#been a hot minute since rambling about xue yang hasn't it

[veliseraptor]

lise, i constantly go back and forth between "xue yang knows he's hot, he knows he's attractive, he likes the way he looks" and "xue yang doesn't think he's hot, he never learned to love himself so he doesn't give much thought to his appearance" or something like that... what do you think?

oh yeah this is an interesting one to me. I generally think he knows he's hot stuff and is pretty confident about that, appearance-wise, with the glaring exception of his missing finger which I've talked about his aversion to that being visible/known. and I think he does think about his appearance to a certain extent - I mean, I've also talked before about my headcanon about Xue Yang being weirdly fastidious in some ways (he likes being clean, for instance), and I think he's very conscious of the way he's perceived in the way that only someone who absolutely aggressively refuses to care about how he's perceived can be.

(I mean. witness his reaction to what he perceives as Song Lan's disgusted response to him. He Does Not Like It.)

being good-looking is also something that lets him get away with more, and he's not above using that as leverage when he can.

the thing is that it only goes so far, though, because when it comes down to it, handsome or not, he's still disposable. being pretty isn't going to keep him alive when someone powerful decides he's outlived his usefulness.

Xue Yang is fascinating to me because he simultaneously has a very healthy ego and confidence in his own worth and also an intense awareness of the fact that nobody else sees him as having any.

as I have said before: one response to knowing that your existence is not valued by anyone else, and possibly not the worst option, is to drastically overvalue your own existence to the exclusion of anyone else.

and: regardless of your confidence in yourself, the knowledge that the world sees you as expendable and subhuman is going to have an effect, in particular on your expectations about the kind of treatment you can expect from other people.

I would argue that Xue Yang has a great deal of self confidence about all kinds of things. it's just also thoroughly unstable and built on sand, and ultimately he knows, deep down, that there's every chance it'll be irrelevant.

#xue yang #aggressively headcanons #conversating #anonymous #the sad queer cultivators show #been a hot minute since rambling about xue yang hasn't it #wild. on this blog??