jungle-fae

Latest Posts by jungle-fae

Imma take a moment to point out the fact that amidst all the hands reaching out to stab Xie Lian, you can see one reaching out offering the bamboo hat, and one holding a flower (Wuming baby 🥺). I am not okay guys 😭

hate J K Rowling button. love asexuals button.

Can we talk about Ruoye for a second.

Like, it’s a sweet, wholesome, playful little spirit that loves Xie Lian to pieces, yet its backstory is so fucked up. It only came to life because of the horrible evil acts it was used to commit, and I’m just thinking that poor baby Ruoye has got to be just as traumatized as Xie Lian. The book notes that in its very first moments, it doesn’t understand the suffering that birthed it, but I hardly think that means Ruoye wasn’t aware of what caused it to gain consciousness. It was a lil baby spirit, so it just didn’t understand the implications yet.

And Ruoye had the misfortune of coming to life during Xie Lian’s worst moments. Of course it wasn’t XL’s fault, but it still hurts that Ruoye, innocent little spirit that it was, just wanted love from the person it saw as its creator and wasn’t able to get it. My guess is Ruoye probably quickly understood the circumstances surrounding its birth because of XL’s initial attitude towards it. I almost imagine it had to feel some sort of guilt for its part, albeit involuntary, in XL’s suffering.

However. As we know, no matter what mistakes Xie Lian made in the past, he ultimately chose kindness. I cannot imagine how painful it must have been for him to see Ruoye for a while, given what it must have reminded him of, yet he welcomed and cared for it regardless. He gave it the love that it so desperately wanted. And I can’t get over that. He realized that no matter how much pain Ruoye had caused him, it wasn’t the little spirit’s fault. In a way, I can draw parallels between that and Xie Lian’s treatment of Hong Hong’er, who he always took care of no matter how much others warned him that he would cause misfortune. Xie Lian ignored the warnings because Hong Hong’er didn’t deserve to be punished for something he had no control over. He deserved to be loved like anyone else.

Now, the scene that really got me thinking about all this? When Jun Wu uses Ruoye to tie up Xie Lian in Quan Yizhen’s palace, Ruoye is distraught. I don’t think that is purely because it has been tied into knots, as is explained in the book, but also because of the resurfacing trauma of again being used to hurt Xie Lian, whom it loves so much. And again, like little ghost fire Hua Cheng, it can do nothing about it.

All this to say, I love precious little Ruoye and I love the relationship it has with Xie Lian even more. Despite the trauma and pain, they found companionship in each other, choosing to love. It’s like, one of, if not the main theme, of TGCF, and I never realized how much Ruoye, with all its parallels to Hua Cheng, embodies that.

Some wholesome lesbian beefleaf for the soul because my babies deserve to be happy <3

Ahhhh my poor beefleaf-loving heart 😭

This idea is so painful but so sweet at the same time, but isn’t that just beefleaf in a nutshell?

Every year, for the mid autumn festival, the crown prince of xianle is undefeated in the number and grandeur of thousands of glittering lanterns lifting to the sky in his honor. All the doing of crimson rain sought flower - and the god's growing number of believers.

But it seems that, without explanation, every year, 523 lanterns are lit for a god that has fallen. The number is always exact, but the god it is offered to has long disappeared. It is a great mystery.

"Palace of the Wind Master... 523 lanterns."

There is nobody to rejoice about it.

From a dark patch of sea, of grief, loss and bitterness, every year, 523 lanterns rise to the skies.

In my crying over beefleaf era where every couple weeks I will reread sections of the Black Water arc (in which I find some new line I somehow missed before that hits like a gut punch) or a beefleaf fanfic and end up sobbing because I love both Shi Qingxuan and He Xuan so much, mxtx why did you have to do them like that

Ok FIRST OF ALL I fucking love Dramaturgy it’s one of my favorite songs, and SECOND OF ALL you made the aesthetic fit KhunBam so well, like this is beautiful, Khun cutting the strings that imprisoned Viole when he was essentially a puppet under FUG, represented by the eyes in the background, AH everything is perfection

Dramaturgy

3rd entry for @/apotelesma_tog fanzine

HOCKNEY APPRECIATION FINALLY I love him so much ty op for this beautiful artwork

hockney from tog bc i love him to BITS 😌🙏🙏🙏

also sorry it’s messy as balls ong 💀

Perfection

:))

I know, it really is no wonder 😭 Poor baby Hong Hong’er, course he would never be able to let go of the one person who went out of their way to show him that he mattered, that he had a place in the world, that he was deserving of kindness

Can you imagine being little Hong Hong'er, always bullied and picked on and told how hated you are and at your lowest point in your short, tragic life so far, the man that saved you, now become a gracious god, reveals himself to you, to tell you to keep on living, to tell you he's there for you and that your existence isnt cursed even though everybody says so? To let you know he can feel your devotion and faith?

