Re-read and anime first-impressions review: Heaven Official’s Blessing
I read Heaven Official’s Blessing, a Chinese web novel about a well-meaning but rather ill-fortuned martial god and his demon/ghost king boyfriend last year and was instantly enchanted. While the story could get a bit silly in places, I loved the characters and the mix of fantasy martial-arts adventure, mystery-solving, horror, and romance was engaging enough to make me easily breeze through 244 GoogleDrive chapters (which was how the translation was available). So I was very excited to hear that there was going to be a Netflix animated adaptation and re-read the original book in preparation.
My original positive assessment still mostly stands, and indeed has improved in places. There were some nice little bits of foreshadowing I missed the first time around. For instance, early in the book it says, regarding how Hua Cheng became a ghost:
Some say he was born crippled without a right eye and was bullied and humiliated since birth, so he was filled with hatred for the world; some say he was a young soldier who died in a lost battle for his country, and later came to walk the earth in resentment; some say he was a fool who was tormented by the death of his love; some even say he was a monster. In the most outrageous version supposedly…Hua Cheng ascended and became a god but immediately jumped back down on his own and became a ghost.
As we learn later on, it’s no wonder there are so many tales because ALL have some truth to them! Also, on the first read I found some of the other heavenly official’s reactions to Xie Lian and Hua Cheng’s obvious feelings for each other to be a bit gratingly homophobic considering the approximate historical period wouldn't be...though on second thought I hypothesized that they might be reactions to Xie Lian dating a demon. Since then, I’ve been reminded that public displays of affection, even between husband and wife, were traditionally considered inappropriate in China, so it could be that as well. Not having any other same- or opposite-gender couples for comparison (not happy couples, anyway) makes it hard to tell! Either way, everyone chills by the end, which is a relief. The main issue with the book – besides some kind of fan fiction/romcom/anime tropes that are a bit cheesy but which I thoroughly enjoyed – are the exposition dumps. Sometimes the action will just stop for half a chapter as one character explains the backstory of another character, magical object, etc. However, some of that is hard to avoid in a pure text format without doing a lot of flashbacks, so I was curious to see how a more visual format might either skip this or make it more exciting.
Fu Yao and Nan Feng suspiciously side-eyeing Xie Lian’s new friend.
The first episode of the animated series certainly doesn’t dawdle. We get a nicely spooky introduction with a bride and her escorts being threatened, Xie Lian’s third ascension (which is awe inspiring until the other gods realize who it is!), and his meetup with his two helpers on a mission to figure out the mystery of the disappearing brides – with, of course, a cameo by one of Hua Cheng’s silver butterflies. The landscape visuals, including of the floating heavenly capitol, are spectacular. The depiction of the heavenly communication array is creative too: the gods who are speaking appear as hazy images on what look like silk banners hung in a circle around the focal character who is speaking. Unfortunately, the voice actors for Xie Lian and Fu Yao sound a bit too similar, so it is initially difficult to tell who is speaking when the dialog is quick! Seeing Ruoye, Xie Lian’s sentient silk band, in action in the second episode is cool – and of course this episode gives us our first partial glimpse of Hua Cheng as well.
The character designs are good. I might have squee-ed a little when we get to see the ghost king properly - one of his faces, anyway - in episode 5 (below). Everyone looks pretty much as I’d pictured or better, with one exception – the hair. Both men and women in ancient China had long hair but mostly wore it up. However, Hua Cheng as San Lang has a lopsided ponytail matching his laid-back attitude1, while his true form has loose hair with a little coral-bead-trimmed side braid – this gives him an unusually rakish look, especially combined with his eyepatch. By contrast, I got the impression that the more “buttoned up” Xie Lian mostly wears a neat topknot until he starts literally letting his hair down around Hua Cheng. The half-up style he wears in the show looks good, though, and giving each character a different hairstyle as well as costume does help distinguish them. I’m a little sad that Hua Cheng’s pet name for Hua Cheng, Gege, doesn’t get used in the subtitles – though it is in the original dialog if you listen for it. A footnote in the text points out that that word literally means “older brother”, which doesn’t emotionally translate to English very well. But using the untranslated word feels more personal than turning it into just “Xie Lian” as the Netflix subtitles do.
1. The show keeps a funny episode when Xie Lian offers to fix San Lang’s hair as a ruse – human hair is difficult for most ghosts in disguise to replicate. But he gets a bit distracted, and, when Hua Cheng cheekily points this out, finishes the job so hurriedly that the ponytail is more crooked than before!
Teasers of things that will hopefully get followed up on: The introduction of the gender-swapping Wind Master, and Hua Cheng’s true form.
Given how US movie studios always claim that including gay characters is
an issue when marketing to China, I wondered how this production was going to
handle a story that is almost entirely about the relationship between Hua Cheng
and Xie Lian. While borrowing some elements from Japanese anime, the aesthetic
of this show is distinctly Chinese and the dialog is entirely in Chinese as well,
suggesting a primary domestic audience. The credits list “Animation Company
Emon/Haoliners Animation”, which is a Japan- and South Korea-based subsidiary
of Haoliners Animation League. The donghua (Chinese version of “anime”)
was released on Funimation and Bilibili (a Shanghai-based video sharing website)
in October 2020 before being licensed to Netflix in 2021. Bilibili is
subject to censorship, mainly of political content, but since it also requires
a membership for some content it may be that the censors wouldn’t scrutinize other
aspects as much as something that gets a theater release. In any case, the show
has been very faithful to the web novel so far, including all the obvious
heart-eyes between the leads and the sweetly domestic scene after the
Banyue Pass incident that was made its own post-episode-12 special, so there is
reason to hope that that will continue in the second season, which has been confirmed
to be in production. If so...then I'd say US film companies will be running low on excuses!
