permissions, ryslig.
permissions page to come (if you see this, legitimately kick me on discord or plurk or something because i probably forgot)
ic inbox, ryslig.
WELCOME TO YOUR PRIVATE CHANNEL, XIAO.XINGCHEN. FOR SECURE COMMUNICATION, USE 018.07.154.55 *** XIAO.XINGCHEN has joined 018.07.154.55 <XIAO.XINGCHEN> You have reached Xiao Xingchen. <XIAO.XINGCHEN> I am often away from my laptop, but I will do my best to answer as soon as I'm able. | ||||
ryslig app.
OOC INFORMATION
Name: trace
Contact: noita on plurk
Are You Over 18?: yyy
Other Characters: none at the moment!
CHARACTER INFORMATION
Character Name: Xiao Xingchen
Age: ~28
Canon: The Untamed
Canon Point: post-death
Character Information: the wiki is for the novel rather than The Untamed, but the bones are the same, with the only differences being how/when a few things took place.
Personality:
Name: trace
Contact: noita on plurk
Are You Over 18?: yyy
Other Characters: none at the moment!
CHARACTER INFORMATION
Character Name: Xiao Xingchen
Age: ~28
Canon: The Untamed
Canon Point: post-death
Character Information: the wiki is for the novel rather than The Untamed, but the bones are the same, with the only differences being how/when a few things took place.
Personality:
- The three distinct layers of who he is currently (pre-death, since that's what we have canon for).
- His character arc to reach who he is currently.
- How I plan to interpret/extrapolate on his post-death canonpoint, both within himself and in the context of Ryslig's setting.
- The ten traits I'm going to list in the 'Key Traits' section, to discuss them in and of themselves.
- When someone comes clean with him much of the time (like A-Qing telling him out of the blue that she stole his coin purse as well), he doesn't bat an eye - or he even goes so far as to gently tease, as when A-Qing tries to tag along with him by spinning a sob story about how poor and defenseless she'll be and how some man will beat her up for stealing, and with an endeared little grin he says, "You're such a clever girl, only you can fool people so utterly and completely. Who could beat you disoriented?"
- He's subtly displayed to be much too perceptive to turn around and fall prey to some of the obvious lies that viewers tend to believe that he trusts. When A-Qing first steals from the stranger, it's a subtle pickpocketing with a very brief verbal interaction and Xiao Xingchen (blind, remember) is a full 15-20 feet away. When he encounters A-Qing himself seconds later, it comes out almost immediately that he caught her pickpocketing the man. How could this possibly be the same man who supposedly believes her lie that she, too, is blind when she does such things as call him 'friend in white' with no reason to know his robe color, or to claim to have found something almost immediately with no audible sign that she felt around for it (which means she spotted it with her eyes).
- HE NO LONGER CONSIDERS HIMSELF 'A DAOZHANG'. While he still strives to embrace the principles of it as best he can, a daozhang is a title he no longer feels he deserves. A daozhang does the bare minimal amount of harm to innocents, and he has killed perhaps hundreds of them, including the person he cared for the most. (He considers this entirely his fault, regardless of Xue Yang's trickery.) A daozhang is also typically one who can be counted on for stability, for advice, for assistance - and he doesn't feel like he can be, anymore. He is no longer water. He is no longer serene. He is filled with the sharp and heavy emotions the life of a daozhang strives to be free of, and he cannot 'accept that which is'.
- HE'S DISTINCTLY LESS STABLE. Outwardly, that doesn't seem to be the case. He still has his soft outward demeanor, but the inside is much more turbulent than he has ever experienced - the precise place where he used to contain a disciplined calm now feels like it contains a whirlwind filled with blades. That disciplined calm is something he has to figure out how to rebuild. (While also transforming into a monster. Good times.) He's also... desperately frustrated, in a way? This is also not something he expresses outwardly, but he has killed himself and shattered his soul and done everything within his power to no longer exist but this Fog God seems to have decided that he doesn't get that luxury, so now he's trapped in that which he has wrought.
- HE'S STILL ATONING, BUT LIKE, EXTRA NOW. Even as he re-achieves his inner zen, he'll still be an unprecedented level of susceptible to going out of his way to get involved in Literally Any Possible Way To Help Or Save People, because he has done unthinkable things and has the burning desperate need to begin to close the vast divide between himself and a state in which he has put at least as much good into the world as he has taken out of it. Relatedly, the concept of 'what he deserves' is also very skewed, and he will often be spotted subtly deflecting good things (treats, favors, etc) onto others instead of receiving them gracefully and gratefully as he might have before Shit Went Down.