And can you imagine later growing up, seeing this same wonderful man go through tragedies that nobody else would have been able to endure, remembering his kindness and seeing it be used as a reason for torment - and then later, perhaps upon ascension or any other means, learning that it is forbidden for heavenly beings to reveal themselves to mortals?

No wonder Hua Cheng loved him for 800 years

The red thread heart 🥹 and my god the way they’re looking at each other

Let's go home, Your Highness. @oryunart

I have no idea wtf compelled me to make this but here ya go

Using the format of this post:

These are adorable, but not the tragic beefleaf 😭

Tgcf chibis :)

Hua Cheng didn’t wait 800 years for Xie Lian’s love—he waited 800 years for Xie Lian

…and that’s a difference some of y’all need to understand

Not this scene 😭 The perspective is breathtaking and the framing is everything, it’s a beautiful work of art that perfectly encapsulates this moment and I might just have to go cry for a bit

My final for art class allowed to us to make literally anything so I made banana fish fanart 🤞

This had me cackling, the fourth one is literally the most iconic roast in the series, and qi rong’s cannibal bed and breakfast is one of the most hilarious scenes, god I hate that guy but every scene with him is so fucking funny

small moments from tgcf i think about a lot

◇mei nianqing calling xie lian "His Little Highness"

◇pei ming tenderly holding a severed leg wondering what beautiful woman it used to belong to, only to toss it aside the second he's told it belonged to a man

◇xie lian's cooking almost killing he xuan. who's you know. a ghost. a dead ghost.

◇"you sure know a lot" "no you just dont know much"

◇shi qingxuan beating qi rong after he called them a tramp

◇ling wen being accused of fathering cuocuo

◇hua cheng noticing xie lian looking at that bowl of yuanxiao and getting him some

◇"you're alive?" "i'm dead!" and "i swear to die following your Highness" "you're already dead"

◇mu qing talking about his feelings once in his 800 year long existence and immediately trying to jump into lava

◇pei ming slapping xie lian's mouth with eming

◇qi rong's cannibal bed&breakfast

◇xie lian going Well its okay none of us is normal anyway :D after seeing the 10k statues

◇that one 5D chess scene with ling wen and xie lian in the brocade immortal arc that was reminiscent of death note shennanigans

◇shi wudu making fun of pei ming and ling wen being depicted as a couple, only to see a play about him and his sibling being in love like 3 mins later

🥲 my poor heart, this is such beautiful art though

him and hym

Thank you, I wholeheartedly agree with this. Like you’ve said, Ash’s death to me speaks more to the tragedy of the abuse he suffered so young. It’s not about whether he deserved to die, it’s about whether he was able to live under the circumstances. And it’s unfair and horrible, but when you become as entwined in that kind of life as Ash was, there sometimes isn’t a way out.

Does that mean Ash deserved to die? Of course not. He deserved to heal, he deserved to be happy, he deserved the world after what he went through, especially when his heart remained pure in spite of everything. But as the OP put it, the abuse he suffered forced him into a life of crime, and that life of crime was not so easy to escape.

I still wish it would have ended differently, because I love Ash. The amount of pain he suffered in his short eighteen years of life is unfathomably horrific, and more than anything I wanted to see him happy. But I will not say that Yoshida’s decision to end the story that way was bad, or that it means she believes Ash deserved death. Ash’s death is not narratively insignificant in any way. Do I hate that it ends that way? Yes, with every fiber of my being, but the fact that I hate it so much, the fact that I shed so many tears over this fictional character, exposes the tragedy inherent in Ash’s story. The prolonged abuse that forced him towards gangs and the mafia is also what prevented him from leaving it behind. In that I find a powerful message about the resounding echoes of this kind of repeated, sickening violence.

When Ash dies, we are forced to confront the horrors of his life. Sure, it can be argued that all of Banana Fish forces us to do that, but when we receive the shock of his death, we immediately start creating a chain of events in our head to figure out how he ended up at that point. And through that process, we internalize the ways in which the violence done to him stretched beyond any single moment to touch every aspect of his life. That creates an endless, soul-rending stream of grief because we are left with a deep sense of injustice—he only ended up dying because his life was so irreversibly shaped by his trauma, and no one deserves that. No one deserves to have the ability to choose the course of their own life taken away, but that is the tragedy of Banana Fish. Ash lost that ability so young, and that is a very painful reality to face.

