I was thinking about the Xianle Trio and how their friendship is so fascinating to me because there wasn’t a time when it was perfect. Arguably there wasn’t even a time when it was healthy. Yet these are still people who cared about each other for hundreds of years, however reluctantly. Mu Qing and Feng Xin are even the only martial gods who share territory without one of them being wiped out.
So, this is an examination of their friendship at the earliest point we see it, before Xie Lian ascended.
Xie Lian sees Feng Xin and Mu Qing like, as he puts it, fine jades among rocks. A lot of what he sees in them actually seems to be their potential to ascend as martial gods, he sees the same thing in Hong Hong-er. He knows they’re special, but he also knows that he’s more special. He doesn’t see them as just servants, and he definitely doesn’t see Mu Qing as a charity case, but like the sacred swords he’s so enamoured with collecting he sees them as something he can have. Or like fine horses, perhaps, they have so much potential and he wants to be the one to train them.
He does love them, and he cares about their feelings, but he takes them for granted because he doesn’t yet know that friendship is something that can be lost. So he doesn’t really think about how he thinks about them, because they’ll always be there and it will always be like this.
Xie Lian also has what seems to be a genuine personality clash with Mu Qing, when it comes to not understanding how humiliated Mu Qing is to be rescued and protected by him. At the time he doesn’t know how it feels to need that, but even once he does, I don’t think Xie Lian ever really stops hoping to be saved. Mu Qing feels like no one who had to help him could respect him, but even when he needs help we don’t ever see Xie Lian feel that way.
Feng Xin is here to protect his Prince. This is the job he was given, it’s what he’s for, and he approaches it in the same stolid way he later approaches having worshippers. Just as he tries to answer his worshippers prayers even when they’ve got the wrong end of the stick (he is not really about giving people sons but he will try) he tries to be whatever Xie Lian needs him to be. As a bodyguard he’s technically there to protect Xie Lian from danger but, before the war, this doesn’t come up much and he mostly seems to try to protect Xie Lian from bad publicity.
Feng Xin’s Prince is good, brave, kind and powerful. He is also silly, naive and scatterbrained, full of deep philosophical thoughts but prone to forgetting to put his shoes on. His easygoing personality means Feng Xin can scold and herd him without much pushback, so he does, keeping him presentable and not giving the people anything to gossip about.
Mu Qing, unfortunately, seems to be exactly the kind of person Feng Xin wants to protect Xie Lian from. Someone who takes advantage of his kindness while sneering at him behind his back. When Feng Xin learns that Xie Lian’s bad start with the other students at Taicang was due to covering for Mu Qing, it only reinforces this impression, and also the impression that Mu Qing is a hypocrite for complaining about Xie Lian getting hurt to protect random people. Feng Xin breaks his own arm rather than let Xie Lian take on that punishment for him, so the fact that Mu Qing has been protected by Xie Lian is something he feels justified in holding against him.
Mu Qing feels like they look down on him, not without justification. He’s the latecomer to the trio and the lowest born, and Feng Xin’s rigid ideas about the world mean he definitely does look down on him. Xie Lian’s arrogance is more casual, if he examines his own beliefs he’d say he doesn’t see being a servant as worse than anything else, but he talks about protecting “the common people” without including himself in that group and the fact that he doesn’t notice that kind of thing drives Mu Qing up the wall.
Mu Qing wants to be friends with Xie Lian and isn’t sure how he ever could be when he’s not sure Xie Lian takes him seriously and when their relationship began with Xie Lian doing him a favour. Yet it’s that favour that draws him to Xie Lian as well, as Xie Lian’s easy kindnesses to people who aren’t used to kindness often do. Xie Lian saw his distress and cared about it when he was just a random servant and now he’s not just a random servant, but he’s still a servant. What he does for Xie Lian is his job and he’s far less at peace with that than Feng Xin is, because how does that give him a way to do anything out of friendship? Everything he does is just expected.
On top of this I think he’s even more scared for Xie Lian than Feng Xin is, very aware that his kindness could be taken advantage of and far more aware of how his certainty that he can help everyone is setting him up for disaster. Feng Xin sees Mu Qing as the one taking advantage, though, so anytime Mu Qing tries to talk some sense into his Prince he gets interrupted by Feng Xin trying to protect his Prince from him. Mu Qing is smart and cynical and far more socially aware than the other two, but they won’t listen to him, and it only adds to his sense of being an outsider because Feng Xin is allowed to scold Xie Lian.
Then Xie Lian’s ascension happens, and the war, and exile, and everything puts strain on an already fragile dynamic.
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