- AS FOR RYSLIG'S ENVIRONMENT SPECIFICALLY... The concept of an evil entity twisting him against his will into a monster and forcing him to kill is very.... very.... familiar, at this point. Enough so that it's hard to believe this hell wasn't custom-built for him in repayment for the damage he's done. So that's definitely a thing. Also, I mentioned above that he's going to be pulling his shit back together as best he can, and due to the nature of the setting he's doing so while also undergoing monstrous changes that might mess with his psyche/personality, which makes that harder. As a final note, as one who is blind, there's also a fundamental difficulty in like. Being blind but generally having a concept of your physical form from having seen it before you were blind, and then suddenly beginning a transformation into a distinctly different form which is entirely foreign to you and which you have no conceivable framework through which to try to visualize. I can see that creating an odd sort of dissonance in his mind between the Xiao Xingchen he pictures and the Xiao Xingchen others see.
- DISCIPLINED - ( see: 'the middle layer' ) Discipline and compassion are the two things a daozhang is known for, and much of his life post-mountain has been structured around achieving the level of discipline it takes to even begin to clarify his mind. This discipline lends directly to how near-impossible it is for anything but the most dire of evils/cruelties to rile him up in any shape or form.
- UNNECESSARILY SELF-SACRIFICIAL - ( see: 'the outer layer' and 'the interim', most prominently ) Xingchen is a man who will give of himself well beyond what any could reasonably expect of him, and this is doubly so when facing a harm that he in any shape or form was responsible for or could have prevented. He begged for the chance to give his eyes to Song Lan without a second's hesitation, and for lack of any true way to repay the lives he found out he had taken, he gave literally all that he had: His own life and the structural integrity of his soul. Even lesser wrongs and harms would, if in any way tied back to Xingchen, receive a distinct urgency in his desire to sacrifice of himself to right them.
- MORALIZING - ( see: yi city arc, ' he can't help but moralize (...) ) Even though he recognizes fully that he himself has no room to preach at others, he can't quite suppress the lingering idealistic reflex to at least try to offer them a perspective that might help them going forward. He offers A-Qing the perspective that stealing is bad for her personal safety, and in the thread I'm linking as my sample, you see him stumble into a bit of compassion-based 'it's easy to care about deference and respect when we have the privilege not to live in fear' moralizing before realizing he's overstepped. I call this daozhang-splaining, because it's probably going to happen unsolicited entirely too many times. It's perhaps one of the few lingering vestiges of his younger imperiousness/presumptuousness.
- COMPASSIONATE - ( see: 'the outer layer' ) Xiao Xingchen is a sap and will help basically anyone in need. He has empathy for any struggle he comes across, even that which the person has wrought themselves, and he allows others to be rude or gruff toward him because he recognizes that they, too, are certainly struggling in some unseen way.
- IDEALISTIC - ( see: 'episode 10' ) While this was much more obvious at his younger age, he still wholeheartedly believes that there is a fundamental good in this world that can be (slowly but surely) salvaged from the evil and cruelty. Each person he meets, he grants them the immediate benefit of the doubt that their intentions are good. He never frets about failing to charge for his services as a cultivator, because he retains the idealistic faith that they will find a way to continue to feed themselves even without it. This idealism, however muted now, continues to permeate his being with a prevailing sort of lightness.
- WARM - ( see: 'the outer layer' paragraph 2 + the xue yang part of 'yi city arc' ) Separate from his prevailing sense of compassion, Xiao Xingchen is warm. Just look at him smile, for god's sake. And when he talks to you one-on-one, he's so devastatingly genuine that you can't help but feel like he sincerely cares. He also has (as exampled in the headpat gif) this tendency to get thoughtlessly tactile with anyone he's even the remotest bit familiar with. He smiles easily, and as of Xue Yang's prevailing influence, he also has learned how to shed a bit of the daozhang discipline and tease those he cares for (though his teasing is always hilariously mild).
- POOR CRISIS-MANAGEMENT - ( see: 'the interim' + 'death' ) Though this comes up pretty rarely in canon, it's definitely worth noting that in times of distinct and severe duress, he is absolutely godawful at handling anything at all. Rather than approach it with a level head, he tends to desperately scramble for whichever (possibly destructive, definitely self-destructive) solution will right what's wrong as quickly and effectively as possible. I can see this coming into play at least a couple of times in Ryslig, and it's absolutely a deep flaw of his, so I wanted to note it.
