#And this emotionally blind as a bat man completely unravels and rebuilds it with head pats

[phoenixcatch7]

Competent sy is my JAM.

Like, just because he nicked all sorts of skills and knowledge by accident doesn't mean he hasn't used them to great effect! This man is a TEACHER and a TOP LEVEL MONSTER HUNTER and a FAMOUS ARTIST and a MUSICIAN and the SECOND IN COMMAND of a mountain! He gets by with wit and deception and obfuscation, but that's the thing! He gets by.

He doesn't have a fraction of the preparation time someone born into the world does. He has no prior experience with any sort of appropriate mindsets, his XP is set to zero. All he has is two months binging (and we all know how terrible that is for memory) the most tacky, over stuffed, distracting, contradictory 'manual' beforehand he immediately lost upon arrival. He has an extremely limited amount of mistakes he can make before he gets killed over it. He is tasked with single handedly raising the child destined to torture and kill him.

And still he has enough love and patience to keep coming back (against his plans) after he's been KILLED, and it saves the world. Just one person.

Y’know I think the thing I enjoy the most about the SVSSS fanfictions I’ve read is getting to flip outside of Shen Qingqiu’s POV for a while and see him through the eyes of others. Because Shen Yuan has some monster imposter syndrome – understandably so, he is literally an imposter! – but even with as little respect as he had for the Original Goods, he still thinks of himself as an inferior substitute, a worthless hack who is just cheating and faking everything to get by. 

But Shen Yuan is such a fun character once you get past the bitchy shell! He’s genuinely very brave! He’s genuinely very smart! Not only in his ability to retain and recall information but in his innovative solutions to intractable problems (just look at the way he got around Zhuzhi-lang during that trick with the drugged wine, that was a good one.) And he has a genuinely compassionate heart under all that bitchiness, much more so than he thinks of himself. He thinks that anyone would care as much and try as hard  as he does, and is blind to the fact that literally nobody else does.

So it’s nice to get to see him from the POV of others (aside from Luo Binghe, who is canonically acknowledged to be extremely deranged about his Shizun and not a good judge of character) and see that oh, the Qing Jing Peak Master actually is really smart and really cool and very good.

And while he may have inherited the looks from Shen Jiu, he brought the style all by himself.