#which is my job in the world
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you don't understand how normal i am about the mario & luigi series' FIRST game featuring prince peasley, a character who not only remembers luigi's name, but chooses to forget mario's all while continuously treating luigi like the extra special one out of both the brothers
like. this game emphasized the whole "haha luigi's a loser" mentality nintendo rly latched onto. in the start of this game he is repeatedly being forgotten and belittled and dragged along this way and that
and then all of a sudden this PRINCE shows up and starts giving luigi all this special attention like? AH. the idea that luigi's self esteem is already so low and then all of a sudden he's having roses thrown in his lap, nicknames given to him, and thanks/compliments left and right
not to mention the. ahem. butt stabbing scene...
and the aforementioned deliberate choice of words on peasley's part when referring to mario. he recognizes that luigi is hardly referred to by name and extends that kind of lack of recognition to MARIO instead of luigi, for once!
and luigi reciprocates hardcore!
he starts greeting/saying goodbye to peasley by waving his hat, blushing around him, collapsing to the floor and sobbing when peasley puts himself in a dangerous situation, and rushing to hug him at the end of the game
and there’s other little things: like how peasley is straight up winking as he goes to catch luigi from falling
and in the remake, luigi keeps peasley's rose under his hat! 🥺
in conclusion: i think their relationship is really important for luigi's self esteem and character arc and more people should witness and recognize their very canonical romance. thank you. <3
#altered a little from my own twitter post but HERE IT IS#since more people are coming into the fandom from the mario movie#i need them to know about prince peasley#PLEASE#learn about prince peasley#people just need to know about him#which is my job in the world#hes gay and and a bean#and REAL#please help me in spreading the word of prince peasley#thank you#prince peasley#luisley#luigi#superstar saga#mario#super mario#smb#pxl
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the crossover nobody asked for
#especially not me cause my xmen knowledge is base at best#ive absorbed a lot thru flor but not a lot#anywyas i read spiderman and the xmen and didnt really like it#hes barely doing any teacher like help me god i want a funny miniseriessssss#peter parker#pete#my art#i think i should draw more but ill be just projecting my experience teaching onto pete. which is fine#hes happiest when hes bullied by 13yr olds#and in my heart i like to think hes like me. working as a TA to get school experience . before embarking on possibly#the worlds most thankless job ❤️
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coloring experiments with some displeased españas 🍅 i always love digging beneath his optimism to find the negativity underneath thats Just as passionate -- its one of the most fascinating things about him to me
closeups under the cut
#hetalia world stars#hws spain#aph spain#i simultaneously Am him and need him carnally. and im not sure which ones more embarrassing#his anger and my anger are.... upsettingly similar and ive been very Angry with my job recently. so. ofc ive been thinking about him#country of passion in all emotions. and the sun isnt just warm and bright. it Burns.#anyway this is Kind of a little bit of a vent piece maybe idk#my art#'i need to rest my hand' i say and then i get so furious at work these all come out of my brain#i have never been so close to starting a physical fight with my coworkers lmaoooo.
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💢repressing compulsion💢
#ace attorney#miles edgeworth#fanart#capcom#i initially drew this as a vent as my job has been exasperating my mental illness but of course i still have to be professional#but then i realized it is very reminiscent of defendant freakouts so happy accident i guess?#the only scenario in which i think miles would express these feelings is directly before his 'faked' su*c*de attempt#which is a whole other discussion too i firmly believe that he Attempted and Failed and upon failing still needed desperately to#get the hell away from where he was.....#i think phoenix uncovering the reality of the dl-6 incident is an incredibly remarkable and world changing event for him#something about self ordained guilt to cope with grief because if i don't blame myself where can i possibly put all of this..?#completely shifts his perspective on himself#and the person he wants to be moving forward#so much rambling i'll stop for now#but yeah expect more ace attorney#God.#IT'S SO OVER FOR ME!
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You know that guy who wrote that he got an idea of what it’s like to be a beautiful woman while walking down the street holding a fancy cake?
I feel like I have a reverse experience of that, where I get a taste of what it’s like to be a big, intimidating guy while at work as a tattoo artist.
like, put the tattoo gun in my hand and suddenly people are a little on edge around me, on the back foot in a way I have never experienced in my normal day to day life as a 5’3” afab person. Clients laugh at all my shitty jokes (for the first month of tattooing I was like “wow I’m really funny all of a sudden” before I realized what was happening) they ask my opinions and defer to my expertise with no convincing or placation. I find myself speaking definitively more often instead of constantly couching my statements with “I think-” and “I feel-”. My confidence has literally never been higher. Bizzare.
#Boring text post#amazing what being assumed competent does for the brain#Though now instead of having to prove my intelligence and talent#it’s a big part of my job socially to put people and ease and prove my empathy and sensitivity instead#especially to women which is….#well it’s just interesting!!#A new experience#the other side of the coin#I much prefer this side tbh it’s way more fun and less exhausting#I wish life was like this everywhere out in the world not just work :p
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when you try to act hot and mysterious but then any song from hamilton comes on & now you’re reciting the whole musical. so, now you’re just hot & a lil odd
#IM A GIRL IN A WORLD IN WHICH MY ONLY JOB IS TO MARRY RICH#MY FATHER HAS NO SONS SO IM THE ONE WHO HAS TO SOCIAL CLIMB FOR ONE#nooo plsss i promise i’m mysteriousss#….#im a trust fund baby u can trust me 😏#hamilton musical#hamilton#broadway#real tbh#i’m literally just a girl
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what about five made him ur blorbo…
Man, what made Five my guy.
