#hua binan was a villain but he had a pretty good reason to want to burn the world

[totentanz]

Shi Mei, Mo Ran, and Injustice

I finally finished Erha, and…well. I’m not sure how I feel about it. I think there are a lot of interesting themes running through it regarding redemption and forgiveness and how do we determine what is just and what is cruel, and yet I feel that those ideas are never interrogated to the extent that they could be. The respective endings of Shi Mei/Hua Binan and Mo Ran leave me feeling a bit cold, mostly because both of their story lines directly touch on these themes and yet they don’t quite seem to know what they want to say about them? They’re just kind of left hanging?

(Fair warning, this isn’t really a structured meta and it doesn’t really reach any grand conclusions; it’s mostly me just rambling on about some thoughts I had.)

So, the atrocity within the cultivation world that really sets the novel’s entire plot in motion is the systematic dehumanization and exploitation of the Butterfly Boned Beauty Clan. The beauties are a race descended from demons that cultivators see as being good for only two things: serving as human cauldrons to increase cultivation (so basically, get raped so their rapists can increase their spiritual power) or being eaten outright or having their bodies harvested to turn into high-level medicines.

Hua Binan wants this to end. He wants his people to return to the Demon Realm, where they’ll have access to their spiritual power and won’t have to worry about being bred like livestock and cannibalized. The kicker is that doing so requires the Path of Martyrdom, which has to be constructed from the flesh, blood, and bone of so many people that it basically requires killing pretty much everyone in the world. One atrocity begets another; in order to save his people from murder, Hua Binan commits murder on a massive scale. And yet Hua Binan’s path is thematically similar to what Mo Ran did to his childhood tormentors—Mo Ran killed everyone in the Drunken Jade Pavilion, either with a machete or by burning them alive after he set the building on fire, and he didn’t discriminate between the ones who had directly harmed him and the ones who just happened to be there.There’s a definite parallel in how these characters are responding to violence with more violence, yet one of them is spared while one of them is crushed.

Just as Mo Ran’s actions led to his new life as a young master at Sisheng Peak, Hua Binan is about to achieve a new life within the Demon Realm. His machinations finally allow him to forge the Path of Martyrdom, the gates to the Demon Realm open, and the Butterfly Boned Beauties are allowed to go home. And then comes the kicker: Hua Binan’s father is descended from a god, and so he cannot be allowed to enter the demon realm. The doors to the demon realm begin to close, heedless of the beauties who have yet to enter (regardless of whether or not those beauties have any god blood!), and Hua Binan, desperate to save his people, pulls on his newly unlocked spiritual power to hold the doors open just long enough for the rest of his people to pass through to safety, then he’s brutally crushed.

On the one hand, it’s easy to say that Hua Binan got what he deserved. The Path of Martyrdom was brutal, built on the blood and bone of everyone regardless of whether they deserved to be sacrificed or not (and who can possibly be the judge of that?), and Hua Binan has responded to the genocide of his people by instigating another genocide. He shouldn’t be rewarded for killing everyone in the world, and his choice to die for the sake of his people but not reap the benefits of mass murder is fitting.

But if Hua Binan gets what he deserved, then I have trouble with how Mo Ran’s story line plays out. Their death scenes are remarkably similar: Mo Ran/Taxian Jun maintains the Black Tortoise Spirit Foundation in order to allow the cultivators to pass through the Gate of Time and Space and Life and Death to safety, just as Hua Binan held open the door to the demon realm to allow the beauties to pass through; and just like Hua Binan’s body was slowly crushed by the closing doors, his own body slowly dissolves into dust. Both of them sacrifice themselves to ensure the safety of others.

Yet Mo Ran is ultimately spared. He’s spared because he was a Butterfly Boned Beauty all along, even if he didn’t know it—because of course, he’s a super special Butterfly Boned Beauty who didn’t have the physical giveaway of crying golden tears but has the ability to cultivate an incredibly strong golden core. There’s something about this that just feels a bit too neat and tidy. Mo Ran is a Butterfly Boned Beauty, but he can safely pass as a regular cultivator and didn’t feel the same fear that constantly tore into Hua Binan. Mo Ran can stay within the Demon Realm, embrace his heritage as a Butterfly Boned Beauty, and live an extended lifespan because he did so much to aid the beauties. And yet, everything that he did for them—the Forbidden Techniques, the creation of chess pieces to create the Path of Martyrdom—was ultimately done at the behest of Hua Binan. Mo Ran has never dedicated himself to the cause of the beauties to the same extent that Hua Binan did and has never taken their cause as his own. He felt bad for Song Qiutong at the auction, but we never really see him engaging with the systematic exploitation of an entire group of people outside of this incident.

And Mo Ran’s grace isn’t based on an idea of morality being rewarded. The Demon Realm doesn’t care if he killed a bunch of people under someone else’s control or not; it doesn’t care if he killed people at all, as long as it’s done for a purpose the demons agree with. Mo Ran being a beauty feels like a deus ex machina in the worst sort of way, a last minute addition to tie the plot work even if it isn’t thematically integrated.

And Shi Mei? The last one of the Butterfly Boned Beauties who were exploited for so long, who lost his eyesight and didn’t return to the Demon Realm? The last we hear of him, he’s wandering the world as a blind cultivator, living a life of atonement, calling himself a sinner, and healing others with his own flesh. Did he get what he deserved? He let Chu Wanning go and dedicated his life to helping others, but is he truly free of the fear that has followed him his entire life? If word gets out that he’s the last beauty, will he be hunted down and harvested like his kin, even after everything else he’s done? We don’t know.

And that’s the thing: we never find out if the rest of the world ever reckons with the harm it’s done to the Butterfly Boned Beauty Clan. Honestly, one of my biggest frustrations with the beauties is that they are the point around which the entire plot revolves, and yet there is so little time actually spent on them—we get Song Qiutong’s auction scene, Hua Binan’s info dump to Chu Wanning, and that’s pretty much it. One of the questions that I feel that Erha could have really engaged is if genocide really needs to be responded to with genocide—were there other options that the beauties could take?

Erha rests on a backdrop of societal injustice and exploitation, and yet it never commits to actually addressing it. It’s leaving me frustrated. It’s such a big question, and yet it never really asks the readers to engage with it. Mo Ran is forgiven! Hua Binan gets his comeuppance! Shi Mei is...who knows! It’s wrapped up so neatly, when these themes are anything but neat.