- SUBVERSIVE - ( see: 'episode 10' paragraph 3 ) This is both a strength and a flaw depending on context, but Xingchen is not a person who is able to accept 'the way of things' if it goes against what he feels is right, even if 'the way of things' is the only option and beating his head against it is only going to wear him and others down. We see this in the tactful but deliberate way he basically disregards the concept of sect politics and formalities in canon, we see this again in the way he surrounds himself willingly in delinquents in Yi City without a second thought, and we will see this again in Ryslig when he will not accept that killing innocents is an acceptable or even necessary way for the monstrous population to survive. I anticipate him butting heads with many a person on this, people who will no-doubt see him as moralizing or imperious for it.
- DISCERNING - ( see: 'yi city arc' ) Xingchen tends to look at each case of someone doing something which is technically 'wrong' - lying, stealing, etc. - and examine why it was done and what harm it brings. While he is technically one who advocates doing what's right, his concept of 'wrong' has evolved to primarily just include that which does harm, and if he discerns that something is harmless, he tends to let it slide/play along/etc.
- disciplined
- unnecessarily self-sacrificial
- moralizing
- compassionate
- idealistic
- warm
- poor crisis-management
- subversive
- discerning
(I'm sorry for this dissertation I'm depositing into your laps.)
Xiao Xingchen seems like a simple and straightforward man, but in truth he has a hilarious amount of nuance that I'm going to break down into four (4) sections for you:
THE LAYERS
CHARACTER ARC
POST-DEATH
KEY TRAITS
Xiao Xingchen seems like a simple and straightforward man, but in truth he has a hilarious amount of nuance that I'm going to break down into four (4) sections for you:
THE LAYERS
- THE OUTER LAYER - Outwardly, Xiao Xingchen could not be more soft if he tried. Look at him. Look at that man. It's a softness that he embodies in his quiet speech and the graceful flow of his movements. Those who know him within Yi City (the city near his home) know him as patient, compassionate, tolerant, always ready with a kind smile, always willing to lend a hand should they express that they're in trouble - even with tasks to which he isn't suited, he'll do his very best.
To many, he seems like a pushover despite the sword at his back and the poise in his step, and he often acts the part - people can be mean to him, talk down to him, generally (at least to a point) treat him like shit and it rolls from his shoulders like water from a duck. And though he's certainly no extrovert, often keeping to himself unless spoken to, there's something to be said for the disarming warmth he has to offer to even a total stranger. Everyone is a friend, regardless of how they feel about him, and when he does speak with others, it's with a comfortable sort of familiarity that few tend to offer in a world such as this one.
I'll get into this more in the next big section, but it's worth noting that this outer layer didn't exist when he was younger - but a number of key factors (being blinded, losing his companion song lan and traveling the world alone, and many more years to witness the cruelties of the world and wipe away his naivety) led to the development of this softer outward layer.
THE MIDDLE LAYER - This layer, in contrast, is alarmingly tough. This is the layer at which all of his principles as a daozhang sit. A daozhang is basically a person who builds their life around the taoist principles and goals; a taoist priest, but not a priest in today's sense. A daozhang's principles revolve around striving to lighten and clarify one's own mind while basically putting good out into the world in every possible way, most prominently by extending care and kindness to all beings.
Xiao Xingchen, for the most part, is all that a daozhang should be. He has 'become water' (water is passive so that anything can move through it, but can also be a mighty force), with the passivity being the outer layer and the mighty force available for situations in which it is needed. Situations in which someone is maliciously and intentionally spreading evil in some shape or form, whether large or small. Such a force comes into play when, for example, he identifies that a man is about to physically strike a teen girl (who had stolen his coin purse, but that's irrelevant to Xingchen) and he steps in to grab the man's wrist, telling the man it's inappropriate to hit a young girl.
