#xie lian does get punished though by being led to believe that

[mxtxfanatic]

While I initially believed that Xie Lian was derailed from destroying Yong’an by a random act of kindness, upon further reflection, I don’t think Xie Lian would have gone through with the destruction, whether that old man had stopped to talk to him or not.

The thing about tgcf is it’s about a person still being their core self, whether they are at the highest or lowest point in their life. We see Xie Lian at his highest point: a beloved prince revered by all who ascends to godhood and is personally taken under the wing of the heavenly emperor, who is extremely moral. Then we see his descent into his lowest point: betrayed by the people he abandoned the heavens to protect, abandoned one by one by his loved ones, watching his kingdom descend into civil war before ceasing to exist, all the while he has his faith in himself and his morals tested over and over again. And by the end, you think Bai Wuxiang has successfully broken Xie Lian, shown him that being moral and upright has no benefits because everyone you love will leave you anyways, so why not use your power to oppress instead? Except, Xie Lian doesn’t.

He gets real close to it, sure, when he collects the spirits of his dead soldiers to release in Yong’an as payback for destroying Xianle, but I don’t believe he was ever truly going to go through with it. If we break down that series of events, we see that Xie Lian collects those spirits with “full intention” of releasing them… except he doesn’t. He specifically does not do this when it would have been the quickest and easiest route to revenge, and instead, makes a stipulation to himself that he will spare the people if at least one person shows him an act of kindness by removing the sword he has impaled himself on from his body. By Xie Lian’s own stipulations, a people who are so self-centered and callous as to not help a stranger are deserving of destruction, so he would be justified in releasing the human face disease. And what happens next?

Nobody helps him.

Sure, some people contemplate it, but those people are easily dissuaded away from his aid and nobody helps him before his deadline. So Xie Lian gets up and is preparing to “enact his revenge,” except the moment he rises, an old man comes up, talks to him for a little, and gifts him his own used bamboo hat. Originally, I thought this was the moment that made Xie Lian see the humanity in mortals again, but that isn’t true. What Xie Lian was trying to convince himself of was the inhumanity of mortals and that that inhumanity was deserving of destruction, but that is not a belief he has at the core of him, so he couldn’t commit. In the same way that the people who were easily dissuaded from helping him didn’t actually want to help him and were just looking for someone else to confirm their base instinct to stay away, so too does Xie Lian want even the smallest crumb to dissuade him away from this genocide that his own morality rails again. Had that man not shown up to talk to him, Xie Lian’s turning point might have been watching some children peacefully play or watching travelers share food and a tale or watching strangers display small kindnesses to each other. The old man was his confirmation in the story, but it didn’t have to be the old man, because Xie Lian would have turned away from his path of revenge for any reason. (On that note, he is then affirmed in his decision to save the people when those same people refuse to commit violence against him in the face of death to save themselves, a reversal of an earlier scene.)

In conclusion, at his highest and lowest points, Xie Lian cannot conceive of himself using his power and authority to destroy others for his own petty reasons because that isn’t who he is at the core of him, and what he needed in that moment was just the validation in himself to see that being good was still worth personal tragedy, as long as you helped someone and could prevent more suffering. Because tgcf is about being yourself and being able to remain true to yourself in the face of adversity, not about random kindness saving the day.

#tgcf #xie lian does get punished though by being led to believe that #his hubris killed wuming his greatest supporter #but he’s again validated by discovering that wuming is actually hua cheng #and all the good things he did during his second banishment that led to bad outcomes for him #have better (if not good) conclusions during his third ascension #all the chickens come home to roost and it isn’t a bad thing #human metas mxtx