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MXTX does something interesting in both SVSSS and MDZS with love and criticism.
Shen Yuan is ultimately PIDW’s ‘best fan’. He transmigrates because he’s necessary to the successful realisation of the story, because his mode of black powder fandom is reliant on loving that story (or at least its characters and the world, if not the plot) and wanting it to be better. Shen Yuan's fixation on details, which surpasses Airplane’s creative, mechanical approach to making pulp fiction (which, after all, has always served a different purpose: Airplane has not had leisure to love his work), is about remembering and holding a mirror to the text to ensure its self-consistency. Shen Yuan’s ability to creatively interpret based on knowledge of characters comes through at the end of the novel (after he emerges from years, or even decades, of reality-obscuring denial predicated on his personal issues) in his successful reading of why exactly Binghe was angry about their separation during the temple confrontation with the cultivation world and, still more importantly, his logical reasoning regarding the death of Su Xiyan. Shen Qingqiu reading Binghe and wanting the best from him is very tied to these frameworks of criticism and appreciation.
From the Skinner arc, where he relied entirely on a mechanical easy mode, genre-savvy and exploitation of the nature of his predicament as a transmigrator, Shen Yuan has grown into someone capable of much more advanced detective work based on reading this world as real, employing a Watsonian rather than Doylist approach. SVSSS sometimes ‘punishes’ Shen Yuan for a hateration predicated on his not engaging with the material realities of publishing, which have governed what readers want from this text and thus some of the things he finds most frustrating about it (in being granted Shen Yuan's PoV, MXTX affords the SVSSS reader the pleasure of being a 'good' critic). But Shen Yuan is also co-recognised with Airplane, by virtue of their shared transmigration, as an essential part of the ‘solution’ of the Case of PIDW/Luo Binghe. No work exists without being read, and further, no work can be ‘great’ without being in some fashion loved.
If we look at MDZS’s model of demonic cultivation as hubris (and functionally, as something similar to SVSSS’s Xin Mo (which is itself, in a different sense, similar to Shen Yuan's system)), it becomes important that Lan Wangji was the one person critical of the practice when he and Wei Wuxian were at the height of their child-soldiering. His criticism is founded on both the blasphemy of the acts and the danger they pose to Wei Wuxian and others. Wei Wuxian later acknowledges the value of Lan Wangji’s consistent concern, though it manifests in Lan Wangji's seemingly contradictory or paradoxical commitment to standing against Wei Wuxian when the world praises him and with him when the world despises him. This criticism is realised quite differently in the fairly divergent moral paradigms of MDZS and CQL: MDZS’s Lan Wangji is ultimately interested in protecting and supporting Wei Wuxian, right or wrong, whereas it’s ultimately important to CQL's Lan Wangji that Wei Wuxian (stripped of the hubris arc, for reasons I’d like to discuss more in a comparison of the mechanics of the texts) is right. CQL's Wei Wuxian reframes his Lan Wangji’s sense of justice, coming to serve as Lan Wangji's moral arbiter outside of any established code or consensus. In fact if anything, in shifting the story's second-act focus from demonic cultivation to a refugee crisis, CQL shifts the criticism function of the romantic relationship to Wei Wuxian.
Both texts present models of love as criticism, wherein a lover will push their partner towards becoming their 'best self' (or at least towards making healthier choices for themselves and those around them). This criticism also involves a more structural/meta resistance to the impetus of Watsonian social forces and/or Doylist plot or market imperatives.
(NOTE: I've seen and read everything mentioned but I've only partly read a bad translation of MDZS, so I can't swear outright to my conclusions on those points.)
Shen Yuan is ultimately PIDW’s ‘best fan’. He transmigrates because he’s necessary to the successful realisation of the story, because his mode of black powder fandom is reliant on loving that story (or at least its characters and the world, if not the plot) and wanting it to be better. Shen Yuan's fixation on details, which surpasses Airplane’s creative, mechanical approach to making pulp fiction (which, after all, has always served a different purpose: Airplane has not had leisure to love his work), is about remembering and holding a mirror to the text to ensure its self-consistency. Shen Yuan’s ability to creatively interpret based on knowledge of characters comes through at the end of the novel (after he emerges from years, or even decades, of reality-obscuring denial predicated on his personal issues) in his successful reading of why exactly Binghe was angry about their separation during the temple confrontation with the cultivation world and, still more importantly, his logical reasoning regarding the death of Su Xiyan. Shen Qingqiu reading Binghe and wanting the best from him is very tied to these frameworks of criticism and appreciation.
From the Skinner arc, where he relied entirely on a mechanical easy mode, genre-savvy and exploitation of the nature of his predicament as a transmigrator, Shen Yuan has grown into someone capable of much more advanced detective work based on reading this world as real, employing a Watsonian rather than Doylist approach. SVSSS sometimes ‘punishes’ Shen Yuan for a hateration predicated on his not engaging with the material realities of publishing, which have governed what readers want from this text and thus some of the things he finds most frustrating about it (in being granted Shen Yuan's PoV, MXTX affords the SVSSS reader the pleasure of being a 'good' critic). But Shen Yuan is also co-recognised with Airplane, by virtue of their shared transmigration, as an essential part of the ‘solution’ of the Case of PIDW/Luo Binghe. No work exists without being read, and further, no work can be ‘great’ without being in some fashion loved.
If we look at MDZS’s model of demonic cultivation as hubris (and functionally, as something similar to SVSSS’s Xin Mo (which is itself, in a different sense, similar to Shen Yuan's system)), it becomes important that Lan Wangji was the one person critical of the practice when he and Wei Wuxian were at the height of their child-soldiering. His criticism is founded on both the blasphemy of the acts and the danger they pose to Wei Wuxian and others. Wei Wuxian later acknowledges the value of Lan Wangji’s consistent concern, though it manifests in Lan Wangji's seemingly contradictory or paradoxical commitment to standing against Wei Wuxian when the world praises him and with him when the world despises him. This criticism is realised quite differently in the fairly divergent moral paradigms of MDZS and CQL: MDZS’s Lan Wangji is ultimately interested in protecting and supporting Wei Wuxian, right or wrong, whereas it’s ultimately important to CQL's Lan Wangji that Wei Wuxian (stripped of the hubris arc, for reasons I’d like to discuss more in a comparison of the mechanics of the texts) is right. CQL's Wei Wuxian reframes his Lan Wangji’s sense of justice, coming to serve as Lan Wangji's moral arbiter outside of any established code or consensus. In fact if anything, in shifting the story's second-act focus from demonic cultivation to a refugee crisis, CQL shifts the criticism function of the romantic relationship to Wei Wuxian.
Both texts present models of love as criticism, wherein a lover will push their partner towards becoming their 'best self' (or at least towards making healthier choices for themselves and those around them). This criticism also involves a more structural/meta resistance to the impetus of Watsonian social forces and/or Doylist plot or market imperatives.
(NOTE: I've seen and read everything mentioned but I've only partly read a bad translation of MDZS, so I can't swear outright to my conclusions on those points.)
