#And clearly he and Lingsha get along

[shiroselia]

The Luofu charioteers mean so fucking much to me I love them So fucking much

[spicehill]

a few post 2.5 characterization notes.

obvious spoilers? yea.

okay so admittedly I am typing this while still pretty darn sick, so if something doesn't make sense grammatically i am actually begging you to point it out to me so I can fix it when i'm not Dying lmao. but here we go:

as I've said in a few places in the server, I'm really not in love with the fact that hoyo's taken away jiaoqiu's ability to see as a consequence of his poisoning when he was already dealing with the loss of his sense of taste in the last thirty years. like just make him deaf too at this point smh -- but forreal ok let's discuss jiaoqiu's current condition and what he is and isn't doing re: lingsha's orders.

the state of jiaoqiu's vision.

tl;dr, it's severely impaired but not completely gone.

lingsha's report describes it as "function blindness", ie. legal blindness, suggesting he still has some ability to see, but it is impaired profoundly enough that even corrective lenses don't do much to help. I'm choosing to interpret this as difficulty discerning people and his environment clearly at a distance greater than two feet, but still some ability to see with some detail (color, clear shapes and features, text, etc.) when something or someone is within twelve inches of his face. this would explain his ability to still use his phone, though I'd imagine he's relying slightly more on accessibility features as trying to type a reply with the phone screen right in his face is probably. quite taxing. when you're further away from him, he can make out a rough shadow of where you are, how tall you are, and so on. so, if he really needs to see something, he can like... get right up close to it, I suppose.

because of this impairment ( and a dash of trauma lmao ), I'm hard-pressed to think he's willingly going to go anywhere without someone he knows and trusts escorting him, unless he wound up there by mistake. see: his theory for how he wound up where he is in the current abyss event, kinda just stumbled in here and got separated from the rest of the yaoqing squad.

the state of jiaoqiu's diet.

yeah, sorry, you can peel the spices out of his cold dead hands. lingsha's report insists on him cutting spice out of his diet for the sake of ongoing nerve damage, though at his age and with how little he really enjoys in life, it doesn't seem like he's taking her guidance 100% seriously. the hotpot text messages suggest he may actually be trying to branch out to more balanced ( and less exclusively spicy ) dishes, so perhaps he's cutting back, but not cutting the spice completely as ordered. also unlikely he'll stay out of the kitchen and away from knives, but maybe he'll ask for some help with that, too.

the state of jiaoqiu's overall wellbeing.

he'll be the first to tell you that he's already an old fox -- all of this is a little astounding, still being here at all. I don't think he planned on surviving to see if his efforts to cure feixiao with hoolay's heart were successful -- and though he says he's content and has no regrets with her non-answer to the status of her condition, I think that was said more for her sake than saying the truth of how he feels. a lot of jiaoqiu's dynamic with feixiao seems to have that in their history -- saying what needs to be heard instead of what is actually believed.

lingsha's report makes it sound like he's in about of good as spirits as he always is, which is to say: pleasant, polite, managing, eager to try some more food lmao. probably subduing some underlying pain with whatever he can put together himself and whatever the alchemists on the luofu think might help as well.

I think some small part of him realizes he'd be more content being gone and not knowing if hoolay's heart was the cure she needed, as opposed to this current reality: living to sense that it was the right cure, but it somehow... didn't work. and honestly, her not getting cured is probably the lesson his master intended all along; does failure make the last fifteen to twenty years at her side pointless? probably not.

but the whole issue of what his master wanted him to learn, oof....... that's a discussion for another day! and maybe another time completely. several months or even years from now.

I don't think the story of the yaoqing trio is over just yet, and I do think we'll see more of them in the future -- hopefully, with jiaoqiu's vision returning in full ( before he keels over of old age, that is 😉)