Mysterious Lotus Casebook, Ep. 40 // The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, John Steinbeck

Thinking about how everyone wears different colours in mlc and how they're all connected...

Li xiangyi wears red. Yes it means happiness and joy and luck (ignoring the wedding symbolism for now) but it is also the colour of blood. He wears this bright, bold colour and still ends up dying on that ship.

Di feisheng's main colours are, for the sake of simplicity, black and red. Red for lxy but it's always darker and more muted on him - there's more blood symbolism for him (based purely on his reputation in the jianghu) but also more wedding symbolism compared to lxy. Black, tragically enough, corresponds with the element of water - it was a pitch-black night when he fought lxy, on a black sea, on a black ship - and that even fits with the western idea of black being for death. But he also wears bolder colours - we've seen him in purple and blue, for example - and this parallels fang duobing's outfits. Inherently a lot of the characters obsessed with the past (jiao liqiao and shan gudao, to name some) wear bold colours while characters who have left it behind/who are looking towards the future wear lighter colours (more to be said about this) and I think this is dfs turning away from the last and towards that future.

Brilliant example of this is qiao wanmian. She wears lighter colours and she gets over lxy and but I think it's important that one of her most iconic outfits is pink. Yes we all know how she and dfs are foils - this is yet another element of that. Pink is white and red: white, for death, for lxy; red, for happiness and weddings, also for lxy. Learning to live with her grief was definitely a long and lengthy process but it also helps her become her own person - she lets go of lxy and eventually learns that she has her own power, that she's strong in her own right, that she doesn't have to rely on men. She leaves xiao zijin and becomes the new leader of the new sigu sect and, while it's likely last her time to become a legend in the jianghu, she's certainly an inspiring figure.

Opposite of this is jiao liqiao. She's firmly still chasing after the past - her desire for dfs to love her back, her one-sided love rivalry with lxy. Her red is wedding red for dfs but it's also a giant fuck you to lxy - look, I'm better than you, I've got his attention and you don't. It's still true to an extent in the present, since she believes it's still dfs' attention that li lianhua wants (it is not). A-mian lets go of lxy (with some help for llh) but jiao liqiao never lets go of dfs, even when he outright rejects her. She's chasing her ideal of dfs, not who he actually is.

(I'm not going to talk about shan gudao. Same colours as dfs but the evilness is boosted to 100. He wears black and red as the classic Evil Colour Combo.)

Then we have the con man himself, li lianhua. In this new life of his he wears lighter colours - some blue, some green, but an overwhelming amount of it is white. As the show progresses he loses the blue and green. Yes he's looking at the future now but it's in the manner as someone staring down the barrel of a gun. There's nothing to say here because llh has it all planned out. He's already started dressing for his own funeral.

Lastly, the one and only fang duobing. He wears lighter colours too (in fact, he and a-mian are the only two I'd truly describe as wearing pastels). It's fascinating to note that there was no distinction between blue and green (his main colours) in old China. The symbolism of it is while it's the colour representing east (hahahahaha) it's also the colour of spring. I will never stop with the fdb/spring symbolism - he brings new life, he brings a new beginning, life will always go on if there's spring. (Spring is also the season when peach trees bloom, and isn't that something.) An interesting note is that he never wears any of li xiangyi's signature red. He really does leave lxy behind because he accepts that he's gone, because he loves li lianhua.