I ALSO DREW LIU JIAYI AND PHOEBE FOR LUNAR NEW YEAR oh my god i love phoebe so so much are there any phoebe fans I LOVE THEM I LOVE PHOEBE AND JIAYIII okay
Something about Bai Liu never letting others truly see him. He always keeps an illusion of being close to people, yet his mind is unreadable. His companions know his patterns, how he operated, which methods he usually manipulate, however, they can't fully predict him. They understand his motivation not even partly thoroughly once the plan is executed, once he has revealed everything.
His goals are unknown, his appearance are calculated to the every little detail, his mouth never lets out anything that doesn't profit him. He had learned everyone by heart, making it appear that they're friendly and not just a mean to reach the ultimate goal.
And at the same time, he displays such pathetic human actions, that make us, readers, not believe his little lie he created to deceive us, making himself as complete evil. He puts blankets over his friends, he forces them to sleep (although most of the time he just drugs them), he keeps his promises to be sure others are safe, neglecting his own condition and covering it up with "purely transaction purpose". And all of it is purely distinct from his other versions, Bai Six for example.
ghg is so heartwarming bc the progression of side characters is so well done
at the beginning, wandering circus members dont understand bai liu or even fully trust him at times. their teamwork is rough and messy. they know basically nothing abt bai liu. theres even a comedic scene of liu jiayi berating mu sicheng and mu ke when theyre trying to save bai liu bc none of them can predict where bai liu could be, despite bai liu having such a strong grasp on all of their psychology.
but then as the story slowly progresses, you see glimpses of how wandering circus members come to fully understand bai liu, despite bai lius own unreliable narration abt how others perceive him
it starts with them understanding bai lius patterns, thought process, and goals. its most obvious in forest frontier where jiayi and tang erda correctly predict why bai liu is doing things like sending them away and causing them to suffer.
then the hugest turning point is 5buildings. bai liu gets tortured for such a long time in front of them, sacrificing himself for them, and they see his bravado abt not caring for others ripped apart. bai six directly rips off bai lius lies abt seeing them as property, making bai liu confront his own love for his teammates. and wandering circus Sees That
and the end of 5buildings reveals that bai liu had told liu jiayi of his plan on intentionally losing that match, and she had acted along to help him. this further establishes how far bai liu has grown, as hes fully revealing his plan to his teammate when previously he wouldve kept it to himself
a bunch of other stuff related to this happens but the most significant and devastating moment that proves how much wandering circus understand and KNOW what kind of person bai liu is, is the drowning man arc.
each characters final moments display how much theyve grown to truly love and understand bai liu.
mu sicheng knows how thin skinned and easily embarrassed bai liu gets abt mushy questions.
mu ke knows bai liu disliked him when they first met, knows bai liu will never let him die bc thats the type of person bai liu is
liu jiayi who is so similar to bai liu thinks abt all his negative traits but cant help remembering more of how kind and gentle and nurturing he was, finally making her own choice to die for wandering circus
tang erda has a DEVASTATING but amazing scene of beating the shit out of cen buming and laying out all the genuine good bai liu has done for others that readers may forget under the layers of unreliable narration and bai lius constant downplaying of his own good deeds. it shows how tang erda has changed /so much/ from when we first met him. hes gone from blindly hating bai liu to being wary of him to seeing and understanding what kind of person bai liu is: a good man.
wandering circus truly love bai liu so so so much, and bai liu loves them even more in turn bc as all thats happening we see the final layer be stripped away as bai liu cries alone in the well with only bai six to see
i do appreciate the Bai Liu/Xie Ta dynamic for the role reversal of the average MC/ML dynamics, you know, with Xie Ta as the cold, aloof, unreachable white moonlight and Bai Liu as the dark obsessive love interest. like, the one time Xie Ta tried to pull a "possessive yandere ML" Bai Liu fucking uno reverse'd him.
