#also sqq fears lbh’s anger and rejection

[mxtxfanatic]

The way people view Bing-mei as a villain for having an appropriate (and I’d argue it’s actually pretty damn tame) reaction to being an abuse victim needs to be studied as a critique of how society very easily turns against victims who do not appropriately perform victimhood. In the story, the cultivation world outside of Cang Qiong Mountain are in the dark about how Luo Binghe was treated pre-Abyss, but we the audience know! We know he was abused horrifically for his first 14 years of life, 4 of those years under his shizun. Three years of kindness before being kicked into hell is not going to erase the scars left by that abuse. And just because we the audience also know that Shen Yuan’s Shen Qingqiu was not responsible for those first 4 years of Luo Binghe’s life as a disciple, that does not mean that he is let off the hook for them as the person assuming Shen Qingqiu’s identity, let alone the fact that he is the one who still forces Luo Binghe into the abyss, not Shen Jiu.

Meanwhile, Shen Qingqiu, himself, knows that he wronged Luo Binghe and spends the rest of the novel attempting to make up for it. After all, the abyss, itself, and that final act of betrayal are a point of trauma on their own level above those previous years of mistreatment combined. Shen Qingqiu never absolves himself of his actions the way fandom does for him, but the fact that he feared Luo Binghe’s retribution is somehow enough to flip who the victim is and who the abuser is in too many people’s minds. Even Bing-ge and Shen Jiu get this treatment: people act like because Bing-ge allowed his resentment to consume him in his thirst for vengeance that this not only absolves Shen Jiu of the grotesque abuse he subjected a 10-year-old to for 7 years in an attempt to kill him but that it also makes Shen Jiu the “ultimate victim” of the relationship rather than the reaper of the seeds of abuse he sowed. Cause as we all know, vengeance makes a villain, but somehow baseless abuse does not (🙄).

People take fear (or claims of it) as the sign of “true victimhood” while anger is assigned as an “abuser emotion,” especially in cases of abuse where the abuser is well-liked, and I see this sort of idea in the stated reasoning behind 95% of the Luo Binghe hate.