#how both sqq and sqh both struggle with their own otherness in different ways and only find solace when they begin to accept who they are

[zykamiliah]

they didn’t say that a 20 y/o dating someone in their early 30s was pedophilia though? they said it was a power imbalance, and that it doesn’t disappear as soon as they are a legal adult. look, i enjoy svsss, but it’s true there is a mental gap. and a student pursuing a teacher doesn’t necessarily make the teacher’s reciprocation okay. i think there’s room for nuance here that neither you nor the other blogger is realizing

they were relating the feeling of weirdness they got from reading svsss to the power imbalance of a real life teacher/student relationship or actual pedophilia.

like i said, the power imbalance is part of the conflict in svsss and bingqiu's relationship. No one in this fandom believes they were the perfect soulmates from start to finish, Healthy and Unproblematic. But it's one thing that their dynamic was unbalanced and toxic because of the their misunderstandings and communications problems, and another entirely different what that other blogger was saying.

by the time binghe comes from the abyss, he has already grown into his own power and become a demon lord. when they meet again, sqq is not the one leveling his power against sqq, but the opposite.

here I talked about why i don't think bingqiu is toxic, if you'd like to read my analysis on it.

now, for the mental gap, what exactly are you saying here? Because if we're going to compare mental age gaps, we need to take into consideration that binghe and shen yuan are from different worlds, and that their upbringing was very different. lbh practically grew in the streets as an orphan before his adoptive mother took him in, and the he went back to that after her death, before entering CQM. shen yuan, on the other hand, grew with a loving family, was a rich and pampered young master and never had to go through the struggles that lbh went through: starvation, mistreatment, poverty, loneliness, being homeless and parentless, with no one to care for him or protect him. so really, between the two, who has more worthy life experiences?

okay, let's get at it from another angle. through the entire novel, and specially after the sqq's death, lbh is very honest with himself about his own feelings and thoughts. he knows his mind really well, even under the influence of xin mo. he knows how to manipulate dreams, after all. you could said that his most unhealthy habits are his codependency and the way he internalizes his self-hate, and the subsequent self-harm he does to his mind and body because of this. i'd say his most childish moments are in the Jinlan arc, where his actions contradict themselves, as he's both resentful toward SQQ and trying to win his approval at the same time.

shen yuan, on the other hand? emotionally repressed. he doesn't process his own thoughts and emotions and pushes everything under the surface. queerphobic. homophobic. deep in denial of his own queerness and gayness, oblivious to everything gay going own around him, runs from his problems, self-sacrificial to the detriment of his own well-being, so tsundere it backfires on him sometimes, unable to understand why someone like airplane would write shitty porn to pay the bills; even thought at his core he's kind to must people, he spends a great part of the novel being very vitriolic towards sqh. it's because he can't let go of his hatred towards the authors, who he partly blames for the bad things that happen to him.

taking all this into account, i really can't say what their true mental ages are, and if the gap is really that big, or if it really has such a huge impact on their relationship.

and a student pursuing a teacher doesn’t necessarily make the teacher’s reciprocation okay.

maybe you're right on this one, but are all cases of teacher/student relationships the same? must we, just as sqq did, ignore lbh's agency and own wishes and do what he thought was best?

there's thinking that teenagers under 18 have no way of making rational decisions when it comes to love and sexual attraction, and there's thinking that a 25 years old's agency in regards to who he wants to be with is meaningless.