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ruinaimagines · 2 years

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Any silly little Xiao headcanons? It doesn’t have to be anything specific I just really love reading your work. You’re very very talented ^^

Thank you! And yes you may. Xiao is just so pretty.. Sorry for my absence! As I said, I've been dealing with medical stuff. At long last I got a diagnosis! Sadly it’s something chronic BUT there’s treatment so looking forward to that.

Xiao General Headcanons:

To people who do not know her well, Xiao can come off as very distant and calloused. This especially tends to be people’s first interpretation of her when they meet her while working. A Liu Association Director as unmovable and determined as can be.

She doesn't want to come off as rude though. Direct, maybe, but appreciative. She is aware of her reputation and to make up for this, especially in everyday settings, she tries to be as respectful as possible.

But because of her tone this can come across as forceful in a way. Not because it’s fake, but like it’s more a command than anything. When she says to the grocery clerk, “Have a good day.” It doesn’t sound like a suggestion, it sounds like her saying “You WILL have a good day.”

Very passive aggressive in an accidental way. This is especially represented in last minute sticky notes scrambled out for other Liu Association members to see. She worries that people will take it in the wrong way, but instead her subordinates just find it funny.

Struggles with figuring out how technology works. Not in the grandma way, but in a way that makes things a bit more difficult if she’s out of her comfort zone. She’ll continue trying to fix things herself though until someone steps in or she finds a solution.

I feel like if she’s guiding or teaching someone it would have to be through physically showing whatever it is. It’s not that she can’t explain what they need to do, but when she does it’s often very complex and not very processible information. She is aware of this, so she tries to help others through other ways.

Avoids people she knows if she sees them in public, especially if they’re from work. It isn’t as though she doesn’t like them or talking to them, it’s just that it's in a different setting and formality and she has no clue what to expect. She often has a goal in mind for what she’s doing when she’s out of the house and she doesn’t want to be sidetracked.

I feel like Xiao would like going to concerts. The kind with bright colorful lights and where everyone is just enjoying themselves alongside the music. She goes there for the atmosphere. You hardly ever have so many strangers just so loose and relaxed in the city, it’s a nice change of pace.

Speaking of said concerts, she doesn’t really go based on what artist is playing, just whatever will be the funnest. Because of this, she ends up experiencing all types of genres than she didn’t even know before. Some of the songs she in particular ends up liking 100% get played in the car, and often people are very surprised with her music taste.

Doesn’t really have a sense of style. Now hear me out, this does not mean she dresses bad or looks bad in any means, we all know that’s not true. However, her closet is just filled with the same colored clothes (typically black or gray) with little variation. You got the 4 suits, and maybe some sweaters, but that’s about it.

She’s a morning person and doesn’t really like taking naps, but has grown really efficient at them. Being in the Liu association especially when it comes to tough combat situations means that getting rest can be quite difficult most of the time, so she’s learned how to very quickly fall asleep.

A light sleeper when she’s napping as one would need to be in potentially dangerous situations, or in areas where you might be needed to immediately jump into responding. It’s never a satisfying or fulfilling sleep though.

She has a huge collection of various board games that are shoved away in a cabinet in her house. Every time there is a mission that causes her to relocate to some place temporarily, in free time she’ll visit any stores that sell any physical games.

Often she’ll leave particular ones she thinks have an interesting concept at work for employees to play if they’re interested. Sometimes being an association member means working a lot of overtime, so at the very least they have some type of entertainment.

Always has to have something to do, very much always on the go. If there isn’t something planned or an idea she has in mind, she feels lazy. This helps keep her energy levels high. That said, has a low social battery, so much of what she does are tasks on her own, or with people she is close with.

Unfortunately this can come with some additional stress, even though she considers the pros better than the cons. She’s actually pretty good with finding ways with managing this though, and often sets up regular meetings with an acupuncturist whom she finds helps with her mood.

Regularly keeps her workplace stocked with caffeine for her and other people. Whether it’s through tea, coffee, or some other drink it will honestly be more difficult to find something that is uncaffeinated. Anyone is open to helping themselves.

