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Threads Of Destiny(Eastern Fantasy, Sequel to Forge of Destiny)

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sergit said:
Greed, but also a desire to give all you have to others, to give them what they need for their sake, even at the cost of your own.

Something about Ling Qi feels a little Robin Hood-esque. She works outrageously hard to get everything. Theft and Heist against their enemies, amass resources, never satisfied, always wanting more. But she doesn't want it for herself. She wants it so that she can give it to her Family.

Taking from the rich to give it to the poor, but substitute "the poor" with "my people" and "the rich" with "my enemies" or maybe "those who are not my people". The duty of providing for them falls on her only, and their needs are andless, and so, she has to give them as much as she can grasp and more.
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Ling Qi very much is focused on her own personal advancement though. She doesn't want things so she can give them to her friends and family. She wants friends and family so they can make her happy and safer. Like, if we look at how our generosity to our friends manifests, what we give them is stuff that doesn't actually cost us anything. We're happy to give them access to our Arts rather than trying to hoard secrets for ourselves because it doesn't cost us anything, and we recognise that doing so makes us all stronger and thus safer. We'd never consider sharing our drugs otoh because those are ours, and we need those.

Ling Qi's "selflessness" I feel is more driven by her self-centred flagellation of her own character. She's tormented by the times she threw people under the bus to save her own skin, leaving her alone, and so she is driven to be loyal and never do that again. Because if she does, then she'll be a bad person, and she won't have any friends again. But this, as we've seen in some of her conflicts, means she's bad about looking at these situations from her friends' point of view. Of understanding that maybe they could feel the same way towards her. Because she's still trying to prove to herself that she deserves to have friends. The point that was made about reciprocity is a good one I think, because I don't know that LQ really thinks about that much and that's part of the problem. Rather than cultivating "friendship", she's focused on "her ability to deserve friends".
 
Maybe we're looking too much into it and this is basically Yrs telling us "You're spreading too thin trying to maintain so many social links. I can't keep track of so many people, so please limit down the amount of social links you try to get into, for my own sanity".

heheh.
 
sergit said:
Maybe we're looking too much into it and this is basically Yrs telling us "You're spreading too thin trying to maintain so many social links. I can't keep track of so many people, so please limit down the amount of social links you try to get into, for my own sanity".

heheh.
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He should stop writing so many great characters then :þ
 
To Ling Qi marriage was… it was a frightening thing, a loss. To be a wife was to be at another's mercy for the rest of your life, or, she supposed, to dominate someone else in the same way. Someone had to be the one in control, didn't they?
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Ling Qi, no, stop. The opening bit of Kaguya Love is War is not an acceptable or healthy conception of relationships.
 
Y'know, I'm kinda confused about Linqin's motives here. If she wanted CRX to fail and not replace Shenhua, why did she help Ling Qi the way she just did? Has she actually comes to terms with Shenhua not being sustainable to the world order? Does helping Ling Qi avoid a disaster in her Way somehow achieve her objective in protecting Shenhua? What is her objective? Bc her nature should be to protect Shenhua in the most covetous, possessive way possible.
 
I'd be very leery of getting carried away and reading LQ as being someone who is excessively selfless, or who gives herself too much to others and spends nothing on herself. Because it's really not true.

Ling Qi still spends like more than 90% of her waking hours on herself. Her cultivation is fundamentally for her (even if her obsession about being the strongest isn't necessarily the most healthy). Even when we give up some time for our friends and family, well, we're still probably spending less time with them than most of our peers. She's very leery of actually letting the demands of others cut into her powerlevelling time.

If we look at how her moments of "selflessness" manifest, there's really two types. Firstly, her "surprising" generosity when it comes to things she can share with her friends in a non-zero-sum way. This, I think, while culturally notable, is also fairly unproblematic, and doesn't really indicated any excess of selflessness. If anything it represents a healthy understanding of how we are all stronger together.

The other bits are the things that people tend to note, and that's LQ's willingness to throw herself in harms way for her friends in certain circumstances. We can draw a clear line from this to her past, where she did not do that and instead threw others under the bus to save herself, and she feels really bad about it. Indeed, it was such loyalty to Meizhen that drew us to Renxiang's attention back in Forge, and a certain level of having your friends' back is clearly well justified. The single incident that people keep pointing to for this is the stabbing incident, and honestly I'm kind of annoyed by the way it keeps being treated as some kind of pattern of behaviour rather than a single incident that was arguably just a mistake driven by an overreaction to her failure in the King of the Forest arc. I don't feel it's ever been satisfactorily interrogated or resolved.