There’s the surface level stuff – he hits a lot of tropes I love. Asshole with a heart, competent in everything but people, an assassin who gets cool fights to good music, teleports, last man in the world, has a fucked up wife situation. He’s a fifty-eight-year-old man who looks thirteen, that concept right there has so much to work through, all by itself.
All of that is really fun stuff, but under all of that, I think I can sum up why Five hit so hard with just that he has heart. The show could have gone the route of comic!Five – unredeemable bastard of a tiny man. That would have been fun, I love comic!Five, but he works better on a comic book page, where things can be more 2D. The change the show made – maybe on accident – is that show!Five loves an incredible amount, and that’s what hooked me hard. Sure, some of this is fan interpretation, but I think it’s got moments in-show to back it up. One of his first moves he made, when stuck in the apocalypse, was to make Delores – he has her within a few days of landing there. She says so much about him the second we meet her in the show - shorthand to tell us just how bad the apocalypse was, and that, when faced with nothing, Five makes a person he has to take care of. With that, he survived four decades as the last person on earth in dystopian hell before he could get back to save the world – so he says, at least, but he has always prioritized his siblings. They're his world. He’s not great at saying it, but he’s a man of action and his actions speak very loudly.
With all that love, comes a lot of grief, which is actually what keeps me going with Five. I’m pretty open that I’ve had a lot of grief in my life. I’m doing better, it’s been a number of years now, but grief doesn’t go away, and Five is an incredible vehicle for playing with and processing grief. Experiencing it, growing from it, moving on with life around it. And Five has so many layers of grief to play with. There’s the grief for his family who he found dead when he was 13, grief for the world because it all ended, grief for the life he lost, grief for the life he had to live, grief for what he’s had to do, grief for his body and his situation. How do you keep going and move on after experiencing such loss? I find it both cathartic and motivating to think about and sit in that space.
He's a walking tragedy and I adore him for it. Character of all time.
#another post that goes around says it well#in that the show does such a good job of letting five both be Cool (assassin! time traveler!) and just a weird old guy#they could have made him Cool to go with the assassin stuff but instead he wears stupid hats and wants to see big balls of twine#it's such a good character choice and humanizes him so much#a thing i love is just the force of *humanity*#which is why the wedding at the end of the world is one of my favorite things in s3 - it's just /such/ a human thing to do#have a wedding in the face of the end of everything. make up a wife and live best you can in the apocalypse.#the human spirit is indomitable and five carries that in spades#character of all time#tua#shark's tua thoughts#number 5#ask response
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Kingdom Hearts 0.2 Birth by Sleep - A Fragmentary Passage - Depths of Darkness
#kingdom hearts 0.2 birth by sleep a fragmentary passage#kh0.2#depths of darkness#realm of darkness#my gif#they did a good job making the realm of darkness look distinct from the realm of light#because this place really does feel like nowhere we've ever been before#the rocky pathways with no sign of organic life make me feel like i'm on the moon or an alien planet#it's interesting how fallen worlds feel like they're all stitched together between areas like this#aqua can simply walk from place to place without needing a ship or keyblade glider to fly her to a new world#though who's to say how long it takes her to do all of that#as if the realm of darkness is one big ever growing expanse of land without any known boundaries between worlds#we know that all worlds used to be connected in the realm of light long ago and i'm guessing that's the case in the realm of darkness#it's never been split or fractured by keyblade wielders so it still follows its own rules and laws of nature#that'd be pretty interesting#we see this area start as a rocky wasteland that transitions into flat sandy terrain from the destiny islands#but you have to walk through a huge blinding light to get there first which is really unusual#it makes me think of how terra and aqua were guided to destiny islands by a bright light#and how destiny islands appears as a ball of light on the world select menu in bbs#but why portray it that way? we've been shown before what the world of destiny islands looks like from afar with the CoM world cards#and it's not like they even needed to include it on the world select screen in bbs because it's not a world you can even visit on your own#i don't know what it's all supposed to mean yet but#i believe the islands are more significant than we know at this time and this game continues to raise a lot of questions#it's certainly called 'destiny' islands for a reason
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i wonder how it feel like for an iterator if, by some miracle, they made it into the void sea and met a void worm
a random false god meeting the closest thing to a true god
Due to the abnormal amounts of void fluid she was made to have, Unparalleled Innocence was lucky enough to do just that!
#rain world#rainworld#rain world comic#rw UI#unparalleled innocence#my art#iterators#GOOD JOB#TO EVERYONE WHO GUESSED THIS WOULD BE A THING!!#its so funny#i have asks which as OLD AS TIME#sitting in my inbox and i was soo impressed#giddy to show you that yeah#she does meet the void worms phew#UI and saint comic will be a ride#ask#dramaticuser
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2 DAYS TILL THE TRAILER!
