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This fella picking up Popeye is a goon.

Or more commonly…these guys in the back? Goons.

most of the mysteries maomao solves are related to high ranking officials or concubines, and if they aren’t, they usually happen in such strange circumstances that it’s impossible to not suspect potential foul play. in contrast, this episode’s mystery isn’t even really a mystery at all. a servant girl got sick with a rather common and treatable type of illness, and was put in isolation by her boss. on surface level, it’s as low stakes a plot as it could get. in the imperial court, servants are merely tools that can be replaced once they die. their lives are not seen as valuable, as even maomao acknowledges.

and yet, it is this unknown, nameless servant girl who becomes shin’s downfall. maomao may have had her suspicions about shin and the perfumes, even before this episode, but she had nothing concrete to go on. she couldn’t accuse a high ranking concubine’s chief attendant of trying to harm a preganant concubine with no evidence (at that point, she didn’t even know who shin’s target was). shin may have been a lot of things, but she was no fool, she was an incredibly intelligent woman who knew how to cover her tracks well, which is why maomao had to goad a confession out of her in order to prove her guilt. she’s arguably one of maomao’s cleverest adversaries yet, after suirei and lakan!

but shin’s fatal flaw is pride. she believes she’s better than lihua and she believes she’s better than a mere servant girl. so she cruelly uses her as a means to an end in order to hide the forbidden perfumes through the smell of her sickness. and in the eyes of the palace law, she is not committing a crime either. a servant girl’s life is nothing compared to the life of a high ranking concubine. who would even notice she’s missing? who would care if she quietly died?

So I've been thinking about @macdenlover 's "levels of headcanon" chart (about how heavily a HC is influenced by canon), so I decided to make my own scale about how likely a HC is to be true (including different levels of canon) using queer cartoon characters as examples :)

I just spent an hour making this because I was bored. Enjoy. Image description under the cut.

Inspiration:

thatbemeqq

video is mildly funny but this comment killed me

I’m Catholic, and I’m a leftist politically and if you check my blog I’ve been pretty vociferously anti-Trump.

Prevost is the right choice, because he was almost certainly chosen for being anti-Trump.

He’s one of the progressive-leaning cardinals who helped Francis push through reforms on schismatic turboconservative American bishops (this was regarding Fiducia supplicans and additional reforms around blessing gay couples, allowing gay parents to baptize their children, and allowing trans people to be baptized as Catholics while being out as trans to their parish), and his election was hinted at when the African cardinals essentially rolled up to pre-Conclave meetings and joined forces with other progressive candidates to pick someone who wants to take the fight to Trump because he’s a danger to the independence of the church and he killed PEPFAR, which they were heavily in favor of.

If it had been a pro-Trump candidate we would have expected to see someone like Cardinal Burke. Prevost has been a wild card for a lot of people but my friend and I were sort of hoping this as a kind of “oh please someone who speaks his language and hates his guts” kind of thing.

Part of it is a main character thing. But Maomao's clothes reflect her status and situation.

She doesn't wear the orange uniform the servant girls wear, because she is not a general servant of the inner palace. Remember, she did wear that uniform in the first episode. However, once she started serving Lady Gyokuyo, she changed into that familiar green and pink outfit.

Maomao does not wear the same uniform as Lady Gyokuyo's Ladies-in-Waiting because Maomao is not a lady-in-waiting. Those girls are literally Ladies. They are noble woman serving Lady Gyokuyo, and their fancy clothing reflects their status.

Its confusing because we as viewers see them acting as servants; cleaning, dressing Gyokuyo, taking care of the little princess, ect. But traditionally, Ladies-in-Waiting are actual nobles, usually younger daughters or from lesser houses, serving higher nobles or royalty. Queens would pick women from allied houses to be their Ladies-in-Waiting, and it would he an honor to be picked. It's why in the second episode of Season 2, it was a big deal that the other concubines had a bunch of Ladies-in-Waiting. It's a matter of status, having tons of noblewoman in your service. They are also paid quite a bit and given gifts for their service. Which was also a thing in that episode, with the caravan.

So Maomao isn't actually one of Gyokuyo's Ladies. She isn't noble. So she doesn't wear the same clothes as the other ladies. She only does it on rare occasions like the Winter Garden Party to blend in. In that case, her normal clothes would reflect badly on Gyokuyo.

It might be a coincidence, since Maomao has worn the same thing the whole series, but her skirt is the same color as the other skirts worn by Gyokuyo's Ladies. That dark magenta is definitely Gyokuyo's color, and likely let's other people identify her as being in Gyokuyo's service. Remember that angry lady in Lihua's service? And the nervous maid that delivered that letter to her? That maid wore a very similar outfit to Maomao's, only in blue and dark blue/indigo. The same simple tunic and skirt, in Lihua's colors. That woman was like Maomao, a servant of a concubine, but not a lady or general servant to the inner palace.