#mo du is about a good man trying to force himself into darkness and being saved

[grassbreads]

Tell me how I, the gal with terminal "can't stop thinking about Tai Sui" disease, read hundreds of thousands of words of Mo Du over the course of months, starting right after I finished Tai Sui, yet it took me until right now in this instant to put together the Fei Du->Zhou Ying parallel

Like. Here's the favored son of a man who is incredibly powerful and morally bankrupt. He hates his dad and would be quite happy to commit patricide, should he get the opportunity, but he doesn't directly do so because it wouldn't suit his schemes. He has spent his entire life since his teenage years painstakingly putting together the chess pieces necessary to both destroy his dad and unravel the truth of a grand unknowable conspiracy that has haunted his entire life. He's a genius and the way his mind works is utterly incomprehensible to everyone else in the world, even those who know and love him best. The right kind of placid smile from him can be the most terrifying thing anybody has ever seen. He is willing to use himself up and toss himself out completely if it is the means to the final end of his schemes.

It's just that with Fei Du, the whole point of him is that he's not nearly so terrible as he thinks he is. He's not a psychopath. He's not cruel, regardless of how much empathy he may or may not naturally have. He's just spectacularly traumatized by his childhood. And the presence of Luo Wenzhou in his life both saves him from spiraling down into his original epic self-destructive plot and allows him to access his buried human emotions.

Then, 5 years later, Priest came back to revisit some of the same ideas and turn absolutely all of them up to eleven. She wrote a man who doesn't just think differently from others, but who perceives the world so wildly differently from anyone else that his experience of existence is utterly incomprehensible to his peers. She wrote a patricidal prince who doesn't just want to destroy his father and his company, then tear out the truth of a criminal conspiracy, but rather wants to destroy his father and his entire country, then tear out the truth of the sky itself. She wrote a man who genuinely doesn't give a single damn about anyone other than himself and his tiny tiny selection of loved ones. Who would destroy the entire world in a fit of vengeance and who uses his own willingness to kill innocents as leverage against others. She wrote a man who plans to achieve his goals by way of epic self destruction and does exactly that, leaving the main character's loss of him as the central beating tragedy in the otherwise best possible ending.

She also wrote a story in which, when Zhou Ying's closest and most loved person realizes the dark and scheming truth of him, rather than saying "I can fix him; I don't think he's really so bad," he says "yeah, this is my cousin and he's a terrible menace who tries to destroy the world sometimes. I love him more than anything."

You can absolutely see how Priest's interest in similar ideas informed both characters. It's just that Fei Chengyu didn't succeed in raising his perfect little sociopath successor, but Emperor Taiming and the demons of the impassible sea absolutely succeeded in Jokerizing Prince Zhuang. They just couldn't possibly anticipate the kind of monster that the demon of the east sea would become.