She feels really bad when she has to bring bad news to her colleagues, and will attempt to tread carefully when breaking it to them. There’s a lot in her head she’d like to say, but she just can’t really find the words to say them. I think those that are often working with her know the sorrow she feels, they can see it in her eyes.

When holidays come around in the office she doesn’t participate too much in them. You can typically find her sitting to herself, maybe with Lowell. That said, there is one thing that has become absolute tradition: she brings the food. Something about the way she bakes treats is iconic amongst the Liu South Section.

Whenever it’s someone’s birthday she gets a card for them and leaves a little note. As she isn’t the best with expression, the note isn’t really special, but what is are the small doodles she often leaves behind. They aren’t particularly good but that’s what makes them adored and loved.

She doesn’t actually understand why her little drawings have become such a favorable thing among her colleagues. She’s not really an artist and she did them in like a couple minutes, yet here they are showing off to each other their cards.

Wants to get better at cooking, for as good as she is at baking and decorating, making actual meals.. Well she can make food of the same type. Xiao just doesn’t really have experience in making other types of food, and she wants to expand that skill.

Really loves knitted stuff in particular?? Something about it is cozy. In winter especially there are often a lot of knitted plushies like deers and she has to resist the urge to buy them, because she knows she won’t be able to stop once she starts.

#library of ruina #lor #library of ruina xiao #lor xiao #headcanons #hcs #library of ruina headcanons #library of ruina hcs #lor headcanons #lor hcs #xiao headcanons #project moon #project moon headcanons #project moon hcs #xiao hcs

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sunshades · 10 months

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grief in the city, or "how many days off will i get when my lover dies of consumption next march"

Expanding from this post (@puffles HI) or mostly just trying to write it out in a readable fashion. (lor spoilers ahead yeehaw 📚)

Just been thinking. Death in the pmverse city. It's not something you're really allowed to get personal with. But some people just can't help it.

In lobocorp we get a look at what it's like from the inside of a corporation, and like yeah the entire story is about it, but to me Yesod's parts more than anyone else's showcase this feeling.

(Yesod core suppression dialogue)

The question of detachment comes up pretty often, and he points out Malkuth's as the ideal behavior to cope with it- forgetting you're dealing with humans as much as you can. Through his arc in lobocorp he struggles with it, this idea that it can all be fine if he stops thinking of the others as having a face, a name, and most importantly (for him) a body. Of course a strategy like that stops working as soon as one remembers, as one gets closer. That is one of the main themes of lor.

We're introduced to Xiao midway through the game, and her story unfolds as we start to learn about Roland's. The way she describes herself is similar to how A talks about Yesod, though Xiao doesn't feel special for it. The softness of her (at the time) coworker Lowell confounds her.

(Xiao's key page)

Then the invitation reaches her, and therefore the news of Lowell's death, and this changes. Her reaction is intense, she describes it vividly. And it feels... kind of natural considering the martial culture of her workplace? Specifically for an Association whose mechanics literally run off emotion levels.

(Liu S1 reception)

But we immediately see that no, to everyone else this seems like an overreaction to losing a partner. We see it from Chun's reaction, then Angela's, who suggests she simply finds a substitute for Lowell, and Roland himself is surprised by it: he muses about the Light influencing the people of the City: this is such a strange thing it gets compared to the goddamn Distortion! When we take a look at Lowell's own book it seems to confirm that out of the two he's always been the one with the more unconventional mindset.

(Lowell's key page)

It's not groundbreaking to say one should care about their partner, but it feels like in the City this isn't really the case? It feels like having someone you cherish becomes something of a nuisance as it can interfere with a Fixer's ability to... well, work. Roland, though affected for obvious reasons, tells Angela about it briefly enough, and it seems it's not particularly noteworthy, having romantic entanglements but also losing them pretty quickly. It's something that happens, that you're supposed to deal with easily enough, and go back to work.

