#expect some very cliche broken mirror art out of me at some point idk

[interstate35south]

li ling deserves a crashout!!

talking abt li ling again bc obviously. so basically dislyte careers are kinda notorious for ending the little snippets in a way that implies that the character is like, on the other side of their struggles and has a clear direction of where their life is going next, and typically i don’t mind it, but i dislike it for meta li ling and i’ll tell you why. just in general, the idea that passing the trials/gaining pneuma is an indicator of like, self actualization or enlightenment or whatever kinda erases the interesting potential from li ling’s circumstance and OH BOY is there a lot.

so, walk with me here. over the course of his trial, li ling lives CENTURIES as nakia, to the point where he literally forgets his own identity, and for all intents and purposes, IS nakia. he lives nakia’s life, to the point where he loves and loses the same way nakia did millennia ago when he first lived. li ling lives through nakia’s entire descent into madness: the bouts of mania, the guilt of having killed, the vilification by old friends, the suicide attempts, the whole nine yards. he even lives through the transformation of nakia’s body into something truly monstrous, and it’s only when yun chuan reaches him does he remember his old self. 

he then. literally slits his own throat. to save yun chuan from nakia’s contract, knowing that he would die with no way out, which ok hell yeah go power of love. but then nakia gives roy the scale that will quote “reshape his body”

where am i going with this? li ling lives nakia’s long, torturous life, comes to terms with dying, and gets fucking ship of theseus’d back to life in the likeness of the very man whose spiral into madness he lived. that’s gotta fuck a guy up. idk abt you but i’d be having the MOTHER of all identity crises in his place. like you’ve been irreversibly changed to resemble the man who you FELT lose his hope and humanity to rage and violence and on top of that your body may not even be yours anymore?? body image issues go crazy

while it’s undeniable that many of the personality changes li ling underwent post-chaos miracle were a result of his newfound maturity/consciousness of his own place, i think many more can be ascribed to like. clinical depression. like on top of everything he lost his damn arms too!!

tldr: li ling’s mental state post-final elegy is literally a gold mine but goes largely unexplored bc of dislyte’s implicit idea that the personal revelations that cause the meta transformation override the whiplash of returning to one’s life after the fact