#...sorta

30 Days Digi-Art Challenge | Day 30: Reunion

I wanna see the moment of their reunion so badly...

oh man so we'll see how long it takes me to answer this ask because I could probably write a whole goddamn essay for this. with footnotes and everything. am I tempted, yes, but the last time I did that it took me like a year and a half and I'm pretty sure nobody cared

anyway, yeah! mxtx is definitely a writer where I feel like I can see the throughlines in a lot of her work pretty clearly. some of these are probably generic and I'm only somewhat equipped to recognize those (being yet a novice in the world of danmei specifically and cnovels more generally), so I can't be certain all of this is mxtx and not just the generic milieu she's working within. but I tried to parse it out based on what I've noticed.

I focused on thematics because that's what I personally find most interesting (and easiest to elaborate on, since some of the relationship dynamics are less specific to MXTX than they are romance conventions, a genre I am less familiar with).

this is necessarily an incomplete list because I haven't reread in a hot minute and also I am, again, not writing a complete essay for this (right now)

Justice/injustice. This one recurs across all three novels, both in terms of the desire for justice and the ways in which injustice is woven into the fabric of society and sometimes, it seems, almost inevitable. There's something deeply pessimistic, for instance, about the way that MDZS deals with this question, or at least a certain ambivalence, but in general I would say it's a theme of MXTX's work that people don't get what they "deserve", and what is or would be just is at best a difficult and often an unanswerable question.

Cycles of revenge/violence. Relatedly: MXTX seems to me very concerned with cycles of revenge and violence and what comes of them - namely, nothing. In SVSSS you see it with Shen Jiu and PIDW!Luo Binghe in particular, and how Shen Yuan's cutting of that violent cycle transforms not just Luo Binghe but the fate of the world as a whole. In MDZS you see it most clearly with the Nie Mingjue/Jin Guangyao/Nie Huaisang situation, which ultimately ends with nobody winning, but also in Jin Ling's explicit rejection of revenge at the end of the novel. In TGCF you can see it in Black Water Arc, where - again - nobody wins, but you can also see it with Xie Lian and Jun Wu. This further relates to:

Disinterest in/distrust of punitive impulses. This is the one I wrote a whole essay about! But in general I think that MXTX is...skeptical...of the impulse to punishment/retaliation, because of the stance she seems to take that violence only ever begets violence and never makes anything better. Again this threads back to the aforementioned "nobody gets what they deserve" thing - because if nobody gets what they deserve, who decides what anyone deserves?

Ambivalence about the "fixability" of society at large. This also kind of goes back to the first point on this list, and specifically I think is illustrated through the fact that two of three of her main pairings retreat from the world at large at the end of their stories. They aren't completely removed from society, but they are distanced from it - in both cases, I would argue, out of some disillusionment with its functioning and/or their place within it. There is a certain feeling in MXTX's work that society is, if not irreparably broken, fundamentally unjust in a way that is difficult to change. (I think TGCF is an interesting outlier in this way, actually.)

Class/status dynamics. I'm not saying that MXTX is, like, writing about class or status, but I am saying that she seems to be interested in the role that it plays in shaping/defining a character, given how often it turns up as a factor - in Shen Jiu, in Luo Binghe, in Jin Guangyao, in Wei Wuxian, in Mu Qing, in Hua Cheng, even in Xie Lian's crash from the heights of wealth to the depths of poverty.

It's bring your bf (boyfriend/batfriend, strike through what's n/a 😌) to work day for Iceman~

Mav is being very helpful and has vandalised only one moderately important piece of paper (so far).

Explanation for if this doesn't make sense under the cut 😌

Requests are closed because Hoody is ready for his portrait.