#sorry this is just verbal equivalent of magician pulling colored ribbon out their mouth. when i have better wordslater i will actually talk

[lostjulys]

thinking abt him (xie lian) & how he breaks every narrative convention that you would expect. tgcf reads like a story where the main character should be anyone other than xie lian. he should be dead by now. he should be the side character. he should be the one whose memory compels the narrative. he reads like a character whose absence echoes in the current actions of every other character. by all rights he should be a laura palmer & the story would make narrative sense, probably, if he was gone; it would be a series of vignettes, all interconnected by this thread of a memory of someone who seems to have been in everyone's life, them coming to realize they're being haunted by the memory of this person, there would be the bereft & tragic lover, survivor, keeping his memory alive. but instead he is, against all convention, still alive. even when he's a thousand years old & forgotten he's defined by this negative space, this absence, these thousands of years of rotten luck and calamity and pain all swirling around the wake he leaves in the narrative. and he's still haunting the story, even while he is present !!! the ghost of xie lian from four hundred years ago topples a domino & then another fourhundred years later, present xie lian has to try desperately to prevent the whole palace falling down on their heads. he is constantly dancing around the minefield of his past & unwillingly embodying his past & he is more than anyone else haunted hunted etc. by it !!!!! anyway a big theme of tgcf i think that i haven't seen talked about much is the idea of like. um. people bumping into people's lives & changing them so much. and the way that happens silently and quietly sometimes and no one else knows. the mundanity of actions that leave massive ripples hundreds of years in the future. the way we never know which of our actions will leave what kind of effect on those we love. etc etc. etc. which probably i will talk about more when i haven't just woken up.but. yeah.

#sorry this is just verbal equivalent of magician pulling colored ribbon out their mouth. when i have better wordslater i will actually talk #about this maybe. #tgcf lb #tgcf