I really dislike the idea that just bc Ganyu is old she has experience with everything, like that's not how it works lol. And this includes serious romance, esp when she didn't even feel like she belongs in human society until recently + not everyone is desperate to date.
The way i see it she's been struggling with her identity and finding a sense of belonging among humans, as well as dealing with going against her peaceful nature during war, while also being someone who appreciates just being alive, and simple things in live unrelated to social stuff, and nature and Liyue as a whole. She has a lot of things to deal with mentally bc of her half-qilin identity, devotion to Rex Lapis and Liyue, and everything she's been through. I think she doesn't exactly need romance. And she has that mysterious qilin side to her, which we don't truly know or understand. It's perfectly fine for her to be a character that was never all that interested in romance, and doesn't have direct experience with it.
And there's really never enough time to experience and learn everything, it doesn't matter how old she is. I find making her this perfect, hypercompetent and experienced at absolutely everything flawless being to be very limiting. Why deny her the space to still learn and grow? I believe we learn all our lives, and it's the same for Ganyu. I mean, literally just look at her being completely perplexed by Keqing and Rex Lapis' fondness of her lmao. And the entire fact of their eventual reconciliation.
Ganyu somehow just couldn't ignore Keqing's existence, even if it was absolutely an option for a 3000+ yo half-qilin. Perhaps because Keqing was kind and truly did care about Liyue and its ppl, making Ganyu have very mixed feelings. She left a strong, hard to ignore impression. And so Ganyu eventually learned more about this human enigma called Keqing lol, and grew as a person.
And generally that's also how i see ganqing's relationship, neither of them rlly need romance, they're not desperate for it. Keqing has her own passions and dreams, she has her life figured out. Ganyu doesn't have her life as figured out so there's a lot to consider here. But they simply decide a romantic relationship witch each other is what they WANT!! Bc it does enrich their lives. They chose to do this, even if they never actually had to.
Long story short, yes Ganyu is amazing, talented and carries Liyue on her back, but she's also only human, and only qilin. Her being so old doesn't automatically mean she must have romantic experience. And she's still learning, growing and experiencing new things.
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on the cusp between childhood and adulthood, the sudden onset of grief when you weren’t in the room where it happened, and the impossible art of growing up in a very short time: or, why the princess of france from love’s labour’s lost means a lot to me personally
on the heels of reading as the princess of france with @socialshakespeare
heads up, the rest of this is going to get Very Long Very Quickly, so i’m putting it under a cut. tw for discussions of cancer, parental death, and grief.
so when @socialshakespeare announced that it would be doing love’s labour’s lost this month, in the box where you can put any additional notes about your casting preferences, i pretty much begged the admins to let me have a turn as the princess of france. y’know, i said, as a sort of twenty-first birthday present. and i was cast as the princess of france! thank you, socshakes! <3
but there was a very specific reason why i asked to play the princess of france.
and that reason is simply: she reminds me of me. more particularly, she reminds me of me from 2020, but me from 2020 was really the germination point of me today.
“savannah, everyone changed in 2020, 2020 was a fucking unbelievable year and it changed us all. it changed our whole world.” yeah. i’m well aware. but there’s a specific reason for me.
***
see, in early 2020, i was having a pretty decent time, actually. it was my senior year of high school, i had a great group of friends (much like the princess had her three ladies except my core friend group was bigger than that), things with my family weren’t great but i knew that come august i would be able to move out.
that first period of covid was awful and it changed so much and at times it felt like i was having a mental breakdown, but it wasn’t what ultimately ripped me apart that year.
you see, in 2018, about a month before my fifteenth birthday, my father was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. for a good long while, though, it seemed like he might beat the odds. treatments were working, he went to one of the best hospitals in the country to get good care, and we believed that he just might make it.
and then in the summer of 2020, things rapidly took a turn for the worse.
on july 20, 2020, we all got sat down and told that the treatments weren’t working anymore, and they had elected to put my father on hospice care. i sobbed all that night and into the next morning, but i had a cashier job that summer at walmart. i was an essential worker and i had to power through.
in love’s labour’s lost, everyone knows even before the princess arrives that her father is extremely sick. for heaven’s sake, it’s why the princess is there in the first place instead of the king. and yet the princess powers through. there’s deals to be made, familial honor to be defended, and there’s also that tiny matter of falling in love and playing with the joy and laughter that come with it. and the princess embraces it.
she is young, she is optimistic, she is a bit sheltered maybe yet so smart, she has devoted friends, she has seemingly all the time in the world because no one knows when the time runs out so might as well believe it never will, right?
my high school graduation came five days later, on july 25. a rare opportunity to see friends then and, at long last, after a two-month delay and twelve years of study before that, a chance to celebrate. relatives came in. we had cake and flowers. we took photos on the soccer field in 90-degree weather but it didn’t matter because we were together and we were so full of joy on that blue-sky day.
and after that, only nineteen days until leaving. i had been counting the days for months, excited for new possibilities, not understanding the impact. it would be easy, i thought. all that needed done were to pack my bags and suitcases and buy some last-minute things, say my goodbyes for now to my favorite people, enjoy every moment i could, and wait in a haze of delightful agony and optimism until the morning of august 13 came.
this went as planned for about three days.
july 29, 2020, started like any other day. i got my things together, had an argument with my stepmom about doing the dishes (you said i can’t do the dishes when it’s late and everyone’s asleep after i get off work, when do you expect me to do them), decided to start the dishwasher right before i left for work (if she was mad about it, then she could unload the dishwasher as needed and we could have this conversation when i got home, i reasoned) and went to walmart for my shift that day. i cut one of my fingers on a taco seasoning packet, watched some of the salzburg 2007 production of berlioz’s benvenuto cellini on my lunch break, and in general otherwise it was a pretty normal shift. and like all normal shifts, i took my sweet time getting out and getting home.