If anything, I would say the only one believing Ash deserved to die for the blood on his hands was Ash himself. I won’t go into detail about this because honestly, I’m not sure whether that was truly what was going through Ash’s head when he made the decision to go to the library. What we do know is that he did struggle with a lot of self-loathing. He often saw himself as a monster because of the people he had killed, the things he had done to survive, and so he could never see himself as Eiji did, or as we did through Yoshida’s story. The people who hurt Ash did so to the point that he believed he wasn’t worthy of healing, that he believed he was only hurting others by being around them, and that is once again an effect of that consistent abuse.

That is what saddens me the most about Ash’s death, that he might have believed he didn’t deserve better, when he did. But we all saw it—we all knew, from the very beginning, that Ash was a kind soul whose life was cruelly domineered by his abusers, and he did deserve to live and heal.

What people seem to constantly misunderstand about what Akimi Yoshida said regarding how Ash couldn't have just gotten away scot-free from his life of crime is that it ISN'T Yoshida saying Ash "deserved" to die. Yoshida frames Ash as a hero from beginning to end. He's shown to be a genuinely good and kind person, that goodness remarked upon again and again by multiple characters, and his death is seen as a tragedy. That should be enough to convince people that Yoshida didn't hate Ash or think he deserved to die. The fact she frames him in such a positive light shows she understands that Ash is a good person that was forced into doing terrible things for his own survival and the survival of others. So this insistence that she thought he deserved to die because she said in some fan-translated interview that he couldn't just walk away from his life of crime, or that there's a price to be paid for murder, is ridiculous. It relies on nothing but assumption about the character of the author.

It's also a problem in fandom, in general, where interviews with authors, in which they're often giving on the spot and half-baked answers to random questions without any prepreation, are given greater credence in interpreting the author's intent than the actual, published work itself. How about letting the work stand on its own and interpret it as is? I've seen so much hate lobbed at Yoshida for supposedly hating Ash or thinking he deserved to die, when the actual story itself does nothing but portray Ash as deeply sympathetic and tragic. Again, no one could read "Banana Fish" with any level of reading comprehension and come away with anything but the impression that Ash is the hero and a good person who's life and death was deeply unfair and unjust. That fact alone should override any answer Yoshida gave in any interview, especially when it's obvious how much Yoshida hates giving interviews and very obviously, intentionally gives half-assed answers that she doesn't put much thought into. It's clear from the work itself that Yoshida has a great love for Ash as a person and as a character. She based his design off of River Phoenix, her favorite actor, she shares her birthday with him, and again, the way she frames Ash and his actions is as that of a hero, from beginning to end. I don't know, maybe it's because she sees Ash as a hero herself?

Ash dying only demonstrates the point further about how child abuse ruined Ash's life. He was led into a life of crime because of the abuse he suffered, and the fact it was that life of crime that led to his eventual death, with it basically being a gang dispute that got him in the end, only further drives home the point of how devastating and ruinous child abuse is. Ash wasn't a criminal because he was a bad person, he was a criminal because the abuse he suffered drove him to become one, and then, eventually, that life of crime he'd been forced to lead came back on him in the form of Lao stabbing him, which is what I think Yoshida actually means when she says Ash couldn't just walk away from the life of crime he'd lived. That inability to walk away further demonstrates the tragedy of the abuse Ash suffered, because it shows how it forced him into doing things which eventually came back to haunt him, things which he couldn't "escape". Lao stabbing Ash was in consequence to his being a gang leader, and his being a gang leader was a result of the abuse he suffered. The two things are interconnected with one another. It's not about Ash deserving to die because of the lives he'd taken, it's about how the life Ash was forced to live as a result of his abuse eventually led to his death. That's where the whole notion of "you live by the sword, you die by the sword" comes from. It's not necessarily a moral condemnation of the person committing acts of violence, but an acknowledgement that violence begets violence. That violence is cyclical. But the fact of Ash's death as a result of his life of crime only further demonstrates the true devastation wrought by the abuse of children, and that's the ultimate point of "Banana Fish's" ending. It's meant to force us to face, through the tragedy of Ash's death, the tragedy of his life in turn.

Day 4 of crying over banana fish, when usually making me cry would be like moving mountains. I cried myself to sleep the past 3 nights after finishing the anime, this is seriously a different kind of pain. I don’t think any story will ever hurt me as much as this. It really tugs at every fiber of your being until all you’re left with is an inconsolable ache in your heart. I don’t regret anything though. Ash and Eiji will forever be in my thoughts, and their story will forever exist in my soul.

Brb just gonna go cry—

Can't stop thinking about this dialogue, during the 100 swords scene:

Compared to this dialogue, when Hua Cheng is gently removing a needle from Xie Lian's foot:

Just, the tenderness of it all, after Xie Lian endured so much pain. The permission to cry out if it hurts, compared to having his voice forcibly muffled. It makes me cry whenever I think about it.

Bear with me, it’s essay time because crying about beefleaf while rereading some parts of book 4 gave me a LOT of thoughts and emotions.

