It seems like ages ago already, but back on June 20, Yibo made a change to his Weibo bio that shook up the fandom: he removed Chen Qing Ling from his list of "representative works."
CQL began airing four years ago, so it shouldn't be that big a deal for Yibo to update his bio to list more current works. But it made a splash because over those four years, he'd added and removed other works and still kept CQL in the list. And so did Xiao Zhan.
The fact that CQL stayed on their respective Weibo bios for four years was something fans of CQL could point to when certain other fans would try to erase the significance of the drama (for a variety of reasons I don't feel like getting into here). If Yibo and Xiao Zhan kept it on their bios for so many years, while cycling other dramas on and off, then they surely had good feelings about it, putting aside what it might mean about the relationship between them. I tweeted this very sentiment mere days before Yibo edited his bio to remove CQL.
Anyway, lots of fans (including me) were sad about the change, although it honestly made a lot of sense. Yibo had just finished a run of award shows where he'd collected honor after honor for his work on three new movies, all released or to be released this year. With his third movie, One and Only, coming out in a month, it was time to revise his bio to reflect his new status as a bona fide movie star.
But because fandom is fandom, there was also drama behind this change, centered around Yuehua's annual "Family Concert," which is scheduled for July 22 and meant to showcase the company's stars. In recent years, Yibo has understandably been the center of this concert because of his huge star power. He is, after all, responsible for the majority of Yuehua's profits.
It's exciting for us fans, but for Yuehua's other stars, it's not so great. Past concerts have featured lackluster applause and attention (such as through lightboards and other displays of support) for all the not-Yibo stars, which is... not a good look.
Yuehua's attempt to try to give more space for those other stars (and their fans) was to open advance ticket sales to fans of everyone not-Yibo. This, predictably, pissed off Yibo's fans, and led to a pretty vigorous campaign to force Yuehua to make changes: better security for Yibo, staffing reassignments, and yes, an update to his Weibo bio.
I really don't want to get more into this, other than to note that it does seem like YBO's staffing was changed (interestingly, a staffer that solos seem to have identified as the 🔴🟢 rumor writer might indeed have been reassigned, since 🔴🟢 later posted, "Next time we meet will be better ❤️ See you later," which some people interpreted as a kind of farewell.)
(To me, the fact that solos targeted this staffer for reassignment/removal means that the 🔴🟢 rumors were true — or at least that the solos believed they were true, but I digress).
So anyway, getting back to Yibo's bio change...
It seems to me that Yibo may have known that he was going to have to update his bio, because in the days before the change, YBO went on a tear, posting photos of Yibo at his award shows with kadian to make clear that Yizhan was still together.
On 6/11, YBO posted at 19:16 and 19:55... 19 is 依旧 (yijiu) or "still" and 16 is both Yibo's favorite number and also the number of strokes in Xiao Zhan's name; 55 is another common timestamp for Yizhan and could either refer to their birthdates or holding hands. So these timestamps could mean "still Xiao Zhan" and "still holding hands" (or "still Yizhan," if 55 refers to them).
The following week, 6/17 (留一起, liu yiqi, or "stay together"), Yibo posted at 17:19 and then YBO posted at 19:17, which mean "together still" and "still together." These two timestamps on the same day seem so intentional, don't they?
Interestingly, when Yibo edited his Weibo bio, he took all of his TV dramas off his "representative works" list, not just CQL, and listed only his three new movies. This change was noticed immediately, and he went on hot search for it.
Even though all of his TV dramas came off his bio, and it was clearly not a change singling out CQL, his edit spawned hot searches for a BE (or bad end) for BJYX. These searches, however, were taken down immediately (this suggests that YBO or other related person or entity paid for them to be spiked because they all came down immediately, before most fans even knew about them). Not only that, good searches started popping up, which also usually takes money. Hmmm...
After the edit, and the rumored changes to YBO's staff, I wondered whether we'd see any posts from Yibo to show that all was well with Yizhan... and I wasn't disappointed! The very next day, Yibo went to an event for Montcler and YBO released a photoset of him wearing a Lan Sect blue-colored jacket.
Timestamp: 9:30, or 就战, jiu zhan, or "just Zhan."
Even more interesting was the fact that the jacket was #32 of a limited run set of... wait for it... 33. Oh, Yibo loves those 2s and 3s.
Even better, Yibo wore a shirt underneath featuring a field of yellow flowers. There is no way that Yibo is unaware of the significance of the yellow field of flowers for CP fans, the way it cues the field of yellow canola flowers from the TTXS episode they first appeared in together. So for him to wear this shirt the day after editing his bio, to me, is a statement.
