#lxy's last letter

[kingsandbastardz]

Tumblr ate the anon ask I was responding to so I'm gonna paraphrase it here:

what do mean llh gave di feisheng to fang duobing? the letter totally said something else

Yes, it did - but I didn't feel I could comment too deeply on it when it's been retranslated and people who are far more literate than I am have analyzed the contents already. -- The letter itself seems pretty straight forward.

However, what I wanted to focus on was analyzing unspoken social dynamics - so I'm gonna get in depth into my reasoning for my interpretation. And admittedly in previous posts I was playing fast and glib with my responses (they were just insomnia-fueled thoughts I typed real fast) so I wasn't really in depth or anything. Anyway~~~ That means it's time for me to get long winded.

So! First thing - this is the scene: The letter was written from Li Xiangyi and addressed in its entirety to Di Feisheng. However, when it was delivered the fisherman asked for both DFS and FDB. It was then read outloud by either the fisherman or FDB -- I assume read out loud, and loudly, because DFS never left his position by the rocks and emoted his distress at the contents. That means everyone there also was privy to the letter contents.

The letter itself is straight forward. It's addressed from LXY telling DFS that he regretfully can't make the duel and that he respects him both as a martial artist and as a person, and if he wishes, he can go to FDB who has inherited his skills and shows great promise, etc.

The thing IS - I firmly believe that this is not a message meant just for DFS.

Both LLH and DFS code switch between their non-leader selves vs Li-Menzhu and Di-Mengzhu. It's easiest to see based on what they're wearing. Li Xiangyi when he's dressed in the Sigu Sect uniform. Or the Styx flower hand-off scene where he calls him Di-mengzhu (not Lao Di or A-Fei or whatever else) likely as a reaction to his official regalia/red uniform which means DFS was showing up in an official capacity. Both of them know very well the importance of a certain.... how to say.... drama? They're both leaders and they were also very performative in their roles as leaders. They both expected that massive peanut gallery that showed up to witness the fight - the one filled with members of various sects, including Sigu Sect leadership -- because dfs was likely the one announcing it.

Imo - aside from the need to express the full weight of what he felt, part of the reason LLH was so formal in his letter is expectation that there would be other people there - influential people. The very people DFS and FDB would have to deal with in the future alone. FDB would be ok but he's largely unknown to the rest of jianghu and therefore his story is still malleable. DFS is known, but infamous and his narrative is as much of a trap as LXY's was. And now he no longer has the benefit of a sect to act as a buffer.

LLH's last act as LXY was not to save Yun Biqiu but to carve a new path open in the world for DFS and FDB:

Expresses that he bears deep emotion and the greatest and deepest respect for DFS despite a reputation of them being enemies

Informs everyone that DFS is not seeking dominion or 'the throne' but rather, is going the fighter-scholar path of studying and testing martial skill -- aka, this is message from one sect leader to all the others present. Spread the word, this man is NOT gunning for your power. None of you have reason to take him down.

Establishes FDB as his one and only successor - while also stating clearly it's entirely up to FDB to decide whether to continue down this path or not

Creates a pathway for DFS and FDB to maintain their connection with each other - and in fact lets everyone else know that there is a pre-established, legacy relationship between DFS and LLH that FDB will be inheriting.

Gently asks DFS to keep an eye on FDB's development - iterating that if dfs is the one asking, then FDB may make the decision to continue to train - aka help him see his full potential whatever his decision is.

At the same time, he silently wishes FDB to maintain connections with/keep an eye on DFS. In another reply I kinda went on about this: imagine a scenario where your friend's mom pulls both of you in front of her. And the whole time is telling your friend that they need to do, expectations, a list of goals, etc. The entire time she's only focused on your friend - but there is this silent implication that you, as the witness, is expected to act a reminder or even an enforcer if your friend isn't listening. If things go wrong, you're expected to go in there and help them to do the thing they were asked to do. This is the unspoken message I'm getting for FDB. Even though his name wasn't mentioned in the letter, it was explicitly delivered to both him and dfs. He's standing right there while an imaginary LLH talks to DFS. So if after all this, dfs disappears without another word = fdb can feel emboldened to go after him, knocking on doors until he answers. Should he decide to do so.

