#u absolutely don't need my blessings to ship a rarepare but you have it anyway! go nuts!

[ben-wisehart]

i've been running into 'shen yuan is only HIMSELF with sqh' and it baffles me. most of the time shen yuan is just verbally leaving sqh one star reviews on goodreads. that is a very specific mood and no more than 60% of anyone's full identity.

...LISTEN. Listen. Of course it's fair to say that SY/SQQ isn't able to fully express his true authentic self for much of the novel due to the role the System places him in! But "Peerless Cucumber" isn't his true authentic self either. It's just the side of himself he expresses most easily around Shang Qinghua. Am I only myself when I post memes on the internet?? Are the people who read my ramblings on tumblr dot com about one specific Chinese novel the only beings alive who truly know me, better than my own mother??

People are complicated! And it's just baffling to me because the side of himself that SQQ shows around SQH REEKS of performative masculinity. Does anyone ACTUALLY think "You don’t push down the righteous empress, are you fucking kidding me? Airplane, hand over the girlfriends, I’ll eat this book raw" is SY being himself?? His "true self" (whatever that is) does bleed through, especially in the way he talks about Binghe, but that's definitely not the self he is actively choosing to present the world.

I like SQQ and SQH's friendship well enough for what it is, but I've never really understood why they get portrayed as having this, like, deep and universe-defining connection. I can see them having fun together and bonding over their shared history, but come on. They're not soulmates. They actually don't even know each other that well. Shang Qinghua was literally the LAST person to figure out that Shen Qingqiu was gay. Throughout the entire novel I barely got the impression that they even liked each other; when Shang Qinghua gets given the option to return home in the extras, the fact that he would never see Shen Qingqiu again doesn't even cross his mind, only Mobei-Jun.

idk. I DO think they're friends and have a certain fondness for each other, especially post-canon, but I just don't buy that it's somehow more special than SQQ's relationship with any of the other characters in the novel.