x_los | Original Bads: Shen Jiu's Whole Deal (Reply)

A lot of ‘Shen Yuan and Shen Jiu inhabit the Shen Qingqiu body together' fic is a somewhat apologist about Shen Jiu’s role in child abuse, and tends to feature a Shen Jiu who’s swayed by his time cohabiting with Shen Yuan (and his knowledge that Shen Yuan didn’t choose to be here or to do this to him, and has no other safe harbour to turn to). Yet canonically, Shen Jiu's biggest problem is that even though he knows better from personal experience, like many people in similar situations, Shen Jiu ultimately abuses helpless, blameless people who occupy his own former position of weakness. Yue Qingyuan can't spit out an explanation to exculpate himself, but equally, Shen Jiu can't simply demand one; he's unwilling to extend that kind of faith in anyone's good intentions. Narratively I do get why you’d make a tsundere Big Brother out of Shen Jiu for a fic, but this seems to me to do some violence to the crux of his issues: especially when it concerns his own survival, Shen Jiu no longer believes in anyone's good intentions, nor does he even care when they manifestly have them. Canonically, Shen Jiu’s not willing or able to break cycles of screwing over relatively defenceless people.

And what constitutes a ‘threat’, so Shen Jiu, is far, far too broadly defined. His strong self-protective instincts have turned maladaptive, because Shen Jiu’s key problem is that he never feels secure. He seems mired in anxiety to the point that I don’t know whether he can conceptualise Being Happy. He's never conscious of his own power and how he uses it to re-enact his own trauma by revisiting said trauma on others. Even at their most destructive, and even while they understand themselves as public figures with authority vested in them, Shen Jiu and Luo BingGe both see themselves as starving, terrified children striking out defensively. While Shen Jiu’s ‘Shen Qingqiu’ cultured gentleman mask is immaculate, is his bamboo cottage aesthetically sparse as a personal choice, as part of his pose or because there’s a thinness to Shen Jiu’s embodiment of the part he’s chosen to play?

The central tragedy of Shen Jiu’s life, then, is that he remains (still, always) deeply invested in Yue Qingyan. Shen Jiu is arrested in a position of love and resentment, even as he’s so stuck in the cycle of trauma, bitterness and abuse that he’s now perpetuating that cycle himself (which connects Qiu gongzi, Shen Jiu, Luo Binghe/Ge and his victims in a lineage none of them want to be a part of). Yue Qingyan is equally fixed. Yue Qingyan and Shen Jiu sit in the background of the novel like insects stuck in amber, unable to free themselves from one another except through death. The situation would be easier for them if they didn't want each other and could walk away, but the awful thing is, they care about one another more than anything.

Shen Jiu sees himself as, and would indeed like to be, strictly mercenary. But from first to last, Yue Qingyan’s life is always more important to Shen Jiu than his own. Shen Jiu is probably exasperated with himself for wanting men at all, and for wanting Yue Qingyan in particular, after his bad experiences with Qiu gongzi and with Yue Qingyan (who Shen Jiu believes abandoned and discarded him). The pertinent novel extra speaks of Shen Jiu’s repulsion towards men, which seems like one aspect of this internalised rat-king of issues (a sort of parallel to Shen Yuan’s homofugue state). Shen Jiu doesn't trust Yue Qingyan anymore, and yet he trusts no one more. Shen Jiu wants to be given reason to trust Yue Qingyan again, and doesn't want that. He wants Yue Qingyan, and is repulsed by and afraid of wanting him, or men, or anything, because wanting is exploitable weakness. Staying at Qing Jing and living as a Peak Lord is a good gig, and so continuing to do so should be a mercenary, correct decision for Shen Jiu: why care that doing so involves Yue Qingyan, who he acts as though he feels nothing for now? (Shen Jiu inexorably cares.)

As time goes on, Yue Qingyan’s failure to come clean (predicated on adolescent shame and the recent memory of a period of intense mental and physical strain and isolation) metastasises into a bigger and more complex problem. Simply explaining the situation wouldn’t fix the fact that Shen Jiu is becoming, or has become, a rather horrible person, as well as/commingled with being a traumatised person. How can Yue Qingyan say “I love you, baby, it'll all be cool!” when he doesn't approve of half of Shen Jiu’s actions anymore, and when shit that made so much sense as the response of a threatened child has become the operating system that an incredibly powerful thirty-something man is running on? Yue Qingyan can’t simply say “I didn’t mean it” and expect that to fix Shen Jiu; he also can't like speak past his own trauma.

In part, Shen Jiu hates Luo Binghe because it'd take another street rat to see, a la My Fair Lady, that his pronunciation is Too Good. Shen Jiu is jealous of Luo Binghe’s potential and believes, or at least tells himself, that Luo Binghe has had an easier time of life, but Shen Jiu has also built his whole persona to withstand scrutiny from people born above his own station, who don't know enough to recognise a certain kind of mistake. Shen Jiu certainly has old habits he's missed; he likely never wastes ink like these rich kids he hates and is stuck raising casually do, etc. etc. Luo Binghe is thus the one person in Shen Jiu’s orbit with a good chance of seeing Shen Jiu, which Shen Jiu cannot permit (because again, if it breathes, it’s a threat to Shen Jiu!!).

In SVSSS and CQL, being from a rough background does not make a character ’salt of the earth’ empathetic. Instead, it tends to give a character long-term damage. Privileged people have their own blind spots, but in some ways it's easier for them to be good. Being Good, learning and growing, comes easier to Shen Yuan than Shen Jiu. There's something sad and real in that, sort of akin to the critique Uriah Heep offers David Copperfield in the “Explosion” confrontation scene that picks apart the hugely popular Victorian novel motif of the upper-class ‘good orphan’ slumming it and yet remaining pure, readily identifiable as a diamond in the rough.