#they're both trying to dress like respectable upper class cultivators

[sunderwight]

"Shen Yuan is careless about his appearance" is an understandable take, but I think it's also inferior to what's actually going on most of the time, which is more like:

Shen Yuan is in fact so preoccupied with appearances that he is extremely meticulous and diligent in keeping up his image, but he's also utterly oblivious to how this factors into attraction (especially queer attraction) and he misses cultural context clues thanks to having transmigrated sometimes, with an end result that sometimes he is carefully and unwittingly making himself up like a thirst trap because he thinks that's what a sophisticated and classy scholar ought to look like.

[livrelady]

#svsss#also the original goods probably had a similar issue due to his background#and due to getting most of his style tips from the brothel jiejies#this would probably be a point of similarity between them actually#they're both trying to dress like respectable upper class cultivators#and both landing somewhere more in the region of “mind bogglingly expensive escort” by mistake (X)

"Shen Yuan is careless about his appearance" is an understandable take, but I think it's also inferior to what's actually going on most of the time, which is more like:

Shen Yuan is in fact so preoccupied with appearances that he is extremely meticulous and diligent in keeping up his image, but he's also utterly oblivious to how this factors into attraction (especially queer attraction) and he misses cultural context clues thanks to having transmigrated sometimes, with an end result that sometimes he is carefully and unwittingly making himself up like a thirst trap because he thinks that's what a sophisticated and classy scholar ought to look like.

[skeren]

See, once again @sunderwight, your tags...

#also the original goods probably had a similar issue due to his background#and due to getting most of his style tips from the brothel jiejies#this would probably be a point of similarity between them actually#they're both trying to dress like respectable upper class cultivators#and both landing somewhere more in the region of “mind bogglingly expensive escort” by mistake

And like, I can see it, honestly. It's a great big mess of pretenses and looking from the outside in, and it's even worse, because of how each of them learned these things.

With Shen Yuan, it's through the lens of fanart, xianxia shows from other fandoms that might not even apply here even a little, and a vague awareness of history mixed liberally with modern fashion. So that's one take, right? Rich boy gonna do this best. He's sure the heck not asking the System for help. That's just asking to lose all his points.

Meanwhile, Shen Jiu was a slave, and he was a slave who ended up in a noble house. This means he probably got an up close look at what was fashionable, to an extend, but it was also fashion in a specific place with its specific little circle of goods. Everything before and after that was in the wild, for him. That turned into seeing modern fashions outside that town and trying to pick and choose what suited him later and, yes, the brothel ladies probably didn't help. He knew he was pretty, and he probably leaned into it because it was the only thing that he could use about his appearance as a weapon. So. If the only way he knew to play that up that didn't give him the wiggins was, say makeup and jewelry then that's what he was just gonna have to do.

Which means that this stuff, even though I can see Shen Yuan bypassing the makeup entirely even if he ever found where Shen Jiu hid it, is the stuff that Shen Yuan had at hand and thus probably assumed was correct and normal.

Neither of these guys actually were taught what they were doing and ended up doing their level best to fake it. And then everyone reacted to that in their, often, entirely unhelpful ways.

"Shen Yuan is careless about his appearance" is an understandable take, but I think it's also inferior to what's actually going on most of the time, which is more like:

Shen Yuan is in fact so preoccupied with appearances that he is extremely meticulous and diligent in keeping up his image, but he's also utterly oblivious to how this factors into attraction (especially queer attraction) and he misses cultural context clues thanks to having transmigrated sometimes, with an end result that sometimes he is carefully and unwittingly making himself up like a thirst trap because he thinks that's what a sophisticated and classy scholar ought to look like.