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x_losI found that contention surprisingly difficult to get on with. First, Shen Qingqiu (2.0) has a character arc over the course of SVSSS which I was uncomfortable with the wholesale abandonment of. Second, Shen Yuan died at an uncertain age, but one at which he’s still referred to as a ‘boy’. (Fandom extrapolates dehabilitating illness onto Shen Yuan’s original body without a great deal of evidence—a choice that merits its own whole discrete conversation.) Let’s vaguely guess that Shen Yuan died at anywhere from seventeen to twenty-five. Shen Yuan makes a reference to having gotten into university, though from the context I’m not certain that he’s being serious. If he’s in earnest, he could have only just gotten in or he could have have fully matriculated: anything’s equally likely.
Shen Yuan lives for at least thirteen years as Shen Qingqiu. If you like, you can discount the five-year plant body death period.
He:
1. arrives when Luo Binghe is around fourteen,
2. raises Binghe until he’s nearly eighteen,
3. mopes for three years,
4. does plot business for an unclear period of time after his boyfriend’s back (but not for that long),
5. dies for five years,
6. comes back to life as a plant man, fucks around, finds out, and then chills in the Stockholm Syndrome Replica Bamboo House for ?? (a time),
7. does plot business involving the rezzing of the Shen Qingqiu body,
8. dies again (to lose both Shizun-rezs looks like carelessness!), and
9. comes back.
Donghua Shen Yuan is around longer, spending three years cultivating in isolation.
However you slice it, that’s this man’s whole adult life. Thirteen years on, even if their life was wholly uneventful, no one is who they were at nineteen. Shen Yuan may well have lived almost as long as Shen Qinqiu as his first lifespan lasted. The fic’s decision to dump Shen Qingqiu back in his long forcibly-abandoned OG body as though that body is very natural and indeed the singular true embodiment, more correct for the character than the body he’s spent his adulthood in, thus feels off, and even somewhat violating. It’s a thorough refusal of the constructed, circumstantial, lived nature of the adult body and self.
These considerations made me think about how MXTX uses her recurring trope of false bodies. This essay will only cover the first two novels and their adaptations, as while I know that there are several assumed bodies in TGCF, I haven’t read it. (I only tried to watch the incomprehensible donghua.) I can’t speak to how this device would engage with trans poetics, it not being my area of expertise, but I think MXTX’s leitmotif of physical malleability accomplishes more than the light opera ‘baby swap’ sort of plot-shenanigans it certainly enables. (excaliburedpan notes that a lot of Western thinking on transmigration must of course come from collective exposure to things like the Narnia mythos, taken up in criticism like Gaiman’s “The Problem of Susan” and Diana Wynne Jones’ fiction (as in Dalemark, or Howl’s perambulations between the world of magic and a mundane Wales).)
SVSSS is built on layers and layers of enabling, assumed bodies. Before the narrative began, Shen Jiu himself constructed or faked ‘Shen Qingqiu’ as a persona. In becoming a Peak Lord, Shen Jiu does far more than simply assume a courtesy name. He walks away from a past he set on fire, and then performs an elite, cultured role with presumed origins totally different than his own. When Shen Jiu dies or is pushed out of his body by the System and Shen Yuan enters it, the ‘Shen Qingqiu’ suit allows Shen Yuan to himself play at being as a different sort of person, and then, over time, to live as one.
Shen Qingqiu has class affectations that Shen Yuan’s own ‘legitimately inherited’ modern wealth didn’t actually grant him. What is the performance wealth in modern China but a weird, costumey affectation, taken up in the wake of the Cultural Revolution’s disruption of centuries of tradition? What a good life looks like has changed more in the last decades than it did in several preceding centuries. The international Chinese antique trade has gotten incredibly competitive in the past decade and a half, not simply due to an increasing well-off Chinese customer base and post-imperial national pride, but also because of said population’s hunger for ‘authentic’ trans-temporal connection and value. The contemporary hanfu revival may well be connected to these impulses to enact culture or wealth correctly.
Before he died, Shen Yuan was comfortable and idle, but not in a way that seems to have particularly satisfied him. If anything, his listless withdrawal and hyper-fixation sound like a description of depression (which he experiences again without knowing it in the novel, after condemning Binghe to the abyss). Shen Yuan is ‘lazy’ in his original life because no choice he can make seems to particularly matter. A few decades ago, before the re-introduction of capitalism via China’s neoliberal market reforms, there were live public questions worth being ideologically invested in and contesting, and a popular sense of meaningful reform as possible and important. Oral histories of China’s counter-culture music scenes from the 80s to the present make clear, again and again, that such convictions have little place in the prevailing zeitgeist. In still earlier generations, a young man from a good family with literary predilections, a good memory and a critical eye would have been an ideal candidate for a job in the civil service. Now, what is there to believe, and what is there to do? Shen Yuan can idle away his days, or he can join his father in Business (tm). What’s the difference, really?
