Meta: on writing Ye Zun
Jun. 15th, 2020 06:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
waterscrollI’m feeling a little nervous to post my thoughts, since I’m still fairly new to the canon and Guardian fandom is full of excellent and thoughtful writers who have been thinking through the show for years, so I’m a little worried that anything I say at this point will be either obvious or wrong. But writing will help me process my feelings about the show and I figure it’s about time for me to get some thoughts out there and see if anyone in the fandom finds anything in them useful. So, here goes. Please be kind.
Content notes: canon-typical violence, murder and suicide. Intended to be creative (a possibly interesting reading) rather than definitive (what I think canon definitely means). Dramaverse, with a very brief mention of the novel.
I found Ye Zun compelling when he was nothing but an emotionally manipulative pillar and when we finally met him in person in episode 20 he quickly got me on his side. My biggest fear watching the last episodes was that he’d cross the moral event horizon so far that there was no bringing him back. And he did, yes, cross the moral event horizon pretty badly. But he stayed interesting and I still have some things to say.
What makes a villain most compelling, to me, is when the villain is almost a hero, but off by, like, half a degree. A woobie villain like this is tragic, not *just* because he suffered a great deal but because he was *so* close to being someone who could change the world for the better and instead changed it for the worse. That is a kind of tragedy that interests me. And I think, dear canon, that when you make the villain the hero’s twin you are asking me to read him this way. You are telling me that Ye Zun has all the ability to do good and to love and be loved that Shen Wei has, but stuff happened. Partly his own choices and partly things that were done to him.
But fanfic is a hopeful genre. We can imagine a world in which the tragedies of canon are undone, or end up meaning something different.
So, some notes about what I see in Ye Zun and what I’d like to imagine.
1. Teacher
Shen Wei is a teacher, and in his empillared form Ye Zun is also a teacher, in that he teaches people to channel their pain into action. He’s very good at finding the places where people hurt. And then once he finds it, he can connect it to something larger.
The people of Dixing are suffering a great deal and I don’t know that there is anyone who takes their suffering seriously. I don’t know that they even know how to take each other’s suffering seriously, see the callous way they treat their kings and that no one seems to notice or object. And then the pillar says to them: hey, you are suffering, this matters, there are things that can be done about it.
Ye Zun in his pillar is the broken heart at the center of wounded Dixing, feeling abandoned by his brother into slavery the same way that Dixing people were abandoned into an underworld without time and without light, trapped in his pillar like Dixingren are trapped underground in their damaged land. He feels their pain and isolation and hopelessness and also embodies it.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the line ‘To find the light, revere the night.’ I like to imagine that Ye Zun has been saying that line for a very long time, maybe since he was a child, and that its meaning has kept changing. Because one possible meaning is, recognizing the places inside you where you hurt and taking them seriously can make the world better.
Except that to get there, he’d actually have to think that he can make the world better and not just break it.
2. Power and destroying the world
The only reason to have destroying the world as your goal is if you think you are powerless to change it. If you have no ability to fix or even ameliorate the way in which the world is harming you (or others, if you care about that) but you do have a way to stop the pain by ending the world, that starts to feel pretty tempting. It’s normal for children and teenagers to fantasize about ending the world, if they feel its pain intensely and also intensely feel their own powerlessness to make a difference. Sometimes they grow up and figure out that there is in fact something they can do to help fix the things that are making them so angry.
Or sometimes, before they get a chance to figure that out, someone shoves them into a pillar for ten thousand years.
The thing is, Ye Zun is not powerless, even in his empillared form. He has the power to speak, and to hear and understand people’s pain and to convince hem to use their pain for his purposes. But it’s ten thousand years before he can figure out how to use those powers, and that is a long time to be alone and helpless.
I think the redemption arc that I want most for him is to see his own power, and to see that the ability to hear and reflect people’s pain actually does give him the ability to change the world. And if he can change the world maybe he won’t want to destroy it. You’ve got a lot of power, pillar boy, a lot of pain, and a lot of anger. Let’s see you change the world instead of ending it.
3. Why was he in the pillar?
Ye Zun in the pillar wasn’t able to go anywhere but he was able to talk to people and to eat people. This is a very odd way of containing someone whose powers are mind-manipulation and people-eating. It left him able to harm people, if not to actually do his apocalypse, and it probably made life in Dixing quite a bit worse. Not to mention what it did to him and the over-the-top unfairness of it as a punishment. So, why did the Hallows do put him there?
