no i’m sorry but dream of the red chamber makes me legitimately insane,,,,, like what do you MEAN she was a flower in her past life and he gave her water and she promised to pay him back with a lifetime of tears,,,, what do you mean ‘the beast of a thousand legs is a long time dying’,,,, what happened to qin keqing????? where did baoyu’s jade go when it disappeared . these two little girls were taken from their families to become actresses for rich families and fell in love with each other so so deeply and then one of them died and the other one burns money for her even though it’s forbidden on pain of beatings or death. wang xifeng is a functionally illiterate teenager who was suddenly put in charge of running the entire jia estate after marrying into the family, and she somehow manages despite that, and then eventually the whole thing comes crumbling down and she is the first one everyone blames. xiangling was kidnapped and and enslaved and abused but all she ever wanted was to write her poems, and then she dies in childbirth and her long-lost father goes to fetch her soul and lead her to the afterlife. they gaslit baoyu into marrying baochai when his grip on reality is already tenuous and diayu is literally on her deathbed... they didn’t even tell him when she died. yuanyang hangs herself from the rafters of her room right after dowager lady jia dies because she knows she’s lost any semblance of control over her own life with her mistress’ passing. ping’er loves xifeng so so deeply and sincerely. all the girls are going to be married away to men and families that could abuse or neglect or exploit them, and they don’t have any choice in the matter. and baoyu cries when he thinks about it because he loves them all so very much. daiyu would rather spend hours burying petals than watch them rot in the stream. after a childhood spent being mistreated by her uncle, xiangyun marries a good husband who she loves, and then loses him almost immediately. all the young people leave the garden eventually and it gets overgrown with weeds. qiaojie is sold by her uncle but saved by ping’er and granny liu and spirited away from the corruption and rot of the jia estate... maybe there’s hope for the children after all. baoyu and diayu love each other so deeply and know each other so intimately and inevitably that they never even try to put it into words, and even the reader is locked out from the bond they share. the stone just wants to experience the passions and tragedies of the mortal world!!! and cao xueqin loved and admired the women in his life so deeply that he wrote hongloumeng partly so that they would be remembered. like????????
