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Saw a clip from 2.5 patch
Dan Heng telling Taoran even after reincarnation he will still be the same person.
The fuck is miHoyo trying to do here?
Are they having trouble keeping their own lore straight or are they ret-conning? Is there some extra context that's missing? (I know that this is on context of the memory potion, which Dan Heng also experienced. But Dan Heng insists he is not the same person while claiming Taoran will remain the same, so which one is it you fucking tsundere? And no, individual variation in response to the treatment isn't enough to explain the difference, because Dan Heng is saying he's speaking from personal experience.)
I agree with the OP, Jing Yuan needs to call Dan Heng on his BS. Are you or are you not the same person?! (But this also feeds into the interpretation that Dan Heng is jealous of Dan Feng when it comes to friendship with Jing Yuan given how insistent he is about keeping the identities separated while also apparently internally accepting he's...the same? I swear miHoyo storytelling drives me up a wall.)
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Trial time probably depends on the complexity of the case. Dan Feng's case probably took a long time because lots of people were involved and much deal trading was happening. Plus, it involves the top leadership of Vidyadhara who have some degree of autonomy, which means even more levels of negotiation. Meanwhile, use of illegal substances probably is far more straightforward and a much shorter trial.
Ending the Imbibitor Lunae line. I think the lineage is the actual issue that was discussed. Dan Feng was going to die, that was non-negotiable. But whether Imbibitor Lunae is allowed to continue was the real question. Ending IL means Luofu Vidyadhara would need to select a new 龙尊 to take over, which could result in a bloody internal succession battle that further diminish the population size. (They were ready to murder Bailu over this. Like murder-murder, not forced molting.) So there was likely real concern over whether the expediency of eliminating IL for good is worth the risk of succession conflict.
I mean I get that technically Dan Heng being exiled is not that much different from killing IL in terms of succession politicking, but having the guy alive still means, in the minds of the old guard, a chance of restoring the old line and thus tamp down on the ambitions of would be successors. The psychological effect of knowing "the rightful king" (as it were) is still out there is a pretty strong deterent.
I mean fair, but if we assume IL's egg takes several hundred years to hatch, that raises a political question: what happens to the political leadership when IL is an egg? Like a few decades away, sure, you can recover political power from that. But 500 years? There's no way to have stable transition of power. The Vidyadhara society should by all rights be in complete shambles. I mean look at the current state of Luofu Vidyadhara after not having a leader for 700 years, they've split into 3 major factions that are ready to kill each other over the throne.
From just a practical standpoint, I don't think IL hatch speed can afford to take a long time. Based on the time it takes to solidify political control, I'd say 70 years tops.
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I dunno, if it was just that, just a dismissal from her job and maybe pulling her credentials would've been enough. Outright exile seems to indicate there was more going on.
Also, Lingsha says Yunhua was exiled due to being framed. Obviously, she's not referring to drugging Dan Heng, because Lingsha didn't even know about that incident. So the stuff she was being officially tried for was other stuff. May well have gotten political since it centered around the power balance of the Alchemy Commission.
> Ending IL means Luofu Vidyadhara would need to select a new 龙尊 to take over
Wut? What are you talking about?
If you are talking about the titular position of high elder, Dan Feng already named Bailu his successor. That had nothing to do with his sentencing of forced molting or when it was decided to be carried out.
I'm talking about the issue *WHEN* the forced molting took place, not the *WHY* he was sentenced. If they took 500 years to actually decide on the sentencing of forced molting, that's taking the hypothetical political trading to a completely absurd degree, and such a government should be completely incapable of doing anything important. If they decided on the sentencing after a few years or even a few decades (the max I could suspend disbelief for), that still means the forced molting should've been enforced 600+ years ago.
> what happens to the political leadership when IL is an egg?
Dunno, it's not like we have a concrete example. Maybe usually the high elder has a faster rebirth rate, and this time it was slowed because the inheritance was split between Dan Heng and Bailu. Maybe in future patches they'll tell us more.