Shen Qingqiu’s body is enabling because it can fly, grants its bearer conditional immortality and looks great doing it, but its position is better still. In this body, Shen Yuan is independent and beholden to no one (his parents didn’t pay for the bamboo cottage for him). But Shen Yuan achieves agency not in freedom, but in obligation. In becoming Shen Qingqiu, Shen Yuan inherits adult responsibilities (teaching and administration) that he never acquired in his original life. These and the relationships he forms in the world he transmigrates into become more important to Shen Qingqiu even than his own life. He repeatedly puts his comfort, his liberty and his very existence at risk to protect the people who depend on him.
Shen Qingqiu is also allowed formerly-exemplary markers of Chinese masculinity that have become dated and potentially whimsical, queer-coded or feminised. A historical or xianxia-period Chinese man could be exacting about his layers of gorgeous clothing. He could have a taste for the arts, and use a fan to express himself or moderate his degree of emotional display. Could a contemporary one, without making himself conspicuous? Similarly, there were periods when Chinese society had more room for queer relationships. This imagined past (conceived by a queer author, Shang Qinghua) is simultaneously fantastic and historic, theatrical and real (and real by way of theatre). Both Qingqiu and the plant-body enable Shen Yuan to utilise anonymity until it becomes a firmer concept of identity than he ever had before, to reshape his masculinity and to realise himself as a reasonably self-assure queer adult with a strongly-developed sense of community.
Luo Binghe’s body has always been a lie. He’s a ‘perfect’ literary construction who by all rights should have no body beyond the non-material, digital text. The Luo Binghe of the original novel is invested in presenting invulnerability and eternal desirability. The Luo Binghe of SVSSS’s parentage was hidden even from himself, and half of his heritage was sealed away. After the Abyss, Binghe is performatively closeted: he's conceals his demonic sigil and pretends to (still) be the respectable, fully human cultivator he never quite actually was in order to earn social capital and claw back a socially acceptable relationship with Shen Qingqiu. A restoration of this socially acceptable master-disciple relationship is, of course, only a part of what Luo Binghe actually wants, and such a fraction of his goals that to say it’s ‘what Binghe wants’ from their reunion would amount to a lie.
In MDZS, Xue Yang’s ‘Xiao Xingchen’ is a convenience, but it’s also a method for embodying obsession. Su She’s facelessness is his plot role and chief complaint, literalised. Meng Yao shuffles through names, Sects, uniforms, roles and hairstyles in an effort to present himself as someone respectable and powerful enough to be safe. In CQL, Xuanyu’s body is just an opportunity (a choice I think works far better for the drama than greater fidelity to MDZS could have done). In MDZS, however, WWX takes on Mo Xuanyu’s form, and then immediately takes the pretext of his host’s ‘madness’ and reputed deviance to engage in gleeful genderplay, absolutely unleashing repressed queerness.
My partner Katy found MDZS’s 'pretend to be Xuanyu/gay' scenes absolutely excruciating. Given the particularity and sensitivity of very different queer communities' conversations, the potential for harm, the book’s rather unsympathetic English translation and the transgressive nature of much humour, I think that’s almost inevitable. But I wonder whether, in a way, Katy’s discomfort did Work? Awkwardness and embarrassment are perhaps as much a part of MXTX’s intent in that section as the gay jokes—jokes made by a queer character to a queer character, for probably-queer readers by a probably-queer writer. Perhaps this section is ugly, unbearable and a bad joke because that's inherent to the nature of the material being handled? Perhaps, in Chinese, it’s treated so lightly or deftly that a source-language audience doesn’t find the content disturbing or jarring. But even then, the subject of these scenes is, inextricably, the power of the nature and degree of one’s desire or one’s femininity to make one loathsome, fit to be disregarded and pushed away. The topic is never, in and of itself, going to be comfortable.
Wei Wuxian barely registers that he’s alive again before he begins using this new body as a deniable disguise to begin restaging the flirtation campaign he started at either 14 or 17. He brings an adult’s greater sexual awareness to his efforts (though he’s still, in MDZS, closeted). On a Doylist level, Wei Wuxian’s transmigration into Mo Xuanyu is absolutely an enabling, experimental body shift. What can Wei Wuxian use his freedom from his reputation and obligations to get away with? aeriallon has also observed that in part, the pleasure function of the Xuanyu body swap is the assurance it offers that a partner will still love you, even if you totally physically change (admittedly, Wei Wuxian changes into a still-attractive person of the same gender and roughly the same age, because there are other fantasy elements at work here). The body-swap accomplishes many things, but aeriallon certainly identifies a key part of the emotional appeal the text constructs for readers.
Part of the charm of these body-shifts is their built-in implication of the continuity of self: the possibility of one’s self being separable from the body, somehow unitary and persistent despite alterations over time. Assumed bodies also enable play with class, flights from and assumptions of responsibility, and freeing engagements with anonymity. So many of these bodies are ‘false’, and only-ambivalently chosen. Yet they are nonetheless powerfully, meaningfully occupied as both enabling psychological devices and ‘true’ bodies.