The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that beefleaf were never going to get a happy ending, not because mxtx didn’t want to give them one, but because their dynamic literally makes it an impossibility. I don’t think it matters that He Xuan genuinely cared for SQX as Ming Yi because he is never going to be able to look at them without recalling what they took from him. Sure, he might not hate SQX, and he might actually wish them a happy life, but that life cannot be with him.

And this is taking into account a scenario in which He Xuan didn’t kill Shi Wudu, because even if he didn’t, I don’t think he himself could ever be truly happy with SQX. There is too much pain associated with them, and even though they were not the direct cause of that pain, I think it’s still fair for He Xuan not to want to be around that reminder. Is that fair to Qingxuan? Not necessarily, but neither was any of this fair to He Xuan.

I don’t think they could ever have a healthy relationship built upon a foundation filled with so much hurt, because they would only end up hurting each other more, whether intentionally or not. I think they both know this, and it’s why I personally believe that the ending mxtx gave them is the best we could have hoped for. In the end, I believe it’s clear that neither of them hates the other, but they do harbor a lot of complicated feelings on the matter that cannot be resolved with apology and forgiveness.

For Qingxuan’s part, I don’t think they blame He Xuan for their present situation. In fact, they are adamant in relaying to Xie Lian that He Xuan didn’t do anything to them after the events of the Black Water Arc. However, they also seem intent on moving forward with their mortal life. As for He Xuan, his dropping SQX off at the royal capital, as well as his willingness to give SQX his spiritual power and the fan (regardless of the dire circumstances) shows that there’s a part of him that still cares about them. He has no desire to interfere with Qingxuan’s chances at happiness in their new life, precisely because of that affection, but he also doesn’t want to be around to grieve over what could have been. Because every time He Xuan sees SQX, there will only be regret, both for his inability to see SQX without the attached pain and for the friend (or even lover) he could have had had their fates not been so maliciously intertwined.

Yes, I love beefleaf, but what I love more than the ship are the incredibly written individuals themselves. And I do firmly believe that, in canon at least, they would both be more at peace by letting go and moving on. Not necessarily happy, but at peace.

Now, in another universe, where these two met outside of these circumstances? Beefleaf most certainly sails.

Side note: In a weird way, writing this was actually kinda cathartic because it gave me peace with and acceptance of beefleaf’s canon ending, while still acknowledging that these two definitely had the potential to be lovers. That potential can be (and already has been) explored through everyone’s lovely fan creations.

I find it hilarious how in tgcf book 8, FengQing’s opinion of Hualian does a complete 180 turnaround from the cave of ten thousand gods, not because they like Hua Cheng any better but because Xie Lian is having the gayest moment of his life.

Straight up went from “Xie Lian don’t go near him he’s a psycho stalker!” to “somebody get this man his husband or he’s going to burn this entire world to the ground with us in it”

This is breathtakingly beautiful, the backgrounds are perfection, everyone is right at home and they’re all happy 🥺😭

last one for now, I was hoping to get 4 posters done total for AB but I've got work to do so the final one is on the shelf until I get more free time 😩

also this one was cute in my head but jeSUS MY HAND IS DEAD why did I decide to draw a show where everyone's wearing 4+ robes 🙃

Tgcf book 5 is so funny to me because everyone is like “we have to keep this on the down low, we can’t let the ghosts know there’s a heavenly official infiltrating Mount Tonglu” and then everyone and their mother shows up for one reason or another and everyone is just like “yeah, this is fine”

Xie Lian can thank his lucky stars (ironically) that Mu Qing didn’t wake up cause he would’ve murdered him on the spot (and then Hua Cheng would have subsequently murdered Mu Qing for hurting his hubby)

Whoops

The tgcf reading experience (spoilers):

Book 1: omg it’s so romantic 🥺

Book 2: omg it’s so romantic, also wind master best character

Book 3: my poor baby *gives Xie Lian head pats* —ooh hualian content

Book 4: PAIN AND SUFFERING—oh cool more hualian content

Book 5: *mxtx dumps lore, refuses to elaborate*

Book 6: NO NO YOU DONT UNDERSTAND—YES YES HUALIAN—WTF WTF WTF

Book 7: Wtf is going on

Book 8: my heart has been shattered and stitched back together at least 10 times, but it was worth it

So anyway that’s what I did this summer

“Only since meeting you have I rediscovered how simple it is to be happy”

Quick Hualian sketch, it has been a tgcf summer reading all the books and it is a crime I haven’t drawn them yet

This is canon change my mind

you know he can’t get a concussion right

I’m gonna cry, book 8 is destroying me and then this 😭

Hua Cheng is precious, and he certainly is the most devoted man in the entire world.

and he’d do it again ❤️‍🩹 (and he does)