Lin Ziye - Blog Posts

Li Lun, a villain I feel for (Pt. 4/4)

Since we know that LL’s redemption is not the point, and the main purpose of him being in this story is a̶ b̶r̶i̶g̶h̶t̶ ̶v̶i̶s̶u̶a̶l̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶f̶i̶n̶a̶l̶ ̶b̶a̶t̶t̶l̶e̶ a bunch of plot twists to be sacrificed, everything what happens next is pretty logical. After that conversation with ZYZ’s boyfriend LL moves to the last two stages of acceptance: depression and, actually, acceptance. He got his answer to the question “why do you treat me like this?” but he can’t turn back time and be of superior attitude as current ZYZ’s boyfriend is, so he understands that he will never be able to get ZYZ back. And since he is insanely obsessed with ZYZ, losing hope to reunite means for him losing the meaning of his existence. So, he doesn’t try to possess any other healthy body. He doesn’t even try to find a remedy for the current one, or to notify ZYZ’s squad that their friend’s body is dying in hope they will save Little Traitor (as far as he knows they can do literally impossible things). Of course they can! GJM’s sleeves are full of aces for them! He just waits for his body to die.

This scene in the cave is very beautiful yet meaningless. Li Lun’s lifeless and dark birthplace is now in intense blooming! It’s so beautiful, it means… What is it supposed to mean?🤷🏻‍♀️ There is no redemption, no reason to bloom if only sophoras aren’t trees that bloom only before their death. The only thing that changed in LL’s mind is his acceptance, both of irreversibility of their break-up with ZYZ and of his inevitable death.

Then we have a super strange monologue, in which LL says that he has no place in this world and no home (But darling, why? In this drama there wasn't a single scene where LL was denied by someone except for ZYZ and his friends, they are not the whole world! He is still a part of demon society, no one can take it away from him!). Throughout the drama there was also no sign of him searching for his place in this world! Not a single scene about it! He just wanted to talk to his ex and that’s it! Hearing him speaking of an absence of home while watching his home all over blossoming was really weird.

Although I found it very nice to see Li Lun treating Ao Ying well (It’s so rare for villains, especially obsessed ones, to treat their servants well!), I didn’t understand what this scene was for. To show us that LL is good now and is able to do good deeds? But I already had no doubt he is, because he saved those demons from the dungeon, and saved Great Wilderness centuries ago together with ZYZ, and all that jazz. He never treated Ao Ying bad in frame, so this scene doesn’t work as a contrast to his previous behavior neither. It’s here just to show us dying, miserable LL and to prepare us for feeling for him a little bit more while he will be sacrificed.

In the end of his monologue LL says that he is ready to die but wants to have a great stage to die on and someone to take with him into nothingness, and goes to… ZYZ! So, since he has no hope to get him back, he wants to die trying to take ZYZ with him, I suppose. It’s so within his obsession plot line, although is hella pathetic.

But Ao Ying disturbs his plans and shows him what end should meet every obsessed person in a Chinese drama. She transfers the poison out of Little Traitor’s body into herself and dies for a person she was obsessed with. So now Li Lun knows what to do.

He passes out at the threshold of ZYZ’s residence, and no one of the main characters uses this opportunity to pull his soul out of Little Traitor’s body! Not dying anymore, he talks to ZYZ again and says that he regrets they broke up and wants to return those times. And ZYZ says once more that LL should leave Little Traitor’s body and die. Why doesn’t ZYZ say by this very conversation that he doesn’t want Li Lun to die and has a way to keep his soul alive? Just because. LL is not convinced by ZYZ’s generous offer, so he fights the whole bunch of ZYZ’s friends, loses this fight and gets expelled from Little Traitor’s body. But SUDDENLY ZYZ asks his friends to spare LL’s life and to return his primordial spirit into his own sophora root that once was a love token between them. So LL could chill in his birthplace for a hundred years cultivating himself a new body and would stay alive. Why didn’t ZYZ offer it to LL before, when LL asked him multiple times to spare him? 🤷🏻‍♀️ No idea!

