u know how people (rightfully) leap to wei wuxian’s defense when someone tries to say that he’s stupid because 1) he is a quite literally a genius and 2) there is no reason for him to have assumed that lan wangji wanted to be more than friends. well i’m abt to do the same for shen qingqiu. he’s not stupid for not figuring out how to con the system, he’s not stupid for not realizing what was going on with binghe, and for all intents and purposes him acting out of assumption because of the plot of pidw was not an act of stupidity, but survival. the tragedy of scum villain is that shen qingqiu couldn’t have known better (like the book literally says “in this world, there is no ‘if only i had known’”). the tragedy of scum villain is that he assumes he knows what the plot is. the tragedy of scum villain is that the system is a neutral yet vague force that leads shen qingqiu to doing what he does. u just can’t suspend ur disbelief enough to see that shen qingqiu doesn’t know he’s in a genre subversion romance novel; he thinks he’s in a survival horror novel.