veliseraptor

Maybe you shouldn’t have left the mountain.

Oh will you look at that, it’s Xue Yang Feelings Hour on this blog again.

@spockandawe wrote a post a bit ago that expressed at least some of what I’m going to grope around trying to say here, so I’ll link to that first before I start trying. Namely, about Xue Yang, and Xiao Xingchen, and the idea of Xiao Xingchen’s innocence/naivete and Xue Yang’s relationship to it.

At least initially, I think what Xue Yang perceives as Xiao Xingchen’s naivete/incomprehension of the way the world works as something that’s infuriating about him. It shows that he’s out of touch, that he doesn’t get it, that he’s removed from the truth of things - and I think Xue Yang sees that as a kind of privilege. 

Of course you think the world’s a better place than it is, of course you believe in people and making the world better, you didn’t grow up in it, you haven’t seen the worst of it, you’ve never been weak and vulnerable to other people who want to hurt you.

So what Xue Yang does with the ghost puppets is, I think, specifically targeted at that aspect of Xiao Xingchen. It’s not just about sullying him morally (though there’s that, too) - it’s about a combination of proving to him that he really doesn’t understand (because if he did he couldn’t be tricked into killing all those people) and making him a part of the terribleness of the world (by turning him into a murderer). 

Xiao Xingchen doesn’t understand the way the world works and so he’s vulnerable to trickery, which makes him weak, naive, stupid. It makes him easy for Xue Yang to take advantage of, and Xue Yang is going to take advantage of him for all he’s worth. 

But. But. 

When other people try to take advantage of his (literal) blindness, he threatens them. Or with the straw game: he lies to Xiao Xingchen about who drew which, but when Xiao Xingchen believes him he tells him he was lying. 

And in this conversation, he holds back the truth about what Xiao Xingchen has done - what he made Xiao Xingchen do - for an astonishingly long time. It’s a weapon he has, and he has to know how much it’s going to hurt, but he doesn’t use it for a long while into the argument. It’s well before the reveal about the ghost puppets and Song Lan when he throws out this bit - when he tells Xiao Xingchen maybe you shouldn’t have left the mountain.

On the one hand, there’s the read on those words that’s the face value of what Xue Yang is saying before - why did you have to interfere? Why did you have to get in my way? But there’s the look on his face that I think is saying not you out of touch, naive, idiot, how dare you talk about things you don’t understand and more you out of touch, naive, idiot, why didn’t you stay where you were safe.

Why didn’t you stay where your innocence wouldn’t get you into trouble, and where people (like me) couldn’t take advantage of you?

Somewhere during those three years, Xiao Xingchen’s kindness and relative innocence has gone from being an irritating indicator of his ignorance and hypocrisy to an exploitable advantage to something that should be protected.

But ultimately, anger and hurt override that, and he turns it back on Xiao Xingchen (”are you qualified to judge me?”) by dragging him down to his level.

Even if that’s not really where he wants him to be anymore.