The incident can readily be understood as her overreacting to try to prove to herself that she is still able to be a good friend after she failed to stick her head up for Shen Hu. And also required her to overestimate her own invulnerability and disrespect her opponent. The big thing though is that I don't think we'd do it again? Like, I feel that we've learnt our lesson there, but there's been no examination of that question. Indeed, if anything LQ has silently refused to contemplate the idea that she was arrogant there.

Regardless, as we saw with the outcome of that incident it was also hardly driven by an excess of empathy. Rather the opposite - LQ was ignoring how her friends and family would feel in an effort to prove things to herself. And while, sure, there's a risk of going too far in the opposite direction in an effort to fix this problem, getting hung up on the idea that it's a problem now seems off...
 
Hmm, I was mostly seeing it in the sense Qi really likes to help her friends get over their trauma (most notably with Renxiang), while Qi doesn't really open up about the effects her trauma has on her with her friends. She kinda shuts down when someone pokes her trauma and doesn't ask for help from her own friends. I think that was what Linqin was getting at when she said be more selfish basically. You can't only help your friends with their trauma and not let them help you.
 
I don't think Linqin's discussion was based on Ling Qi as she is now. Part of what LQ is doing is developing her sense of empathy and, by doing that, she is beginning to become aware of other people's problems. This is completely fine, even necessary to live in a society.

The problem is that a cultivator who is developing this sense can make it substantially more sensitive than what a mortal would have, or even what a cultivator trying to improve that mortal baseline of ability they have would do. In doing so you inevitably run right into the first of the Noble Truths and that's a rather big thing to have to deal with.

Elsecaller said:
Hmm, I was mostly seeing it in the sense Qi really likes to help her friends get over their trauma (most notably with Renxiang), while Qi doesn't really open up about the effects her trauma has on her with her friends. She kinda shuts down when someone pokes her trauma and doesn't ask for help from her own friends. I think that was what Linqin was getting at when she said be more selfish basically. You can't only help your friends with their trauma and not let them help you.
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Also this.
 
Elsecaller said:
Hmm, I was mostly seeing it in the sense Qi really likes to help her friends get over their trauma (most notably with Renxiang), while Qi doesn't really open up about the effects her trauma has on her with her friends. She kinda shuts down when someone pokes her trauma and doesn't ask for help from her own friends. I think that was what Linqin was getting at when she said be more selfish basically. You can't only help your friends with their trauma and not let them help you.
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Mmm, I agree that there's scope for her to go to her friends for emotional support there... but at the same time those issues are ones she also refuses to interrogate herself.

Like, when it was something she felt capable of addressing in the King of the Forest arc she did talk to Meizhen and others about it, so to say she never does it would be a stretch.
 
I think it also comes down to the question, "why do you want to get stronger?"

LQ's answer at the Moment would probably be something like.

"to protect my family and friends so they can live in Peace."

And one of her insights tells her that noone is alone and everyone needs some Form of Support.

And linqin just told LQ what a path like that can end up as and to find a more selfish reason other then" the happiness of my close ones is my happiness. "
 
Ok, so the way I see it, the scene with Diao Linqin does several things:

first: it establishes a deadline for the super long-term project Yrs established in the recent Shenhua interlude: we need to be ready to challenge Shenhua by the time Diao Linqin dies of age at the latest, which depending on the specifics about how old she is and how old prisms can get seems to be around 300-400 years from now. (Btw. for comparison: Suzhen is around 400 and is a very talented Bai scion with significant resources)

then the scene is also used to establish more about Diao Linqin herself: her personality and her 'quirk' shine through during this interaction so that we have now a much better idea about who she is and what she is about.

and then for the third part we get to the lesson about cultivation: This seems sorta similar to the 'dont be a shadow' thing Jiao pulled: Linqin showed us the downside of focusing overly much on empathy based on her personal experience, but I sorta agree with other posters here that this lesson doesnt transfer that well 1:1 to LQ, similarly as Jiao's 'dont be a shadow' thing didnt transfer 1:1 to LQ. I would still say that this lesson has value, because we can generalise it:

Imperial cultivation is about cultivating yourself into an ideal and the higher realm you get, the closer you come to your ideal. The general lesson that we can take away from this interaction is that even seemingly benevolent ideals or parts of ideals like empathy can turn harmful at the higher realms. This is still useful to us, even if the specific issues we would encounter, if we were to go all in on say Community would be different to what Diao Linqin experiences herself.
 
