#mo ran

i've been thinking of the way mo ran's chronology is (un)represented... from the moment we first experience him as a teenager, where we only experience him from his point of view as a 32-yr-old evil emperor... this way he has of seeing and thinking about other people, like watching the world around him, sizing it up, figuring it out, with an intense, clear idea of what he wants and making a plan for how to get it, while holding and remembering the memories of the first time he experienced this all at 15, and how he felt, what he thought. from the beginning we have never really seen mo ran or known him as he actually was at 15, it's always through this lens of his 30s-aged, jaded, bloodthirsty, (and immature) self in his 15-year-old body.

it's why when i try to think of who mo ran is it's like banging up against a wall because it's hard to make sense of him when we so often understand who people are by their development from infancy, all the things that happened to them and how they responded and the choices they made through to adulthood and the person they became, the desires they have and the choices they make. but mo ran... as we witness him 'growing up' he's already grown up and become this broken and spiteful person acting as his 15-year-old self.

and especially to see the way he can be so friendly and cute, charm so many people so easily as a teenager. both his past memories and living in the current memory. trying to think of what was going on with him really, the first time, it's always heavily filtered through the thoughts of taxian-jun, who isn't who mo ran was when he was a child actually. and it's only so many many many chapters later that mo ran 2.0 goes back to his actual memories of when he really was a child and clinging onto his mother, who have no one but each other, who starves to death to allow mo ran to live, and then mo ran having to drag her body for days, and bury her, wandering alone almost starving to death himself, finding a place to take care of his own needs eventually at the brothel, but being bullied cruelly by the owner and her son, and being so so lonely and pathetic, being treated like a dog, and locked in a cage as punishment like he was a dog, scapegoated for everything until he lashed out violently and killed EVERYONE. like . little teenage baby boy murdering an entire house of people, the whole brothel. crying because of how sorry he was now with what he's done he can never see his mom again, but it was either do that or lie dying himself as these hateful people kill him.

and then we hear the story of how he gets picked up by Xue Zhengyong, and then we see him from Chu Wanning's perspective, as this sweet, beautiful, privileged kid. He's this social and pleasing and perfect darling teenager. And after all this time to learn about what Mo Ran lived through and what he must have been feeling at this time, the stark difference between his interior life and how people see him, I feel like I want to know so badly, directly, what he felt then, but you never get that. this kid my heart breaks for but... he's like a ghost, he doesn't really exist anywhere. He's this memory. He's not there the first time we experience Mo Ran at 15 because that's taxian-jun inhabiting him. It's something similar, how Mo Ran 0.5 is harbouring this secret self and goals as this 30s-aged tyrant trying to capture the thing he lost as a kid, to the original Mo Ran youth who just killed a whole bunch of people and is given this new life in a cultivation sect based on a freak chance and his ability and willingness to lie. In the bits and pieces of memories you discover him, trying so hard to do good for what he did. Lying to everyone. Smiling so charmingly. Wanting to cling onto kindness and beauty, knowing that his punishment is coming one day, just like how he felt when he was in his 20s and trying to become a good zongshi to make up for everything after chu wanning's sacrifice.

The other place this original personality of mo ran's actual youth seems to exist is chu wanning's memories before mo ran changed... how mo ran wanted to learned to write to burn a letter for his mom to read in the afterlife... this sweet baby quietly nursing so much grief and guilt. and shi mei's memories of mo ran stopping him from planting the hate flower in chu wanning, from that you can kind of infer how he felt about all the things he had done before he was brought to the sect ... that he had done so much evil, he had to be doomed, and the least he could do for his teacher was to protect him by taking it for him. letting himself be doomed even more so he could at least save chu wanning, who had been kind to him. just like he did years later as mo ran 0.5 when chu wanning sacrificed himself for him. like the book says so often, he was like a dog who will be loyal forever to whoever was nice to him and hate whoever hurt him.

i thought it was interesting rereading the first pages introducing taxian-jun as equally this powerful and cruel emperor and pathetic dog. the tone was mocking this powerful figure. to find after so many books this little fierce, heart breaking, loving, and desperate kid that no one really knows hidden deep deep deep down in the heart of it but also barely existing...

each of these brief little moments you can glimpse him get tucked away, that kid doesn't exist anymore in anyone - taxian-jun inhabiting his body with almost 20 years between them and an intense focus on what he wants now, just picking through past memories to make tactical plans, and mo-zongshi years later recounting this story but feeling so distant from it, not trying to dwell on it or justify anything, or explain how he felt, like it happened to someone else. for mo-zongshi too... he hasn't lived that time in so long, he lived through all the years of his childhood and became the evil emperor, and then become the emperor in the 15-year-old body and grew up again over years to become this moral cultivator. it feels like he's watching the world unfold around him through a screen, waiting for everything to fall apart. he feels like he looks at the world like an ancient, so distant from it all, hurting and loving it but also waiting for and expecting the end. he's still the person who was taxian-jun who had those memories before the hate flower erased.

it is really beautiful that the original chu wanning takes such care and effort to bring his memories to the other world, like this message in a bottle for his other self to find so someone can hold onto these original memories of mo ran and cherish them, keep them in the world and hold onto the fullness of who mo ran is before the hate flower, that mo ran himself can't keep hold of.

i can't help but feeling like... i want to know who is mo ran beyond all the things that happened to him. i want to spend time with him. i was fantasizing for hours about what if things just were slightly less terrible, and he didn't do mass murder and he ended up finding a way out of the brothel, becomes a cook at the sect. who would he be? who is he without all this suffering and concealment? who would he be if he could just be himself? you never see him once just in a moment where he can exist without this heavy weight of sense of his own badness and the guilt and grief of the past. there's no self that has survived from a time 'before' and a chance to know who he could have been otherwise. how familar, that's trauma i suppose. but it's like this beautifully subtle narrative experience that is never overtly stated. mo ran's loss of his possible self that he can't even really remember.

Not Taxian-Jun wanting the taste of Chu Wanning's uniquely bad cooking!

Our final move he says in book 8 of 11

Is it wrong of me that I want them to take Chu Wanning with them to the interrogation, solely because I know he'd fuck up their plans?

The golden-dragon-wrapped-around-his-dick method may be obscure but it sure has made me laugh

Okay. As sweet as it is that Taxian-Jun is getting some kind of fucked up closure, let Chu Wanning remember his life...lives

Taxian-Jun really said, "I want to fuck Chu Wanning in public, but I want to be the only one to see him"

So in omegaverse fics do we think the more common tag is 'omega Chu Wanning' or 'bitching' cause I could go either way on that, but somehow I think 'omega Chu Wanning' would win