mousenttt 👁‍🗨👁‍🗨

so for Lear, the implication that he gained the ability to resonate with Fusang later in his life is SO interesting. this is kind of ambiguous, because in some panels of the actual comic, Lear's eyes aren't totally black like they are in the promo art, so they might have been red? and the promo art was just an oversight? but in many of the panels they're also totally black, so maybe they're red only some of the time, or it was just a stylistic choice lol. but Liwen is much more consistently drawn with color in her eyes.

In his pages of the art book, we can see that the "Young Lear" portrait has red eyes:

he's so cute :3 okay that's not important rigth now... so if we use the promo art as the source of truth, sometime between childhood and young adulthood, Lear's eyes turned red. the art book says, "In his youth, Lear adorned himself with various pieces of Fangshi-tech gear to fully harness his potential as a 'Resonator' of the Primordial Roots, significantly boosting his combat prowess." okay WOAH now what does THAT mean!! how do solarians know that they have potential to be resonators? is it partially genetic, since Liwen has red eyes and Lear has them too? what could the other factors be? what's this technology that Lear used? so much room for speculation

I want to talk about Liwen in this context too but I'm not sure what to say specifically — most of her characterization in the comic is focused on her reaction to the Haotian Sphere becoming weaponized, so we don't get a lot of other info on her, but we know she has a fascination with the stars like Heng does (more on that below). I'm unsure whether this is related to her being a resonator though because her husband has the same fascination specifically because of an experience they shared together... if anyone has Liwen thoughts please feel free to add them!!

and the whole concept of resonators seems like something that's been lost to time by the time Heng is alive, since she has such an isolating experience. so, from Heng's words, what do we know about what it's like to be a resonator?

in one flashback (the one that plays right after Yi meets Ji for the first time at Daybreak Tower), Heng says "the weather tonight is great, so all the branches are singing" and that "they can be quite lively." She mentions in her call that she tried to stop listening to the Roots after Yi discouraged it, but she physically couldn't; there's no way to tune them out (maybe technology used to exist to quiet their song for the resonator? but considering that Fusang was worshipped in ancient times, that seems like it could've been considered blasphemous)

Talking about the stars, she says, "That's what nourishes the Roots. They absorb the remnants of stars, turning it into milk to feed us and supply us with energy. What my teacher doesn't know is that all souls and dreams also end up as the food for the Primordial Roots. They emit a song as they devour... They sing about all the stories across this vast expanse."

Partially because she has this connection to Fusang, her perspective on death is so different from Yi's. She's heard the stories of others' lives and knows that they all feed into a greater whole. I'd argue that it goes beyond the religious belief that other Taoist solarians hold and becomes straight-up knowledge; she's not Taoist just because that's what her parents taught her, she knows what she'll return to after she dies because she's experienced it already from hearing the Roots. From her final conversation with Yi:

"Life and death are one. When the end comes, we won't disappear. We'll just return to heaven and earth. As long as we have lived, the Tao will remember everything."

okay now let's connect that to Jietong. cuz the implications. ARE NUTS!! and to preface, this is genuinely so confusing to me because neither Jietong nor Jiequan ever mention being resonators. like maybe this is why the art book specified "deep, crimson red" because Jiequan's eyes are kind of a brighter red when you compare them with Heng's, but in the Lear comic promo art, Jietong's eyes are a darker red than Liwen's... maybe they just have red eyes to look more evil or maybe it doesn't count because a different part of their eyes are red than Heng/Lear, but i'm at least assuming they're resonators for now as a fun thought experiment

anyway there are so many cases in real-world history of rulers stating that they have a divine mandate to rule because they can communicate directly with whichever divine entity the given culture believes in, so why would people from the Jie kingdom NOT talk about that if it's something they can ACTUALLY do?? why would they not use that as a justification for uniting all of Penglai under Jie rule? probably in Jietong's case, being a resonator used to be more common, so it didn't necessarily feel like some kind of divine sign... but the thought that maybe he was motivated to unite all of Penglai because he's a resonator is so interesting to me

if you've had access to this sort of collective consciousness for as long as you can remember, if you KNOW that souls don't actually ever expire into nothingness but instead rejoin the Tao, then death could easily lose meaning, or could be seen as something positive. the language that Heng uses of souls becoming "food" for the Roots is so interesting; Heng admits that she's afraid to die and mourns her parents' deaths, but she takes comfort from the knowledge that her energy will live on forever and nourish other souls.

the below line from the comic is so interesting when you think about it in that context:

"I don't believe in a peace without bloodshed." Maybe Jietong believes something similar to Heng, that solarians have been living in a way that's dissonant with what the Roots want, that they're taking more than they give, so he concludes that anyone who continues to get in the way of him uniting Penglai should become food for the Roots. Could the callous way he treats death have manifested because he has a similar internal logic to Heng? Just applied in a very different way? And then he obviously loses the plot along the way what with the Jiangshi soldiers (creating horrific undead monstrosities) and the warlord project (creating sentient life with no free will) and the many other crimes against existence/against the life and death cycle, lol, lmao even. but thinking about how Jietong started out before he went down that route is so interesting

like think about the feedback loop that would begin after Jietong's first conquest. the Roots' song would get louder because of all the new souls Fusang is consuming, so Jietong would think he's doing the right thing. maybe it's just a slight difference at first, but it gets louder and louder with each battle and Jietong gets more and more self-assured. in the third chapter of the comic, his reaction when Lear asks him to consider a non-violent method seemed so disproportionate to me... like in the below image he looks ready to straight-up maul a child, and he didn't even react that strongly when Liwen was standing up to him... but if you view this scene through the lens that he thinks Fusang itself is telling him to keep going and that what he's doing is the correct way, it kinda makes more sense imo (and is a more interesting explanation than the obvious fact that he's a king who doesn't want to be pushed back against):

and then all that combined with the fact that Lear taps into his powers of resonance later in life... OUGH it makes the conflict between them even more interesting. they're both hearing the same thing directly from the source and interpreting it in SUCH different ways because they're still shaped by their external environments in addition to their connection with Fusang.