(Liu S2 second reception)

Instead Xiao's feelings lead her to do the direct opposite; it's noteworthy that before her reception she resigns from the Association, and immediately justifies herself to her subordinates by letting them know this shouldn't affect their careers. It's worth noting that Roland's story is marked by a similar situation, once he's exposed in his revenge quest, he loses his Color title as well as his Fixer grade. In both situations we find that the question of how to deal with Survival (being a survivor to the person you love) can't escape from the problem of Survival (how to make a living). The death of another puts you in actual danger if you actually care about them.

In light of this, Lowell's hopes and promises for Xiao read differently. His apparent softness and sensitivity reveals itself as something he can handle very rationally; aware of how deeply their feelings run, he asks her to vow to always watch over herself.

(Liu S1 reception)

Instead Xiao, and we later learn about Roland, embrace the horror of what's happened to them, and show us what it's like to go into the deep end of this grief; it's a deviation from what we might consider normal or #HEALTHY, but it's also a display of feeling that usually people of the City just... don't allow themselves to have. I don't wanna ramble about this too long, but since limbus vaguely uses the Divine Comedy as a source, in Dante terms I would say: while Xiao and Roland commit sins of excess of love, letting their anger over their loved ones take them over, the people of the City in general commit the sin of sloth, "laziness of the heart", it's people who refuse to let any kind of attachment in their heart, because it's simply easier not to deal with them. Roland's arc touches on it quite often.

(Natural Sciences realization)

Though Roland does eventually turn out to be, well. A big deal, a lot of his behavior in the library is supposed to show him as a kind of everyman of the City. In moments where he talks like this, he's expressing what it actually feels like for most people to live in there. This heavily contrasts with Xiao's own beliefs, the ones she develops through her love, and that leads to her EGO manifestation.

(Liu S1 reception)

By the end we also know that the truth is Roland's own mindset isn't quite the one he tries to preach ("that's that and this is this"), but the grief over the loss of Angelica, and more generally the pain for the life he's always had, still weighs so heavy on him he isn't able to just start again- he doesn't want to! As the stories goes on and he faces the horrors of the City together with Angela, even this facade of "sloth" fades away, and his actual feelings start to show, the love and the anger and all of the grief- he starts to resonate with the abnos as Angela did, a similar experience to distorting.

While Roland has a lot of interesting dialogue, it'd take a whole other post to talk about it (I'm sure someone smarter has done it already) so for the purposes of this and to keep on topic I only wanna talk about a little bit that Xiao doesn't touch on, and that feels relevant with the perspective of canto VI.

(Black Silence "soulmates" reception)

In one of the darkest moments, we get a (can I say it now?) ⛈ HEARTBREAKING ⛈ confession straight from the inside of Roland's mind, the fear that in choosing to move on he'll have abandoned Angelica and all they meant for each other. The "pair of linked souls" is tied on a mechanical level, to beat them you need to disrupt their soul link, a buff they give each other that makes them basically unbeatable- they keep each other alive. Roland's fear, after years of Fixer work, after seeing how little value a person's life has in the eyes of the City, is this: that the second he looks away from Angelica's death and his attempt to avenge it, he'll have forsaken her forever, that their love and life together will lose its meaning.

Only with the help of the librarians and particularly Angela he's able to accept that's not the case, and in the final reception he once again wields her name and her gloves, carrying on her legacy and memory for the sake of the future and the new people he wants to protect.

Finally, I wanna show an incredibly interesting piece of dialogue from Leviathan, between Vergilius and Carmen.

(Leviathan chapter 18, translation by @/SnakeskinFS on twitter)

Now, Carmen's take on love is... something. Love as she means it is what we know to bring to Distortion, but it is interesting that the actual implication in the world she draws up is what the people of the City need back is contact with one another, understanding. It's also interesting Vergilius calls it a word he's unaccustomed to. Obviously here it doesn't apply strictly to romantic love, but this does check out with how little we get to see City residents... well, loving each other.

Xiao for Lowell, Roland for Angelica, as well as honestly Carmen for herself, her vision for the future, stand out in crowds of cordial coworkers and friends of circumstances, for the strength of their feelings, love in its danger and beauty. The paths they end up following are messy, some very bloody, and done in remembrance of the people they valued above all else. It's the theme of love that entwines so closely with that of death, the question of what you do when you're the one surviving and left behind.

