#but hua cheng IS awfully ominous here. flushed emoji

[keingleichgewicht]

the short version of this post is "wow hua cheng scary, good for hua cheng." the long version is that IT'S INTERESTING how obviously we know that in fact he's cool, and very sweetly in love, and that he is going to be a very good husband to xie lian someday, because we know we're reading a fuckin romance novel and we know we adore him as a character…… AND YET you cannot possibly argue that this does not LOOK QUITE BAD.

mu qing and feng xin's reactions are convincingly justified and notably probably very much in xie lian's best interest—they are, under significant duress, reverting to the old teamwork, thought forgotten, in mutual protection of a man they once loved and had for so long cut off so thoroughly. which is in itself… kind of a lot! that despite everything that happened eight hundred years ago and in the eight hundred years since, for a hot second here all the old arguments are wiped clean away, and they're willing to stand shoulder-to-shoulder and willing to stand up to hua chengzhu (by all accounts a hell of a serious threat) for their prince's sake. sweet!

but the point being it's not like they're wrong; it is not like xie lian's weak protests that certainly it would have turned out alright and certainly no serious harm was meant are not extremely in-character for a guy who has so little self-preservation it's frightening, who seems to have forgotten that it is preferable or possible to avoid pain, who does have kind of a crazy tendency to look for the best in people and let's be honest plausibly might have gotten seriously attached to anybody who was remotely nice to him considering the way literally everybody else treats him constantly. like, luckily hua cheng is cool, and we know this because he's the love interest in our romance novel...

and nonetheless there is another one of these deliberate little reversals happening here, the clear point made that he needn't have been, and had he not been then feng xin and mu qing's intervention, well-intended as it is, is so abysmally too-little-too-late; they abandoned him and everything else also abandoned him and if they had wanted him not to fall in love with a monster they shouldn't have let the monster be the first person in centuries to show the poor bastard any kindness or consideration whatsoever. i dunno. jeezus

#im ch175: Earring Reveal Tm #lovely example of narrative problems caused and executed exclusively by everybody being simply completely in character #but hua cheng IS awfully ominous here. flushed emoji #tgcf lb