#gotta respect da shixiong

[tianmijun]

Tang Lian of Xueyue City || The Blood of Youth Ep.25

“the lotus leaf has floated to the heavens, but his noble spirit is eternal on this earth”

[vermillioncrown]

What about the thoughts of the rest of the monkey cohort? How do they deal with an agent of chaos as a senior?

i'll address this peripherally in hou-shifu's pov and further in dbd, bc those thoughts have evolved over the years.

you can catch hints of it in the writing so far.

ch 3: not much interaction, but they're willing to fistfight other disciples when zyx was being menaced (pre-zl cage match). it's not a case of 'that's our shixiong and mad respect' but a combo of 'this weird little kid is... well. that's our shixiong and we gotta live with that. and now that we live here we can't have you insulting our house' and 'this kid is younger than us and knows nothing even if they are a 'prodigy', we need to protect them'. something of the like.

ch 5: get hints that the monkey cohort has a good working relationship, enough to pal around and just get into general shenanigans, but zyx still stands apart from them and unconsciously keeps them at arms' length. lucky for zyx, the other members of the cohort are easy-going enough (or i hope it seems that way, despite their pettiness) that they kinda just... :/ 'i guess shixiong's just on another level' and both parties were not trying to close the distance.

ch 7: you get another hint that the cordial working relationship between zyx and their juniors isn't as cold and lacking of connection as zyx thinks. little things bleed through, esp if you've been working w someone long enough. the cohort all know about zyx's thing with zl, they know enough about what would make zyx break with laughter.

(there's a whole thing about disciple selection that i need to go into for hou-shifu's pov that will glue this all together

it would be so easy to have some young 'prodigy' become the outcast due to oddness, disparity of ability, attitude, blah blah - but the key ingredients that make things mesh well enough on shuangfeng is 1) the type of disciples picked 2) the sect's focus and guiding principles 3) zyx's personality and 4) their background in academia.)

ch 8: playfulness and connection - now they know for certain that their shixiong is a little weirdo and relishes in being so. has their neuroses and habits that make them just a regular person, not some built-up 'prodigy'. any shenanigans they do, it's never at the expense of their cohort, and there's always some benefit (apparently ppl find me fun irl). like having a team mascot. or a little pet, except once in a while you realize this pet holds a lot of power over you and you gotta respect it.

i guess a good way to contrast it is, you know the type of da-shixiong that wwx is? super friendly and popular, teasing big bro to all? always at the forefront?

that's not zyx. they are involved with everything by virtue of being just noticeable enough to be called on, but normally not at the heart of drama so people don't think too much of what they tell them. a good, dependable teammate to have. they don't actively get involved with things, but they don't shirk their duties. the biggest scandal was the ch 9/ch 10 punishment (and ch 3 fistfight).

surprisingly, it's not always chaos around zyx. they're pretty good at avoiding situations like that. the chaos comes when drama can't be avoided, and is focused on them like an alien tractor beam

actually, the rest of the cohort is messier than zyx most of the time