Something's so funny to me about earlych! Bai Liu. He's cunning, extremely cocky, confident to the point of excluding the possibility of being wrong, narcissistic to some extent, tells everyone the truth hiding the inconvenient details, his luck is on 0 and he has 1hp yet his plan always works out. It's not simple intelligence - it's intuition, pattern recognition and definite will to get money of all things. His mind works like a clock, hell even his friend mentions how he could get money in the most profitable way, completely bending the law over. He sees 10mil points and starts saying "we need to get through 50 scenarios in 60 days". He says "I don't care about none of you" then saves them all because "he needs to take care of things he's investing in". Extremely silly guy
REAL i love his unhinged way of thinking, always going for the maximum profit route he dgaf abt dying he dgaf abt pain or anything else he wants that MONEYYY
but what i find rlly interesting is as he adapts to the way the game works, a really strong advantage bai liu has is his familiarity with horror games as both a player and a game designer.
his experience working on horror games makes him think not just abt Surviving or winning, but he thinks abt what the DEVELOPER would think or do.
a lot of his decisions come from the thought "well if i were designing this game, /i/ would do this." and well we all know why this mentality guides him on the right path, bc in a sense he DID design the game
its also why bai liu has such an edge over other players that are also smart. i mean for an mc thats noted as very intelligent, bai liu isnt even the smartest character in the story. hell, you could argue he isnt even the smartest in his own team (liu jiayi has a higher intelligence value).
yet bai liu exceeds SO MUCH in the games precisely bc his mentality towards them is exactly that: its a game. he treats it as a game, smth thats solvable and designed in mind to be PLAYED.
it gives him an extremely powerful intuition abt what to do and secret routes he can take.
its also kinda cute that bai liu seems to be the completionist gamer, he always wants to 100% clear the game in early arcs lol
MAN, watching Bai Liu work is just like... if you think about the mcu scene where Natasha is tied to a chair being tortured and gets a phone call and is like 'are you kidding? I'm working!' and decimates the men. That's Bai Liu in so many of his relationships in here, and I'm eating it up like i haven't been fed in months. I'm having the time of my life watching him INTENTIONALLY kick off a domestication arc via a catalyst of his own capture and torture like om nom nom nom nom
an aspect of bai liu i find very entertaining but kinda depressing is his abnormal pain tolerance. hes sooooo good at bottling up all his extreme desires and suffering that he seems so calm on the surface but hes constantly on the verge of crashing tf out
will always remember how, literally right after remembering his extremely tragic childhood of xie tas death, he immediately recovers with a smile and goes "back to work" in trying to get tang erdas soul.
and then after that when hes alone he Immediately tries to drown and trash the entire facility bc hes so devastated abt xie ta.
another good example is after ice age where he seems so normal on the surface and jumps back into business, taking control of the situation so calmly and jumping into another game.
and then spends the entire game trying to kill himself and everyone around him bc, once again, xie ta died.
i got into it at the start of high school lol. bai liu influenced quite a lot of my personality development, and now ive been spared from consumerism.
so yeah, naturally, i draw art of it, oc and all. most of the official arts we have got kind of peeve me bcs most of the side characters (not in the circus) look exactly the same.
sorry that the imgs are low quality, they are screenshots of a canvas.
i tried some dark purple for her hair for variety, since realistically all of them would have dark brown/black hair due to being ethnically chinese. im not really good at drawing young children yet though
tang erda post and pre makeover. im not a big fan of plucking him clean, but thats what happened in canon.
ive always seen LYZ's appearance as highly Average. not that he has any canon descriptor than i know of? and i added some white hairs bcs he has to deal with bai lius shenanigans.
fang dians most notable descriptions center around her smile, so this design is more influenced by fanarts and such.
cbm my favorite man. my miserable middle aged man.
he and tang erda are most likely in their middle ages actually. tang erda and su yang in the 658th world line, at the end of the rose factory arc mentioned serving the bureau for 20 years tgt, and in the first world line, they (t2d & sy) joined the bureau at 16. so, if nothing changes between the world lines, tang erda should he in his late 30s.
cbm is just older than that bcs i like perving up middle aged men.
for all that i love abt that novel, i find its lack of concrete character design quite irritating. except for bai liu and spades, i cannot find a solid description for any characters clothing. especially when it comes to the bureau uniform. there are lots of fanart that depicts it as a cop-ish white suit, which personally doesnt make sense to me.
this excerpt comes from tang erdas makeover, and it says "his uniform was taken off, hanging around at his waist", which really only makes sense if its a jumpsuit.
so here is my speculation on what it could look like based off of that.
this design also doesnt fully satisfy me because tang erda was able to take his uniform top off and put it on when he quit the bureau. a real headscratcher.
Daily reminder that Bai Six saw Xie Ta's face in Hearts and said "hell yeah. I'm gonna keep that woman in my team, despite her attempts to kill me in every possible way, just to see my long-forgotten crush and catch a glimpse of his facial expressions reading the book that holds too many memories. Oh and don't fucking call me by my name with that face again. ^^"
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