Leaving Havoc in Heaven and entering the Lull

We have officially completed the prologue Havoc in Heaven¹ and are now entering what I’m calling The Lull, a five-chapter long series of events that sets up the actual “journey” in Journey to the West.

The reason I’m calling it The Lull is because, let’s be honest, we just want to see monkey shenanigans, and Wukong is markedly absent from these chapters. Abridged versions and adaptations also often cut out these chapters, so a lot of the plot in these chapters is completely new to me, having never read the original before. But. Some absolutely ridiculous stuff goes down in chapters 8-12, and I think it’s a shame to completely skip over them. At the same time, more monkey shenanigans please!

All that’s to say, I will be changing up the narration style again. Chapter 7 was pretty one-to-one, mostly out of lack of time. For The Lull, I will be trying a much more oral storytelling style, shortening and simplifying to focus on keeping the pacing snappy, so we can get back to our beloved monkey king as quickly as possible. Cheers!

^{1 7% of the way through *sweats* ↩}