Today is a request
Baldjungasaurus
Binoceratops
Y'know the more I look at major, the more I realize how BIG he is
Baldrius makes a cameo
#jurassic world chaos theory#jwct#chaos theory#jwcc#camp cretaceous#MONDAY#darius bowman#This is beautiful i know#what else do i put here uh#i see the moon in the violet sky and it looks so pretty i just might cry i sit alone in a candle light because i didnt get the job for#which i tried and tried you know its so so scary when you see me for who i really am and its so so scary when you look right at me in my#eyes and i say dont say that dont be sad i didnt think people can get this bad i mean it dont say that dont be sad i didnt think people can#be this sad#yeah im that bored#yippee ricky Montgomery#i went to his concert this past Tuesday he's all im listening to rn 😭
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i like portraying hyde as a hallucination of jekylls which was caused by his desire to seperate hyde from himself to avoid blame for his wrong actions and give himself a mental scapegoat for the child he dropkicked the day before as hyde and um um um something else nerdy anyways i like drawing pretty green colors and i really like how the tgs hallucination stuff in the first few chapters looks yayyyy warm stuff putting in my mouth now thank you goodbyyyyyyeeeee
bonus incomprehensible hyde doodle
#the glass scientists#my tgs headcanon world#which gets more weird by the day!! yay#tgs hyde#tgs jekyll#uh#what else#tgs#good job me#im not tagging with the main j&h tags EVER i will end up on a hitlist and dead by morning#may of gone overboard with the yellow in this art#oh well#my art
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day 5 on chapter 15 of Hands of the Emperor:
He played until the full moon sailed high above them, his last song one of the endless longing of a poet who had fallen in love with the Moon. [...] "It is nearly the eclipse," his Radiancy said in a quiet voice, and Cliopher realized that he probably knew its coming far more intimately than any of them.
#the hands of the emperor#hands of the emperor#artorin damara#nine worlds#inktober24#THIS ONE KILLED ME WUAGH.#i am in that part of the art curve where my eye is SO much better than my skill so it all looks OFF#anyways part of the problem is also this should have been a Colour WorkTM#you get the tone contrast between the background (which is also BLUES and GREENS)#against HR who is still in darkness EXCEPT for the fire glow on the harp and his skin and the BRIGHT gold of his eyes#ink is such a tricky medium to work with sometimes!!!! i also feel like i'm struggling with not making all the pieces the same...#last year's had more variety in stroke i feel this year i'm just hatching#it gives it a more coherent look though so i guess i can't be too mad#ANYWAYS. long ramble bc i'm putting off finishing a job application#but i should go do that now... if you've read this far have a cookie#OH AND!!!!!!! I WANTED THE MOON TO HAVE A RED GLOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! someday i will redo this in color
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apartment hunting lead me to a job interview tomorrow, wish me luck 🙏😭
#it just happened out of the blue??? so basically the gist of it was that i was handing documents on behalf of my mom and one of the people#in the office just went 'u can work for us here'#and i went huh?!?!?!?!!? but i mean hey why not. it's a great opportunity#might hold off on uni if i do get this job (which i hope i do augh please 🙏🙏😭😭😭)#aparently one who offered me the job was a recruiter so that explains it#i feel so nervous tho i mean it wont be the end of the world if i dont get it but i just hope i dont mess it up#i alr met the person whos gonna interview me he seems like a great dude too im just super fucking anxious aughhvghnhgv#that's it for the small update i swear more art soon a lot has been happening lately so yk its kinda hard to find time to finish things#frambling...?
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what i love about the Famous Actor Natori Shuuichi of it all is that...it's not just that he's famous and therefore widely recognizable wherever he goes. like yes that is very funny because he was an exorcist before he became a famous actor, which means he CHOSE, on purpose, a day job that would make it harder to hide his double life/secret identity from the hordes of his adoring public, but it's more than that. it's not just that he's famous, it's that he's famous specifically for being an ACTOR, aka a person whose job it is to dissimulate, to make believe, to inhabit roles and emotions other than his own. like he decided he was going to become as visible as possible (which again was literally not necessary! he could have gone into any other career for his day job!!) but in such a way that everyone would see him but no one would see him - they would just see his various made-up personas, including the Famous Actor Natori Shuuichi persona. i can't decide if he's a genius or if he just made so many absurd decisions that they canceled each other out and circled back around to working out. he's either playing 9-dimensional chess or he's eating the pieces. too soon to say.
#the other thing i love about it is that in a very real sense it's his actor day job that is his alter ego#being an exorcist is his normie job. he's just a famous celebrity on the side#which isn't that uncommon in secret identity setups but it's still very funny#natsume's book of friends#natsume yuujinchou#natori shuuichi#natsuyuu meta#my posts#f#i think probably the actual answer is that acting was a very natural career choice because he already masks so extensively#both to hide that he can see things other people can't (and that youkai exist and that he exorcises them)#and to hide what he's really feeling so that no one can use it against him#so if it's already something he has to do & he's good at it...why not have someone tell him exactly how to do it & get paid for it?#and the other part of the answer is that most ppl don't go into acting assuming they'll get famous. the fame was a side effect#so each decision as it was being made probably made perfect sense. but put them all together#and you have this hilarious assortment of elements that seem to directly contradict each other#okay also i would be remiss if i didn't mention the other possible answer which is that the attention came first and was unavoidable#and the acting developed from the need to protect himself from the attention that he was going to be attracting no matter what he did#because he's so beautiful. and (in the exorcist world specifically) because he's the last of the natori#the more i talk about it the more i'm like no becoming a famous actor was the only path that made any sense for him lol#1) he's gonna be watched no matter what bc he's him -> gotta figure out how to hide his secrets -> learn to act as self-defense#or 2) he's got secrets -> he's gotten a lot of practice hiding them -> hey you could make a career out of this!#all roads lead to actor natori shuuichi. and since he's beautiful...all roads lead to FAMOUS actor natori shuuichi#i love it when i ramble so much in the tags that i end up contradicting my own post lol#he's neither thinking ten steps ahead nor is he irrational. he's simply making sensible individual decisions#that follow logically from what is available to him and what his priorities are
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props to my roommate for unintentionally saying the most romantic thing about Daisuga
rewatching "senpai's true abilities" in s1 and she was really digging the way suga interacts with the third years and there's a moment where Suga starts to get overwhelmed and Daichi interrupts telling him to calm down and she says [about long term school friends]
"i like that he just knew he was about to spiral. like you've been around someone so long your hearts have synchronized."