I don’t know because I don’t really understand the Hallows, but I’m going to make a guess from Ye Zun’s perspective: Maybe it was because Ma Gui and Fu You, who made the Hallows, were kinda racist and more interested in containing Dixing than in helping it. I mean, the treaty was pretty bad for Dixingren, making them all go to Dixing even though it had been destroyed, and even though some of them had lived on Haixing all their lives, and you can ask why Dixing Underling Dude agreed to it but you could also ask why Ma Gui and Fu You wanted it to begin with. They said that the Hallows would improve the living conditions in Dixing but maybe they never really cared all that much, and the Hallows that they made never really cared either.
If that’s the case, then by going into the Lantern and willingly dying to give light to Dixing out of love for Shen Wei and compassion for Dixing people, Zhao Yunlan didn’t fulfil the original purpose of the Hallows but rather entirely transformed it. But more on that later.
4. What did he see from the pillar?
With ten thousand years to sit and think, you’d think Ye Zun learned something.
Ye Zun is very good at listening to and reflecting other people’s pain. It’s his main tool for manipulating people: find out where people are hurting, amplify it and offer a (bad) solution. But given how good he is at listening to pain, that would have meant, well, ten thousand years of listening to people’s pain.
And he’s not so good at seeing anything else. He’s not able to see kindness that people show each other or the love that they have for each other. He says as much to Sha Ya, when he says that sisters and brothers never love and care for each other, even though he literally showed the Chu brothers loving each other as part of his little morality play for Shen Wei just a few episodes earlier. But all he could see was the ways in which the love was corrupted and destroyed. Dixing has no hospitals and no schools and also no justice. It’s a place where even if a brother loves another brother deeply, like Chu Shuzhi and his brother, it doesn’t matter because it will all be taken away.
I think that’s why Ye Zun asked that entirely wrong question to Zhao Yunlan: Is it worth it? It’s such a wrong question that it outs him immediately, but if you only see the suffering and not the good that can come from it then it’s hard to imagine that it could be worth it. Or that anything is.
Shen Wei is very sensitive to other people’s pain and also intensely altruistic. Ye Zun has the unusual personality combination of being both extremely sensitive to other people’s pain and over-the-top callously cruel. But I think both responses to other people’s pain make sense. When you’ve seen people hurting for long enough, while not being able to do anything about it, you can start to believe that other people’s suffering is inevitable, so maybe it’s not so bad if you cause some more. Or do what it takes to end it, including ending the world.
Some thematically relevant music: My Body is a Cage
My body is a cage that keeps me from dancing with the one I love but my mind holds the key…
…I’m living in an age that calls darkness light…
When everything feels like a cage it’s not unreasonable to want to smash it.
I find it so interesting that in Ye Zun’s last scene it is transformative for him to find out that Shen Wei hadn’t abandoned him as a child, even though Shen Wei literally just killed him five minutes earlier. Not that it was wrong to kill him, obviously, but I’d hardly expect Ye Zun to see it that way five minutes after it happened. What I take from that is, well, partly that he doesn’t particularly mind dying as long as he can be with his brother. But also, that he doesn’t need everything to be good to change his worldview. If he can see one moment of his brother loving him, really see it, even if it happened a long time ago and even if there’s been nothing but violence between them since, that one moment can chance everything because it’s something he’s never truly seen before.
5. Balance
As yin/yang twins it makes sense to me that the happiest possible ending would be for Ye Zun and Shen Wei to balance each other. Because canon is tragic, instead they kill each other. But if they could balance each other in a positive way, what might that look like? What could they do for Dixing together?
I want to be careful about this, because I don’t want to give a take on Shen Wei here, because this meta isn’t about him. So let me say: the light/dark yin/yang imagery leads me to want a reading in which Shen Wei and Ye Zun are a mutually balancing dyad, and a tragedy of canon is that this never happens.
I think that is beyond my ability to write but I enjoy thinking about it, and that is one reason that I am devouring Shen Wei/Ye Zun fanfic like a crazy shipping freak. To find the light revere the night, because ultimately darkness and light need each other. So as paradoxical as it sounds, to find one you have to seek the other. So now kiss, boys, while I indulge my longing for balance between contradictions.
6. Light
In the novel, the Ghosts don’t have souls. The fact that they were never given souls is a terrible wrong and the events of the novel were set into motion as part of a complicated plot from the god Shennog to fix this. It costs Shennog his life, and Shen Wei many thousands of years of suffering, but you can’t just leave a people without souls, whatever it takes.
In the drama, instead of souls that Dixing people are missing, it’s light. But there are no gods in the dramaverse and the Hallows are not necessarily benevolent. But light is still necessary, even though Shen Wei says Dixing people don’t need it to live. And maybe light is not really what Ye Zun wants, but he says he wants it and that counts for something.