Entreaty - "These are LXY's (my) last wishes. Please respect my memory after my death."

Conclusion: LLH's last actions were to create a space where both DFS and FDB can make their own decision on their path in the world, without the weight of all those other people in jianghu influencing them.

Note: I also believe that on dfs' side, his clothing choices point toward his plans to publicly step down and leave the martial path with Li Lianhua. But llh sucker-punched him and left him standing on some rocks like a widow waiting for her husband who's lost at sea. They were technically on the same page, but it somehow went wrong because... well. Unfortunately that's DFS' narrative. He never quite reaches his goal without the hero either hindering or helping him. The entire drama was LLH being that karma busting fulcrum for him. But now, should he wish it, it'll be FDB's turn to step up and do the same.

#also as an aside - with all the marriage symbolism and the dead brides in every story arc - both lyx and dfs with red uniforms? #llh stealing dfs repeatedly away from marriages? sgd wanting llh to wear the red for HIM but instead llh wears it for everyone else but him #it's very much giving me sacrificial savior where the hero is for the people and not any given individual #mysterious lotus casebook #my royal ramblings #di feisheng #li lianhua #li xiangyi #fang duobing #lxy's last letter #meta

[seventh-fantasy]

已向严冬，感慕兼伤。 / 小舟从此逝，江海寄余生。 情不自任，奈何奈何。 / 十年前东海一决，李某蒙兵器之利，借沉船之机与君一战，犹不能胜。 陛下何如，吾哀劳。 / 君武勇之处世所罕见，心悦诚服。 何赖，爱护时否。 / 今事隔多年，沉疴难起、剑断人亡，再不能赴东海之约，谓为憾事。 陛下倾气力，孰若别时。 / 余感念君所赠之忘川，然终有负君之所望。江山多年变幻万千，去去重去去，来时是来时。方多病习我之功法，资质上佳。不暇多日，定不在明月沉西海之下。君今无意逐鹿，但求巅峰。李某已去。若君意不平，足堪请其代之。

#xdq and lxy penning their last words in a place they have belonged to their whole life #they wrote their only farewell letter to the person they have been battling and struggling with their whole life #to tell them that they're so tired but they still love them #a one-way letter they never expect to hear back from #also it's important to me that they handed the letter to another person they loved who was the messenger between #on top of these being heartbreaking #if you think about it it's also extremely funny both of them were going #hey STOP BOTHERING ME I'M TOO TIRED TO FIGHT ANYMORE #here take my child and spar with them instead GOODBYE! PEACE OUT! #once again for legal reasons this is only for myself and whoever wants to read!! bye #my posts #hlht #lhl #if you see me posting hlht and lhl parallels again pls have forgiveness in your heart

[cheetahing]

thinking about grief and love and my two favorite cdrama ships today, namely di feisheng/li lianhua (dihua) from mysterious lotus casebook (mlc) and lin chen/mei changsu (linsu) from nirvana in fire (nif). i apparently go for the old married couples where one of them is actively dying.

both mcs and llh are main characters dying from incurable poisons and both are more or less ok with that whereas their partners are less so. after that they do diverge quite a bit; lin chen rather famously declares that he doesn't know lin shu, mei changsu's previous identity, only mei changsu. di feisheng, on the other hand, is obsessed with who li lianhua used to be, li xiangyi, di feisheng's one and only rival.

lin chen shows up at the beginning of nif to set up mcs and then fucks off for 40+ episodes only to show up at the end to try to discourage mcs from fulfilling what he feels is lin shu's (his) destiny, because he's no longer lin shu but mcs and mcs has inherent value of his own. dfs starts out forcibly trying to cure llh to turn him back into lxy, but grows closer to llh over the course of mlc and they drink nuptial wine together and talk about the moon. at the end, dfs leaves the probable cure for llh's poison with him rather than shoving it down his throat like he would have at the beginning.

