Shang Qinghua is such a sad character.
Honestly, the more I think about him the worse I feel for him, and I know that to some extent he has gotten his happy ending, but we don't see much from it other than an interview confirmation that he and Mobei Jun had ended up together.
This is not going to be an in depth character analysis like I did with Mu Qing, I'm just ranting to get my thoughts out.
So first and foremost, let's start with his life before the transmigration. His parents divorced and he wasn't really wanted by either sides. That is already a painful thing to know and realise as an adult, let alone when you have time to internalise it ever since childhood.
As a writer, he had to abandon his own principles and artistic visions to make ends meet. I do think that Shang Qinghua does enjoy being a ragebaiter as a writer, based on the way he was reading the comments and his reactions to them in the Airplane extras (SVSS vol. 4 if you have the published books), but at the end of the story in book 3, the way he told Shen Qingqiu about how he didn't start out writing things like this and this was not what he wanted, it read so bittersweet to me, even if he said it jokingly. And while we could debate that you have to give some things up in order to follow your dreams, is it still your dream if you had to abandon what you actually wanted to do?
Also, the way he highlights that writing a novel is a lonely thing. We only see him as a shut in and he doesn't think back to having any friends at any point in the extras, so we can assume he didn't have any.
And, in my opinion, that doesn't change after the transmigration.
I read fics because I do love Moshang a lot, but I genuinely don't know how I feel about Shen Qingqiu and Shang Qinghua's "friendship". I guess this is like shipping FengQing for me when in the books I said there was no love lost between them.
I don't think Shen Yuan cares much other than the fact that Shang Qinghua is convenient. Shang Qinghua annoys him on every turn, and Shen Yuan can't help but fall for the ragebait. He has Shang Qinghua help him with the mushroom body, but he doesn't think of him fondly at all. Once again, no love lost between them. I can't claim that Shen Yuan wouldn't help Shang Qinghua if the tables had turned, like when Shang Qinghua left Mobei Jun and he and Binghe took him in for dinner and a chat. So I think he would help, but he'd be a bitch about it the entire way. I don't know if I'd consider them genuinely friends, but maybe that's just my own standards.
And another thing is that how willing Shang Qinghua is to accept the abuse. We can argue that being hit by Shen Qingqiu's fan is one thing, that they are in a setting and they're both guys so then tussling is normal (? I still don't think it's healthy or good, but I also am a woman and therefore can't accurately judge how far guys are willing to go like that). But it is also a fact that he endured Mobei Jun beating him for years.
Shang Qinghua is portrayed as cowardly and thick faced, who will take whatever humiliation as long as he gets to survive at the end, but I genuinely think that this is something to think about a bit deeper. Because yes, he does get fed up and hits Mobei Jun back when he knows the demon can't retaliate, since Shang Qinghua is not stupid enough to fight the demon outright, but for the most part, he just takes it. He took the humiliating treatment in the Airplane extras. He took Mobei Jun kicking him and tossing him into his possible death on Maigu Ridge when he threw him into the cave to check what's inside, and then still went out of his way to save Mobei Jun when he flew after him on the sword. (Whether or not this was needed is another debate, because couldn't Mobei Jun just rip a portal in the air and teleport himself onto the ground? Food for thought for another day.) And he went and faced Linguang Jun to save Mobei Jun when it was almost certain death for him if Mobei Jun didn't miraculously push through everything.
Yes, I know Mobei Jun is his ideal man. Yes, I know that Mobei Jun probably changed after the Airplane extras. But Shang Qinghua had no way of knowing he would when he did all that. He just took the hits and helped anyway.
There is an argument to be made that Shang Qinghua knew what kind of man Mobei Jun could be like since he was the one who created him, but my counter argument would be that at this point the story had changed so much that there was no guarantee for that. Luo Binghe, the one Shang Qinghua spent the most time honing in the original novel, has changed, why is it impossible for Mobei Jun, a side character who was most likely not flashed out enough to show that he could be kind and caring, to turn out differently than what Shang Qinghua dreamed of? There were so many variables by the end that there were simply too many risks in my opinion.
It could be seen as romantic, that Shang Qinghua persevered for the man, and that Mobei Jun ends up changing for him, but... I don't know. I also want to argue that we can't judge Mobei Jun by modern, real word standards, because those are not the standards the SVSS universe abides by. He's a demon and even if he was human, the way he grew up would absolutely prevent him from understanding love and care and from knowing how to show it. So the same way we can't judge historical figures from hundreds of years ago by today's standards, I don't want to judge a fictional character by real word standards, but it's making it very, very hard. Maybe I'm just not cut out for dark romance. Honestly, at this point, I'm just bombing my own ships. (This will not stop me from shipping Moshang and reading fics about them, so I will gladly take my little hypocrite badge, thank you very much.)
Anyway, my point is, Shang Qinghua is... a very worrying character. I love him, I desperately want to give him a hug, but he is a very sad man.
So yeah. Shang Qinghua is a very sad character, and I love him so much. He needs a hug and sooooooooo much therapy.
He has pretty much subscribed to the low views everyone has of him. He doesn't have dignity, he doesn't have any pride, he just takes whatever harsh words or actions are thrown at him as long as he lives another day. And the worst thing is, we genuinely don't see any good to him. Shen Qingqiu doesn't consider anything good about him, and even when we read Shang Qinghua's own POV in the Airplane extras, it's so self-effacing. He's the lord of the "lame peak" that everyone bosses around, the other peak lords don't think anything of him, except maybe Yue Qingyuan who might somewhat recognise that he's useful because he probably understands how much trouble it is to handle logistics for the sect, but even then, it's most likely not fondness but the fact that he's trying to get taxes and logistics off his own plate. (Being a side character with no POV, we don't know his actual thoughts.)
Shang Qinghua has literally no self-worth and it shows deeply in his actions for the most part, until the very end of the Airplane extras.