Zhao Yunlan in the lantern is the inverse of Ye Zun in the pillar. Both are trapped in inanimate objects, but Zhao Yunlan in the Lantern gives energy while Ye Zun in the pillar absorbs it. Zhao Yunlan is there willingly, out of love, and Ye Zun is there angrily and unwillingly. One way or another, though, they’re both there because of their feelings for Shen Wei.
(So yes, the opposite-balancing thing works for the Ye Zun/Zhao Yunlan ship too. Which is good, because you don’t under any circumstances try to separate Shen Wei from Zhao Yunlan, that’s the whole point of the show, and even with my strange shipping preferences I get *that*.)
Because it’s Zhao Yunlan in the Lantern, the light isn’t just light, it’s also love. That’s got to make a difference, for Dixing, that the light is coming from someone who loves them.
Put that way it makes it sound like Zhao Yunlan is saving Dixing, but I don’t think he is, just because Dixing still has to save itself. It’s got light but it still doesn’t have hospitals, schools or justice. Or a way to get out, now that they’ve been sealed in. In a way it’s still a cage.
If I had the stamina or writing skills to write something long and plotty now (which let’s face it I don’t) I’d want to write a story in which Ye Zun’s redemption is intertwined with that of Dixing, because he was the gaping wound at its heart for ten thousand years and watched it suffer while all he could see was its suffering. I’d like to see him use his powers of listening and reflecting - his true superpower - to help Dixing figure out where to go next and how to get there. Along the way he’d have to convince people that he’s worth working with and not immediately executing, but I’m not worried about that, he’s good at convincing people of things and if he’s not actually omnicidal it will probably go even better. He’d also have to get better at listening to and hearing things that aren’t pain and anger. That might be harder, but I think it’s possible. Zhao Yunlan could help, because it’s the business of lanterns to shine light on everyone, whether they deserve it or not, that’s what lanterns do. And if the pillar and the lantern really are inversions of each other, maybe it makes sense for them to work together. Meanwhile there would be lots of pining for and inappropriate fantasizing about Shen Wei, and eventually a reunion. Not for a while, though, because I’d like to see Ye Zun be awesome on his own first. I like to think he’s capable of it.
Like I said, I’m not there. But the little fic I wrote was intended to sort of be a beginning in that direction, at least to show Ye Zun try to come to terms a little bit with being in the light and not wanting to die. What could he be in a world that doesn’t call darkness light and in which his body is not a cage? I don’t feel like I got to any answers, but I wanted to at least ask the question.
Thank you for reading. If you found anything here useful I'd be glad to know.
Content notes: canon-typical violence, murder and suicide. Intended to be creative (a possibly interesting reading) rather than definitive (what I think canon definitely means). Dramaverse, with a very brief mention of the novel.
I found Ye Zun compelling when he was nothing but an emotionally manipulative pillar and when we finally met him in person in episode 20 he quickly got me on his side. My biggest fear watching the last episodes was that he’d cross the moral event horizon so far that there was no bringing him back. And he did, yes, cross the moral event horizon pretty badly. But he stayed interesting and I still have some things to say.
What makes a villain most compelling, to me, is when the villain is almost a hero, but off by, like, half a degree. A woobie villain like this is tragic, not *just* because he suffered a great deal but because he was *so* close to being someone who could change the world for the better and instead changed it for the worse. That is a kind of tragedy that interests me. And I think, dear canon, that when you make the villain the hero’s twin you are asking me to read him this way. You are telling me that Ye Zun has all the ability to do good and to love and be loved that Shen Wei has, but stuff happened. Partly his own choices and partly things that were done to him.
But fanfic is a hopeful genre. We can imagine a world in which the tragedies of canon are undone, or end up meaning something different.
So, some notes about what I see in Ye Zun and what I’d like to imagine.
1. Teacher
Shen Wei is a teacher, and in his empillared form Ye Zun is also a teacher, in that he teaches people to channel their pain into action. He’s very good at finding the places where people hurt. And then once he finds it, he can connect it to something larger.
The people of Dixing are suffering a great deal and I don’t know that there is anyone who takes their suffering seriously. I don’t know that they even know how to take each other’s suffering seriously, see the callous way they treat their kings and that no one seems to notice or object. And then the pillar says to them: hey, you are suffering, this matters, there are things that can be done about it.
Ye Zun in his pillar is the broken heart at the center of wounded Dixing, feeling abandoned by his brother into slavery the same way that Dixing people were abandoned into an underworld without time and without light, trapped in his pillar like Dixingren are trapped underground in their damaged land. He feels their pain and isolation and hopelessness and also embodies it.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the line ‘To find the light, revere the night.’ I like to imagine that Ye Zun has been saying that line for a very long time, maybe since he was a child, and that its meaning has kept changing. Because one possible meaning is, recognizing the places inside you where you hurt and taking them seriously can make the world better.
