thinking about shen wei again ... this kid who grew up doing nothing but fighting, using his brains for battle strategy and nothing else. he tries to die but has this impossible chance to keep living that he's not even sure he wants and — he chooses to redefine himself as much as he can, to make a new version of himself as different from the original version of himself as possible. a scholar. a scholar!
this makes me want to write his return to dixing in modern day as something coerced — whether by an outside person or by the forces of society or by his own sense of guilt or justice or a mixture. not something he wanted. not something that he sought out to stop being the only dixingren, to have his encounters with dark energy be more than sensing the natural drifting eddies in the world.
i'm thinking about shen wei, years into — grad school even, maybe. a completely new version of himself. just having finished undergrad, just having been accepted into grad school. somewhere — on the cusp. and then his past comes back for him. i don't know how exactly, but i want it to all come crashing down on him. this new gentle version of himself — i keep thinking about 文明 as a term specifically for this academic version of shen wei who becomes professor shen — brought under threat by who he "really" is.
i think there's a reason that even near the end of the show, shen wei still thinks about himself as a knife. partly i read that as him percieving himself as a tool to be used and directed by others. but part of what interests me too in that is the inherent violence in the object.
just — the idea of what it means to look at professor shen as as much of a curated, purposeful facade as heipaoshi. it's the one shen wei wears most. it's the one shen wei chooses to the wear most. i think we can interpret that as meaning professor shen to be the version of himself that shen wei most wants to be.