most relevantly to me, lin chen gets the chance to go with mcs to the very end. he enlists and follows him to meiling. he works to keep mcs going as long as he possibly can, he looks mcs's death in the face and does his best to delay it. he's there until the very last second. llh doesn't even leave dfs a body.

lin chen lives with the grief as it looms closer and closer and knows the shape it takes in his life. he's a doctor, he's faced this before even if it's much, much more personal this time. dfs is left widowed at the altar at their beach wedding with a hundred guests. he searches relentlessly for llh with all of the considerable resources available to him, and finds nothing. i wonder a lot about how long he searches. does he search forever? does he eventually give up? does he, a man steeped in death since childhood, actually know how to grieve?

i don't really have a conclusion to draw. i'm just thinking about who these two men leave behind and what different pictures the ones left have to work with. mcs leaves behind letters, but not to jingyan and not to lin chen, who most likely has to coordinate their delivery. llh leaves dfs his only letter where he offers fdb as his successor.

maybe it's that lin chen has to watch mcs die but gets the closure of being with him up until his final moments and dfs gets nothing. no goodbye, no grave, just the shards of lxy's broken sword. llh didn't even leave him those on purpose. maybe he gets the hope that it's not true, but at what cost?

god i love these two ships so much.

#mysterious lotus casebook #nirvana in fire #dihua #linsu #feihua #di feisheng #li lianhua #lin chen #mei changsu #rambling #i could also talk about my tendency to ship something just off the fandom juggernaut ship #either mc with someone other than fandom's designated boyfriend #or just straight up background characters #but like honestly that is another conversation lol #i'm only a little sorry i'm like this

[thesilversun]

Originally posted last weekend on my Blorbo.social after seeing the IQIYI ending extra for Mysterious lotus casebook

I know there seems to be something of a consensus that the open ending a sad one, that Li Xiangyi is gone.

Yet it doesn’t feel this way to me - it’s an open ending.

Lxy jumped into the boat on the river with nothing but what he was wearing. It’s what he’s still wearing when he writes the letter on the boat.

It is not what he is wearing standing on the beach. Clothes, cloak & hair pin are different. It inner layer is something other than white.

He wears a red inner layer as young pre-poisoning lxy, but as llh it’s always white.

Llh wears wooden hair pins - on the beach it’s ivory or bone. It’s the only time we see him wear this.

We see why fdb hurries there. A man at the roadside says he found the bag of sweets on a dead man on the beach.

It’s 3 months after lxy disappeared, when he had less than a month to live. A body that’s been floating in the sea/laying on a beach for 2+ months is not going to have sweets on it you are going to consider eating.

Dfs simultaneous arrival - what was his tip off to go racing there?

Fdb & dfs & fox spirit stop and look, but we never see what they see. They halt, it seems mostly in disbelief.

Fox spirit is happy - why would show him happy if he wasn’t getting to see llh again?

I can see how it can be interpreted as lxy having died on the beach, but it’s only one interpretation of the scene.

Alive and cured, or alive and somehow still poisoned, or dead. none is absolutely proven or disproven.

So I will chose the alive option.

——

Added here on Tumblr now I’ve seen the differently edited extra as it appeared when it was broadcast on CCTV.

Which although very similar to the iQIYI one is edited slightly differently so you get a sense that they are all on the beach together.

They’ve done something too with the lighting of the scene. It’s warmer. The last view of any of them before it the view pans out across the sea is lxy/llh with a small smile on his face.

I’ll take that as my happy/hopefully ending.

#mysterious lotus casebook #mysterious lotus casebook spoilers #spoilers #MLC #MLC spoilers #li xiangyi #li lianhua #di feisheng #fang duobing #thinky thoughts

[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