, its common to see "fengqing mains" (people who ship the two immensely) use the sword (⚔️) & bow and arrow (🏹) to depict their corresponding weapons. Another common portrayal of the two includes the cat and dog (Mu Qing being the cat, Feng Xin being the dog). The most common dynamic associated with the ship is Rivals to Lovers, with many fics taking place in the time after canon when it is implied that Feng Xin and Mu Qing will finally be able to start setting their differences aside.


English-language Fandom

Fan translation

The completed English translation is by Twitter user Suika. Suika is credited for bringing the TGCF novel to an international fanbase, and is also credited for the English popularity of the novel. Suika famously translated one chapter per day and would make daily updates on the Google drive holding the translation, until all 244 chapters were completed. (In a fail_fandomanon thread discussion, anons disagreed about how widely known Suika's translation was before it was finished: "I know one of the other slower translators was pretty salty about it because they had no idea that Suika's translation existed, and felt the whole thing popping up at once took interest away from their version."[2])

Snail Paced Translations translated the first two chapters in August 2017 before dropping it when they left for college. Sakhyulations then started translating from the beginning in December 2017[3], releasing chapters on an irregular schedule through at least June 2019 with chapter 23.[4] Suika's twitter indicates they took over translating circa November 2018 "for friends cuz I don't wanna cry alone".[5] Suika later said that when they started translating, there was no English fandom for the novel, they "never imagined this would blow up the way it did", and that they really enjoyed getting to see other people on twitter reacting to the translation as they posted it.[6] Suika's twitter timeline shows they finished the last chapter in August 2019 and then did more editing until November/December.[6][7] The finished chapters were then linked from Novel Updates between November and December 2019; Suika then went back to translate the early chapters to have a complete set by July 2020.[8] Meanwhile, apparently unaware of Suika's translation until it was added to the Novel Updates page, Deep Dream Translations took over from Sakhyulations and translated chapters 25 to 40 between October 2019 and November 2020.[9]

After completing the novel, Suika also released pdf, epub, and mobi translations and created a carrd linking to them. (The eight extras were translated by other people and are not included in the compiled ebook version.) Access to these fan translations was removed after the announcement that Seven Seas would be publishing an official translation.

Official English Translation

On August 5, 2021, the manga and novel publisher Seven Seas Entertainment announced that they had acquired the licenses for all three novels by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu: Tian Guan Ci Fu, Mo Dao Zu Shi, and Scum Villain's Self Saving System. Each novel would be split into multiple volumes, with a volume published once every few months. TGCF would be published in eight volumes, the first released in mid December 2021 and the last to come out in 2023. The translation for the official release was done by Suika, who had also done the fan translation, and edited by Suika's friend Pengie, with the cover art by 日出的小太陽 (tai3_3) and internal art by ZeldaCW.

There was much rejoicing in the English fandom at finally getting an official translation, and many fans pre-ordered one or more of the novels. Some people expressed concerns about the cost of the books, especially TGCF; at US$20 per volume, Americans would be paying US$160 for TGCF alone. Meanwhile, Suika had understandably taken the fan translation offline, which until recently had been available for free and was presumably very similar to the official product. Compared to other fan translations, TGCF was reasonably good, but whether it was worth US$160 was another question.[10] On the other hand, cnovel fans were hoping to show that there was an English market for cnovel translations, and not buying TGCF and other MXTX works could mean losing the chance to get other cnovels translated in the future.

