#i think I suddenly just understood the contextual meaning of ‘no paths are bound’

[budd-ie]

I don’t think Xie Lian ever really got the chance to feel human. When he was born he was the center of the world, and since he was young he wanted to be a god. There was nothing he couldn’t do and nobody who didn’t love him, he had massive privilege and he knew it, and at the time, he really genuinely thought he was omnipotent. His mind skipped mortality and went straight to expecting godhood. But even when this period of his life is over, what comes next is isolation. Now, he’s someone without heavenly appeal but with knowledge and experiences much beyond the understanding of mortals. He lives among them, takes the same jobs, eats the same food, has the same needs, he can try to help them, he can try to love them as he always has, but there’s still something that’s just not quite the same. He may understand their plight after living through poverty, but he’s never truly been the common person he’s always wished to save. He can’t grow old, he can’t die, nothing can kill him, his existence is something so beyond humanity but still so far from the god he dreamed of being. And so, he berates himself whenever he has strong emotions or slips up a little or says something kind of weird or misses little details, becuase he still sees himself as not quite human enough to make those kinds of completely normal mistakes. He pushes people away before he has the chance to hurt them, before they have the chance to learn to hate him. So when Hua Cheng finally comes into the picture, he’s trying to say it’s okay to be human, Xie Lian. It’s okay to want to save yourself too.