#events were locked but not every moment in between was dictated LBH and LQG in svsss had a sense of agency they developed

[10thmusemoon]

People arguing about the morality of Shen Jiu’s actions will never not be funny because Airplane literally scrapped all his dimensionality and made him be cartoonishly sinister in order to advance Luo Binghe’s narrative. MXTX gives us the QiJiu extras to show that he wasn’t as one dimensional as readers (SY and us) were made to believe when out of the control of the author. Shen Yuan’s own experience trapped in the character lock shows how limiting that was.

Shen Qingqiu is written to be Luo Binghe’s Count Olaf, his Miss Hannigan, his Miss Trunchbull, his Tywin Lannister.

It’s very Jessica Rabbit, “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way”

Not only that, but he’s also the first of MXTX’s characters to fall to misinterpretation.

All of MDZS centers on the unreliability of misrepresentation, about how easily swayed people can be and how easily poisonous words ruins lives and shapes what is perceived as truth.

She pulls the same trick with SJ as she does with JC, letting the readers build them up as villains through out the story (sprinkling in moments where that doesn’t quiet fit) and then revealing something at the end that should question that assumption. That’s literally Mu Qing’s whole thing. Everyone, even Xie Lian (our unreliable narrator), perceives him as scornful and vindictive, selfish and harsh. His actions are constantly misunderstood over and over again simply because he does not come in palpable packaging. In a way, original flavored SQQ is the meta prototype for these characters, and Shen Yuan is the deconstruction of that archetype.

SVSSS is meta of a narrative genre with common and cliche tropes, we’re beat over the head constantly about this, and somehow people still forget the SQQ only exists within the narrative (PIDW) inside the narrative (SVSSS). He’s the looney toon playing in the back of a drama, used for foreshadowing and a narrative foil. The villain coded in black so you know who to point a finger at and who to root for.

I just think that’s neat.