and if that doesn't just-
#for the record she knows I write fanfiction for haikyuu but she doesnt know for which characters#she knows daichi is my fav but she has no idea the copious amount of daisuga content i put into the world#we dont really talk about shipping stuff shes not that kind of fan but honestly fuck she could probably take my job with lines like that#haikyuu#daisuga#daichi x sugawara#haikyuu daisuga
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li xiangyi, yin, and femininity
we all know that li xiangyi is a character of fractured identities. and li lianhua is an unreliable narrator to his own story. these make him not the most straightforward character to study. but I've believed in treating li lianhua as a part of li xiangyi, rather than separates. and there must be a common thread that ties all of him together. thus, I offer what I have found to be the most useful lens to use to view him as a cohesive whole, regardless as li xiangyi, li lianhua, or any other identity he may reinvent into: his 阴 yin qualities. (yin of yinyang)
this framework suggested by the drama's text itself has helped clarify to me his strengths, weaknesses, motivations, and struggles. by identifying this constant, too, makes it so much easier talking about what has changed in him.
[to the, hopefully growing, boli lhl hivemind @markiafc @ananeiah]
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there are some notes on the concept of yinyang and chinese conceptualisation of gender I have to preface with.
[disclaimer: of course, I'm not even trying to cover a tip of what experts have extensively studied and debated in a depth it deserves. all I'm doing is try to parse the broad, fundamental ideas that are needed to explain my blorbos through my own spotty brain filter. so there bound to be nuances I've overlooked or some degree of my own interpretation. pretentious but needs to be done.]
阴 yin and 阳 yang are concepts characterised by passiveness, darkness, gentleness, femininity etc, and proactivity, light, toughness, masculinity etc respectively. a very key and handy concept to have in mind is their relationship to each other - which I'll not attempt at explaining better than literal scholars have:
Yin and yang exist only in relation to one another internally as the way warmth-coldness only exist relative to one another. Furthermore, when using yin-yang as an organizational schema, achieving balancing harmony is always the goal, not domination nor subordination of one to the other. [x]
while yin and yang can be symbols of femininity and masculinity, it doesn't mean all female are yin and all male are yang. it's certainly not a strict 1-to-1 equation. the concept of gender in chinese context is more social than biological. this suggests room for fluidity, and shaping of identities, often through social rituals as one journeys through life. it also means that there can be femininity in the masculine, and vice versa - in fact, that's only healthy because you need a good balance of the two worlds. no one part is better than the other. if you think of the two components as relative to each other, they are always interacting and affecting each other, rather than being strict and inert binaries. simply put, it needs to be kept in mind that there are greater nuances in applying yin and yang to the definitions of gender, and to avoid at all cost a simplification of this framework into a binary.
sure, the show has implied that lxy's powers and energy are yin-coded. but femininity is only one of the multiple attributes of yin. so how are we extending lxy's yin to femininity specifically? it's in the text that substantiates and qualifies lxy as feminine. dead women being used as proxies to his character. being literally dressed as a woman in order to put himself into their shoes and feel what they've felt. adopting a name that happens to be very, very feminine - 莲花 lianhua (lit. lotus flower) (it must be caveated that chinese names are NOT gendered. but there are just some names that are more feminine than others.) him coming to lead a life revolving around traditionally feminine, domestic things as li lianhua. him having interactions with the women around him like he's in his own element - no pressure and tension at all, unlike with all the other men.
as such, I'm more willing to use yin and femininity interchangeably in discussing lxy (while it's not necessarily applicable to every point that will be mentioned albeit there being some degree of implied association). and it's for the sake of elucidating what I feel is an intention or very plausible reading of the canon text in parsing feminine experiences in lxy's character. and thus, his queerness.
one last note is that taoism is going be mentioned quite a bit as well because of how much it as a philosophy honours the yin quality. its key tenets include valuing passiveness and inaction as a form of action, and submitting to the nature of things. and we will see how those come up in lxy's life too. (though I'm not gonna attempt to deep dive into it here beyond broad strokes of it.)
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a huge part of li xiangyi's yin actually manifests in him being a passive person. this applies not just to li lianhua, but also li xiangyi. I know. ok wait hear me out. the idea of yinyang is after all components that can change and are relational to each other: thus, there were points in li xiangyi's life when he was less passive than other points, but they ultimately don't match up to the degree of aggression displayed by other men around him. so relative to their display of proactivity and aggression, he can be considered as passive. the best example is that of shan gudao proposing to launch an offensive on jinyuan alliance, while lxy - as much as he was arrogant about it - was standing his ground on not taking action in favour of peace.
it has already showed up in his childhood as well. he wasn't a particularly competitive child: 从来都没有谁要和你争 nobody has ever thought of competing with you over anything, he told sgd as he recalled of their times growing up. it was in fact sgd who was desperate to control and override lxy's presence. baby lxy did not hesitate at all over giving up on winning in favour of protecting his only rare few close relationships left in the world (given how hard-earned relationships are when they're non-familial !!!!). as much as I resent the one-dimensional writing of sgd, he has served as a very strong marker to highlight on lxy's yin.
