From discord:
Probably part of why Zhengui really wants to impress her is probably due to LQ not taking up name of Mom and Zhengui feeling that makes him inadequate.
While there might not be any amount of interaction that will fix this, we should still try.
... I'm perplexed how you came to this conclusion? Like we can quite clearly infer from the fact that Zhengui calls Qingge grandmother he
mentally views Qi as his mother but simply does not refer to her with that terminology to avoid his mother's emotional hangups with it.
The fundamental problem Zhengui currently has is twofold imo.
1) While the exact reason is debatable based upon his decision to keep his dream of making a garden for LQ/mother a secret despite it being an
incredibly distant goal he quiet clearly desires success
independent from help by his mother, and the heart of this is that Ling Qi has never really
stopped catching Zhengui before he hits the metaphorical ground, or to look at it from a different pov he has never had the room to gain confidence from correcting a
failure he has made. This is a
serious issue as from his pov the only "failures" he has been making is permitting mother to get
hurt, and well by allowing him to do so in a social setting where there are short-term failure is trivial
compared to becoming "strong" enough to make the whole world stop hurting his mother alongside her family.
2) The primary issue is for a bunch of reasons including, but not limited to his natural affinity for taking hits i.e his domain, him being at best a child mentally, and most of all the fact that an
overwhelming majority of his interaction with mother has involved the improvement of his combat abilities Zhengui currently measure his self worth in terms of his combat ability
especially him getting hurt instead of mother/family. There isn't any easy solution to this as the path Ling Qi through us as players have chosen is one filled with such hardships, but in the short-term helping him achieve success outside battle through giving him enough room to make mistakes in social interaction, or simply gain confidence from success on the first attempt, and time will give him the opportunity to come to terms with the realities of the world.
The TLDR is that the debate over whether, or not Ling Qi is a helicopter mother is a debate over what type of tree a specific tree is within the forest of her being a
tiger mother* whose interaction with her son have resulted in him
measuring his self worth in
studying performance in battle, and more often than not the questions on the tests he is being given do not lead to the result he
wants of mother emerging unhurt from the test, which results in confidence issues.
Unless we expect Ling Qi to
stop risking life, and limb to accomplish near impossible tasks much less the impossible ones no amount of AP will
solve this, and throwing AP seems liable to make it worse as Zhengui will
keep failing despite mother spending more time training him instead of growing stronger whereas if Ling Qi expands the horizons of what her son considers to be success to include social interactions he can become more confident through social interactions.
*This seems rather accurate as Ling Qi has a heart demon from having an insight that gives her "high expectations" that she is applying to her family from being a teenager, and another insight that involves "Respecting the will of other family members".
