One of the most effective generals...yeah, the general whose main method was throw enough lives at it to win because Sacrifice.
This is a profound mischaracterization. Everything we see about Sun Shao says he was a brilliant and immensely effective general who only sacrificed his men's lives when necessary...which it is sometimes. Shao isn't wrong that war is sacrifice. Even Fuxi acknowledges that Shao is one of his best generals.
The general that all the other White Serpents disdained and looked down on because he wasn't a White Serpent. The general who's promotion took so much political capital. The Bai are a literal snakepit, with all that implies
. Even punishing the person who killed Shao's family would have caused a huge backlash. So imagine killing said person, a White serpent,... for Shao.
No. You kill them for treason. For allowing their internal politicking to become more important than the wellbeing and survival of the Bai as a whole and the security of the border. The fact that Sun Shao brought it to his attention should've been incidental, or at least presented as such. Does this get pushback? Sure...but if you actually care about changing things, pushback is inevitable. Fuxi was unwilling (or unable due to his Way) to actually do anything meaningful to enact real change. He was thus incapable of causing or allowing such change and in the long run his death is probably better for the Bai than his life ever would've been.
As for the borders, well yeah. There are other more deserving people (White Serpents). Really, the border would have been defended event if Shao died. The Bai have been fighting it so a long, long time. The only reason it wasn't defended was because Shao did the unexpected and took all their none-Bai vassals save for like two, and the Bai, snakepit that they are, didn't expect such rebellion.
Would it? The whole reason he became a general in the first place was the Bai profoundly screwing up at this task. But more importantly, its a matter of principle, if your goal is to get people to actually do their job and be effective (and that is Fuxi's stated goal with the Bai), then actual consequences for doing the opposite of that are necessary. Fuxi was
coddling the Bai, protecting them from the consequences of their own actions,
spoiling them until they were utterly useless in many ways.
Efficient? Not in the least.
I don't really believe in the killing being more efficient when all the White Serpents are various shades of the guy who killed Shao's family and since the Bai generally have breeding issues.
It's because they're all shades of him that a few killings (or other appropriate punishments) are necessary. Prove that there are real consequences for failure and corruption and you have a lot less failure and corruption.
Like, the times are different. That was when the Bai were at their strongest. Now, the can't even allow the petty squabbling to get in the way of reform and Prosperity. They're at their lowest. That's why someone with a Way like Suzhen has come up. Prosperity, even if it means cutting family off. Remember, the bai haven't been at this level in a long, long time. Not even sure she'll be less discriminatory or if it's okay because she less so than other White Serpents since she's like this specifically because the White Serpents are killing themselves.
Sure. But all this a reason they hadn't been overthrown sooner, not an excuse for them to become more decadent and worthless, which is exactly what Fuxi's leadership led to pretty directly.
And I think that's where we disagree in the end. I don't think Fuxi's an asshole. He just didn't understand emotions because of his Way, and he was trying to make the mess that was the Bai work. Rhis really just makes LQ's Way more important imo because if this misunderstanding didn't happen, Fuxi and Shao would have been great and reformed the Bai.
They're a parallel to CRX and LQ imo, if CRX was set in her Ways that family is bad and if LQ joined her later on, after her Way was set.
Fuxi certainly had lost understanding of emotions due to his Way, and like all White Realm cultivators, was defined by that Way more than he was a person. But he was not
only 'pure efficiency blind to emotions', I'm not sure he was interested in efficiency at all, frankly. I don't know what his Way actually entailed, but evidence suggests it simply couldn't have been involved with actually reforming the Bai, because that's impossible without imposing real, meaningful, consequences for their actions and Fuxi seems to have been utterly incapable of doing that. Which, frankly, makes him a complete waste of space as a leader.