LL’s behavior oddly swings from his willingness to die to his willingness to survive, but Ao Ying paved him the only way obsessed characters could follow, so if he can’t be with ZYZ anyway, he dies saving him. His act of dying is the last part of break-up acceptance: he regifts ex’s gift to his current boyfriend and symbolically hands him over the burden of caring about ZYZ. And lastly has a tantric threesome sex with both ZYZ and his new boyfriend.

"Zhao Yuanzhou, I can't bear seeing you this weak."

I discussed my unhappiness with LL’s plot with my fellow @i-selina and she voiced the thought that there is some sort of Chinese cultural pattern in dramas saying: “your misery is your own weakness and a reason others will try to make you even more miserable”. My cultural pattern says that one should be merciful to other’s misery, that’s why I would like to see Li Lun’s inner fracture get healed and his true redemption arch happen, letting him stay alive. But GJM didn’t seem to bother even developing the main characters, so I shouldn’t expect that much of him here. He was busy making FoF insanely beautiful. No one can be equally good at each aspect of cinematography. Still love Li Lun, though.

Here is Part 1 Here is Part 2 Here is Part 3

Li Lun, a villain I feel for (Pt. 3/4)

While no one remembers of Li Lun anymore, he is still here. His body is destroyed but he can possess other people, so he secretly possesses a little traitor from the main heroes’ camp. Little Traitor is ½ wood, so his body suits LL well (LL is a sophora, after all).

He dramatically reveals himself as Li Lun to the main heroes and says that he can destroy Little Traitor’s soul wholly and make this body his forever, but he doesn’t do it. If we think of it not as of another script flaw, he needs this body not to live happily ever after in his new healthy shell far far away from any dull exes, but to talk to ZYZ!

Poor Ao Ying, I like her, too! She is LL's mirror: death is the price of loyalty and not having your own private life.

He is hurt and angry, so he vents his anger on ZYZ’s new boyfriend (His behavior here is realistic!). The fight looks very raw and feral, and you can see LL’s feelings seeping through it.

He doesn’t really need to keep ZYZ’s boyfriend alive. You may say that ZYZ’s boyfriend is the only one who can kill ZYZ with his magical sword, and LL wants ZYZ dead, but he obviously doesn’t: he breaks the magical sword of ZYZ’s boyfriend by himself and doesn’t want it to be restored, in order to not to be expelled from Little Traitor’s body. What is the best way to leave that sword not restored ever again? Yeah, right, to kill its owner! LL has an opportunity, a lot of them, during this fight, but he wants to humiliate ZYZ’s boyfriend, not to kill him.

It’s very important for LL that other people can see his true self, so he lends Truth Eye to almost everyone except for ZYZ. Because ZYZ promised LL to see his heart with his own heart.

But the triumph of LL’s pettiness is short: the main heroes gather together to tell LL that he is stupid because he helped the killer of those dungeon demons with his own hands.

LL goes to dungeons to kill Big Bad in Mask, but the guy says that LL’s current body is poisoned and he will die if Big Bad in Mask dies. How Little Traitor’s body’s death relates to Big Bad in Mask’s death I don’t understand even now. But LL leaves his attempts to kill Big Bad in Mask, which is strange, and focuses fully on attempts to leave Little Traitor’s body for himself, although it’s dying from poison and of no much use anymore. OK, the main heroes don’t give a flying heck about Big Bad in Mask, his zombies and demon tortures, but LL? (But at least he tried to kill him, unlike ZYZ, who wholeheartedly didn’t give a damn).

Why wouldn’t he possess any other healthy body that could contain his fierce spirit? Maybe possessing this very boy is his twisted attempt to be a part of ZYZ’s life as far as he doesn’t understand what’s the difference between him and new ZYZ’s friends and why can’t he be a part of ZYZ’s life anymore. It’s pathetic, yet still understandable.

He tries to put the crimp into the main heroes’ attempts to restore the sword because he doesn’t want to lose Little Traitor’s body and die, but, at the same time, he actually helps ZYZ’s boyfriend to stay alive without the sword (there was so many variants whose inner core could be given to ZYZ's boyfriend for that...).

