#((the admins usually are of the same opinion with slight variations so i hope I did the topic justice))

[threelivesthreeworlds]

@mcheang said   :    First off, I wouldn’t say Jiheng was abandoned by the demon clan so much as she abandoned them when she left them to pick up the pieces of the botched wedding. She knew she would be exiled and chose to run away anyway. Second, it was never really stated that Dong Hua would stop visiting her after he was married. He would still have to check on the poisoned daughter of his trusted general and make sure she survived.

The admins always think of a few quotes to go in each essay as textual evidence, and admittedly with these next few quotes the previous essay would’ve likely been more complete - we just don’t want to overload our audience with paragraphs and paragraphs of text. So, let’s consider this the Ji Heng Essay, Pt. 2, feat. some Interesting Narrative Foils / Parallels, because I think we don’t actively recognize how similar Ji Heng can be to our leads, and I think sometimes we have to directly look at that and to look within ourselves to figure out why we let our favorite characters off, but we go hard on Ji Heng forever. You’ll have to bear with me - this carries a lot of extra analysis of the text per point addressed, but I believe a somewhat more thorough exploration is required.

TW SUICIDE MENTION, TW DUB CON MENTION, TW GASLIGHTING, for mention of certain canon events, proceed with caution

TO THE FIRST POINT, we have to address, in further detail, what happened after Ji Heng ran away from the wedding. When Xiao Yan tells Feng Jiu about the story Ji Heng told him of what’s happened since they went their separate ways, he does say that she stayed away from the demon clan of her own accord:

Feng Jiu massaged her shoulder, and looked a touch confused: "What does that have to do with Princess JI Heng?"

Xiao Yan was even more confused. "Did I never tell you, that when Ji Heng ran away with that little guard Minsu, they eloped to Fanyin Valley?" He scratched his scalp, the face as beautiful as autumn flowers under the moon touched with a tint of red: "Actually, I only found out half a year ago. All this time, Ji Heng's true love Minsu was a girl who was dressed as a man, and she liked her brother. After she figured that out, Ji Heng couldn't deal with the shock and fought with Minsu, and they separated, but she felt that she was too embarrassed to return to the demon clan, and so she stayed in Fanyin Valley to be the court musician."

However - later, at the end of the book when Chonglin goes to ask the Red Demon Clan about Ji Heng and where she is, he gets this answer:

When Chonglin went to meet with the Red Demon Clan, Lord Xuyang said that after the incident three hundred years ago when his sister ran away with Minsu, the Red Demon Clan had already banished her, and Ji Heng had no contact with the Red Demon Clan since then. Their clan could not tell where she was now.

If anything, then, I think it would be considered a mutual abandonment. For, drastically different reasons, I might add. Ji Heng’s reasons for staying away from home appear to be pride - that she ran away with someone who ended up not being in love with her, who ended up to be lying to her this whole time. That she’s become “pitiful,” because she didn’t follow through on the marriage her brother arranged for her even if she didn’t want it, and now she’s unhappy. Put yourself in her shoes for a minute - and because Admin Ro is both Asian the queen of analogies, imagine that you’ve decided against everyone’s wishes in your family that you were going to be an actor. They all told you you’re going to starve, and, what do you know, they were right. You are in fact out of work and poor. Would you go home, to a chorus of I-told-you-so? To a chorus of people more pleased that they’re right about you than they are willing to support your dream and what you want to do with your life?

Along that vein, her brother’s motivations for banishing her are likely more political. He arranged Ji Heng’s marriage to Donghua because he wanted the political ties to Heavenly Realm. And, in the aftermath of the elopement, in all likelihood he’s trying to disown Ji Heng as fast as possible to avoid it being a reflection on him / his clan, so they don’t get into trouble with either Donghua Dijun (who, by all means should’ve been humiliated by this turn of events) or Jiu Chong Heaven. He does not support his sister’s decision, and in fact, does not want to even be seen supporting his sister’s decision.

