What I think is so fantastically well balanced about this arc is that the fall of Xianle might really, genuinely have been unavoidable in some form or other. The drought was a real issue that even the power of the rain master couldn’t reverse at that point. There was corruption throughout the government and excess in the capital. Xie Lian heard about the problem far too late to be preventative because his kingdom valued wealth and beauty above inclusiveness (incidentally, the same forces/values that I think made Hong’er’s whole life situation worse).
What Jun Wu did was make sure that things went so catastrophically, precipitously, improbably wrong that people needed someone to blame. He took a relatively normal sociopolitical/economic issue and made it undeniably evident that larger forces were at work here and then pointed the resulting ire at Xie Lian.
Idk if I agree that the drought wasn’t enough to bring down the kingdom, because I actually really like that Xianle did in fact have a whole set of interconnected preexisting problems, but they were not Xie Lian’s fault, and I DO think that there should have been plenty of ways for Xie Lian to help mitigate the issues, and be thanked for his efforts.
Jun Wu’s primary goal in making everything go so completely to hell so badly was to try and force Xie Lian to accept that any attempts at selfless aid would not only be thankless and draining, but also ineffective and even harmful. And THAT is the conclusion that Xie Lian and his third paths spend the rest of the book refuting — his moral/idealogical victory is firmly rooted in the belief that no effort is wasted and no small amount of progress/aid is worthless. A bamboo hat won’t keep you dry but it’ll keep off some of the rain. Maybe one soldier can’t end the war in Banyue but he can protect a few towns of civilians who will appreciate it so much they call him “general”. Saving the life of one person can result in unparalleled devotion that will ultimately reshape your life, and the barest act of kindness can mean the world to them.
I honestly really like the idea that even in the natural course of things, Xianle couldn’t have continued as it had been in Xie Lian’s youth. Maybe that looks like major political reforms. Maybe it still looks like a civil war, but one that doesn’t absolutely decimate the population with war and disease. Certainly, I think it looks like Xie Lian getting at least a little help from other gods to mitigate the sheer damage, and prevent ghostly interference from flattening whole countries, which is supposed to be what heaven is doing anyway. Generally, I think it looks a lot more like Xie Lian being appreciated for his efforts and not losing his position and family and nearly his very identity to the struggle.
But, critically, we’ll never know.
In some ways, what Jun Wu did was almost took more from Xie Lian than if he’d single-handedly corrupted some kind of ideal existence that Xie Lian was leading. He didn’t make the initial problems, he co-opted what should have been twenty year old Xie Lian’s deeply personal chance to really come into his own — to dig into practical solutions, to work with other gods, to grapple with what really were pre-existing issues in his home country, to deal with a complicated, real-world problem that probably was always going to come due sooner or later, and figure out what was and wasn’t preventable, and what he could do about things anyway — and flattened it into a no-win exercise in futility with only one possible lesson to be learned (at least that was the intent).
The fall of Xianle was probably as inevitable, eventually, as the fall of any other country. Either then or later, Xie Lian was probably always going to see it someday, and he deserved the chance to navigate it and learn from it himself. And that was stolen from him by a guy obsessed with “teaching him the right lessons”.
Genuinely, the fall of Xianle was not Xie Lian’s fault and he was never in the wrong for wanting or trying to help. But beyond how horrible it is that Jun Wu tried to convince him and the world that it was at all, I often want to scream about how horribly Xie Lian’s ability to process his feelings of guilt would be impacted by the overhanging cloud of Jun Wu’s Intent. Because he was young, and he probably did make some reasonable mistakes during a highly stressful time, (the things I could say about him entering the battlefield on one particular side of a civil war because he felt like he had to, good lord) but he never had a chance to really pick them out amidst the sea of things that Weren’t Mistakes But Were Treated Like Them, or their dramatically exaggerated consequences. And how is he supposed to untangle that knowledge from the certainty that A Lot Was Someone Else’s Fault when he doesn’t know how things would have gone otherwise, and when not a single one of his actual mistakes was allowed to have a reasonable or proportional fallout.
Xie Lian has a defining core sense of right, I don’t doubt his ability to pick through the right and wrong of it all after the fact and act accordingly in future, but I think the result of it happening that way had consequences that were… not kind to him, and certainly didn’t make him any kinder to himself.
I just… I keep coming back to what he says about the gilded banquet, about how he killed the king and An Le, and therefore it might as well all have been his fault, and I wonder how many other situations got that treatment in his mind. How often has he just decided all of it might as well be his fault because he can’t untangle where his own culpability ends? And how founded is that in the clusterfuck that was the fall of his kingdom, and the fact that he spent centuries feeling guilty about it, even knowing full well what White No Face, at least, did on purpose to make it worse. He’s not able to tell what he could/should have done better there, that was stolen from him. He spent centuries unsure where his own guilt ends because it’s all overshadowed by another person’s attempts to manipulate the consequences of every one of his actions.
