We get another example in this episode of two different people recounting the same series of events and telling us different things, and once again what each one says is so revealing of each of their characters.
When Ye Li is telling Mo Xiuyao why she hates Mo Jingli, the emphasis is on the disciples of Lishan who were collateral damage in the imperial powers struggles that Mo Jingli is a victim of. She tells us personal information about them, and while she is sympathetic to Mo Jingli's suffering, her focus is on the lives that he took with his decision. What is interesting though is that although she says she can't forgive him for what he did, she also doesn't paint him as the villain. We get the sense that she knows that he was also a victim of circumstance, and maybe even feels sadness that this is what their lives led to, but ultimately she just wants to part ways with him so they can live their own lives.
Mo Jingli doesn't even mention the disciples of Lishan. He focuses so much on his relationship with Ye Li when he was studying there, and then paints their separation as one of the many injustices that the Empress Dowager did to him. Where Ye Li's story was a tragedy of two people driven apart by cruelties beyond either of their control, Mo Jingli's story has a wronged hero, a villain, and the prize at the end of the line. And this fantasy is entirely self-centered. Not only does he not mention the disciples, he also doesn't mention the confession they made him sign, and barely even mentions Ye Li. He's entirely focused on his own suffering and his image as the wronged prince.
But what is even more interesting to me are the discrepancies between the two stories. Where Ye Li pictures Mo Jingli being tortured in a dungeon, Mo Jingli places himself in one of the rooms of the imperial palace. Confined, sure, stripped of all autonomy, definitely, but hardly the level of severity that Ye Li imagines for him. And while his refusal to mention the confession may just be a refusal to share anything that could paint him as less than the ultimate victim, and there are plenty of ways to coerce a frightened teenager without even touching torture, the fact that he doesn't even allude to them coercing him to sign it is a massive red flag for me. Anything they could have done to him would have been the perfect outlet to milk sympathy points, so the fact that he completely glosses over the confession makes me feel like there's something he's hiding about it.
