I've been thinking a lot about the Turmoilers' plotline in Tai Sui and the way the associated themes are executed. The slow unraveling of the truth that the world of steampunk cultivation we've come to know and love over the course of the novel could not exist without the Turmoilers' suffering. The way that everything technological would topple without the constant brutal resource extraction of the Southern Mines, the way that He's land had to be destroyed and its people had to be starved, disfigured, and exploited as a result. There is no other way for the era of Moon Plated Gold to function.
Tai Sui is a novel about realizing over and over that the world you know and love and live in comfortably is, in fact, a nightmare built on a foundation of horror, exploitation, and lies. It's about peeling back what you've always known to and taken for granted to find the nightmare of the machinery underneath. It's about Xi Ping realizing in the very first arc that Heaven's Design Pavillion protects him, but it does not protect Jiangli. It's about four sets of laws in Wan: for cultivators, for nobles, for people, and for ants. It's about Xi Ping discovering Xuanyin will kill him for the Hidden Bones. It's about Zhao Qindan discovering that her family will sell her for stability and wealth. It's about Xi Ping and Zhi Xiu and Zhou Ying discovering the truth behind the laws of cultivation and the fact that the Way of Heaven leads to nowhere but to fusion with the mountains, that unique and heretical Ways still lead ultimately to "immortality" through freezing/killing your humanity and losing/rewriting yourself.
And in the midst of all that, I think the Turmoilers are the incarnation of that theme that resonates most with my own real life. You grow up privileged and comfortable in a wealthy country only to discover that every comfort you take for granted is built on the back of brutal exploitation of countless foreign strangers. This is not a flaw in the system; the exploitation is an integral cog in the machine of modernity that the whole structure, in its current form, would crumple without. What do you do about it?
Because Tai Sui is not a doomer novel. It's not about just pointing out the horrors of its world to agonize over. It's about a very stubborn group of people who discover the horrors of the world and, over and over, choose to do something to fucking fix it. If cultivation is a nightmare, find a way to change cultivation. If the machine of society cannot function without the Turmoilers' suffering, build a better machine and find a way to dismantle the old one. Fight the very might of Heaven for it if you have to.
It means a lot to me to have a story that says "Yes, the exploitative nature of the world is a feature of the system, not an accident. But yes, you can and must work with allies to dismantle that system and build something better anyway." The problems of the world are systemic and baked into the structure of modern society. They are not something that can be fixed by getting rid of individual bad actors. But systemic problems are not unfixable ones.
It's a lot more resonant to me than fantasy stories where the problems can be fixed by killing the evil king, y'know?