Now, food for thought, okay - take a moment and compare that to Feng Jiu, who’s had a very similar narrative. When Feng Jiu goes after someone she loves, going so far as to become a maid, pretend to be a fox, and, basically lose all face for Qingqiu, and he turns out not to have loved her and he turns out to hurt her, what happens? She goes home, to friends and family that do love her. That do support her and have shown support for her, all this time. She has a family who’s waiting for her to go home, who’ll be shields for her, as Zhe Yan says, who she trusts because they’ve always been there for her, over political obligation sometimes. The Bai Family “help their family, not the one that’s in the right.” And let’s take a look at what happens when Feng Jiu runs away from a wedding okay - she blows Cang Yi’s whole palace apart, and yes, she gets punished for this but it’s no more drastic than, likely, being locked in the cave or being spanked. Her family doesn’t disown her because she lost face or because she made a political blunder.

The fact that fandom in general holds these two women to very different standards in this very similar event despite them both being just women who’re trying to run away from a political marriage they don’t want - is concerning. But that fact notwithstanding - from just these two different environments, it’s not hard to see why, in the face of certain decisions, Ji Heng and Feng Jiu make different choices. Now, as a person, I firmly believe no matter what your situation is you make your own choices. So, it’s still on them, as to what choices they make when faced with yet again, a similar situation: not being loved by the person they love. But, with any amount of compassion, you can see, very clearly, why it’s more likely and easier for Ji Heng to make the bad choice. She hasn’t had a particularly large amount of strong relationships in her past, familial or otherwise, that shows her what a good, healthy, strong relationship is like. There is no reference point.

One might argue that Donghua’s just the same, since he has had no real parents and he isn’t close to his foster family. Well, that’s just it - out of this void, where his close relationships are supposed to be, Donghua doesn’t do any better either. In fact, he screws up just as much. Now, I can’t weigh “threatening to kill yourself unless your crush divorces his wife” and “lying to your crush and changing their memories so that they forget everything bad you’ve ever done and sleeping with her using a whole different identity” against each other on a scale of, which is worse. Because they’re both bad, and it’s both toxic in a relationship - but, it seems as though the fandom in general judges them differently as well. 

With Donghua, we seem to be more capable of admitting that the things he does are mistakes. We seem to be more capable of saying “it’s because he doesn’t know what he’s doing, it’s because he hasn’t had any experience, it’s because of xyz.” We seem to be capable of understanding that his flaws are flaws, but that Donghua is not a fundamentally evil character and these flaws don’t fundamentally define who he is. We seem to be capable of liking him and forgiving him for his flaws overall. Whereas, with Ji Heng, the general trend I and Admin Lins have seen is to dislike her, even though these two characters screw up the same amount, and, I mean, for similar reasons and to a similar scale. 

And while I’m not saying people can’t dislike the characters they dislike - I think we have to to evaluate ourselves and ask ourselves the question - why is it that we are capable of forgiving Donghua for what he does, but we aren’t capable of forgiving Ji Heng? Why is it that we would rather assume that Donghua is a good person and that he isn’t making these decisions because he is bad, but we aren’t capable of the same assumptions for Ji Heng? 

One of Donghua’s major flaws is carelessness - and that lead us TO THE SECOND POINT. When Donghua leaves the valley with Feng Jiu, Ji Heng catches up and asks to be taken with them. His response implies that Ji Heng’s condition was not really a concern to him at that moment: 

A flash of surprise entered Ji Heng's eyes, but her gaze was full of hope as it directed toward Dijun. Donghua said coolly: "Living in Fanyin Valley will control the Quishui poison. If you live here for three thousand years, the poison will fade away by itself."

And also gives a response that leaves even Feng Jiu saying he’s cold:

Donghua suddenly said: "Your father asked me to take care of you before he feathered...but, I have never liked to care for someone who has designs on me."

Ji Heng's face was suddenly pale, and after a long while, she said sadly: "Yes, I understand."

At the edge of the lake, Feng Jiu stared at the surface of it. Dijun wet a handkerchief and gave it to her. Feng Jiu took it and pressed it to her face for a while, and waited for the cold to sink into her skin, and finally woke up entirely to say: "Thank goodness when I was maid at your palace, you didn't have the chance to know me. If you met me then, you would've said to me what you said to Ji Heng today, right?" And said, tentatively, "You were a little cold, when you said that."