He strives to lighten and clarify his own mind, through meditation and through the shedding of most negative emotions. He's difficult to anger or even irritate, and while he is saddened easily at a surface level, it's almost never deep enough to affect him. This allows him, despite his wealth of compassion, to do such things as eliminate an entire village full of puppets (zombies who were recently human, basically) and then burn the bodies without sadness over the tragedy interfering with his duty as a daozhang and a cultivator. Additionally, daozhangs are supposed to 'accept what is' - to accept peacefully the inevitability of change and of loss. Like water, a daozhang is meant to flow from one circumstance to the next rather than allowing any given circumstance to impact his inner clarity. He has done this pretty much his entire life - when his companion Song Lan basically told him to 'fuck off' in grief and anger, he did so kindly and without question, accepting that change as gracefully as he could. He has been a traveler much of his life, which lends itself well to accepting constant change, and even that much he allowed to change as he and his unlikely comrades (a blind girl and an unidentified wounded man) accidentally made a home outside of Yi City. Finally, he tends to adhere to the daozhang principle to preserve energy by not meddling or getting overly involved where he isn't needed - he tends to arrive at a situation, do what he can to fix it, and then leave the situation with a clear mind rather than allowing himself to get enmeshed in further involvement. You see this when he meets A-Qing, saves her from the angry man, ensures that she's financially stable for the moment, then attempts to depart (whether or not she lets him get away with it).
Outwardly, he does display compassion for all as best he can - the 'outer layer' blurb is a good example of all of that. Additionally, while many cultivators seek repayment for their services in hunting and destroying ghosts, monsters, and other such things, Xingchen does so entirely free of charge and will gladly assure those whom he helps that no debt is owed - that he was glad to assist. In addition to helping others, a daozhang is to "beware of creating burdens for yourself or others to carry." Xingchen follows this perhaps more than he should, to the point where I consider it one of his flaws. He is more than willing to humbly accept help in a task he has little experience with, but his actual genuine burdens? He'll carry those with him until they break him. As honest and upfront as he tends to be about his surface-level feelings, the actual baggage he carries on his shoulders will never see the light of day. This sense of humble but adamant independence leads to a double-standard of sorts, in which he tries to help others in every way possible but won't allow them to see that he might need help in return. It hasn't bitten him in the ass too terribly yet, but in Ryslig his burdens are a bit more intense, maybe too much so to try to wrangle alone.
All in all, this middle layer is the steadfast rock that one encounters if they overstep his patience and compassion - if they show cruelty toward an innocent, or take advantage of him too many times. Here, he is stubborn and resolute. He has yielded as much as his principles and integrity allow, and he will not yield further. While he still tends to speak politely (all deserve basic decency, no matter what they've done), it's often slightly clipped and entirely without warmth.
THE INNERMOST LAYER - This layer has been encountered, by my estimate, precisely twice in Xiao Xingchen's life. It's softer like the outer layer, but instead of compassionately soft, this innermost layer is raw. If something breaches down to this innermost layer, it breaches all of Xingchen's composure and leaves behind a man ruled by all of the emotions that his daozhang meditation has taught him to let go of. At this layer, he is no longer rational. He is no longer compassionate. He's desperate, because both instances in which he has reached this innermost layer have been crises, and both have demonstrated that Xingchen is absolutely fucking awful at handing an honest-to-god personal crisis. I'll actually talk about that more in the next section, so let's hop on over to that now -
CHARACTER ARC
- The Untamed is a show with an extremely wide cast of characters, some of which (like Xiao Xingchen) manage to experience full character arcs while lingering on the periphery of what's Actually Going On. We see him precisely twice in canon: Once in Episode 10 (at age ~19), and then again in Episodes 38/39 (where he's found dead, and flashbacks lend us much of his narrative between ages 25-28). The gap between those two points is accounted for secondhand by others and can otherwise be extrapolated.
PRE-CANON - Xiao Xingchen was one of the few disciples of the reclusive Baoshan Sanren, one of the only people (and perhaps the only woman) who had no cultivational sect but who took on disciples regardless. She only ever took on orphans as disciples, so he came to her at a pretty young age and spent much of the next decade and a half learning cultivation on her secluded mountain with no real contact with the outside world. I've read in a few places that she and her disciples shared the prevailing belief that seclusion was best because the world was too broken for even cultivators to fix, but I'm not 100% sure if that's canon or fandom interpretation. Regardless, it plays very well into the fact that Xiao Xingchen, a fresh young mountain bumpkin with stars in his eyes, was willing to part ways with his master and his only known way of life forever (once you leave the mountain, you can't return) on a mission to Save The World. No, literally, that's his actual concrete goal, 'save the world' - and apparently his overeager ass announced that to enough people that it has basically become his advertising slogan (enough so that later, the cynical Jiang Cheng of all people greets him eagerly with, "Your kindness in saving the world is famous among people. It's an honor to meet you.").
He knew quite a bit about cultivation, but nothing about the world. He was basically doomed, but for his saving grace in the form of one Song Lan.
