#wrapped lotus

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Daddy, don't go.

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[jobycewl]

Cumplane but they’re spiritual dragons??!?!

[fairsweetlonging]

even though shen yuan disdains wife plots, i feel it's because they're often so contrived and the wives are always damsels in distress, and when the system puts him in one it's against his will and he has no control over it, BUT, i think if he makes the choice to put himself in one on purpose and with a plan, he would excel at it, he would play into it so hard to get what he wants, he'd see it as his opportunity to cheat the system (pun intended!) and farm easy points

[deadshadowcreature]

Redesigning Ink Nezha 🖋🪷

[corruptedeclipse]

New designs in the Etsy shop! Honestly this one that KidK made might be my new favorite, it's just stunning. It's got a lotus design on the top, these open and lacey panels and scalloped edges. It's beautiful!

There's only one of this design in the store, so if you like it, grab it! It's $80 for a stunning piece of craftsmanship.

Here's the link to the listing, and thanks for checking it out!

[tiny-breadcrumbs]

Have some zongzi!

[lotus-pear]

Soukoku is not about dazai. It’s about chuuya, how it affects chuuya, how dazai is chuuya’s abuser (wrong) but still ship it anyways because you all want to be quirky. How sad stormbringer is (wrong) so how sad chuuya’s life is, it’s not about dazai or his traumas. Dazai is a blank slate for self projecting and constantly mischaracterized and demeaned. Soukoku is only for chuuya and only shipped by his fans. There’s no dazai stan except me. Skk isn’t a place for people (me) who like dazai. It never was and never will be.

that’s where you’re wrong. dazai is my favorite character and his dynamic with chuuya has quite literally made him want to live. as someone who is alienated from emotion and consequentially feels inhuman, chuuya—being so bright and fearless and passionate—made someone as suicidal as dazai feel alive. chuuya continued, along with oda, to be the only person in the mafia who saw through dazai’s violent and cruel exterior and capable of humanity. someone who was unwavering in his resolve and knew dazai to be more than just the heartless killer of a mafioso, more than an analytical brain, but a kid. he was just a kid to chuuya.

and that’s why soukoku works so well. dazai and chuuya continue to advocate for each others humanity and are unflinching and undoubtful about it. never once have they faltered or lost sight of the other’s personhood. and that’s the beauty of their dynamic.

[xinyuehui]

⊹ Hello It's Cdrama Wrapped time. Ready? Let's do this! ◈

[evolutionsbedingt]

Did somebody order pain on this lovely Friday?

Have some feelings about the end of Li Lianhua, inspired by a thought I had this morning. Meta-ish ramblings below the cut!

CW: terminal illness and resulting physical disabilities, suicidal ideation, open ending (equivalent with the special episode)

☆☆☆

You are called Li Xiangyi and everyone knows your hair is up in a jaunty ponytail. Simple guans hold it in place, not drawing any attention, not like the red ribbons trailing your every step like the love you inspire across the jianghu. 

You call yourself Li Lianhua and you buy the hairsticks and crowns and ribbons to match. They’re white now, for the grief that follows and forms your path, and hold a bun made of half of your hair. It’s so much easier to comb just half of it and in the weeks where your muscles and joints ache with the icy cold of the yin slowly poisoning your neili, you leave the bun for as long as you can stand it. 

You don’t call yourself by any name anymore, because you don’t remember which name was ever truly yours. You leave everything behind and hope that it too will do you the courtesy of letting you go. There are no more ribbons in your hair, only the bits of leather you use to tie it up. The hairstick you bought in return for all your other accessories is plain and the auntie who sold it to you said it’s as white as the morning sun. And your arms shake too much to keep them up for long, your shoulders protesting the twisting and pulling and holding. 

The first time you do your hair after not-dying again, the hairstick slips from your stiff fingers and your shoulders scream from staying up that long. 

The second time you have to lie down afterwards, short of breath and with the beginnings of a headache exacerbated by the hair dragging on your skull. 

The third time you abandon the bun. Twist the strands only far enough that they hold in something rounded and soft, accept the wisps of hair you can’t ever seem to catch and that tickle your face, and use the hairstick to pin the end of what once was a ponytail up.

You have no name, you have no ribbons, you have only a stolen fur coat and a single piece of white jade. Your bones ache like the waves forever rushing in your ears are dragging you under. And you want to give in to them. So you take paths half-remembered, rely on strangers, kind and unkind alike, to return once again to the eastern shores and, on the edge of one world, you turn your back on the other and sink into the rising sun.