Now, I can’t tell you for sure whether or not Donghua meant exactly to make good on it - but the implications are all there. Telling her the poison is no longer a concern and she should just stay in the Valley while he presumably leaves,  and when he talks about her father, doesn’t that sound like a threat? It certainly probably would have, to Ji Heng: “I know you like me, now stop, or I’ll never come back.” That’s what that sounds like. Now, both admins on this blog have anxiety, and, if you look at Ji Heng and how she was literally ready to kill herself at the end of the book, it’s not hard to conjecture that she probably has some mental illness. Piecing that together with what we previously discussed, it’s not hard to infer that she likely has some anxiety surrounding abandonment. 

In her mind, that might very well translate to a straightforward, he’s leaving and never coming back. One might say “why doesn’t she just stop liking him then” but that’s an unreasonable thing to expect...honestly, no one can just turn their emotions off like that, we know this, right? We can’t expect that of a person, so we can’t expect that of a character or that character would no longer be authentically human. Furthermore, if you look at the actions Donghua took in the Valley before he and Feng Jiu ever got together, I think you can see where Ji Heng’s mind might take that even more drastically. The second Feng Jiu showed up in the Valley and this coincided with Donghua’s visit, what does Donghua do? He makes her cook for him, he goes to live with her, he straight up puts up a ward to block them both from the rest of the world. He basically declares to the whole world that, “the only thing I care about here is Feng Jiu.”

Bear in mind, he visits Ji Heng every ten years and is the only thing close to a friend she has in the Valley before Xiao Yan shows up. Ji Heng has been cooking for and living with Donghua every ten year interval he has shown up. To be suddenly and quite completely shut out and removed by this person she thought was her friend, that she had feelings for, even if they were only on her part as far as she knew, is hurtful. It’s like Donghua is saying “I like Feng Jiu, and so I don’t care about you or what you do anymore.” 

Now, that’s not Feng Jiu’s fault, and it’s not Donghua’s fault. He’s free to do that, of course, and people change and they outgrow each other and they leave. But - to a person who’s been left by a lot of people, doesn’t it make sense for Ji Heng to react drastically? Doesn’t it make sense for her to see that Donghua is getting married to Feng Jiu and further extrapolate from his previous actions that he’s unlikely to visit again? Think of it if it happened to you - if your best / only friend, one that you care about a lot and are extremely invested in, left you because they found a new friend, can you truly say that you wouldn’t harbor a single bitter thought for that new friend? Can you say in those circumstances, every time, you would make the right choice? 

IN CONCLUSION, all this, and the previous essay, is not to say that what Ji Heng does throughout the narrative isn’t bad. It is bad, and it is messy, and it does hurt people. These are explanations and not excuses for her behavior. I and Admin Lins will both agree that of the two of us, I am definitely the harder one on Ji Heng. I get my little bursts of rage when I get to certain areas in the novel that, yes, I can’t soothe over even knowing everything that I know. However, I do think - that a part of evaluating reads and the flaws of each character is trying to understand them. I think I have enough faith in Tang Qi that I believe she wouldn’t put a flat antagonist character in a novel to be “evil” for evil’s sake - and therefore, when I go through my read and I see the hints of dimension, I can say, I see it and it’s there. 

In the end, sure, it’s about what everyone wants to believe. You can see that evidence and interpret it however you want. That’s how art and subjectivity and reads work - no one read is completely right.  No one read is completely objective. If someone looked at all of this and thought “nah, bull, Ji Heng did all of it because she’s just an awful person,” I guess there’s nothing to stop them. But in literature,  where every character is a reflection of a living, breathing, relatable person, the admins on this blog are more inclined toward a middle read. That not everyone is completely good and that not everyone is completely bad. That people make bad decisions because of their pasts, because of their circumstances, because of their mental illnesses, but that it does not make them, over all, a bad person forever. 

I think if I can extend my compassion to Donghua and Feng Jiu, who have screwed up all over the place throughout this novel, and say, “I understand why you did this, you’re stupid, but I love you anyway” then I can extend that very same compassion to Ji Heng. And I think, if I can say “It’s ok, give them time, they can do better” about the main characters, then Ji Heng also deserves that very same hope. People are flawed. People make mistakes. People can regret it and get better.