#choco yaps

She got past her presumption, Nezha just exempted rin (somewhat)

Idk bro I pretend it's paper minus the caveats of coloring on paper

TPW: To rin, Altan betrayed her innocence, her trust in him as a commander by leaving her with a weight she never learned to carry, of a people she never knew.

TDR: Nezha's betrayal was for the good of the country bc once the hisperians were in there was no driving them out and Nikan NEEDED to progress— you wouldn't be able to tell the book is actually set between the 1940s and 1950s. But it was a betrayal nonetheless, just as she started to accept him and her feelings for him, just after she fulfilled her duty as a soldier, just as she started to think she could start over calmly, somehow, somewhere.

There's nothing wrong with being obsessed with a ship or the romantic aspect in a piece of media

But it gets to a point where we reduce said relationships to just "enemies to lovers" or the book to "just a romance" which takes from the nuance of book, characters, and the relationship itself

Whenever one of my friends would find me gushing about a ship, they'd go, "You? Reading romance? Huh, that's weird. Since when?" And I'd feel mortified since my only example of stories about "pure romance" growing up were local cheesy romcoms with shitty jokes, weird American films that gave me second hand embaressment, and that one time someone asked me to read Colleen Hoover.

But as I preceed to explain myself I'd notice "wait, my argument here is that the romance here is a reflection of character, but aren't all interpersonal relationships used that way in media?"

There's a difference between reducing a book to just the superficial aspect of the main pairing (the main reason I've avoided The Cruel Prince so long after finding the first 2 chapter boring at 13 lol) and acknowledging romance- and other interpersonal relationships- as thematic devices

You can't "ruin" a piece of media by adding romance - romantic feelings are a very real, very integral part of the human experience as a whole

You ruin a piece of media by adding baseless romance - baseless anything really - but specifically romance because many people, including myself; love to focus on the personal aspect of books more while appreciating the big picture

Considering almost all my mutuals (shout out, babes) are from the tpw fandom let's use that as an example.

Tpw on tiktok is apparently sometimes marketed as an 'enemies to lovers tragic romance', nezha is 'romantic bf goals' bc of The Drowning Faith oddly enough completely ignoring the part with his father and how almost all his talk about rin is reinforcing them as character foils

Rinezha, jiang and tseveri, Riga and daji, go to show that sometimes personal matters don't mean anything in the grandscheme of things. Because the book is largely from rin's pov their relationship is consistently used to explore nezha's character and rin's emotional consipitation

Similarly to how rinkitay shows us the depth of devotion and where it can take you, how compromise can get out of hand. Jiang and Hanelai, the Red Emperor and Tearza, show us that history often skips over the most important parts for convenience, etc etc

Rin on the other hand, I saw so many people complain about how vague and weak her motivations seem after she gets into sinegard and secures her place there which yeah, her wants ARE vague bc she never had the chance to mull on them

"You know that you had it once and you know that you need it back" could apply to so many things

Whatever brief time she had on Speer, except it was war torn.

The stolen moments with kitay, venka, nezha, the cike, except they were all in the thoroughs of danger