#did I go into qiye thinking I was going to die on helian yi’s hill? no

[intyalote]

What are your thoughts of Helian Yi? I just feel so bad for him in Qiye and I think that it was unfair for ppl to hate him for actions that an alt!version of him did.

Oh boy, I hope you’re ready anon, because I have SO MANY thoughts. Sorry for the essay - I couldn’t help myself.

I already wrote a bit about him here (from the perspective of power and the loneliness of being Emperor), and I’ll point you to hunxi-after-hours’s Qi Ye summary post as well, which makes a couple points about him that I completely agree with. 

My biased take is that Helian Yi deserved better - I even had a few moments of regret while reading that he and Jing Beiyuan weren’t the endgame couple. I love Xiyuan and Wuxi, and Helian Yi/Jing Beiyuan would necessitate a very different novel, but I think that dynamic would be so interesting. Anyway, shipping aside, I was quite surprised to go on tumblr after finishing Qi Ye and find that some people really hated him, because when I was reading I mostly just saw him as a tragic parallel to Jing Beiyuan.

I do understand why some people are put off by him considering that, though it doesn’t happen in this lifetime, he does kill the protagonist of the novel. It’s just that I saw that as part of the tragedy of his “7-lifetime fate” with Jing Beiyuan. In the first lifetime, Jing Beiyuan pines for him and he doesn’t realize until it’s too late that he loves him back. In the seventh life, Helian Yi becomes aware of his own love much earlier - but ironically, it’s only because Jing Beiyuan doesn’t love him this time around and so he can’t take that devotion for granted anymore. I think he’s drawn so strongly to Jing Beiyuan in the seventh life because Jing Beiyuan has this freedom (which in itself comes from not loving Helian Yi anymore!) that he himself will never be able to achieve, and that’s what makes it all so tragic. The circumstances are such that they literally cannot both be in love with each other at the same time. That’s part of what I was trying to get at with my earlier meta.

The other thing I wanted to say in that post is - yes, he’s not a great person. But no one in Qi Ye is, and I never got the impression while reading that, in terms of morals or lack thereof, Helian Yi is any worse than Jing Beiyuan or Zhou Zishu. All three of them parallel each other in such interesting ways, and it’s a little weird to me that one gets singled out as worse than the others. This TYK meta argues that what makes all these terrible people sympathetic is that they choose to love - well, Helian Yi doesn’t get to make that choice. Partly because Jing Beiyuan makes it for him, and partly because he’s the Emperor, and can’t afford to put personal attachments above his duty. If you think of Qi Ye/TYK as novels about escaping court, the end message is basically that the degree to which you can do so is determined by your proximity to the throne. Zhou Zishu, as a jianghu man, can just leave entirely, Jing Beiyuan can sort of leave but can’t completely let go of politics, and Helian Yi can’t get out at all, ever. 

All this to say that, while I have nothing against his haters, to each their own and all that, I personally find him to be a deeply sympathetic character. I haven’t even touched on some of the other things I love about him, like how his father’s coldness and brothers’ scheming fucks him up, or how we suddenly get to see his core of steel during the invasion, but I do want to talk a little bit about how his Qi Ye self is different from his first life self, because it does feel a bit unfair that he has to suffer for something he doesn’t even remember doing. 

I’ve already gone into why Helian Yi realizes that he’s in love a lot sooner, but the other thing is - he lets Jing Beiyuan go. Yes, in the end he thinks Jing Beiyuan is dead, but before that he flat-out tells him to leave with Wuxi and is surprised when he doesn’t. From that, and from reading the Helian Yi extra (which is super depressing by the way, highly recommend), what I gather is that Qi Ye Helian Yi is a lot more self-aware. He knows that he loves Jing Beiyuan, and he knows that he can’t love Jing Beiyuan, and he knows that trying to keep Jing Beiyuan will result in destroying everything he loves about him. And though he chooses to let go - in those circumstances, isn’t that also a form of love? It’s just such a terrible situation to be in, and, all other things aside, that’s why he’s so compelling to me.