SONG LAN - Song Lan was a young daozhang from Baixue Temple, and they quickly became close allies, bonding over their shared dream of building a sect that ignored the bloodlines or political formalities which ruled all of the current sects and united instead based on shared ideals and the goal of helping as much of the world as possible.
Though it doesn't go into much detail on this time frame in canon, I feel like they gave one another precisely what they lacked. Xingchen was adrift in this world with nothing but a dream much too big for one young man, and Song Lan provided him structure. He introduced him to the principles and discipline of a daozhang, as well as shared his knowledge of the world at large with this boy who knew precisely none of it. Meanwhile, Song Lan was a highly-disciplined young cultivator with no true purpose, and Xingchen and his big dreams had more purpose than he could possibly shoulder alone. It was a pretty beneficial partnership, all in all. They traveled together or along parallel paths from then on out, helping those that they could and trying to generally save as many small parts of the world as they were able.
EPISODE 10 - We first see Xiao Xingchen in Episode 10, when the main gang encounters Xue Yang, a murderous delinquent whom Xingchen had been chasing for weeks. The Xingchen here is quite different from the one we see later (and thus the one I'm applying for), in a number of ways.
Compared to later-canon Xingchen who is soft around the edges, young Xingchen's edges are crisper, more vivid. The title he has been given in lieu of any clan affiliation is 'the bright moon and gentle breeze', and in as much as older Xingchen is the gentle breeze, this Xingchen is the bright moon. You can see the difference just looking at him.
At 19, we see a Xiao Xingchen who still believes fervently in his dream to save the world, and in his and Song Lan's shared dream of building that ideals-based sect for such a purpose. As soon as the actual capture of Xue Yang is over, he begins to display an immediate disregard for sect formalities - a subtle one, one which many viewers tend to read as simple backwater ignorance, but it's much more deliberate than that. In a world where the accepted norm is to bow and greet one another with full name + sect affilation + title, he skips the bow and simply says, "I'm Xiao Xingchen. This is my friend, Song Lan." Their bloodlines or where they come from are irrelevant. As far as he's concerned, their deeds and their names speak for themselves. Meanwhile, Song Lan (who is well-versed in sect politics and damn well knows better) is watching his flagrant disregard like 'oh look at him go', but instead of tacking on any respectful formalities to soothe the discrepancy, he just nods in solidarity of his partner's graceless greeting with a fond little smile.
This Xingchen also has a very black-and-white concept of right-and-wrong, of justice. In fact, while he disregards the senseless formalities of sect life, he very much puts the concept of justice on the same pedestal those tend to occupy. He arrives on the scene in pursuit of Xue Yang, greets him with what almost sounds like an indictment of the murders he has committed, and declares, "I will make you pay for your crime today!" He clings to this formalized concept of justice until after Xue Yang is properly restrained, when (despite Xue Yang earlier agreeing that he was guilty) he demands a formal confession. He and Song Lan decline an invitation to involve themselves further in the situation - literally all they cared about in this scenario was that Xue Yang was caught and was delivered into the hands of those who would bring him to justice.
At this age, Xingchen is nothing if not distinctly imperious. While he isn't outright haughty in demeanor, nor is he verbally anything but polite and even complimentary to those we see him address, he nonetheless seems to subconsciously feel as though he is above other people. Though three other people are already on the scene and addressing Xue Yang when he arrives, he floats in like an angel of justice and addresses Xue Yang (that's when he lists off his crimes to him and declares that he'll make him pay) without so much as a single glance toward the three people who were there first. Throughout his fight with Xue Yang, he's repeatedly aided by a sort of lasso-esque talisman trick by the show's protag, but he never once acknowledges it nor thanks him for it after the fact. In a sense, it seems as though his imperiousness comes from simple recognition of the respect he does hold - at one point, Jiang Cheng is about to spout off rage at Xue Yang and Xingchen silences him with just a raised hand, which is presumptuous but is also clearly a gesture he was aware would have the intended effect. Regardless of whether or not it's warranted, I still think the somewhat naive way that he embraces his own overarching privilege is definitely a character flaw at that age. He has yet to have ever been humbled by anyone or anything but his own personal principles and it shows.
All in all, we see here a young man with a strong idealistic goal, a very clear-cut sense of what he believes in and fights for, and a polite but vivid disregard for critical parts of the world as a whole - along with a naive confidence in his assumption that he understands the world well enough to make such judgments.
