Another sketch from yesterday. The Butterfly-boned Beauty Feast Hua Gui, trying to make her beloved son Hua Binan sit still for a photo. Of course that doesn't work, right? Look at that little lively critter, he doesn't know the horrors of the near future yet.
anonymous: How do you think hbn would have reacted if he found out that mr was a bbbf all along? Would he feel guilty for doing all that to one of his own people?
Long post and spoilers under the cut!
Frankly, I don’t think he’d be too torn up about it. It might make him pause for a minute, but ultimately I think Hua Binan would have simply brushed it off. Hua Binan has empathy, but it’s too conditional for him to have felt bad for the things he did to Mo Ran, even if he knew Mo Ran was a Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feast like him. The fact that he’s one of the rare ones would prevent Hua Binan from sympathizing with him, imo. See, the main dangers that Hua Binan and the majority of the rest of the Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts suffer are:
1). They have golden tears, a dead giveaway of their status as descendants of a demon race
2). Cannibalizing/having sex with them raises a cultivator’s cultivation level
3). They have an extremely low cultivation level, meaning that they’re essentially powerless to defend themselves
Mo Ran doesn’t have 1) or 3). In that case, it’s nearly impossible to tell that he’s a Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feast; not only is his mother dead, but Mo Ran himself isn’t aware of it, either. That greatly reduces the danger he’s put in for being a Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feast (although it sure did not save him from literally every other kind of danger). Which means... Mo Ran being a Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feast is not, after all, much of a similarity with Hua Binan, or a connection from which Hua Binan would develop sympathy for Mo Ran.
I think his thought process would be something like, “Oh, he’s a Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feast... but he can cry when he wants to without his tears giving him away, and he’s not powerless to fight back against the cultivators who would want to rape/cannibalize him to raise their cultivation level - assuming he’s even found out in the first place, which is nearly impossible? ...Well then he’s really not in danger for being a Beauty like the rest of us are, is he?” Of course, this is... not a mindset most decent people would have, as Mo Ran has been through hell in other ways and many of those ways were because of Shi Mei, but when have you ever known Hua Binan to show basic moral decency?
There is one person that Hua Binan sincerely cared about (not including Chu Wanning) who was not a Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feast, and that’s Mu Yanli. I don’t think anyone can deny that he loved his sister - he’s devastated when she dies. You could say that, well, Hua Binan obviously cares about her since she’s his sister, but I don’t think just being biologically related to him would be enough for Hua Binan to care about someone. Pretty... far from it, actually. I don’t think Hua Binan would have any scruple murdering someone related to him, lmao. There’s a few things beyond their biological relations that bind the two siblings, and those things are why Hua Binan loves Mu Yanli despite her not being a Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feast.
One factor is their shared history; they were together since before Hua Binan got hit with all that trauma of his father eating his mother alive, which was the start of his determination to use the Path of Martyrdom to get his people to safety. In essence, they’ve known each other, and were probably close, since they were both harmless, innocent children, before becoming scarred and hardened. I think that probably warrants some level of a connection, even from someone as cutthroat as Hua Binan.
Another thing - Mu Yanli, like Hua Binan, suffered because of their father. Mu Yanli loved Hua Gui (Hua Binan’s mother) and considered her her mother although they weren’t biologically related. Their grief, and probably resentment and trauma, over Hua Gui’s (very horrible) death is shared. That’s another connection.
And third, Mu Yanli was working with Hua Binan to free the Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts. She was just as determined as him to end their oppression and brutalization. Definitely a strong connection there. (And I know many people hate Mu Yanli for what she did to Mo Ran, but gosh I really do love how she felt so strongly for the Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts despite not being one of them. That “please, let them go”... I felt that.) Mu Yanli and Hua Binan are united in their single-minded dedication to ending the suffering of the Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts, to the point that they’re willing to use extreme violence.
Mo Ran doesn’t share any of these similarities - these connections - with Hua Binan. He did not suffer because of Hua Binan’s father (like Hua Binan, Hua Binan’s mother, and Mu Yanli) and he did not/will not suffer for being a Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feast (like Hua Binan, Hua Binan’s mother, and the rest of the Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts). He’s not working to end their brutalization either, and certainly not willing to turn to mass murder for it. He’s not even in danger the way a typical Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feast is in the cultivation world. Thus, Hua Binan would not feel guilt for doing what he did to Mo Ran. (And disclaimer because I don’t want to be torn limb from limb - I am not blaming Mo Ran, or saying he’s bad, for not suffering the things stated above. He’s suffered plenty in other ways. Nor am I saying Hua Binan is right for treating him the way he did just because they don’t have many shared experiences.)
If anything, I think Hua Binan would have been even more spiteful of Mo Ran if he knew that Mo Ran was a Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feast. Kind of like, so he gets to be a special kind with a high cultivation level and normal tears, while Hua Binan and the other Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts can’t protect themselves from being raped and/or cannibalized, can’t even cry without the danger of being raped and/or cannibalized? The similarity between Mo Ran and Hua Binan of being one of the Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts is a shallow one, imo, thanks to the differences caused by Mo Ran being the irregular type of Beauty. It doesn’t really... give them any parallels, aside from their family trees vaguely branching off from the same place. Which isn’t really a parallel.
For me, what makes these two narratively foils is that at one point in their lives, they were just a pair of innocent children who suffered horribly and unjustly without doing anything to warrant any of it, traumatizing them to the point of latching onto the first person (Chu Wanning) who showed them kindness. And if their similar powerless childhoods weren’t enough for Hua Binan to feel sympathy for Mo Ran, I highly doubt that his disdain would change with the knowledge that Mo Ran is a Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feast - because, in Hua Binan’s mind, Mo Ran didn’t suffer the same horror that he, his mother, and the rest of the Beauties suffered for being Beauties. He didn’t suffer because of Hua Binan’s father, either, like Mu Yanli did.
Tldr; Hua Binan is pretty pitiless (it’s kind of scary how pitiless he is lmao), and the revelation of Mo Ran’s lineage might have made him blink, but not much beyond that, imo. (I do think it would have been different had Mo Ran not been one of the rare kinds of Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts, though.)