For those of you who read rp fic, I wrote all my thoughts about the bio change into this story. It's all speculation, anyway, so fic seems like the right vehicle for wailing about it!
By the way, Xiao Zhan hasn't edited his bio to remove CQL yet, but with Longest Promise coming out soon and the Condor project in the works, it will surely happen some day... but we also know how fond Xiao Zhan is of Wei Wuxian, so it may take awhile.
So did Xiao Zhan throw candy after Yibo's bio edit? I would say so!
On June 29, both of them appeared and performed at a concert in Hong Kong, and Xiao Zhan was photographed in the airport en route to Hong Kong looking like this:
Try to tear your eyes away from those pecs of his and notice the awkward pigtail in his hair. It's... a look. Yes, his hair is in that in-between stage of being long but not long enough to put into a real ponytail, and this pigtail only emphasizes that. The rest of his hair is under his hat and down his neck — why draw attention with a pigtail sticking straight out the back?
My first thought was: "he must have lost a bet to Yibo." There was, in fact, a "fake rumor" just a few days before that had Yibo proposing they play a game, and the loser would have to call the other "gege"... and Xiao Zhan supposedly pushed back on that punishment. Was this the punishment they settled on?
And where else have we seen this pigtail-as-punishment thing?
For those of you who read rp fic, I dumped my CPN brainrot about the pigtail into this fic, but I think Yibo did Xiao Zhan's hair for him that morning (they've both been in Beijing for weeks as their home base between filming and other work projects), and that it's absolutely a cue to Born to Fly.
So if you ask me, Xiao Zhan consented to wear this ridiculous hairstyle in public because he lost some kind of bet, and it's also his way to show that all is well in the Yizhan household.
It's worth noting that a number of their CQL co-stars posted celebrations of the 4th anniversary of CQL's broadcast, and the outpouring made me feel like they wanted to show that CQL was a beautiful experience for them all, regardless of what Yibo did with his bio. Most notably, Yubin posted a video that featured a couple of seconds of Yizhan having hot pot together back in (probably) 2018. If Yizhan had broken up, I very much doubt that Yubin would have included this personal clip of them, just saying.
Anyway, the boys looked and sounded fabulous at the Hong Kong concert (and carefully coordinated their appearances so they were never seen in the venue at the same time... they even timed their posts carefully... XZS didn't share Xiao Zhan's photoset until Yibo was off the stage and had left the venue, even though the photos were clearly shot the night before).
It made me grin that Xiao Zhan sang "Run Without Care," because it made me think of his 2020 performance of "Running to You With All That I Have." Gege and his song choices! (Did I write a fic about his "Running to You" performance? Yes.)
The timestamps for their Hong Kong outfits:
YBO posts at 19:35, which I read as 依旧战我, or yijiu Zhan wo, meaning "still Zhan and me." I'm probably reading too much into this, but there are five photos that are darker, taken against a curtain, and three photos that are lighter in cast, and 5 and 3 could be "me and Zhan," mirroring the timestamp.
Xiao Zhan's post was more of a hammer:
XZS posted 18 photos... and if you count all the images in the 18 photos, there are 33. That seems so, so purposeful, no? These numbers keep coming up over and over again. 18, of course, is Yibo and 33 is ZhanZhan.
The timestamp is 20:50, which could be 爱你我, ai ni wo, or "love you and me," which is a nice response to the YBO timestamp of "still Zhan and me" but if you don't like that one, 20:50 is also 8:50... 85 (Yibo's birthday is 8/5 and everyone knows 85 is Yibo's racing number. 💚
And look at the ❤️💛💚 color cast to the photos! That's surely purposeful too. XZS later posted a vlog from his Hong Kong photoshoot and it's clear that the location was nowhere near this vibrant in color. XZS staff clearly had to amp up the color saturation, especially to get that green to pop out:
Compare the saturated colors from the photoshoot to the relatively washed-out tones in this video still (I know the image is distracting, blame XZS for the framing):
So tl;dr... the boys are fine, don't worry. They are busy and in demand, and as time goes by, their newer works will surely loom larger in importance in their respective careers, and that's good for them and their growth as actors.
CQL will always have a special place in my heart as the drama that introduced Yizhan to me, but I'll surely support their other works too, and respect the decisions they make in how they present their works in social media and elsewhere. And I hope other fans will too (and I think they do... the BJYX supertopic hasn't skipped a step through all of this, and is steadily heading to 4 million turtles).
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