So here's where I think of canto VI- WH is so heavily defined by grief. This is partially tied to its literary influences, partially to the author's own experience, but the story is scarred by the various funerals, each of which changes someone's life, mostly for the worse.

Is this malicious? A little. A little... not? Like in the City, the feeling is that the dead, the memory of them, follow because they love the living. When we get to Cathy's death, she and Heathcliff curse each other back and forth before making peace again, but in the end more than their harshness, what hits the most is the connection, the yearning to be reunited- "I care nothing of your sufferings" is soon followed by "I'm not wishing you greater torment than I have", which leads into the Heartbreaking speech, that we already know will be very relevant in the canto, in which Heathcliff takes her pain as his.

NOW I see readings/speculation around that this will be portrayed as lcb Cathy trying to tie Heathcliff to his past forever/them needing to Kill Her, and metaphorically his affection for her in order for him to move on and become his own person, to which I say: meh? I think that misses part of the point, makes her out to be a plot device instead of a character that, like him, has grown in an awful abusive household, and laments in her deathbed that she wishes things had been different, and that the person she loves could stay with her longer, after circumstances beyond their control have forced them apart.

By the end of it, though we know that in the book it doesn't really turn out like she'd like, Cathy claims she'd rather him remember her words, and her, as harsh and cruel than nurse anger while he lives on, she hates the thought that he should suffer more when she's gone, because she, too, feels his suffering as hers.

To me this last wish she expresses is most reminiscent of what we see of Lowell's request to Xiao, the way it's not fulfilled until the last minute. Xiao doesn't listen and she goes on, fully aware she's betraying the trust he put in her, and that she might be the next to die. Because of this betrayal, her feelings, this excess of love threatens to have the best of her, to make her forget about Lowell and focus only on herself and her anger- the "love of the self" that is the Distortion. Her final reception has her talking back to Carmen's proposal and worldview, detailing the way her bond with Lowell, but also Miris, Chun and all of her men, have been keeping her strong to this point.

(Xiao reception)

With the awareness her lover is dead and gone, she manages to work through her feelings and gain strength from them, deciding that these bonds, and her memory will keep all of them alive through each other.

SO am I saying this is totally happening to Heathcliff in canto VI. I mean, nah, not necessarily. But considering the similarities he shares with these other stories, and how we've already seen these examples of the theme of grief over a loved one being handled before in the previous games and resulting in these genuinely amazing characters, it's something I think about.

As we're talking about a game adaptation that obviously can't adapt 20 more years of story (and let's be real, shouldn't either. If you want to read WH you can just read WH,) I think that would be a reasonable way for the canto to play out: getting to see one of the sinners genuinely lose it over someone's death in a way none of the others really did, explicitly showing the uniqueness of such intense affection in a place like the City, and then slowly beginning the road to recovery. Much like for Xiao and Roland, this being done not as a result of leaving the past behind, but as a direct result of their love for another, and that of their lover as well as everyone else who cherishes them (Miris, Angela and the librarians- I think we'll soon add the sinners to the list).

(post core suppression dialogue)

To quote another bit from our bestie Yesod, the hope that grows out of the rot, as the death of another, but as your own wounded self as well.

So to conclude. I think in general, in the context of how we've seen major characters work around their grief in previous games it'd make sense for canto VI to reach a similar conclusion, the death being something that weighs heavily, but doesn't obscure the possibility of a future. Still. Love as something dangerous that has extreme power over us, but as something that lives in us and can't be taken away.

#bell.txt #limbus company #library of ruina #project moon #edit ok all screenies are captioned now. how did i write so much #its like barely even speculation im just putting together some stuff that gets me thinking about the general Vibe. i love u the city #xiao roland and heathcliff talk. dead wife club (honorific)#btw Did You Know: if canto vi releases on white day that means part 2 will release right after cathys book accurate death day. LOLLL #lcb heathcliff #xiao lor #roland lor #canto vi #edit 2: VINDICAAAAATION

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