#i thought he was talking about 忘川 METAPHORICALLY bc i forgot that was the name of the flower HJBJHHJBJHB

[seventh-fantasy]

okay... idk at all if this has been discussed or that I'm just stating the obvious. I'm posting any way to get more feedback.

so. can we be sure that the last boat scene even happened (in the way we saw it at least)

yeah the letter was delivered to the intended recipients. the letter also did say 李相夷绝笔 lit. the final writing by li xiangyi. there's a brief exchange between him and the assumed "boatman" asking him where he was going. and we see he spat blood while writing yeah but:

llh/lxy's eyesight had been failing for some time.

Professional Letter Writers are a thing in the past in service to people who can't write their own letters (idk enough to verify the historical accuracy in this specific context though)

what has been bugging me since forever is the manner of speech of the letter. yeah it's different from their everyday speech, but that's actually perfectly fine since this is A Letter so I'm good with it being more formal. but... there's something I just can't quite pinpoint. especially with the use of the 君 jun pronoun by llh/lxy to refer to dfs when there could be other pronouns with less connotations of intimacy (and scholarly/imperial court system) implied and still conveyed cordiality, marking a shift in their relationship. (I'm not well versed with wuxia as a genre enough to know what are the conventions. someone else who does can say something though.)

whatever these put together means (eg. he may not have written the letter personally, or he wrote it in a different situation from what we saw, etc etc.) alongside:

this scene existed only as part of a visualisation as the letter content is revealed to the audience (or assumed to be fdb reading the letter to dfs & guests of the wedding spectators of the duel)

the boat lxy/llh jumped on is not the same as the one he was writing the letter on - the boatman is also not on it despite the conversation at the beginning, but lxy/llh's dressing and hairpin are the same as the ones before he jumped. (the boatman delivered the letter so he's real though.)

also as @wonderfulnonsense happened to have just pointed out in the tags left in my other post: it's in fact the same boat he took to go fight dfs at donghai 10 years ago. (edit: or maybe it isn't? as pointed out by anon.)

if we viewed whatever we perceived in this scene as imaginary (not what actually happened), then the reading of it being a metaphor for lxy/llh being on his way to enlightenment just makes sense. (the boat being a carrier on his spiritual transformations.) especially when you consider that 彼岸 the other shore is another concept in buddhism to represent enlightenment, alongside the motif of lotuses. (credits to @markiafc for the buddhism reading - edit: mark's meta here) and then, consider the beach ending... yeah.

#莲花楼 #mysterious lotus casebook #my posts #lhl #lhlmeta #断剑又绝笔...... #this was a question / discussion brought up internally but i wanted more feedback / ideas so. and also for the record #but ofc...if there are details missed out that completely prove this wrong then pretend i never wrote this #pls blame it on the brainrot #lhl discussion of the day is buddhism meta. #taoism and buddhism readings loving hand in loving hand. #honestly i did not think of the story specifically as a path of enlightenment until i was writing the meta #and then it was a downward spiral there on. #it makes a lot of sense given how it's a story about cultivation of the personage (and the struggles of it) #which is the goal of all chinese ideologies. not just taoism and buddhism. they just have different answers #mark is gonna come back with a massive buddhism meta. i'm excited and afraid #also the detail i am sitting on is what is the significance of him signing off as lxy. on top of his r/s with dfs being from lxy's pov. #considering the way he has been identifying with lxy ever since he took over llh as an identity. #PLUS when i first heard lxy thanking dfs for the wangchuan flower. the chinese didn't include the subject of flower #i thought he was talking about 忘川 METAPHORICALLY bc i forgot that was the name of the flower HJBJHHJBJHB #yeah so like this is the river of oblivion he's on or wtv (i'm just babbling now) #also i said INTENDED RECIPIENTS. but the envelope cover is also interestingly empty. though boatman knew who it was meant for