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extrapenguinIn the darkest hours of the night, I am more likely to lie awake in my bed than actually sleep. While this is bad for my alertness, I do get a lot of revelations about myself then. And when I say "myself", I mean "my fandom opinions".
A long time ago, there was a post, the comments of which touched upon what levels of sexual/romantic experience Shen Wei and Zhao Yunlan might have. The fandom consensus is that Zhao Yunlan is experienced and Shen Wei isn't; a few commenters discussed the opposite case and expressed their love for the concept. I found myself squicked by it, and now, months later, my brain has decided to tell me why!
Let's take a step back: we have on the one hand an alien with superpowers who is sort of a head of state and widely seen as a hero amongst his kind, and on the other hand a regular human civil servant who is good at leadership and manipulating people. We can all see the power gradient, right? Our war hero could very easily kill or hurt the civil servant physically. And from the points of view of their respective bureaucracies, the war hero is irreplaceable, unlike the civil servant. To add to that, over the course of the series, the war hero alien knows more things than the civil servant, and withholds information even when he could safely tell it. Now, Shen Wei does have his reasons, but I think we can all observe the way the deck is stacked.
Switching our viewpoint to a romantic relationship, Zhao Yunlan's people skills even the ground a bit, but Shen Wei is still someone who habitually keeps secrets from Zhao Yunlan (including unnecessary ones, like that time he went to have a chat with Zhao Xinci and acted like it was a hostile interrogation the moment Zhao Yunlan maturely asked about it). Experience would be a good way to even this – make Zhao Yunlan the experienced one, and he can have fun showing Shen Wei what love and sex and so on can be like! When you put that card as well into Shen Wei's hands, however, it just turns the relationship into something squicky to me.
More commonly, though, I just see stuff that flattens Shen Wei's character unpleasingly. He's the Envoy, confident and competent at it, yes, but he's also more than just the guy who turns himself into justice. (For one, he has a trollish sense of humor. Bears, anyone?) A key trait is the streak of vulnerability: Shen Wei is the person who gets flustered when flirted with, cares very much about Zhao Yunlan's opinion of him, and spends the course of the series scared that Zhao Yunlan might not return to him from the wormhole. To remove that and make him into an authority figure with no weaknesses is to run contra to the show's message that Dixingians are human, too.
On the Zhao Yunlan side of the equation, he is a master manipulator who's capable of landing on his feet no matter what conversation he's dropped in (though occasionally he doesn't want to slip out because that'd be against his morals). I see a lot of people go "ohh he's such a subby sub!" and then cite scenes that to me are very explicitly about him using social judo to get his way. To insert a metaphor, he is a master at limbo: the fact that he bends backwards is incidental; the point is that he got to the other side of the bar like he wanted. He covers himself in a veil of artifice – we know he is both the person who'd ask a foreign diplomat to clean his bedroom and the person who single-handedly planned and then organized the plot to capture Zhu Jiu. His interiority is a lot harder to pin down, but I'd argue that we see a lot of him with minimal pretending during his first trip to Dixing, and that really makes plain how much mask-wearing he does in his regular life.
A long time ago, there was a post, the comments of which touched upon what levels of sexual/romantic experience Shen Wei and Zhao Yunlan might have. The fandom consensus is that Zhao Yunlan is experienced and Shen Wei isn't; a few commenters discussed the opposite case and expressed their love for the concept. I found myself squicked by it, and now, months later, my brain has decided to tell me why!
Let's take a step back: we have on the one hand an alien with superpowers who is sort of a head of state and widely seen as a hero amongst his kind, and on the other hand a regular human civil servant who is good at leadership and manipulating people. We can all see the power gradient, right? Our war hero could very easily kill or hurt the civil servant physically. And from the points of view of their respective bureaucracies, the war hero is irreplaceable, unlike the civil servant. To add to that, over the course of the series, the war hero alien knows more things than the civil servant, and withholds information even when he could safely tell it. Now, Shen Wei does have his reasons, but I think we can all observe the way the deck is stacked.
Switching our viewpoint to a romantic relationship, Zhao Yunlan's people skills even the ground a bit, but Shen Wei is still someone who habitually keeps secrets from Zhao Yunlan (including unnecessary ones, like that time he went to have a chat with Zhao Xinci and acted like it was a hostile interrogation the moment Zhao Yunlan maturely asked about it). Experience would be a good way to even this – make Zhao Yunlan the experienced one, and he can have fun showing Shen Wei what love and sex and so on can be like! When you put that card as well into Shen Wei's hands, however, it just turns the relationship into something squicky to me.