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I've harped on it several times before but this is the time I finally get to explain it proper: my own theory is that li xiangyi became an unparalleled swordsmaster because of his yin/feminine quality, not in spite of it. an interesting point that had been out in the open unclaimed until it was brought up in our friend group is that, li xiangyi does not actually fit anybody's conventional image of a 武林盟主 wulin mengzhu (ie. ruler of wulin). it would most likely have been some burly, muscular, ultra-masculine dude. even if they don't look like the demonic monk, it should be someone more like di feisheng. but. it's li xiangyi, the boyish, delicate-looking kid, who came to the top. (no wonder people - mostly men - love or love to bully hate him like weak men hate powerful women??)
"why didn't they cast someone who looks more like a wulin mengzhu (read: traditionally manly)?" no, no that's precisely the point. nobody said wulin mengzhu have to look manly. and also who is to define the manliness required to be in a place of authority? (or in my other meta, we would ask, who is to define anybody gets to have the authority over anyone else at all?)
by taoist ideal, gentleness is the most refined form of strength. li xiangyi has been haunting and distracting me in my chinese calligraphy practices lately because I'm thinking about how this must be the closest to what it felt like lxy becoming the best swordsman in jianghu. (so pretentiously brainrotten of me, I know, BUT IT'S REAL and I'm suffering.) mastering a chinese art is essentially about mastering a delicate balance between force and gentleness; being able to draw force from softness 柔中带刚 and an ability to maintain this balance. a beginner will instinctively hold a brush for the first time with brute, unrefined force. some fairly reputable contemporary calligraphers, according to my teacher, can be seen as being either too soft or too forceful - but are still able to pass off as good enough. it's then, the master of masters who will have the sophistication of a firm yet flexible control of the brush with the appropriate use of gentleness/laxness that produces a harmony of strokes. this idea extends to any other sort of chinese craft or practice including traditional chinese medicine, and I believe, swordsmanship too. I'm taking a fucking leap of faith here to say this because I practise NO sort of (chinese) martial arts, I must caveat. (someone who does may want to say something...) but theoretically that should be how it works.
it is not for no rhyme or reason, or *handwaves* that lxy emerged to the top AND is almost undefeatable. among a competitive, forceful (ie. yang) wulin, li xiangyi stood out with a power and energy defined by yin (ie. gentleness and stability) that led him to create his signature 扬州慢 yangzhouman. it is characterised by 慢 slowness (my calligraphy teacher says to us all the time to take it slow), and also described by dfs as 中正绵长 - which I would best describe by painting a picture of a steady and stable stream. these precisely speak of the essence of a mastery of gentleness as strength to me.
conversely, dfs's way in mastering power is very largely premised on taking action because he literally had no other choice in the environment he grew up in. both of them develop in opposite ways. it was the case of gentleness for lxy clearly because he grew up in a safe, nurturing environment that had allowed him to be slow and steady at his own pace, drawing on his natural gifts.
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now top of the wulin world at 17, li xiangyi founds sigu sect. li xiangyi, the boy before becoming menzhu and li xiangyi the leader of sigu sect are not the same.
how then did a (relatively) passive boy like lxy end up founding sigu sect. this lxy is the one who was fostered into competition - though not in an abusive, twisted way. in fact he was raised in a rather taoist way by his shifu: to be honest with yourself and respect your opponent. so he honoured whatever powers he had been bestowed with by nature. he gives into it. even so, at another level, I just have a sense that shifu and shiniang's competitive marital spat had an insidious effect on the boys...though the detrimental effect was more on sgd than lxy. baby lxy feels like a sweet-natured kid who was just in his own zone, you know - some (aka sgd) would say, too much of him even, to have not realised what was wrong at all with his shixiong for years.
that's not all of course. I've always gotten the vibes that his attitude behind forming sigu sect felt more like, this is what all the good men of jianghu do and I will have to do it now especially that I'm the best. it didn't feel particularly personal to me, but rather what would have been expected of him by the social climate of wulin jianghu (eg. lxy saying to 光耀师门 bring honour to his teacher). it's definitely not an expectation from his shifu, who explicitly told him that he was never expected to become a noble figure of any sort, but just to be alive and contented. as concluded by the man himself as li lianhua: "有些人入了江湖是为了立心,而有的人入江湖为的是立命。我却不知道自己真正想要的是什么。some people enter jianghu for the cultivation of the mind, others for a cultivation of a meaningful life. but I never knew what I truly wanted." he was ultimately, unwittingly a passive player in his own story of becoming the great sigu sect leader.
(at this point, as a side note, I do wonder if there were any other similar sects or alliances that function the same as sigu sect that came before it. because I'm damn well sure there must be something, as likely as there must have been generations of wulin legends who came before lxy. but of course, this is not what the story is concerned with at all and I'm ok with that.)
it's crucial to point out that, even despite this being the phase of his yang in the display of taking action and enacting firmness, lxy had still done sigu sect with the sole purpose and manner of upkeeping peace and order (in the way of the pro-universal love, anti-aggression mohist 侠 xia leader of the people). he's still very characterised by yin in my books, especially when vis-à-vis to sgd.
a li xiangyi full of himself and made himself too useful to the people was only bound for a great asteroidal fall, in the concept of 物极必反 - or in taoist lexicon 反者道之动 (ie. anything that has reached its limit will only start developing in the opposite direction). if you think you're above all, you can only go down.
this manifests during the next time he took action - and it was one so forceful that it overpowered even his opponent, dfs who ended up being the passive, receiving party in this case - was in initiating the battle at donghai 10 years ago... and gee oh boy. it didn't end well - for both of them, but even more so for lxy. (dfs was like 'tis but a scratch (shrugs)' as compared to him being ripped off his tendons by jiao liqiao like nezha did to the dragon prince. truth is he had to go into a 10-year healing retreat served by his entourage. :p) ok, I digress.