THE INTERIM - So then, for basically the first time in the entirety of his life, some shit goes down. Xingchen's unyielding faith in the concept of justice utterly fails him - Xue Yang is released on what amounts to a really shady technicality, and immediately frolics off to murder his way through Song Lan's peers at Baixue Temple, then blinds Song Lan himself when the man comes back to visit a few days later. A gift for Xiao Xingchen, he calls it. Xue Yang is sharp enough by now to know that the best way to get to Xingchen is through the the suffering of the person he cares about most, and he makes it absolutely known to Song Lan that it's in retaliation for Xingchen's attempts to bring him to justice.
Xingchen himself is, of course, only shortly behind Song Lan. He finds Baixue Temple in that massacred state, his friend half-conscious and blind and telling him Xue Yang was to blame - and it's the first genuine crisis he has ever encountered, and he's precisely 0% equipped to handle it. If you recall the three layers summarized above, stumbling into that scene ripped away all but his innermost layer, the raw desperate layer that viscerally could not stand to let things be as they were.
So he disregards his Master's rule (once a disciple leaves the mountain, they may never return) and hauls Song Lan up to Baoshan Sanren, begging her to give his blinded friend Xingchen's own eyes. This decision has been a bit of a joke in the fandom, people teasing it as a stupid decision and saying 'he could've just given Song Lan one eye and everything would've been fine!', but jokes like that fail to grasp Xingchen's abject desperation in that moment. He in no way considered asking if there was a non-sacrificial way to heal him, nor did he even consider for a moment the practicality of retaining one eye. Xue Yang took Song Lan's entire temple (entire family) and his eyes from him just to get at Xiao Xingchen, and giving Song Lan anything less than 100% of what was in his power to give was unfeasible to him.
And so Xingchen is thus blinded (eyes literally removed and put in Song Lan's face), and Song Lan awakens with healing eyes covered by bandaging. And he's grieving and he's hurt and he's angry, and he takes it out on Xingchen. He casts blame on Xingchen just as Xue Yang had, and he essentially (in slightly milder words) tells him to fuck off. Xingchen doesn't try to argue. He doesn't tell Song Lan that he's given him his eyes. He doesn't plead for the sake of their friendship. He simply stumbles his way blindly down the mountain, because a daozhang does not fight to grasp that which is lost, and also because he was completely and utterly convinced that rejection was what he deserved for bringing such a thing upon his most treasured friend.
This is a huge turning point for Xingchen. As the immediate raw despair begins to fall to order under his discipline, he begins to recognize all that he did wrong. He recognizes his own hubris, his own naive mistakes, the flaw in his utmost faith in the concept of justice in a world which skewed justice to meet political needs - and he decided to remove himself from the world at large and seclude himself in a withering corner of it on the outskirts of a city filled mostly with poverty, because in leaving the mountain he brought with him so much suffering he can't even begin to properly make up for it.
YI CITY ARC - That brings us approximately to his canonpoint. He has made a modest life for himself in this withering city, where he night-hunts five nights per week just to protect the impoverished locals from monsters they can't afford to hire anyone to chase off, and where most know him simply as 'Daozhang' rather than by name. I described a lot of where he's at in the above 'three layers', but a few things are important to note here in contrast with his 19-year-old self -
The most critical thing I want to point out is his transition away from his black-and-white way of thinking. A younger Xingchen thought he understood nuance but displayed very clearly that he did not, approaching everything with a youthful lack of subtlety. That which he approved of and believed in, he all but evangelized (justice, a sect based on ideals rather than politics), and that which he eschewed, he did so with precisely no softening of his opinions. The ~5 years since the tragedy that parted he and Song Lan have worked wonders in introducing him thoroughly to the concept of shades of grey.
His outermost layer is comprised entirely of shades of grey. The misconception that he is too naive or too trusting stems in large part from this newfound nuance - he's actually quite perceptive and picks up on nearly every trick or lie tossed his way, he just seems not to because he doesn't respond to them or call them out like one would expect. This is because, in his various shades of grey, he looks at each lie or cheat or delinquency in and of itself and discerns why it occurred and whether or not it brings anyone harm. If he deems the lie or trick 'harmless', he tends to play along and/or act as though it went unnoticed. I've come to this conclusion for a couple of reasons, namely:
He actually lets A-Qing get away with most of her lies - because when you think about it, why would she need to lie? About the blindness she claims to suffer, she's a lonely street girl lying that she shares the same trait as Xingchen in order to grasp at kinship, which she has never been afforded without some sort of trickery. Shortly later, she lies about spraining her ankle to get a piggyback ride - and while he'd rather she learn how to convey her desires in a healthy way, he once again recognizes a girl who has received very little good in her life that she hasn't had to con for, and her lie brings him no harm to accommodate.
