Heads up if you're a sewing hobbyist...
Buy those patterns you've been thinking about while you still can.
This is a motherfuckin' GAME CHANGER
you think so much. You could think about a door for a hundred years and it would stay closed.
everytime i remember chiye is about 23 i think wow he shouldve been at the club but. for the past 3 books he has, very famously, been at the club. so. maybe hes doing fine.
the only thing stronger than the gastric distress i get from eating cherries is my love for eating cherries
what
thank you. im once again reminded why i love tumblr because where else could i get content like this
One thing I like a lot about the writing for Hualian — because this is something I think is difficult to get right — is that it takes very seriously the anguish of seeing a loved one suffer without turning it into a self-aggrandizing "think about how your pain affects me" situation on Hua Cheng's end. It's certainly no secret that a lot of Hua Cheng's own trauma stems from his proximity to Xie Lian's, in that he is frequently positioned as a witness to Xie Lian enduring something horrible while being powerless to stop it in any way, and the narrative confronts the impact this has on him with the gravity it's due without framing Xie Lian as a burden to him or Hua Cheng as the "true victim" of Xie Lian's suffering. We also see him react to Xie Lian's self-harming/self-sacrificial tendencies with distress that Xie Lian himself doesn't really understand, so when Xie Lian abstains from these tendencies he is more so doing it because he doesn't want to make Hua Cheng upset than out of concern for his own wellbeing — but this is not presented as something he's forced into or obligated to do to be a "better victim" by not making anyone uncomfortable; it's something he does because witnessing Hua Cheng's pain similarly pains him. And they misunderstand each other sometimes on this front — like when Hua Cheng thinks Xie Lian is going to stab himself and Xie Lian thinks Hua Cheng is angry with him — but the narrative isn't concerned with punishing or blaming either of them for that.
I think what solidifies the intentionality of this for me is how their dynamic is contrasted with the relationship between Shi Qingxuan and Shi Wudu, the latter of whom is impacted by his sister's suffering because he does indeed love and care about her but crucially is more preoccupied with his own unwillingness to watch her suffer than he is with her personhood, to the point of paternalistically depriving her of her autonomy to keep her "safe."