Kirr said:
I think it also comes down to the question, "why do you want to get stronger?"

LQ's answer at the Moment would probably be something like.

"to protect my family and friends so they can live in Peace."
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I don't agree with that.

She wants to get stronger so that... well, she hasn't really interrogated it but the motivator seems to still mostly be a feeling that that's the only way she can be safe and happy.

Friends and family are a strand in that rope of power, a means to help acquire safety and happiness.

yrsillar said:
It is more a warning about future direction than a critique of the present
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But it's given far more emphasis and depth than Jiao's warning and that feels weird when we're so far from that even potentially being an issue. Like, we haven't even managed to really get LQ to care about people who she hasn't befriended yet.

If anything it feels more like a reaction to vague suggestions one or two people have made about potential future paths for LQ than anything LQ has actually done or thought? Dunno.

Mostly though I just don't follow the jump from "wife" and LQ's issues with how close relationships work and if she's managing those connections well (which seems like a good question that one could relate to Linqin and Shenhua's relationship) to "but what if you cared about everyone though?"
 
Erebeal said:
Ling Qi still spends like more than 90% of her waking hours on herself. Her cultivation is fundamentally for her (even if her obsession about being the strongest isn't necessarily the most healthy). Even when we give up some time for our friends and family, well, we're still probably spending less time with them than most of our peers. She's very leery of actually letting the demands of others cut into her powerlevelling time.

If we look at how her moments of "selflessness" manifest, there's really two types. Firstly, her "surprising" generosity when it comes to things she can share with her friends in a non-zero-sum way. This, I think, while culturally notable, is also fairly unproblematic, and doesn't really indicated any excess of selflessness. If anything it represents a healthy understanding of how we are all stronger together.
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"Selflessness" is certainly a bad way to phrase Ling Qi actual/potential problem. It isn't just that she cares for others, but why she tries so hard to do so.
I think that it's closer to what Ling Qi herself has been warning Cai Renxiang about: lack of self-care.

Ling Qi is certainly selfish with her time, resources and cultivation. However, all of this are just short term things.
"One person's desires cannot, alone make a home nor a family. (Community, Power, Want)"
The entire purpose of her Way is to create a safe home so her friends and family can be happy and fulfill their desires. But, what are Ling Qi's desires?

Ling Qi sees herself as the protector and provider of her family. She has to be strong and has to help their friends and family. Because if she doesn't, that means she has failed her role, and then she would end up alone. What would she even be working so desperately to become stroger for then? Something like this had already popped up during one of her musings about her heart demon.

So Lingqin is trying to warn Ling Qi to include something just for herself in her cultivation, so Ling Qi doesn't end subserviced to everyone's else desires.
Edit: Nevertheless, I don't think Lingqin assesment is entirely accurate. She claims that Ling Qi "gives without asking back".
While technically true, it isn't due to altruism. Ling Qi simply thinks that is her role as a friend/family to give, but doesn't apply that in reverse. It's better for her to give up on something than her loved ones. She also thinks that others can provide her with anything that she couldn't do better anyway.

As I said: reciprocity, inferiority and superiority.
 
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Ling Qi has already been told by Six that she is arrogant for thinking she's the only one in her friend group that can tank physical and emotional hits when she jumped into Renxiang's mind during the ice spirit encounter I don't see how this is unrelated.
 
I'd take Linqin with a grain of salt, mainly because of her unclear and vaguely antagonistic motives. Even if the empathy-vision is true (and not some illusion meant to shake LQ's confidence in her Way), it's just her truth, not the truth. Plus, we already know cultivating to conceptual extremes may result in bad ends, so it's not exactly new information.

So I'd treat this more as a cautionary tale rather than iron clad advice regarding LQ's Way.
 
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Also I was going to ask when Fen Fen is gonna get her own snake friendo but realized Black Vipers probably don't get partners as that is a bond that might get in the way of their loyalty to their White Serpent :sad:
 
Meizhen is Fen Fens snake friendo.
And yes, Black Vipers almost certainly got not partners for the same reason they get no other social bonds whatsoever if the white branch can do anything about it.
 
Erebeal said:
but the motivator seems to still mostly be a feeling that that's the only way she can be safe and happy.
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She wants to reach the Peak to be save.
But she cant be happy alone. So she needs her family and friends to be save to be happy herself.

But she did never really answer that question so im guessing, but that's the read i have of LQ atm. And since we are in the realm were these Kind of question are supposed to be defined and answerd i guess there will be some changes.
 
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