Except that to get there, he’d actually have to think that he can make the world better and not just break it.
2. Power and destroying the world
The only reason to have destroying the world as your goal is if you think you are powerless to change it. If you have no ability to fix or even ameliorate the way in which the world is harming you (or others, if you care about that) but you do have a way to stop the pain by ending the world, that starts to feel pretty tempting. It’s normal for children and teenagers to fantasize about ending the world, if they feel its pain intensely and also intensely feel their own powerlessness to make a difference. Sometimes they grow up and figure out that there is in fact something they can do to help fix the things that are making them so angry.
Or sometimes, before they get a chance to figure that out, someone shoves them into a pillar for ten thousand years.
The thing is, Ye Zun is not powerless, even in his empillared form. He has the power to speak, and to hear and understand people’s pain and to convince hem to use their pain for his purposes. But it’s ten thousand years before he can figure out how to use those powers, and that is a long time to be alone and helpless.
I think the redemption arc that I want most for him is to see his own power, and to see that the ability to hear and reflect people’s pain actually does give him the ability to change the world. And if he can change the world maybe he won’t want to destroy it. You’ve got a lot of power, pillar boy, a lot of pain, and a lot of anger. Let’s see you change the world instead of ending it.
3. Why was he in the pillar?
Ye Zun in the pillar wasn’t able to go anywhere but he was able to talk to people and to eat people. This is a very odd way of containing someone whose powers are mind-manipulation and people-eating. It left him able to harm people, if not to actually do his apocalypse, and it probably made life in Dixing quite a bit worse. Not to mention what it did to him and the over-the-top unfairness of it as a punishment. So, why did the Hallows do put him there?
I don’t know because I don’t really understand the Hallows, but I’m going to make a guess from Ye Zun’s perspective: Maybe it was because Ma Gui and Fu You, who made the Hallows, were kinda racist and more interested in containing Dixing than in helping it. I mean, the treaty was pretty bad for Dixingren, making them all go to Dixing even though it had been destroyed, and even though some of them had lived on Haixing all their lives, and you can ask why Dixing Underling Dude agreed to it but you could also ask why Ma Gui and Fu You wanted it to begin with. They said that the Hallows would improve the living conditions in Dixing but maybe they never really cared all that much, and the Hallows that they made never really cared either.
If that’s the case, then by going into the Lantern and willingly dying to give light to Dixing out of love for Shen Wei and compassion for Dixing people, Zhao Yunlan didn’t fulfil the original purpose of the Hallows but rather entirely transformed it. But more on that later.
4. What did he see from the pillar?
With ten thousand years to sit and think, you’d think Ye Zun learned something.
Ye Zun is very good at listening to and reflecting other people’s pain. It’s his main tool for manipulating people: find out where people are hurting, amplify it and offer a (bad) solution. But given how good he is at listening to pain, that would have meant, well, ten thousand years of listening to people’s pain.
And he’s not so good at seeing anything else. He’s not able to see kindness that people show each other or the love that they have for each other. He says as much to Sha Ya, when he says that sisters and brothers never love and care for each other, even though he literally showed the Chu brothers loving each other as part of his little morality play for Shen Wei just a few episodes earlier. But all he could see was the ways in which the love was corrupted and destroyed. Dixing has no hospitals and no schools and also no justice. It’s a place where even if a brother loves another brother deeply, like Chu Shuzhi and his brother, it doesn’t matter because it will all be taken away.
I think that’s why Ye Zun asked that entirely wrong question to Zhao Yunlan: Is it worth it? It’s such a wrong question that it outs him immediately, but if you only see the suffering and not the good that can come from it then it’s hard to imagine that it could be worth it. Or that anything is.
Shen Wei is very sensitive to other people’s pain and also intensely altruistic. Ye Zun has the unusual personality combination of being both extremely sensitive to other people’s pain and over-the-top callously cruel. But I think both responses to other people’s pain make sense. When you’ve seen people hurting for long enough, while not being able to do anything about it, you can start to believe that other people’s suffering is inevitable, so maybe it’s not so bad if you cause some more. Or do what it takes to end it, including ending the world.
Some thematically relevant music: My Body is a Cage
My body is a cage that keeps me from dancing with the one I love but my mind holds the key…
…I’m living in an age that calls darkness light…
When everything feels like a cage it’s not unreasonable to want to smash it.