xiao zijin was quick to attribute sigu sect's fall to lxy's arrogance - in turn setting the stage for lxy's 10 years of self-hatred and the framing of lxy as a villain? irresponsible figure? by jianghu. (god forbid girls do anything! ok for legal reasons, this a joke.) lxy lost his mind in ways I believe he never had in his life there and then upon seeing his shixiong dead. so, you could say he led the jianghu world to ruins out of love (using this term loosely). but it feels inaccurate to say it's due to arrogance. he did not do that out of self-importance or ego, especially when the revenge for sgd was a collective decision made by sigu sect as we know from the flashback. so when llh pinned all fault on himself for being arrogant in the past, it is with caution to take his words because that's the unreliable narrator in him speaking.
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anyway, it's precisely li xiangyi that is capable of bouncing back from such a fatal crisis, equipped with his yin and a mastery that gave him the power of flexibility.
it's extremely vital to re-establish that literally the only thing that was keeping li xiangyi alive, physically, as li lianhua is yangzhouman. (monk wuliao literally said that to lxy even though he did facilitate in saving him.) it's the yangzhouman that was drawn from lxy's mastery of yin. without yangzhouman, li xiangyi would not even have the chance to become li lianhua and undergo any needed process of transformation. without li xiangyi, there would have been no yangzhouman. no li xiangyi, no li lianhua, get it?
the point is not to deny the change li xiangyi wants to make and has made. but to acknowledge that change isn't about complete erasure and destruction. something from you survives. something in you had kept you alive to have you come so far, regardless of all the bad bits that you want to denounce of. you've always been worth it.
bringing back the thing about his new name: the distinction must be made that he did not pick it because it was feminine but it just so happened a feminine name had resonated with him. (read: he didn't necessarily identify as a woman but identified with femininity. at least within the parameters of canon text.)
he also made an interesting choice to retain his surname for someone who was desperate to sever ties from his past. hmm. or maybe he wasn't that desperate? when li lianhua says li xiangyi is dead, I believe it meant that li xiangyi the sigumen menzhu is dead rather than li xiangyi as an entirety. li lianhua is a returning to the path lxy could have gone if he did not establish sigu sect, the path that shifu wanted him to take. when he walked to the doors of sigu sect in the aftermath, nothing was actually stopping him from going back (people were still around and alive, instead of all dead people, you know)... except for himself. taking that action would have been too much for him. so he went with the flow of life giving him a chance at rebirth and walked away. there, inaction as a form of action.
zhan yunfei and qiao wanmian have said to li lianhua, oh that doesn't sound like li xiangyi at all. but has it been considered that, maybe it was sigu sect's lxy who wasn't the real lxy? sigu sect lxy was one big performance of the values of masculinity and heteronormativity that llh had came to an awareness of, and eventually struggle with again and resist against in the final year of his life. there had only been some glimpses of his true nature allowed (validated by fang duobing talking about lxy at his altar).
imho, most flashbacks of lxy during that period felt impersonal and more like a template of a hero expected to marry his girl at 18. going through all the motions and steps of a normative life even before he was old enough to grasp and explore his own identity and what it meant in the world. no wonder he denounced so much of what he had done as lxy including liking girls. walking away then also meant a walk away from those duties and expectations. li lianhua is li xiangyi liberated from masculine duties and heteronormative performance.
in doing that, he had the opportunity for the first time in his life to explore what he truly wanted, at least within the parameters of what he could afford to do at that point. he could go on to build a domestic, feminine life within the space of jianghu (as I've established here). it's a kind of feminine lifestyle that doesn't quite exist in mainstream society - being a woman there meant to stay put in a domestic space without much room to move socially. nor did it exist in wulin jianghu because even the women there like shi-guniang and jlq were expected to be masculine, aggressive, competitive. so building a mobile home in the space of jianghu is his way of defining the life he wants and can have. li lianhua is the extension of femininity in li xiangyi - and one that can be free.
it's also worth talking about in my opinion what is one of the most important and a favourite dihua moment: when dfs said to lxy that his greatest weakness was to like being a hero. and a swordsman should be without weaknesses. I'm forever wrapped up in how many layers this can be read in. was he mad at lxy for liking to be a hero or having weaknesses, or both? if the former, it was dfs criticising, based on lxy's public reputation, lxy's oversized illusions about being a hero - a figure of masculinity with an unrealistic sense to uphold noble goals eg. saving the world etc. that is actually perfectly logical coming from dfs, the straightforward, no-nonsense, morally neutral guy with no illusions about heroism (in this case, he feels more like a yin). but at the same time, we should understand that lxy's motivations behind the donghai battle are more personal than noble. if any, it was actually the opposite of noble - it was like he was acting out of the role of a caretaker of his family, and at a cost of the peace and order of jianghu he was set on guarding(!!) dfs also knew that lxy was there just for his shixiong. and so, dfs, who happens to be the epitome of yang, can be read as a symbol of masculinity disapproving of lxy for being sentimental and emotional; for having the "feminine" desires to simply want to defend his family (not saying those are exclusively feminine traits but they have been conventionally associated as feminine). I think both layers of reading are correct and should work together to contribute to the complexity of their characters. (we can see how it contributes to lxy and dfs being the perfect yinyang halves to each other, which I will come back to briefly touch on later.)