It's also worth noting, while we're on the topic, that he feels no guilt in turning others' trickery around on them if the situation calls for it. Upon first meeting A-Qing (who is supposedly blind) and guiding her to a less crowded street, she tries to weasel out from under the eye of this kind but lawful man with some sort of 'thank you, friend, I'll be okay from here'. Xingchen recognizes 'friend' as an attempt to ingratiate herself to him, to seem sweet and innocent so she could slip away, and so he has no trouble firing back with a gentle but firm, "Since you regard me as your friend, please return that man's moneybag." Busted.
He also has a distinctly different relationship with the concept of justice, after his faith in it went so awry. Justice, too, has fallen into shades of grey, with his former crisp perspective on it proving unrealistic and unable to withstand a world full to the brim with nuanced degrees of injustice. He no longer pursues justice, simply enforcing it as he encounters situations in which it seems necessary, in which the wrong being committed is one which genuinely does some sort of harm. While he no longer advocates his prior idealistic beliefs, he can't help but moralize on a much more modest and practical scale - rather than telling A-Qing it's wrong to steal, he warns her that she shouldn't because of the risk of violence that it poses to her if she's caught. (Another example can be found in my sample thread from the TDM, where he daozhang-splains a facet of a situation he knows nothing about to the man he literally just asked to tell him about the situation... R.I.P.)
In large part, the more limited scope of his actions and his beliefs is because he continues to atone for what was done to Song Lan and his temple. He wears his robes in the full-white of mourning, even so many years later. He does what he can without risking the hubris that did so much damage before. Xiao Xingchen is a man who feels the wounds that he (directly or indirectly) inflicts on innocents as deeply if not more deeply than if he were wounded himself, and he has an extremely hard time coming to terms with a situation in which he has brought harm to others but can't rectify it.
Which brings us to: Xue Yang. He doesn't know that the man he rescues on the side of the road is, in fact, a wounded Xue Yang, and Xue Yang hides his identity as soon as he wakes into a reality in which he's not yet recognized. Over the next three years (legitimately three whole years), Xue Yang lives with Xingchen and A-Qing in their abandoned coffinmaker's home in what amounts to domestic bliss. And this is... honestly completely life-changing for Xingchen, as tragic as it turns out to be. His mystery friend with his sketchy mysterious past, his perpetual teasing, the way he pushes and pulls at Xingchen like a puppy, all of it drags even Xingchen's middle layer (his daozhang principles) into shades of grey as well. As their time together goes on, his mystery companion's easy familiarity reminds Xingchen of what it's like not to be alone - and in turn, it makes him want to be more human than he has let himself be in quite a while. He remembers how to laugh and to tease, how to let himself want things. It was like coming in from the cold to sit by a waiting fire, warming him bit by bit 'til he felt it in his bones. He came to trust this man almost completely, despite not even knowing his name, to the point where he started to take him on night hunts (and thus letting him have a direct hand in the only active good Xingchen still goes out of his way to do) despite A-Qing's warnings that he's hiding something.
It's kind of interesting, because just as his relationship with Song Lan gave one another what they direly needed (purpose & structure), his relationship with Xue Yang did the same. Xue Yang essentially gave him his life back, and in exchange, he gave Xue Yang the precise mixture of compassion and steadfast positive influence to actually start to reform that little shit against all odds.
What a shame that it all fell apart. Because through an abrupt series of events that ended in Song Lan's death by an unknowing Xingchen's hand (we'll get to that), A-Qing learned Xue Yang's true identity and hurried to tell Xingchen the moment they were next alone.