at about 5:15 i was dawdling and trying to find an excuse to not get in my car just yet when i got a call from my stepmom that basically went like this:
me: hi
stepmom: hey. are you coming home yet?
me: i will be there in a little bit.
stepmom: it’s been raining so you need to be careful getting home.
me: it hasn’t rained that much and i know how to drive in the rain.
stepmom: just be careful getting home. bye.
so i sighed and went “well i can’t put this off any longer”, and got in my car and put some more berlioz on and drove home, thinking about how she sounded upset over the phone and oh i was going to get a tongue-lashing for leaving the dishes in the dishwasher all day.
and just as i was pulling up, i noticed my older brother’s truck outside. huh, i thought, that’s weird. why is he here?
i pulled into the driveway and saw my stepmom sitting on the step outside the side door by herself. two thoughts about what this meant went into my head at about the same time:
option 1: uh oh my stepmom is big mad and she waited out here just so she could tell me off right when i got home
option 2: uh oh my brother and my stepmom got into a fight again for whatever reason and she just can’t deal with it right now
(both of these, for the record, were entirely plausible things that could have happened)
so i parked and got out and decided to not commit to either of these but just play this very strange situation as coolly as possible. i believe my exact words were “hey, what are you doing out here by your lonesome?”
and like monsieur marcade, she could only get out a handful of words, and it was left to me to fill in the meaning.
the meaning: savannah, your father is dead.
and, to quote a different shakespeare play, “i must be from thence.”
my father died and i wasn’t there.
***
this is the same fate to befall the princess of france: her political mission mixed with girls’ trip has taken her to navarre, to a world full of annoying yet beloved men and delightful games and amateur theatre filled with passion. and then she learns that her father all the way in paris has died, and she wasn’t there.
now we don’t know what the princess’ relationship with her father was like; this is not something that is discussed at all in the play. but i know what my relationship with my father was like. we didn’t always understand each other or agree on everything, but i loved him. and in a childhood where the concept of family was a loose one due to an over decade-long stretch of family drama, he was the one constant.
and then four days after my high school graduation, he was simply gone, never to return.
now some folks will probably go back to those days of late july and early august 2020 and see that i posted exactly nothing about all this. why? i just needed a space where i could forget, where i could live in denial for a little longer, where i could cling to something in my life that wasn’t about this unimaginable loss until i couldn’t anymore.
living in the late 1500s, with a whole country to newly run, no social media, and a permanent existence in the public eye, the princess does not have this sort of escape. she knows right away the awful truth. it is inevitable; she must leave this happy sojourn, this newfound love.
her first line after she realizes her father is dead shows that plainly: “boyet, prepare. i will away tonight.” and even as she plans to shut herself up in a mourning-house, it is at the same time that she will be learning first hand how to run her kingdom.
sixteen days after my father’s death, i left home to learn how to live on my own. and even before that, i got only five days of bereavement leave from work, and i went back to work the day after my father’s funeral. let alone the rest of the frantic preparations for leaving home and starting a brand new life alone—in the middle of a pandemic and now, with this grief weighing on me.
life and the world do not wait for grief.
and sixteen days is too fast to grow up.
you can’t just flip the switch from child to adult, especially when you’re grieving.
and when the world forces you to do so, it is truly awful.
there’s no closure to it. as another character mourns in the closing moments of the play, “our wooing doth not end like an old play.” well, neither did the princess’ relationship with her father.
to continue with the shakespeare allusions, as much as i love and am heartbroken by the deathbed reconciliation between king henry iv and prince hal in henry iv, part 2 (a scene i was lucky to get to read with socshakes last september and which still lives in my head rent free), sometimes it simply doesn’t work out that way and you’re still left to pick up the pieces and forever wonder what might have been in those final moments on top of it.
living without that—without those answers, without closure, without any sort of comfort, on top of everything else—is so, so hard.
it is widely accepted that the love’s labour’s won mentioned in the catalogues is, in fact, a lost sequel and not an alternate name for any number of surviving shakespeare comedies. and while i have never found love in the manner of any shakespeare comedy, i believe nonetheless that i am living the princess’ story—a young woman, always grieving, trying to learn about life and figure out how to live it in a hostile world, trying to balance all the things, trying to come to terms with closure that will never come to her.
love’s labour’s lost fills me with an ache by the end. a true heartache, a deep emotional pain like few other stories i have ever come across. when i first saw it, i praised it for being messy and real. i saw me in it. i saw my own grief. i saw what i could have been, the kind of person i was before that fateful and fatal summer, the realization that we must leave that self behind because they can no longer navigate this new world, the not wanting to let go, the not understanding why but knowing you have to anyway. to know you have to take the other road.
***
recently, for a local exhibit, a museum asked people in the area to send in writing about their regrets, something they wished had happened differently. mine was eventually one of the ones selected for inclusion. here it is.
in another lifetime, i am there when my father dies.
i am there, holding his hand, feeling the blood that connects us rush through him, hearing his breaths—however shallow.
skin on skin.
i’m able to tell him one last time that i love him, i will always love him. perhaps through all the pain that comes with a pancreatic cancer diagnosis, the sleep-like state he was in for most of the last two days, he will hear me and even respond.
my family can all grieve together, knowing we all saw it happen and we all got a strange sort of closure.
my relationship with him on this earth would not feel like a perpetually unfinished story, with an ending written when i wasn’t even there.
but it is this lifetime.
someone once said grief is just love with no place to go. i believe that. and, well, this is my life. i have to muddle through and believe, make closure out of thin air and time, let love go nowhere and everywhere.
***
so, life imitates art and vice versa. and thank you @socialshakespeare for letting me have this story that has come to mean so much to me in the few short months since i first came across it. <3
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