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for 10 years he lived a life of seclusion and staying-in-his-own-lane a taoist would be proud of. he knew he was dying and has always been ok with dying, as he claimed. but did he want to die? to think of it, it was the opposite. because in those 10 years when he could have 100% just taken action to take his own life, he didn't. in fact, he lived on and took care of himself in the way shifu wanted him to. he had simply preferred letting nature run its course. if bicha didn't take him, he wasn't gonna do anything. but if he died one day very soon, he would be ok with it too. sure, he was maybe banking on a lead to sgd's whereabouts to appear during his last years alive but that clearly wasn't the only thing on his mind for NINE years because he didn't actively go out seeking for that either. this is basically him telling dfs that he would just lie in the sun and wait for the sweet release of death, if dfs were to force him to fight. not even the mortal threat from dfs was enough to move him into action of fighting back or killing himself.
time and again, lxy as llh was dragged into fdb's cases but not only that, he also maintained an impersonal distance with them. it's starkly different from the usual (wuxia) hero archetypes (for eg. fdb) who would be more impassioned and personally invested in the plight of the victims- or unlike most seemingly aloof protagonists who would somehow grow emotionally invested over time. one of the many things I love about llh is that he never tries a second time to persuade people out of their decisions he finds unwise (eg. him just wanting to move on in response to the girls in 女宅 insisting on staying behind with their slave master at first.) he will not interfere in other people's choices made in their own lives. it's not his business. he didn't even want to be there, to be honest.
however as the story progresses, more and more people - especially men, his past, and the leads to the truth came back to demand and taunt him into doing something. they vary from well-meaning people without any harm intended such as fdb intruding upon his private space completely uninvited and qwm wanting him back; to dfs merely seeking him as a mean to an end initially (eg. I only need him to live long enough to have one last fight); and finally, on the other end of the spectrum, outright aggressive and hostile people like sgd and xzj who wanted him to die. under all this pressure, he tried his best to deflect, but he does waver especially when it comes to matters concerning the people he cares about aka his obsession wish of 10 years of looking for sgd's remains that had lied low until fdb entered his life, and then later on taking revenge for his shifu.
looking for sgd became his final bid at taking action. he was operating on a slim chance of getting some emotional closure from finding out his shixiong is dead for real, yes. what a good plan. but objectively unnecessary. or surprise! uhhh...finding out his beloved shixiong is actually alive and would strangle him for one corn chip? AND OH NO IT GOT WORSE- uncovering a devastating truth about his shifu's death that he could have totally gone on with life fine without knowing if he had continued not caring.
but it is sometimes just impossible not to care - it is only human to care. and he is human, not an icon in the image of a hero. so he took a chance, once more, and it killed him in unprecedented ways. it's donghai all over again. things in life don't go as planned. you fuck around and it fucks you back. finding out the truth behind his shifu's death and his family background from the past did nothing for him as li lianhua living in the present.
it's no wonder that this lxy decisively relinquishes the desire to take action in the end. he goes back to letting nature run its course. and this time, stands firmly to it despite everyone begging him otherwise. wangchuan flower could only give him a recovery (or survival?) rate of 30%. there's a 70% chance of failure and even in the 30% he was not sure what he was to become. in comparison, dfs took a 10% chance game of survival in a heartbeat, and it pushed him to new heights. that's how they differ: he thrives by taking risks and action while lxy the other way round. so, something like that has happened before and he wants none of it again.
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he leaves lotus tower, only taking his horse and a sack - relinquishing almost every other material belonging he had - and sets off on a journey. before xzj interrupted...where to was he going?? I wonder. we don't know for sure, I think? and are we allowed to know? that makes the scene he had with xzj an understated inflection point in the very last part of his journey. yes, he was already on his way to...maybe die? but not necessarily. you don't have to travel distances with your belongings for that, right? or speak to dfs personally about not wanting to fight? (borrowing one of @ananeiah's takes.) regardless, he was definitely leaving behind jianghu - not only wulin jianghu (he already did that 10 years ago), but also the jianghu space he had carved out in the last 10 years.
what sparked the decision to jump off the cliff in him was dfs's words from the night of their wedding 10th donghai anniversary: 横扫天下容易,断相夷太剑不易 conquering the world is easy, breaking xiangyi sword is not. in the original context, dfs was talking about defeating lxy being harder than conquering the world. but when it came to this scene, it was to lxy about forsaking the very last worldly possessions he had after already giving up on lotus tower and hulijing (including releasing his horse), especially his only connection left to swordsman lxy.
perhaps it had dawned on him that, wanting things at all was bad for him. in the last 10 years, he lived a life of seclusion, wanting very little. but he had still wanted things. there were still things he couldn't let go of that had led him to this state. despite having lived on an identity inspired by a buddhist teaching for 10 years, maybe it was only at this point that he was finally the closest to reaching an understanding of it. (I wish I was knowledgeable enough right now to dive into the possible buddhist reading here but alas. I'll leave it to our resident expert @markiafc)
it doesn't quite matter in the end where he was going after all. what mattered was that he literally went where the water took him and we're not supposed to know where it ends. I'm not seeing this in a bad and pessimistic way though. I think the relief in all this is that he had tried his best to within his abilities. also it's a form of enlightenment in relinquishing a desire, an obsession, a need to take any more action in order to live well. thus his ending felt to me relatively tender, empowering, and kind - albeit bittersweet and heartaching - than other possible kinds of ending, in a story where it was very possible for him to have died under the knives of his opponents or bicha at any moment, outside of his control.
