Given the interpretations of JTTW/Xiyouji - what is your opinion on when media or even solo creators make a romance for Wukong?

Especially since most of Wukong's romances in media end up played for tragedy as well as the fact that from a textbook analysis he seems very no love/no sex/only friendship.

Innocent interpretations for their personal enjoyment or does it feel more harmful to the character of Wukong as a whole and fetishy?

Given Xiyouji and Wukong in general has such an influential swathe over culture/pop culture as a whole and the uh...quite gross mishandling of him at times from Western culture (Ex. Making him some musclebound meathead who only cares for violence which doesn't only devalue his character but the East-Asian view of masculinity as a whole.) or Anime culture. (Ex; making him a 'Yandere' style obsessive partner which may be interesting when played off his previous lifestyle as a Yaoguai - but most of the time isn't and is simply played to be a 'love me or else' danger boyfriend.)

What do you think of it all? Especially with the prevalence of a lot of this stuff propping up due to LMK?

Feel free to read more if you want to watch me complain lmao

Hmmmm OKAY so I do need to preface this by noting that I've now run across a number of retellings/presentations of Sun Wukong composed by eastern creators that made me deeply uncomfortable or even straight-up be like "well I hope I forget that exists forever!" because of the ways in which the monkey king was oversexualized and/or painted into extreme grimdark territory. So it's pretty obvious that western creators aren't unique in some of the ways that Sun Wukong gets flanderized to hell and back.

And while being very much aware that what one sees in the west for free on youtube is a very small sample size of big-budget retellings of Xiyouji, a LOT of those retellings with a Monkey King romance have an incredibly samey plot of "Sun Wukong is a dick-->he encounters some lady and is a dick to her-->she likes him anyway-->he softens up a bit-->she dies-->he's sad-->her death still gives him the powerup needed to defeat the big bad." I know that the angle is tragedy but oh my god at this point the 500 year old text that presents Sun Wukong as a communal grandpa that will do literally anything for his family including challenging the heavens & how this comes back to bite them all in the collective ass BUT they still love each other very much and Sun Wukong never stops fighting for them and doing everything he can to make them happy and safe speaks far more to tragedy that's balanced out with hope & is far more original than many a contemporary retelling in my opinion! tbh i wouldn't be surprised if this was one of the reasons why Monkey King: Hero Is Back became so popular that it basically revived Chinese animation; it's one of those rare retellings that puts the emphasis on dad/protector of children Wukong rather than lover Wukong, and as a result 2015 SWK still seems to have a special place in the hearts of many.

But turning back to western creators in both individual and big-budget productions, I guess my main gripe would have to be not so much that your meathead/yandere/destructive monkey presentations of SWK exist (you'll find such depictions across the globe), but that these often seem to be undeniably the most popular, the most common, and at times the ONLY ways that the Monkey King is understood in the west. As it is eastern countries like China do seem to have their share of such depictions, but there's also a abundance of other understandings/portrayals of the Monkey King, including those of him being a dedicated and quick-witted being, a tireless protector of children, and oh yeah a literal buddha! I've joked before about how hellbent many western creators seem to be in taking the "intelligent" out of "intelligent stone primate," but looking over the ways that SWK is commonly presented in the west...well, can you really say that this isn't the case? Honestly at times SWK really feels like he's become yet another victim of narrative monoculturalization in the west, where one version becomes the Official one and barely anyone deviates from it. Personally I feel it particularly sucks that this Official version seems to have become one where the Monkey King is routinely presented as a destructive idiot whose only worth lies in this weird frenemies relationship to the Six Eared Macaque :( (though I will say it's kind of fascinating how western creators so completely rewrote the True and False Monkey King arc that it's the Six Eared Macaque and not Sun Wukong who's become the definitely preferred individual. Dude finally achieved his goal of replacing the Monkey King lol).

In a number of ways this disparity does make sense. Besides Xiyouji definitely not having the same cultural impact in the west as it does in the east, there's very few decent English translations out there, and even fewer that give due course to the entire story. As far as I'm aware the Anthony C. Yu translation is the only one to do so, and yeah it's understandable that many people wouldn't or couldn't make their way through 1,400+ pages worth of narrative and footnotes. Plus there's the added fact that the east has more traditions of monkeys being understood as tricksters, whereas in the west primates have long been framed as man's poor imitation with ties to the Devil himself, so you can get some sense of why/how SWK's destructive tendencies would be emphasized above all else. Plus it certainly doesn't help that the two(2) primary ways that western audiences are learning about the Monkey King & co. are through cartoony retellings, which are fine in of themselves but when that's the ONLY popular version you have well you are not going to end with a complex or even a positive impression of the Monkey King. And it definitely definitely doesn't help that one of those versions--even while it is a silly lego show--consistently presents Sun Wukong as an absolute failure that basically everyone either has good reason to be mad at or just flat-out hates. And yeah you see this getting emphasized even further in fandom creations a lot, with many a popular fan work being all about how Sun Wukong ruined everything and/or getting yelled at & punched for being a cataclysmic moron. Like hell there's a very good chance I'm not looking hard enough but I don't remember coming across a single piece of recent fan work for Monkie Kid that shows Sun Wukong actually being a good mentor or actively doing something positive. The emphasis is pretty much only ever on his relationship with Macaque, and for that how thoroughly he screwed it up.

So going back to your original question anon, I would say that in it's abstract the idea of giving Sun Wukong a romance isn't inherently a bad thing. It's just that (and maybe it's just me) for a variety of reasons, in both eastern and western creations, in both individual fandom and big-budget works, I've pretty much never seen it done well lmao.