#and i do love that fanghua is a little incestuous

[markiafc]

i love and appreciate western media very much, but there really are some feelings only chinese media can tap into. it's the eternal tension between conforming to long-established tradition v. defying it all and being something new, something deviant. we find that conflict in the ideological battles between chinese philosophies; the criticisms and derivations between confucianism, buddhism, daoism, mohism, etc. we find it in the way chinese states are always torn between honoring traditional values v. loosening their grip to accommodate those at the margins. we find it in people like myself; i grew up in a very religious chinese buddhist family, having to studiously study buddhism and some prominent confucian texts. inside the cultural consciousness, there are real living people. and they want so badly to break free from convention, its suffocating and painfully limiting. at the same time, it feels so important and they want to keep engaging with it, they can't abandon something so close to their identity and heart.

mlc also dedicates itself to discussing this push and pull. and it lives in this grey area, this overlap of tradition and nonconformity. fanghua exemplifies this wonderfully, by embodying the traditional and non-traditional family all at once.

lxy is fdb's master, his role model. he is the ideal patriarch of jianghu (as @seventh-fantasy very rightly points out, lxy is the ideal picture of a mohist leader, mohism is the ideological inspiration behind wuxia fiction and all). on the other side of this same coin, llh serves as fdb's protector and guardian. he takes fdb under his wing and roof, looks out for fdb and passes his teachings down to him. llh raises him as a fair, wise and dependable jianghu figure, so much so that llh names fdb as his successor in the farewell letter. fdb inherits everything that was llh's, his house, dog, his skills and his legacy.

to fdb, he is both lxy and llh's heir. he owes them a lot. he wants to do right by them. he is their charge, the seed they both nurtured.

lxy/llh is also 长辈 an elder to 晚辈 the junior, fdb. there is an age gap between lxy/llh and fdb. in addition to his canonical status as master, guardian and uncle in a way, llh is a member of the older generation and fdb is a youth of the new age (the era of lxy's sigu sect v. the era of baichuan's sigu sect). tianji is fdb's family in regular society and llh is fdb's family in the jianghu world. and fdb is lucky to have parental figure(s) in both spheres.

to lxy/llh, fdb is his responsibility. fdb is his burden and also his pride. he is the naive youth that llh accepts into his home to mentor. lxy/llh holds seniority. and there is a certain amount of distance he expects from fdb. even if fdb refuses to abide. similar to the princess zhaoling who was kept at arm's length by the older girls in the mansion, fdb is kept at arm's length by llh.

so traditional dynamics and social roles lie at the root of fanghua. and yet there is:

a) an explicit rejection of blood family (fdb rejects sgd and lxy/llh chooses his adopted jianghu family over bloodline) wherein the family & marriage is said to be a foundational unit of chinese society,

b) an ambiguity, it is hard to slap one single label on fanghua because they embody multiple things at once. their dynamic derives from the traditional chinese concepts of family and seniority. there is duty and obligation that goes both ways. but the boundaries delineating each form of that are broken down. fanghua resembles father/son, and mother/son, and uncle/nephew, and master/disciple in one package. fdb also believes them to be shoulder to shoulder in friendship, equal partners, and that adds another layer of ambiguity.

there is a unique mobility and ability to traverse between definitions, and that marks them as non-traditional. an elusive quality that is built on top of the traditions that we know.