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if you've come so far in this post, congratulations! but also a reveal is that... you're not immune to the dihua propaganda threaded throughout this post. :P
as mentioned, other men like sgd and xzj in lxy's life were incredibly hostile to him. their yang nature overwhelmingly powers his yin. but dfs is different. dfs is the yang counterpart that fits perfectly to his yin.
dfs's yang is one that contains yin, that mirrors lxy's balance of yang in yin. it was suggested in text they are yinyang-coded meant to complement each other, given that whenever wangchuan flower's yin vs yang properties were discussed, the two men were always spoken about in the same breath. more importantly, as with the above few analyses of dfs's words playing a big role in shaping of lxy's choices with multiple meanings - as well as their day-to-day interactions - we can see that they constantly play off each other.
dfs's yang energy has been used to help lxy prolong his life (though not saving him entirely), while lxy has used his yin energy to save dfs and subsequently helped him attain his breakthrough. dfs has also helped lxy in his breakthrough of yin but not in the same way as dfs's cultivation of his combative powers, and rather, it's for lxy an understanding of his own path to take in life - a cultivation of the mind (both times 10 years before and after). given how significant dfs is in the shaping of lxy's realisation of the yin path - alike his shifu has, it's no wonder that they were the only two people lxy had imagined in his last sword dance of a farewell to jianghu.
with each of them coming together to form the perfect yin-yang model, they're a harmony of yin and yang representing the cosmos. what I also love is that they didn't start out as a perfect fit, but only towards the end of the story was the harmonisation completed, which makes sense for two components that are always in a flux influencing each other. the fact that they were number 1 and 2 of wulin, and being the only ones capable of understanding each other in a level nobody else could... it all reinforces the cosmic sense of their relationship. they're the halves to a whole, fitting in a specific way nobody else can.
(I mean. technically this is going into the space of extrapolation based on a tangential interpretation of canon text, so do take it with a pinch of salt. but of course this pinch of salt can do wonders for a shipper's feast... :P and this certainly could have been a meta of its own expanding on dfs's side of the analysis, but this is it for now in this context.)
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to think of it, li xiangyi has actually died more than that one time that turned him into li lianhua. first was a death of him as a nanyin royalty - I resent having to bring up nanyin like it should hold any weight to the narrative as far as I'm concerned, but the point being that he had a completely different (familial-based) life before that still stands. then he had a rebirth as li xiangyi, disciple and swordsman to his shifu and shiniang, and later died again when li xiangyi the sigu sect leader took over. lxy the sigu sect leader died at sea in the battle 10 years ago and came back as li lianhua. (just like nezha, died after battling at east sea and rebirthed from the lotus) li lianhua then dies by the end of the drama.
there can be a myriad of interpretations as to what exactly happened to him, including the possibility that he's still alive. regardless, we can agree that li lianhua as an identity has ran its course, and he had to evolve again. but into what form?
in the line of thought of yin and femininity, and how his transformation has been in an increasing degree of presentation of femininity - even way back when I was watching the show, I had the idea of him living socially as a woman post-li lianhua. I don't know what he would be realistically doing or what could be practical for him in such an identity. but conceptually it was sensible and compelling to me before diving deeper into the details. (I have more elaboration to do on this that I won't be talking about here publicly but it is in the same strain of idea as this other comparative meta I wrote.)
I think the next possible identity lxy can assume - alive in the material realm or not - is one that will be beyond a material being. a nameless entity. once you've gone through the phases of life - from not knowing to knowing, and perfecting knowledge, then to the surpassing of knowledge - you surpass all worldly existence, and become one with the cosmos.
I end this off with an excerpt from Tao Te Ching's Chapter 41 (I'm not pretending to have read the whole book ok but I couldn't resist including this):
明道若昧,进道若退,夷道若纇 [...] 道隐无名 The bright path seems dim; Going forward seems like retreat; The easy way seems hard [...] The Tao is hidden and without name. (x)
the character translated into "easy" is the same 夷 yi of li xiangyi's name. somehow this seems to encapsulate the journey of his life: one that seems blessed and smooth-sailing but ending up to be rocky and turbulent. but at the end of the day, after all that he had been through, he will become hidden and without name.
#莲花楼#mysterious lotus casebook#lhl#lhlmeta#my posts#a big win for the inaction fandom. lxy would have been patron saint#this inevitably turned into a 'lhl is a taoist and buddhist story if not a very chinese story' meta hbhjbjhbhjjb#the last thing i do before going to sleep is write this meta. the first thing i do after waking up is write this meta.#i feel so insane writing this. it kept growing like a monster. do you think this is a joke it's like my part-time job now#but it's one of the few times in my life i have confidence in my insanity. so.#crazier thing is. this meta is approaching 6k words yet i still think there must be things i haven't covered.#the last section is so nuts idk how i even wrote it guys i think i was possessed#it's also like the most pretentious way to put that he's dead in this world ok hjbjhbhjbhjbjbh#to be clear iirc the drama didn't say LXY'S POWER/ENERGY IS YIN in the same way it literally said dfs's energy is yang#but it's definitely implied by the explanation of the flower's healing properties for both of them. on top of yangzhouman#also fuck. another reason he didn't choose to save himself was so dfs could have the yang flower which he believed was what dfs wanted#thank u frens mark and ana for indulging my brain in the first time i brought the lxy as woman thing up. for it to have come this far#ofc disclaimer is that a lot of this is my own reading. it doesnt have to be agreed by everyone#i would be very happy though if any part of it resonated with anybody#also a good part of the analysis is based on my memory of the show. though i did revisit parts selectively to verify. sooooo. yeah.
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