And then this dialog happens:

I was in such a GREAT PAIN. The worse of their conversations ever. ZYZ tells the person who was his boyfriend and was killed by him twice that he will kill him for the third time to save people he knows a couple of millenias less than him. And when LL brings on for the last time the topic of what’s the difference between him and them, ZYZ says that he is the only reason of everything what happened to him. It’s such a hypocrisy! Yes, LL should leave the body that isn’t his, it’s right thing to do, but ZYZ knows the way how to keep him alive if he does it! Yet he doesn’t say a word about it. Moreover, he is the main reason why LL doesn’t have his own body anymore. Yet he prefers to say something like “only your voluntary death can atone your sins, anyone’s life is more precious that yours”, which hurts af considering their previous relationship and the way ZYZ cut LL out of his life.

Meanwhile, the current ZYZ’s boyfriend, who used to be a demon hunter and killed demons, turns himself into one.

His ancestor was an ancient water dragon demon, so when his demon blood takes over him, he goes to sleep onto the bottom of the pool in his residence.

Now, as ZYZ's boyfriend became a demon, people who praised him when he was a demon hunter start hating him for his new race. LL comes to him after him being humiliated by humans he used to protect and asks him his question for the last time.

And this conversation is strange af. LL asks if ZYZ’s boyfriend feels anger because he was unfairly accused of crimes and beaten just because he is of other species now (read as: does he feel like LL felt when that dungeon situation happened), and ZYZ’s boyfriend answers that he chooses not to hold a grudge against humans, and his superior attitude will destroy such an evil and hopeless thing as LL is. And throws humiliated LL into the puddle of mud.

It supposes to be a turning point after which LL understands all his wrongs and moves towards his redemption-through-death arch, but in fact it doesn’t work! When I saw it for the first time, I had a gut feeling that something is wrong here, somethings doesn’t work for me. Then I rewatched it to write this post and finally found out what is exactly wrong.

Originally, I thought that it doesn’t work because GJM takes two topics for redemption development and fails to work with them as far as they are intertwined and interfere with each other, but now I see that there is no redemption development topics at all! Let me explain.

Redemption should be driven not by external circumstances, but by inner processes inside a character with the help of external circumstances. For example, if the main problem of LL’s character were his prejudice against humans, his redemption arch could start like this: LL meets a human who is honest and treats demons nice, maybe does something selfless for LL (does all this stuff that LL thought impossible for humans); LL sees it, proceeds it inside himself and changes his mind. Or, if the main problem of LL were his obsession with ZYZ… Oh, it’s harder than the previous one. LL could release his obsession with ZYZ if ZYZ had an understandable reason why he ghosted LL (he, obviously, hasn’t) and they would talk about this reason in a proper way. Or if there were a reason why he is so obsessed with ZYZ, and some another person would show him that it’s possible to cover his needs without ZYZ (but it’s not a topic of a villain character development in a xianxia drama at all, as far as it’s used for the most part in modern romantic stories).

But here LL looks like an abuser’s wife: he literally asks new ZYZ’s boyfriend why ZYZ dumped him, and ZYZ’s boyfriend answers that LL was a bad wife and didn’t behave as ZYZ pleased. Does LL understand what exactly was wrong with his attitude towards humans? No, not at all. The only thing he understands now is that he needs to behave as ZYZ pleases if he wants his boyfriend back. He didn’t change his believes after this conversation. He didn’t overcome his obsession neither (otherwise, why would this absolutely stupid conversation work on him?). Because you can’t bring someone towards redemption by constantly humiliating him and gaslighting him into believing that he is all alone. He isn’t! He has got all the demons of Great Wilderness, he has got Ao Ying, he has got plenty of demons who share his believes. It’s just that he unhealthy obsessed with a guy who doesn’t care about him and can’t see any other good things around him.

Throughout all this scene I expected there to be some gesture of empathy from ZYZ’s boyfriend (because see the first redemption scheme I described), but it never happened. Li Lun also waits for something like that, as we can see in this scene with Ao Ying and an umbrella. The main heroes constantly talk about importance of patience and kindness towards those who don’t deserve it but never show it to LL with their own example.

LL is upset that this gesture of kindness (an umbrella) isn't from any of ZYZ’s squad, and here I feel sad for Ao Ying, too, because she is obsessed with serving LL the same way LL is obsessed with ZYZ, and an obsessed person has no value in the eyes of the object of their obsession. Just like in real life. Sad but true.

The only thing that changes in LL’s character during the story is his stage of acceptance.

Here is Part 1 Here is Part 2 Here is Part 4