Most people I see who are also Shen Jiu enjoyers understand his character.
But there are some that frustrate me.
Because yes, a lot of the shitty things Shen Jiu actually did and the aggressive way he acted was due to his history of trauma. But! The tragedy of his character is he made an active choice to lean into the worst of his traumatic responses and replay his trauma onto others.
His tragedy is that he is the scum villain because he decided he would rather be a piece of shit then actually deal with his trauma on any level. He is written to be a character who made the choice to continue the cycle of abuse.
And we know he's written to have made a choice because Yue Qingyuan did not make that choice.
Don't get me wrong. Yue Qingyuan is a deeply flawed individual and he falls into the enabler category. BUT! He was, and this often gets forgotten, as deeply traumatised and abused as Shen Jiu. He had his body completely broken down and was locked in the dark in a cave to rebuild for a YEAR only to be to late to save the person he loved most. Then when he found that person they became one of his abusers.
Yeah. Shen Jiu was abusive to Yue Qingyuan. As justified as his hurt was he didn't have to antagonise and test Yue Qingyuan at every opportunity. Yue Qingyuan fucks up by making excuses and trying to apologise for Shen Jiu which upsets everyone but some of you have not been in a situation where you are responsible for someone who making a scene and who you know can, and will, get violent and tried to deescalate that knowing the only way to salvage that is to turn their violence on to you.
But to get back to my point Yue Qingyuan was deeply abused by his Shizun. And he did not, from what anyone can tell, pass on that abuse to his own disciples. He did not pass on that abuse to Shen Jiu. He didn't even allow his own trauma of the caves to impact Shen Jiu's cultivation. He could have banned him or anyone from the caves and he did not. Because he recognised that his trauma was not something to put on others.
He is still deeply flawed but he is, in his own way, trying to change things for the better. He is trying to find a way out of the past for both himself and Shen Jiu.
Shen Jiu however, keeps playing out the same trauma over and over again with new characters because he doesn't want to change. And that is why he is a scum villain. Because he chose this.
And that's why I love him as a fictional character. Because that's very real.
I could tell you my parents tragic backstories. Tell you exactly why they are insecure, hurt, damaged people. Their backstories would probably made you well with sympathy and empathy. They are still abusive assholes who chose to pass on their trauma and pain onto me. And then I decided not to do that to my own kid.
The cycle of abuse is real
But its still a choice to continue it.
And that's why I love Shen Jiu as a character. Because his role in SVSSS is to point out that it's a choice to continue the cycle, and no one in the narrative, not Shen Jiu, not Shen Yuan, not even Yue Qingyuan, thinks it's anything other than a choice Shen Jiu made.
and that's what makes him so interesting to me.
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