Hi since you were already talking about her a bit, I’ve always been curious about your jingliu thoughts if you don’t mind! How do you think HSR fails to portray her well and what would be your ideal role for / portrayal of Jingliu within canon?
The thing with the High-Cloud Quintet storyline is that it doesn't feel like it has any moral or message to it, I think, other than 'people are messy'. It does feed in to Star Rail's overall theme of humanity/divinity but it more explores that theme than tries to tell you something definitive about it. However, it is undoubtedly a story about moving on, and about letting go, and Jingliu is very different to the other three in that regard.
They all go about it in flawed ways to begin with, to be fair:
Jing Yuan uses his position as general as an excuse to not deal with his personal feelings
Dan Heng resorts to straight-up denial which ends up hurting him more than anyone else because he taught himself to hate things that he could never change about himself
Blade dehumanises himself such that he can devalue his own feelings and hence ignore them
But Jingliu simply does not move on, even if she thinks she does. She doesn't see it yet, but she too is refusing to let Baiheng die by holding so fast to her revenge. It's less that Jingliu is actually at fault- she's arguably even moreso a slave to circumstance than the others are- but thematically, she contradicts everyone else's arcs.
The most obvious example of this is with Blade, especially so now that we have Mortenax Blade who indirectly opposes her philosophy. I don't think I need to remind anyone how much quintet lore is confined to optional dialogue, but Jingliu's 'teaching' is absolutely the worst example of it. It's the ultimate example of how Jingliu is not only unable to move on, but also unable to accept other people moving on. Blade never tried to deny their past the way Dan Heng did; he was willing to atone, he wanted if nothing else to be able to set things to rest. If Jingliu wanted to kill him as punishment, she could have tossed him in a star somewhere, but that's not what she did.
What she does during the Clouds Leave No Trace quest is similar in principle: she goes out of her way to gather the other members of the Quintet for the sake of dredging up a past simply to remind them of what terrible people they all are. She can't accept the idea of any of them moving on, of healing, because in her eyes the only absolution is in eradication. That's where her parallels with Blade are the most obvious, too: In an artisan's eyes, broken things must be mended, but in a warrior's eyes, broken things must be purged.
And then we come back to that humanity/divinity motif, and weirdly enough, to Amphoreus. "Divinity is flawless humanity, and humanity is flawed divinity." 'Love' is the prime mover of life, something that belongs only to humans, something that lets humanity do what Aeons can't. So when we look back to Jingliu, who's so intent on purging her very self- her Ego- in order to cut down the gods, it becomes clear that her path is a futile one. When we look at Dan Heng who, through moving on, through embracing his present with the Express, was able to look back at Dan Feng and understand him, that also tells us that shunning the past makes it harder to reconcile. When we look at Blade who, like Jingliu, craves revenge against Yaoshi, but chooses to reforge his self into a weapon rather than discard it, and who welcomes change in the way Dan Heng does, that tells us yet again that reconciliation comes from self-acceptance, not rejection. Worldly ties are a strength in and of themselves, not a hurdle to be overcome or a burden to be discarded. What Jingliu is trying to achieve is the 'flawless humanity' that Cyrene describes- cold, emotionless purpose. Like an Aeon. And Aeons are undoubtedly thematic antagonists, representing utter certainty and inability to change- another opposition, this time to the theme of rejection of fate.
The biggest way she stands out from the rest of the Quintet, though, is in presentation. We never see her weak. We never see her doubt. She's mara-struck, yes, but we never see her lose herself the way Blade does. She hasn't appeared to rely on anyone, ever. Jing Yuan's brand of "everything falls within my calculations" doesn't come across as condescending because he has to make hard decisions and we are shown how those decisions affect him, and because he struggles elsewhere, showing genuine regret in his interactions with Blade and Dan Heng and trying to quietly prepare for his own imminent fall to mara. Jingliu speaks of her regret and pain, but it's always undermined in that she makes sure to remind everyone else that they're just as bad as her. It's frustrating because they do show her weakness in flashbacks; struggling with her mara in the animated short, begging the cloud knights to let her see Baiheng's body in one of the mirage echoes. But with present Jingliu, all we get shown is her resolve and tight control and that's very difficult to empathise with.
So with so many other characters telling us that Jingliu's path is the thematically wrong one, and with how she has actively impeded the others' attempts to move on, it's a little jarring when it feels like the writers want you to sympathise with her. She's a tragic character, yes, and a pitiable one, but not sympathetic. So it's kind of jarring that anyone in-game character is even willing to give her the time of day. While admittedly we don't know the full scope of her plan with Luocha, it takes a lot of suspended disbelief to accept that the Xianzhou Alliance, who wiped her name from their history and intended to incarcerate her, are now working with her.
