The way Lin Ling and Yang Cheng’s arcs mirror each other is so poetic, especially with Moon’s death (still haunts me) setting them up to be bitter enemies.
Here you have 2 young men, with low trust values, low self esteem, and precious few people who both know and care for them. But it’s also here at their start where things diverge. See, as far as we know, Lin Ling had no one. No family. No friends. Just a job that he was passionate about and a boss that hated him. He died and the only person to read about the article on his death was Enlightener. It’s not an exaggeration to say Lin Ling was even more of a nobody than Yang Cheng was.
And Yang Cheng on the other hand, well, we know he had it rough growing up. An orphan with zero trust value meant he was bullied and belittled at every turn. He has a whole mental breakdown over it, even. But then we see him through Xia Qing’s eyes, and we learn that from their first day of class she saw him. She saw the person he was in the same way Moon saw Lin Ling. She and Pamelo both saw the hero that he could be, if only he believed in himself. It’s ironic that despite having a trust value of zero, he had more people in his corner than Lin Ling (as himself, not as Nice) did up until the end of his arc.
And then there’s both of their forays into heroism. Yang Cheng’s story is much more textbook. The classic rags to riches zero to hero start from nothing guy that rises to the occasion when the chips are down. Manufactured or not, Pamelo’s kidnapping highlighted all the things that he and Xia Qing already knew, and that was that Yang Cheng was a hero. A real hero who helps people because he thinks it’s the right thing to do, and he was just like his predecessor in that way.
Old!Soul didn’t care about personal recognition or image, he just wanted to help people. We see time and time again that to him, this whole media circus is entirety secondary to his goal of saving people and doing it well. In this way he’s probably the best hero we’ve seen so far, and the closets to the actual ideal of heroism.
On the flip side, Lin Ling was literally forced to replace Nice. He didn’t take up the mantle because he wanted to line Yang Cheng, but because Treeman got him legally declared dead to save their image, and it’s here that the single greatest difference is highlighted. Where Yang Cheng as New!Soul went out of his way to differentiate himself from Old!Soul as a hero, everything Lin Ling did, from his training to his words, was in service of mincing Nice. He straight up says multiple times that he must become Nice, erase who he was before and paint over with the perfection of the Hero he has to be.
And that highlights another mirror, and that’s that where Old!Soul hardly cared for his image, for Nice it was everything. He’d been built from the ground up as the perfect hero. His (and sorta Lin Ling’s, though I’m holding out for a unique theme) sing is literally called Paragon, and he’s a very unsubtle Superman expy. So not only are Lin Ling and Yang Cheng contrasted in their arcs, so are the heroes they both end up replacing.
And of course we can’t forget their relationships, particularly Lin Ling and Moon vs Yang Cheng and Xia Qing. With the former, for most of his arc Lin Ling only knew Moon from behind a screen or script. He didn’t know her beyond the heroic persona she showed, and he idolized that facade. And yet the moment he sees how she acts behind closed doors, instead of falling from the pedestal he’d put her own, it only elevated her in his eyes. Motivated him to concoct a plan to make her happy.
And Yang Cheng…didn’t do that. He did the opposite, even, stomping all over the promise he’d made with Xia Qing. We know why, of course. He was wracked with guilt over letting Shang Chao die, and had gotten it into his head that Old!Soul was responsible. His low self worth and jealousy actively prevented him from growing closer with Xia Qing, even when she reached out first, and in the end his choice to peruse a battle with E-Soul destroyed their relationship.
And that brings me to the final parallel. The conclusion to their arcs and the final and arguably greatest point of divergence.
In his battle against God Eye, Lin Ling first had to overcome the chains of being Nice. While I could rant for hours on the sheer horror of seeing just how much a Hero is bound by the will of their fans, it’s outside the scope of this post. What I wanna focus on is how Lin Ling’s desire to protect Moon’s happiness totally overrode his desire to be the perfect hero. He had no interest in being Nice if it’d cost moon her life, and willingly shattered his perfect facade to pieces for her sake. Lin Ling realized that to be the sort of hero he wanted to be, he couldn’t be Nice. He realized that he didn’t want to be Nice, not really, and proudly declared himself nothing more then a Commoner for the whole world to see.
And then we have Yang Cheng, who also declared equally loudly for the entire world to see his intention to replace his predecessor, thematically in direct opposition to Lin Ling’s own climax. Both Moon and Xia Qing give similar sentiments of “maybe you don’t have to be the hero who’s name you bare”, but Yang Cheng’s motivation is very different from Lin Ling’s. From the start, being E-Soul had been a conscious choice-and sure, he was definitely coerced in more than a few ways, but he was not legally and physically cornered in the same way. His actions were ultimately, in accordance with the manipulations of Uncle Rock, playing directly into the man’s hands where Lin Ling’s own were in blatant opposition to his corporate backers.
Honestly, I love the way these two contrast with each other, and I hope that in season 2 they’re made to foil each other more directly instead of just having such complimentary arcs.
