oh dear

Wu Wangyan, a shape shifting fox demon assassin, says at one point that she has had so many identities, she isn't even sure who she is any more, for example. We first meet Ji Ling as Chi Wen's innocent younger self that he uses and plays with literally like a wooden puppet. Lu Wuyi is insistent that Chi Wen (who, we learn, isn't even the real Chi Wen!) is really Ji Ling. Their whole relationship revolves around the tension between an authentic and performative selves.

All the main characters shift between multiple identities and the viewer is never sure at any given point which one they are or which one is their true identity. I think the fact that we're all so confused about who is who is the whole point: we keep trying to pin down an authentic self, figure out who each character "really" is, but maybe the center is always empty? The characters actually are all their identities, there is no true, core self, and the identities characters take depend completely on how they relate to other characters and situational context.

We see this clearly in the relationship between Wu Wangyan and Wu Shiguang, who started off as assassin and target but ended up married for 50 years in an illusion, only to come back to reality no longer sure of who they really were anymore.

The character of Xiaowei, who we first meet as a male fox demon hunting for his lost love across incarnations, later turns out to have originally been a female fox demon when she met her lover. When Xiaowei finally finds the lover in the present day, she is in a female incarnation, so Xiaowei has become a man. Interestingly, since all the female fox demons are extremely lesbian coded, it's not clear to me if the original lover was a woman or a man. Was the original love a queer one?

Regardless, the point is that gender is fluid, only the emotion is eternal. Xiaowei had to pay a big price to make that emotion eternal, however. She had to sever herself from the moon cult's monthly memory-washing ritual, which made them attacked by some kind of ice magic whenever they used their own magic. And the lover, she did not remember Xiaowei, insisted she was not the person. All that sacrifice and effort and the beloved is not the person you want them to be! There was no part that remained across incarnations.

So, the effort to pin down an emotion, the effort to pin down a relationship, is futile and self-destructive. Several times later in the show, characters ask, "Will he/will I become like Xiaowei?" meaning, will I become obsessed with pinning down an identity or obsession that cannot be pinned down?

There are also the mixed up family relationships. Family are the ones who truly "see" you. Can a son be his own mother's husband? Can a man raise a younger version of himself? What does it mean to be a "normal loving brother" versus twisted "Cain-Abel" brothers? These aren't done purely for the shock value of incest or family drama, but to make us question the stability of identities we tend to think of as natural, inevitable, and unchanging.

I decided to write down all these thoughts percolating through my brain because in episode 17 we learn that Wu Shiguang was born from a dragon egg made by the scales of his 9 dragon brothers (fathers?) that fused into a rock, gestated, and eventually, "gave birth." First, I acknowledge that dragons are magical, mythological creatures and who knows how they reproduce in this universe.

But to me, a human, it brings up several things. First, some reptiles reproduce asexually, by basically cloning their own chromosomes and laying eggs (parthenogenesis) that are almost identical to their own genomes. Only females, however, have this capability, since it still depends on laying eggs. Which brings me to the second point: males using a female mode of reproduction. Third point: This isn't truly parthenogenesis, since it required the combination of material from nine different dragon scales. So we're seeing another blurring of gender and sex, giving males the reproductive capabilities of females and the idea that people of the same sex can produce a child together.