More commonly, though, I just see stuff that flattens Shen Wei's character unpleasingly. He's the Envoy, confident and competent at it, yes, but he's also more than just the guy who turns himself into justice. (For one, he has a trollish sense of humor. Bears, anyone?) A key trait is the streak of vulnerability: Shen Wei is the person who gets flustered when flirted with, cares very much about Zhao Yunlan's opinion of him, and spends the course of the series scared that Zhao Yunlan might not return to him from the wormhole. To remove that and make him into an authority figure with no weaknesses is to run contra to the show's message that Dixingians are human, too.
On the Zhao Yunlan side of the equation, he is a master manipulator who's capable of landing on his feet no matter what conversation he's dropped in (though occasionally he doesn't want to slip out because that'd be against his morals). I see a lot of people go "ohh he's such a subby sub!" and then cite scenes that to me are very explicitly about him using social judo to get his way. To insert a metaphor, he is a master at limbo: the fact that he bends backwards is incidental; the point is that he got to the other side of the bar like he wanted. He covers himself in a veil of artifice – we know he is both the person who'd ask a foreign diplomat to clean his bedroom and the person who single-handedly planned and then organized the plot to capture Zhu Jiu. His interiority is a lot harder to pin down, but I'd argue that we see a lot of him with minimal pretending during his first trip to Dixing, and that really makes plain how much mask-wearing he does in his regular life.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-14 07:26 (UTC)To me, experienced Shen Wei would necessarily run into some problems of experienced with who? I can't see him wanting anyone other than Zhao Yunlan after meeting him in the past, and before that, well, he was a general during wartime. There's some power dynamic issues there.
My headcanon is that Shen Wei is demisexual, that he had never had sex before meeting Zhao Yunlan 10k years ago, and that he didn't want to have sex with anyone else after meeting him. Which left him lots of time to study at uni and bemusedly observe the antics of his classmates. :D
no subject
Date: 2019-07-14 09:51 (UTC)Realistically, I know that Shen Wei likely hasn't had any other lovers, because 1. busy, 2. dirt nap, 3. busy and lost, and thus is inexperienced with anything save his own hand. However, I have Problems with demisexuality headcanons (it hits my purity squick, and then there's some complex interplay with it vs how queerness and gender have been treated by society – I think I'd just shrug and move on if it were applied to a het dude, but other cases get my hackles up), and thus my brain, ever the contrarian, is trying to come up with ways for Shen Wei to have acquired experience. *g* At the very least, I think he's had crushes on other people before Kunlun came along.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-14 10:25 (UTC)I... sortof have a purity squick... or something similar - I don't like emphasis placed on inexperience or 'virginity', which for me ties in with how I dislike the idea of monogamy as the Only Acceptable Happy Ending and dislike jealousy between partners. It's just how I'm reading Shen Wei's character and backstory - not that he was 'keeping himself pure' but that he just wasn't interested and didn't see any reason to go through the motions. And I also think the difference in experience would be a complete non-issue between them.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-14 12:15 (UTC)Yeah, I agree with you! The whole purity stuff also edges on my squick related to claustrophobia-as-kink (soulmates, reincarnation, single-target sexuality, etc) and jealousy presented as romantic. I can like fucked-up stuff too, don't get me wrong, but not if the author seems to think that it's the height of romance.
Re: Shen Wei, while I think he might've had some interest, I don't think he had the time to do anything save maybe notice that people were attractive. He's a (child) soldier at war, and then he's an alien trying to hide his identity amongst humans. Even without any crushes on Kunlun or demi/asexuality, it's believable that he wouldn't have had the opportunity to get together or get busy with anyone. He definitely wasn't "keeping himself pure" for a nebulous stranger who might appear someday! :P
Yup! I think Zhao Yunlan's attitude towards Shen Wei admitting lack of knowledge or experience with anything would be more akin to this xkcd than anything else. After all, he is very careful about only having positive reactions whenever Shen Wei tells him something of his own volition. Here he'd have the opportunity to share something delightful with Shen Wei, so of course he'd make the occasion as positive as possible.