Hi there, and welcome to the quest! As you probably have noticed by now, there is lots of discussion involved
Others have already answered some of your points about freedom and servitude, but I have a thing or two to add that I believe goes in a
slightly different direction. To wit:
The problem is that by being involved with Cai Renxiang, this will just lead to more and more politicking and less and less actual fun adventures and interesting situations. I don't know about you guys, but if I wanted to read about boring crap like politics I'd go read a newspaper, not a cultivation xianxia story... I also don't understand why people like to overcomplicate stories with this kind of stuff, when they were already great to begin with without all that.
So, I was wrinkling my brow, reading this argument. Not because of your criticism of the choice to align with CRX, I was not a fan initially either, but have come around since; no, I disagree with your point that politics just overcomplicates stories, who are already great without it.
Now, I think I know where you are coming from, the real-world politics one reads in newspapers are hardly a wellspring of joy, and plausibly something one tries to not worry about when escaping into a fantasy story every now and then. No argument here.
But, I would argue, in any story, any world where you have more than one intelligent creature doing anything, you
always have politics. You have your protagonist who wants to have stuff their way, and you have other people who also have ideas about how things should be, and that's politics in a nutshell.
So, the moment you have an author/QM who gives their characters/NPCs agency of their own, in any story where the rest of the world is not just set-dressing, but rather that villains and allies of your protagonist have plans and goals of their own - politics happen. I for one would argue that giving agency to non-MC characters is one of the hallmarks of good writing, a story without this tends to become very predictable very fast.
So, to put this in context for
this story, you say you don't want politics in your cultivation xianxia story, but... what else is there? The whole outer sect story, from befriending Bai Meizhen to the ultimate defeat of Sun Liling in the tournament, was a story about politics, even multiple layers thereof. You have the rivalry between the Bai and Sun clans, the subsequent side-taking of everyone else, the establishment of an actual (pseudo-)government to curtail the chaos, factions within said government, betrayal, intrigue, espionage, alliances...
Forge of Destiny without politics, all I can think of is LQ sitting in a cave thinking about how lonely she is.
Now, all that being said, I don't mean to sweep your concerns under the rug with an argument like this. In fact, when I binged FoD back in the fall of last year, I felt similarly to what you express - oh no, LQ is trading her freedom for security! But she is the hero of this story, not some kind of mook!
What brought me around was the realization that Ling Qi, for the first time in her life, has
friends. And these friends are deeply embroiled in politics, for better or worse. Ultimately, as tough as the decision was, LQ decided that her personal freedom was rather pointless if she she spent it alone. I don't think Ling Qi is in it for money, or title, or anything along those lines. She became a retainer of Cai Renxiang because that puts her in the best position to stay close friends with Meizhen, and help her oldest friend navigate that complicated mess that is in her future. That she is making more friends along the way is great, and while she might never be a sly social operator, that's not too bad, for whatever flaws the Cai may have, they are good at giving people tasks that suit their talent. We will see where things stand at the end of this quest, but I really doubt that there will be a lack of adventure in our future.
And in my opinion, being a famous bard can be a great cover for doing spy work, so they aren't mutually exclusive.
This is actually a common overlap, historically. The more successful bards, those who would write for and about rulers and politics, were by nature influential figures, well-informed about any important events. They would often work as diplomats, spies and entertainers at once.
