Old Palace Master Meta

[x_los]

CW: sexual assault

So the Old Palace Master either suspects or knows that Luo Binghe is Su Xiyan’s kid. (Arguably he could also be unsure whether Su Xiyan and Luo Binghe are related, or whether they just look very alike, match up temporally and are both powerful cultivators by random chance.) But the Old Palace Master also knows that Su Xiyan was possibly impregnated by demon dream daddy, because he himself asked her to honeytrap Tianlangjun. 

 

So, does the Old Palace Master think he was wrong about her child’s parentage? Luo Binghe wasn’t killed by an abortifacient that targeted demonic elements, ergo Su Xiyan must thus have actually been carrying an unknown human man’s child. Does Luo Binghe’s looking fully human lend weight to this belief? Does the Old Palace Master consider it possible that the abortifacient eliminated only the child’s demonic blood? Possibly the Old Palace Master believes Luo Binghe doesn’t know he’s half-demon. Or he could suspect that Binghe does know, and believe that he’s holding that information over Binghe’s head. 

 

This is unpleasant, but it would make sense for the Old Palace Master to tell Binghe, and even to believe, that he’s Binghe’s secret father. After all, he had a thing for his head disciple (a vicious reversal of Luo Binghe’s own romance, and thus a commentary on what that situation looks like gone wrong). The Old Palace Master held Su Xiyan in a dungeon for what seems to have been almost the duration of her term: no one else remarks on having seen her pregnant before she mysteriously disappeared. He ordered Su Xiyan to use her sexuality to his own political advantage, isolated and caged her (in the Water-Prison, which adds another layer of parallels between her situation and the next generation’s romance, staged on the same literal ground), and presumably cut off her cultivation to do so.  He then force-fed her the abortifacient that killed her.  I’m thus not convinced that the Old Palace Master never did anything else violating and untoward to Su Xiyan: sexual assault hardly seems beyond him. (And for that matter, questions of parentage aside, it seems possible that the Old Palace Master at least sexually harassed Luo Binghe.) As her master and a powerful sect leader with little concern for her rights, he could also have engineered a situation wherein Su Xiyan was consenting, but situationally disempowered. 

 

If the Old Palace Master did sexually assault Su Xiyan, and she subsequently gave birth to a seemingly human son, the Old Palace Master might well believe the child must be his own. Possibly the abortifacient had nothing to do with Tianlangjun, and the Old Palace Master just wanted to cover his own ass as the presumptive father: a child would have been living proof of accusations he mistreated his disciple. Arguably the Old Palace Master wouldn’t pressure Luo Binghe to marry the Little Palace Mistress if he believed Binghe to be his son, but how sincere is that pressure, and how much of it is coming from him? Besides, what can we say about the moral bottom-line of a man able to justify Su Xiyan’s murder?