🔥 liu'er mihou (jttw) :]

fsadfd, well @wyverwithy this is far from what most people think but it's my sustained opinion that the six-eared macaque of JTTW is one of if not the best version of this character out there. And YES I am basing this all off of implications!

I've ranted about this elsewhere but there is just something so haunting & scary & fascinating about how Xiyouji-canon LEMH is either A) a part of Sun Wukong that somehow gained sentience and is now living the life he truly wants to lead (i.e. gets to be both a yaoguai warlord AND a religious pilgrim) but does so in the most selfish and violent possible way, or B) is a different yaoguai, but one who threw away literally everything about their own original self so that they could perfectly imitate SWK, who they defined as nothing BUT selfish and violent, in a bid to be the "true" Monkey King. And the scary thing is that it almost worked! This is a "Monkey King" who not only beast his shifu into unconsciousness, used his "little" ones as his personal tools in a quest for fame and glory, but literally ate one of them! And literally no one though to suspect that this wasn't the real SWK! Either way this is some peak horror/identity crisis stuff!

Something very poignant and kind of tragic as well about how after SWK kills LEMH he tells the Buddha himself that LEMH deserved to die; the suggestion being that SWK either thinks he needed to kill a part of himself to continue the journey, or that even at this point in the journey and for all that he's trying to find other solutions besides violence to the problems he faces that there's still going to be times where that's the only option. That, or that SWK is still knows himself to be defined by the same selfishness and willingness to violence that convinced everyone that the Six-Eared Macaque was indeed him.

(plus there's still the overhanging reality that between the Demon King of Confusion and the 1,000 hunters that killing the beings who go after his loved ones has actually worked out pretty well for SWK in terms of keeping them safe. aaaaaaaaaAAAAAA).

And it does, of course, help that it's written not with any push towards one kind of moralization or interpretation over the other but something closer to "goddamn you see that shit? That was fucking crazy. Anyway I'm Wu Cheng'en."