#seriously watch it on viki if at all possible bc the youtube subs are hot garbage

[vyther16]

Shen Waner atleast the one from your fic, proves that smartness and compassion need not be mutually exclusive. I kinda think Yby brought up among people who treats feelings as weakness, fell for that personality of hers. He tried to cover up for his feelings by calling her stupid because deep down he knew that she is not. Not bcause he thought she could help him with any state secret. Your thought on this and Why shen zong allowed his sis to keep visiting the enemy spy leader?

I think that Yan Bingyun’s feelings for Shen Wan’er terrified him, to be quite honest. He wouldn’t have ever had the chance to really be in love before, especially with how gender-segregated DaQing society is. What girls would he have actually met and interacted with? The only girl we meet in DaQing I can reasonably see him actually having a conversation with for anything other than a training exercise is Ye Ling’er, bc swords and stabby things. I feel like they might have a little in common there, maybe share a teacher for a day to ~expand yby’s repertoire~ or something. Now I want a pre-canon story where Yan Bingyun has to train with the city guards for a day and he ends up shoved together with Ye Ling’er bc they’re the only two aristocrat-adjacent people there and they end up geeking out over swords. (sorry, that’s off topic lol)

You are absolutely right in saying that Bingyun probably fell for Shen-xiaojie’s personality. To quote @hunxi-guilai‘s wonderful Yan Bingyun meta  (after literally a single episode how did you perfectly encapsulate his character so quickly?) (x), “Yan Bingyun grows up in the capitol, in the nest of vipers and backstabbers, political intrigue and murky waters; he has the pedigree of his father, established rank and influence.” In other words, he grows up with everyone around him wearing a mask, and then, after everything is cut out from under him, he goes to BeiQi, where everyone and everything is foreign and strange and everyone is wearing a mask, but he can’t tell which masks are which because this is a foreign country and he doesn’t know BeiQi like he does NanQing.

Then he meets Shen Wan’er.

Shen Wan’er very much does not wear a mask. She is who she is. She’s kind for the sake of being kind. She smiles when she’s happy and she cries when she’s sad and she believes in the best of people until she has nothing left to base that belief on, and then some! (Literally. She comes running to save Bingyun from her brother’s ambush after he told her to go kill her brother. Like, what the hell lady. As much as I ship you two, no guy is worth that.)

Yan Bingyun is definitely just using her at the beginning. He starts out using her for information. There’s no way around it. But as she keeps being her genuine self, Yan Bingyun finds himself liking her company, and soon he likes seeing her solely because she is herself, not for any information she might bring. He always has the underlying thread of the mission, but he just likes spending time with her (I’m going to project a little bit here and say that my Yan Bingyun is on the aromantic spectrum. Demi-aro, more specifically.) After he gets captured, he should logically use her to get free, but he thinks that he ought to pretend he has no feelings whatsoever instead, so he pushes her away. Obviously, it doesn’t work, but points for trying?

In my hc, Yan Bingyun fell in love with her because of her kindness and genuine nature, but he wouldn’t have given her a second glance if she wasn’t intelligent in the first place. So yby knows she’s not stupid, per se, but the way he was raised and the environments he’s lived in treat kindness as weakness, like you said, and if you’re weak, then obviously you’re stupid. It’s difficult to overcome internal biases like that. He knows she isn’t stupid, but it’s easier to tell himself that after he’s captured bc that makes it easier to push her away.

okay, that is more than i intended on writing about yby & sxj, but on to your second question, anon! I rewatched parts of the BeiQi arc for this because I was never really paying attention to Shen Zhong when he was interacting with yby or sxj. (Sidenote, the youtube subs are awful and Viki’s are so much better, and it’s free on viki, so if you haven’t watched the viki subs, do yourself a favor and go watch those.)

So, the doylist answer to why Shen Zhong lets Shen Wan’er continue to visit yby is they needed someone to help Fan Xian find him and she worked out perfectly as a plot device.

Watsonian answer (the one we all actually care about) is that Shen Zhong was probably trying a good cop/bad cop dichotomy and hoping that maybe his sister’s kindness would get more answers than his torture. It obviously doesn’t work, but I guess he gets points for trying?

I think that most of the reason he lets her go see Yan Bingyun is the good cop/bad cop reasoning, but also if she is bringing him meals and medicine, he doesn’t have to bother, and then he can restrict her access to punish yby.  

After Yan Bingyun is rescued, Shen Zhong definitely forbids Shen Wan’er from visiting yby, especially because of the instrumental role she played in the rescue. This is why he’s so upset at her after she visits yby at the diplomatic envoy’s house? hotel? (the subs are unclear. or maybe i just missed it. that’s known to happen.)

I have more thoughts, but this is long enough as is, and I don’t think I can make those thoughts coherent right now, so I’m going to cap this answer off before it hits a thousand words. Thanks for the ask!