Font wank occurred when the official covers were revealed on September 30, 2021.[11] Many twitter fans expressed excitement about the cover art and said they were looking forward to reading the book. However, some comments were critical of the font choice. Examples:

  • "As a designer, the font bothers me. I see what everyone is raving about. Why didn’t you guys use the same or a similar font as you did for MDZS covers? Im still happy for its release tho"[12]
  • "the fonts in all 3 covers look too kiddy. it looks like a children’s book. you wouldn’t want to attract the wrong demographic …"[13]
  • "yes I have a bachelor’s in graphic design. No I would not like to speak about the tgcf book cover font"[14]
  • "love the covers for mxtx’s books but i will never in my life be over the fact they made tgcf’s font look like That!! i get what they were going for, but they packed so much into the font it’s actually hard to read"[15]
  • "Looking at the other translated covers compared to this one I'm just- I think you should change the font, this book have the heaviest content out of all three but looking really Disney like it belongs in the children's or young-adult section"[16]

Other fans thought people were overreacting:

  • "Logs in. See's people acting like the tgcf novel cover font is gonna ruin their entire lives. Logging back off again 😴"[17]
  • "the eng cover of tgcf is perfectly in line with cover designs for translated light novels, including the font. plenty of jp releases with adult content have similar styles. all this “think of the kids!” hand-wringing over a font choice is very weird"[18]
  • "when is there NOT mxtx tl wank. it's my 1st time seeing people get so worked up over the translated novel font choices though w/c i think is hilarious"[19]

TCGF rewrite and censorship

After MXTX announced that she would be rewriting and adding more to the books, as well as additional extras chapters, fans were overall excited. However, there was also some pushback and wank over what people believed would be censorship of the more romantic parts of the models. Other fans argue that such fears are far overblown, that more shipping content will be added, and that the rest of the fandom should 'be grateful' for how obvious the romantic content is in the novel despite censorship in China

Chinese-language Fandom

Chinese fanspaces are known for being both impressive yet vicious. Debates throughout the fandom take an alarming turn most of the time, as people spew death threats and argue about canon and post-canon parts of the novel. Despite having a few menacing fans, the Chinese fandom is overall extremely welcoming and is quite notable for their historically accurate cosplays and unlimited fancontent (largely thanks to TGCF being native to China).

Fanwork Examples

Hua Cheng and Xie Lian digital art by lofter user ooten (2021)


Fanfic

Fanart

Russian:

Gen:

Ship art:

Fanvids

Zines

Cosplay

Fannish Resoures

References

  1. ^ Heaven's Official Blessing confirmed for a 2020 release
  2. ^ Re: Cnovels - The TGCF plagerizing drama cont., Archived version, fail_fandomanon thread started 2021-03-31.
  3. ^ Novel Updates Wayback Machine copy
  4. ^ Wayback Machine copy of the Novel Updates page, 10 July 2019.
  5. ^ tweet by yummysuika, Archived version, 9 November 2019. Accessed 11 June 2022.
  6. ^ a b here be my TGCF End Rant, Archived version, tweet by yummysuika, 8 August 2019. Accessed 12 June 2022.
  7. ^ tweet by yummysuika, Archived version, 13 November 2019.
  8. ^ Wayback Machine copy of the Novel Updates page, 10 January 2020.
  9. ^ Heaven Official's Blessing - Novel Updates, Archived version, accessed 11 June 2022.
  10. ^ "The TGCF fan translation is...fine for a fan translation. It's fanfic quality. Asking people to pay $160 for it is ridiculous." Re: Cnovels - MXTX English Translations, Archived version, fail_fandomanon thread, 15 December 2021.
  11. ^ tweet by Seven Seas, 30 September 2021, Archived version
  12. ^ tweet by liiliiluna, Archived version, 1 October 2021. Accessed 11 June 2022.
  13. ^ tweet by wangxianling, Archived version, 1 October 2021. Accessed 11 June 2022.
  14. ^ tweet by lotuslate, Archived version, 30 September 2021. Accessed 11 June 2022.
  15. ^ tweet by alcego_writes, Archived version, 1 October 2021. Accessed 11 June 2022.
  16. ^ tweet by ElixirSerenity, Archived version, 30 September 2021. Accessed 11 June 2022.
  17. ^ tweet by fengxinnie, Archived version, 1 October 2021. Accessed 11 June 2022.
  18. ^ tweet by tyelperintal, Archived version, 1 October 2021. Accessed 11 June 2022.
  19. ^ tweet by halfcactus, Archived version, 4 October 2021. Accessed 11 June 2022.
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