★★★

So. I recently again came across a post pointing out LLH's significantly different styling in the special episode and this morning I realised that his hairstyle may well be a highly stylised version of what may have happened if the yin poison continued to ravage his body.

Apologies for the questionable phone screenshots, but I'm mostly interested in the hairstyle which is nice and visible here.

I used to have that length of hair and let me tell you any sort of complicated hairstyle was absolutely impossible after my shoulder injury and subsequent loss of muscle mass. So it's, to me, entirely plausible that this is a stylised or idealised (possibly because we see him through Fang Duobing’s eyes) version of what might happen if he lost the vision, motor skills and strength to put up his hair into a proper bun (especially without modern, elastic hair ties).

In the fic I wrote it as him only twisting the hair minimally and pinning it up like this on purpose, but I've also had this kind of look when a bun of mine came loose without me noticing (or caring). The wisps likely don't look half as intentional without the Fang Duobing filter and, looking at that hairstick in the first pic, it also looks like it was shoved in rather haphazardly.

In summary: this is Li Lianhua at his weakest (can't do his own hair anymore) and loneliest (doesn't have anybody else to do it for him) and his hairstyle reflects that.

[m-kyunie]

"The supposedly sealed memories of a miniature garden"

[qilingxiong]

right then, i know i've already discussed this with several people in bits and pieces, but i'm going to attempt to organize my thoughts about the intersection of di feisheng and li lianhua's endings in one post.

i've already touched before on how i think li lianhua moves through the story as a restless ghost. his aim is to tie up the loose ends of the life li xiangyi exited, before his time runs out, and that's why so many interactions with characters from his old life are about either mending relationships or ensuring they've both moved on with finality. by the end of the show, there's just one person who knew li xiangyi who hasn't gotten either of those, and that's di feisheng, waiting by the sea. he's still fixated on the duel, fixated on the competition between himself and li xiangyi, whether it's as foes or friends.

di feisheng's arc throughout the show sees him as someone who goes back and breaks cycles of his past. but li xiangyi is the part he can't shake off, the part he's still obsessed with. he's still insistent on defining himself and his worth by where he stands in relation to a man li lianhua has told him is dead.

the point where we don't see him do this is when his memory is lost, and that's why di feisheng's time as a-fei is so important to the story. we see him begin to define himself as a person in a world where the name of li xiangyi means nothing to him. we watch him start to figure out who he is free of ten years of agonizing over winning/losing to this man, and all the baggage of the past carried with him. it's something di feisheng didn't get a chance at before, and as it stands, maybe it's not too late for him to continue on that path. li lianhua, at least, doesn't think it's too late.

and so this is what li lianhua has to do to attain this last bit of closure, end this last relationship: he has to force di feisheng to let him go.

this is why it stands out so much to me that the goodbye letter li lianhua signs as li xiangyi is addressed to di feisheng. li lianhua is concerned with resolving li xiangyi's troubles, and so with the goodbye to di feisheng, his work is done. the fact that we watch di feisheng accept li xiangyi's death in the epilogue with "the bright moon has already sunk into the western sea, to where does the grieving wind urge the eight directions" is an important follow-up to this last action, because it means that it worked. di feisheng is mourning, yes, but with more certainty than he was at the beginning of the show, frozen in place emotionally for a full decade. his explicit acknowledgment that li xiangyi is dead now must push him forward in some direction to search for meaning in this world, and his life, outside of li xiangyi, rather than standing still. this way, their story truly comes to a close.

all this is also why it makes sense in my opinion that whatever image of li xiangyi is standing by the sea in the end isn't really there. he might be a ghost, or imagined by di feisheng and/or fang duobing, but that's not the real, living li xiangyi. because if he hasn't died or fully, completely exited the narrative, then it means that none of this effort succeeded. "it's hard to be a dead person", li lianhua said. for him to settle everything between li xiangyi and di feisheng— the conflict this story begins and ends with— and to free these two people of each other, li xiangyi must be dead to di feisheng. in the story this show chose to tell, when it came these characters, this is how it had to end.

[likeshipsonthesea]

how dare i, of my own volition, go and read a jiang cheng centered fic so good it has taken any interest i had in my current, wei wuxian centered wip and turned it into mournful wails of shidi!!!!

[magistralucis]

what?? are they doing 😳

[mimicteruyo]

The next time I post a multichapter, odds are I won't have the penultimate draft of the entire thing on the ready. We'll be way closer to working chapter by chapter*, baby!

(*I won't start posting before I have a FUNCTIONAL draft of the entire thing because omg)

[mysteriouslotuscasebookreference]