DEATH - This revelation devastated Xingchen - enough to cut down to that innermost part of him for the second time in his life. He seems to have the situation well in hand (confronting Xue Yang, asking if it was fun to trick him, fervently condemning his years-old actions against Song Lan and Baixue Temple), but he's also once again lost all sense of compassion, of nuance, of anything but the utterly black-and-white fact that Xue Yang is a murderer. It's this black-and-white crisis-based judgment that ends up being his fatal flaw, as you'll come to see. Xue Yang had lived with them for three straight years, had been a helpful and delightful companion, had seemingly failed to cause another being unnecessary harm for three fucking years and at no point did he consider to himself that Xue Yang might be attempting to reform. He greeted the unsuspecting man out of the blue with a sword in the gut (deep enough to wound but not cripple) and the seething accusation, "Was it fun to trick me?" And Xue Yang, for his part, immediately tried to appeal to him, to explain why it was that he'd killed the Chang clan before Baixue Temple and what the Chang clan had done to him, because in his three years of experience his Daozhang knew intimately the concepts of nuance and compassion and clearly Xingchen would recognize that he had been wronged first, right? No. Xingchen condemned it harshly (in the face of a flinching Xue Yang), outright calling him 'disgusting' - after all of the times Xingchen had shown compassion to those who had done harm for misguided reasons, there was no compassion here.
Xue Yang began to argue back, in desperation at first. "This was your fault from the beginning. You shouldn't have meddled with other people's business. Right or wrong, kindness or hatred are not clearly distinguished, so how could you possibly understand!? Or maybe you shouldn't have left the mountain in the first place. (...) If you couldn't understand human affairs and this world, then you shouldn't have come!" Xingchen is already raw, and this manages to strike a deeper nerve still. It reminds him of the mistakes he has been trying to this day to atone for, of his own past naivety and stupidity, of the damage he brought with him in leaving the mountain in the first place. But he can't face that right now, and so he seethes once again that Xue Yang is disgusting. "Xiao Xingchen," Xue Yang says, "This is why I hate you. The people I hate the most are the ones like you who say they're righteous, who think they're virtuous. Stupid naive idiots like you who think the world's better just because you did something good!" Xingchen's deepest flaws and regrets, the precise mistakes and attitudes he was trying to escape from and atone for, driven into him like a knife.
And then it went one step further. Having deemed the situation unsalvagable, Xue Yang finally revealed that which he had wrought - he asked Xingchen if the daozhang really had room to call anyone disgusting, revealing that all of the villages full of 'puppets' they had killed on many of their night-hunts had really been innocent people poisoned with corpse powder so that Xingchen's sword sensed them as 'undead', with their tongues cut out so they couldn't dispute it. Xingchen had killed countless innocents, perhaps hundreds, and he never knew. This cracked what remained of his composure, and amidst his denial ("You're lying!") and accusations ("You tricked me!"), Xue Yang delivered the final blow: He called Song Lan out to stand before them. Song Lan, who had finally tracked Xingchen down but had encountered Xue Yang first, and after being corpse-poisoned and having his tongue cut out, he too was killed by Xingchen without the latter being any the wiser. It took very little further antagonization from Xue Yang ("Saving the world? What a joke. You can't even save yourself!" + a bit about how this was all his fault and always has been) for Xingchen to take his sword to his own throat, deliberately (though I have no idea how this works) shattering his own soul in the process so that not even that remained.
POST-DEATH
- I'm including this section because we're understandably not given perspective on how the events leading up to his death would impact him as a character if death weren't an option he was afforded. This is important because for the first time in his life he came face-to-face with a true unfathomable darkness which he was not only unable to withstand, but which he himself in part wrought with his own senseless hands - and that leaves a mark. The key extrapolations I'll be integrating into my portrayal here are:
KEY TRAITS
- Just a quick run-through to pick out and contextualize the individual traits I'm going to list below (plus offer where to consult for further info), since the above was A Lot and I want to make sure these are clear. Also note that these aren't in order of importance, just kind of in the order that they came to me.
5-10 Key Character Traits:
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Roleplay Sample: right here!
open post!
hit me with starters, image prompts, texts (he'll use voice-to-text, fuck it) - anything goes.
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info.
CHARACTER
canon:
the untamed
title:
daozhang ("taoist priest")
clan:
none
age:
mid-late 20s
height:
185cm (~6'1")
weapon:
frostwork (or shuanghua)
PREFERENCES
tag style:
either; prefer brackets
memes:
✔
psls:
✔ ( love these, hit me )
au prefs:
✔ ( prefer to chat first )
crosscanon:
✔ ( prefer to chat first )
shipping:
down to try most ships
otps?:
xue yang or song lan
don't want:
crack, arbitrary smut
PERMISSIONS
backtagging:
✔ ( slow taggers unite )
fourth-walling:
✘
shipping:
✔ ( talk to me )
mind-reading:
✔ ( talk to me )
injuring:
✔ ( talk to me )
killing:
✘ ( unless planned )
warnings:
eye gore; self-harm*