I find it so interesting that in Ye Zun’s last scene it is transformative for him to find out that Shen Wei hadn’t abandoned him as a child, even though Shen Wei literally just killed him five minutes earlier. Not that it was wrong to kill him, obviously, but I’d hardly expect Ye Zun to see it that way five minutes after it happened. What I take from that is, well, partly that he doesn’t particularly mind dying as long as he can be with his brother. But also, that he doesn’t need everything to be good to change his worldview. If he can see one moment of his brother loving him, really see it, even if it happened a long time ago and even if there’s been nothing but violence between them since, that one moment can chance everything because it’s something he’s never truly seen before.
5. Balance
As yin/yang twins it makes sense to me that the happiest possible ending would be for Ye Zun and Shen Wei to balance each other. Because canon is tragic, instead they kill each other. But if they could balance each other in a positive way, what might that look like? What could they do for Dixing together?
I want to be careful about this, because I don’t want to give a take on Shen Wei here, because this meta isn’t about him. So let me say: the light/dark yin/yang imagery leads me to want a reading in which Shen Wei and Ye Zun are a mutually balancing dyad, and a tragedy of canon is that this never happens.
I think that is beyond my ability to write but I enjoy thinking about it, and that is one reason that I am devouring Shen Wei/Ye Zun fanfic like a crazy shipping freak. To find the light revere the night, because ultimately darkness and light need each other. So as paradoxical as it sounds, to find one you have to seek the other. So now kiss, boys, while I indulge my longing for balance between contradictions.
6. Light
In the novel, the Ghosts don’t have souls. The fact that they were never given souls is a terrible wrong and the events of the novel were set into motion as part of a complicated plot from the god Shennog to fix this. It costs Shennog his life, and Shen Wei many thousands of years of suffering, but you can’t just leave a people without souls, whatever it takes.
In the drama, instead of souls that Dixing people are missing, it’s light. But there are no gods in the dramaverse and the Hallows are not necessarily benevolent. But light is still necessary, even though Shen Wei says Dixing people don’t need it to live. And maybe light is not really what Ye Zun wants, but he says he wants it and that counts for something.
Zhao Yunlan in the lantern is the inverse of Ye Zun in the pillar. Both are trapped in inanimate objects, but Zhao Yunlan in the Lantern gives energy while Ye Zun in the pillar absorbs it. Zhao Yunlan is there willingly, out of love, and Ye Zun is there angrily and unwillingly. One way or another, though, they’re both there because of their feelings for Shen Wei.
(So yes, the opposite-balancing thing works for the Ye Zun/Zhao Yunlan ship too. Which is good, because you don’t under any circumstances try to separate Shen Wei from Zhao Yunlan, that’s the whole point of the show, and even with my strange shipping preferences I get *that*.)
Because it’s Zhao Yunlan in the Lantern, the light isn’t just light, it’s also love. That’s got to make a difference, for Dixing, that the light is coming from someone who loves them.
Put that way it makes it sound like Zhao Yunlan is saving Dixing, but I don’t think he is, just because Dixing still has to save itself. It’s got light but it still doesn’t have hospitals, schools or justice. Or a way to get out, now that they’ve been sealed in. In a way it’s still a cage.
If I had the stamina or writing skills to write something long and plotty now (which let’s face it I don’t) I’d want to write a story in which Ye Zun’s redemption is intertwined with that of Dixing, because he was the gaping wound at its heart for ten thousand years and watched it suffer while all he could see was its suffering. I’d like to see him use his powers of listening and reflecting - his true superpower - to help Dixing figure out where to go next and how to get there. Along the way he’d have to convince people that he’s worth working with and not immediately executing, but I’m not worried about that, he’s good at convincing people of things and if he’s not actually omnicidal it will probably go even better. He’d also have to get better at listening to and hearing things that aren’t pain and anger. That might be harder, but I think it’s possible. Zhao Yunlan could help, because it’s the business of lanterns to shine light on everyone, whether they deserve it or not, that’s what lanterns do. And if the pillar and the lantern really are inversions of each other, maybe it makes sense for them to work together. Meanwhile there would be lots of pining for and inappropriate fantasizing about Shen Wei, and eventually a reunion. Not for a while, though, because I’d like to see Ye Zun be awesome on his own first. I like to think he’s capable of it.
Like I said, I’m not there. But the little fic I wrote was intended to sort of be a beginning in that direction, at least to show Ye Zun try to come to terms a little bit with being in the light and not wanting to die. What could he be in a world that doesn’t call darkness light and in which his body is not a cage? I don’t feel like I got to any answers, but I wanted to at least ask the question.
Thank you for reading. If you found anything here useful I'd be glad to know.
