Luo Binghe: Original Drafts Edition! Who and why?
“[…] in fact, in his original outline, Bing-gē hadn’t even had a romance plotline; he had been doomed to fade away, alone and unaging forever.”
— The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System, Vol. 4 (Mo Xiang Tong Xiu)
The drafts version of Binghe! Not Bing-gē, nor Bing-mei, but a secret, third thing! (I’m partial to Bing-xióng (兄) myself, just for thematic cohesion. Bing-mei remains as he is: Shizun’s special glass-heart maiden.)
So! Who is this elusive, mythical Binghe we never got the chance to meet? What is he? How do I get to pick this one’s brains?
Why is he haunting me! What does he want! So much to think about.
Listen: I love my trash sons, both the racoon and wet dog variations, but I am curious about this handsome demon lord who did not bed thousands, and did not steal his shizun to lovingly coax him into a loving and respectful marriage. Alas, Airplane-bro, as is custom, has left me hanging.
The solitary quote above has been floating around my brainspace for months. Intermittently, I would look up at the sky and sigh a big sad dog sigh, and think of this lonely demon-man emperor who seems to be both perfectly representative of No-Shizunitis Suffering Binghe, and on the exact opposite end of the line. I have spent many a night trying to rearrange the blocks of both SVSSS and PIDW like a sad toddler with no plan but plenty of amorphous longing.
Thus, Bing-xióng. My beloved new toy.
We know he is left alone and unaging. This means that:
He does not marry even once. (Sorry, Other Bing Variants. This one came broken.)
He is not defeated, killed, or left to suffer his not-father’s fate of sulking under a mountain.
From 1) we can assume two more things! Xin Mo either gets fixed/doesn’t influence this Binghe the same way, or: Xin Mo is completely written off à la Airplane Retconning, making Binghe potentially even more individually powerful than his younger counterparts.
(Or he just. Takes people’s cultivation ad-infinitum. Interesting thought, but too straight-forward for my tastes. Airplane’s thoughts? Unknowable.)
From 2) we can also assume Binghe cannot die, is under the influence of the Protagonist Halo unto infinity, and will only be put out of his misery once the heat death of the universe deems it a worthwhile endeavour. Either that or the story ends, but. It tickles a miserable part of my brain pink to think Binghe will not be let off even then.
Anyway. Bing-xióng, of course, has the same source material to work off of. Up until the Abyss, and including it, the plotline should be if not the same, adjacent enough to be indistinguishable.
However. This means:
Bing-xióng never got coerced into sex by Qin Wanyue, thus not starting him on the path of sex-dependency/addiction, avoiding Bing-gē’s fate by virtue of the Butterfly Effect. (Read this post because it explains Bing-gē's whole thing better than a lot of things I've seen.)
Again, Xin Mo implications.
Alternate Universe Shenanigans make an appearance. (Shen Jiu’s fever and death was actually meant to happen, Bing-gē just got very, very unlucky and his Universe’s Yue Qingyuan very, very lucky. For a few years. Either that or there is a Shen Yuan for every Binghe! Again: sorry, Bing-gē. You need to find your own. Middle child issues…)
Once the drafts/original outline got lost, all bets are off and now the characters become real people, without narrative influence. This also has the very fucked up implication that Bing-gē is actually a result of exclusively external forces and would have never gone down that path if not forced onto it by Airplane’s unwitting hands. I do and do not love this version. Very Mo Ran-esque, if looked at from afar and squinting.
Other options I’m either too not-high to think, or too high to put together. (Cold medicine is insane?)
I am fascinated by this… Schrödinger’s Binghe. A jaded, lonely emperor left in the ashes of his world, gazing upon his own history and finding fucking nothing and no one. Metaphorically and, like, practically, if I’m understanding Airplane’s musings correctly. Isolated, cursed by his own blood in a completely new and fucked up way!
I need Airplane to speak with me for like, half an hour. This is paramount to my mental health, I’m losing my braincells by the hour.
What happened to this impervious, cocky, badass demon bastard lord to become so alone? How did it happen? Why did it not happen to the other two, or at least Bing-gē, who has had every horrible and shitty thing possible and impossible piled onto his head? What the fuck is up with Xin Mo? Why isn’t it eating away at Big Bro Luo? Or, worse: why is it eating away at him in such a way that instead of turning into a violent yet charismatic, horror-creature of a man, it turns him into the existential terror-fate I’ve contemplated and abhorred since I was seven?
Tianlang-jun as the final boss. Discovering Huan Hua Palace Master’s crimes, deceit and… stuff. Perhaps even uncovering Shen Jiu’s backstory.
Ooh! Worse! Or better? What if he finds out everything, after having followed Bing-gē’s path, and simply… gives up? A grown up Bing-gē, minus the marriage and surrogate-lover part(s).
(More unlikely than other options, but still there, I guess.)
Fucking insane of MXTX to do this to me, personally and specifically.
I can only speculate forever, I guess! Left… alone and pondering forever.
So. Not a Bing-gē, and not a Bing-mei. A Bing-xióng, if you will.
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