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According to the entry of the potion (前尘回梦针):
So by law, the sentence is forced molting. Exile is getting off easy.
We actually have no clue when he named her the successor. Like, did he know the dead abomination was going to turn into a viable Vidyadhara? How would he be sure of this? Since the process was experimental, what was he going to do if the egg turns out to be a dud?
I would assume he could only name her the successor after confirming the egg would hatch. That suggests he'd have to be alive for at least that long.
In the mean time, his trial still has to go on and there will still need to be debate over what to do with Imbibitor Lunae line. Even if we assume the succession has been named before arrest (which, again, sounds iffy due to not having any idea of whether the experiment would be a success), then preservation of IL would be even more problematic.
Imagine a king has a prince that should've been the rightful heir, but the king gets deposed and the ministers claim that actually his majesty named the princess the heir instead...there'll definitely be people who want to install the prince, simply because he's available. At that point, it'll be much more politically stable to kill the prince along with the king to eliminate succession arguments.
I'm pointing out that even at the end of Dan Feng's lifespan, the question of death vs molting would still be relevant. You were saying that it wouldn't matter at that point, but I think it matters regardless of when the sentence was carried out.
As for the exact timing...
500 years may be excessive, but there are cases of criminal (murder) trials that go on for literally 60 years that still never get fully settled IRL, where our average life expectancy is only 84 years. In US alone, many inmates die of old age waiting for their trials to reach a conclusion. Political prisoners can go through easily 40 years of trials without results on the regular. I imagine a complicated case like Dan Feng's isn't resolved in one go, but rather goes through trial, retrial, appeal, etc.
I mean the guy is in prison and not at risk of escape or jailbreak. That gives bureaucrats all the time they want to litigate a satisfying result.
I think you'd be surprised how inefficient the criminal trial system can be while still having a functional government.
There's also the issue of whether the sentence will be carried out immediately. It's also possible the reason the process took a long time is that Ten-Lords decided on execution, but the preceptors appealed the decision, Jing Yuan steps in to ask for a stay of execution to debate the issue further, blah blah back and forth for a couple hundred years. This is pretty normal both IRL and in fiction.
Plus, even death sentences aren't immediate. Just because the sentence is finalized doesn't mean its carried out immediately. Over half of US death row inmates (aka prisoners who received death penalty) wait OVER 18 YEARS before the execution is carried out. A similar thing could happen to Dan Feng, except the wait is like 200 years instead of 18.
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I mean, we don't know Bailu's age either. We also don't know what happened after the monster was killed and somehow a viable egg came out of it.
But the common presumption was that once there was a viable Vidyadhara egg with (half of) the power of the high elder inheritance in it, it was a viable candidate for succession. *shrug*
> I'm pointing out that even at the end of Dan Feng's lifespan, the question of death vs molting would still be relevant.
I'm not talking about death vs molting at that point though. I'm talking about the point after they already sentenced him to molt and not death, and subsequently when that molting was carried out. Because if they dragged it on too long and past his natural lifespan, he's going to do the natural rebirth automatically. What's the point of forced molting if they wait til that point or after that happens? So of course this all needs to take place before the estimated end of his lifespan.
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Would be funny if Bailu is technically older than Dan Heng... (Since we know she was given a medicine to suppress her aging, so her appearance doesn't reflect her age, even by Vidyadhara standards.)
I thought Dan Feng named her the successor? That implies he gave verbal/written indication. If her becoming the successor was automatic due to having powers, then Dan Feng had no real agency in making Bailu the successor, seeing as Dan Feng wasn't sure what was coming out of his experiment.
Sure, but we have no clue how much natural lifespan remained when Dan Feng was arrested. The only reason fandom thought he didn't have very long left was because of one folk song, which we know are not reliable accounts of anything.
If Dan Heng is only 30 years old, then Vidyadhara development is much faster than fans thought, making Dan Feng's age (based on appearance) on the young end during arrest. That means he'd have easily another 400-500 years to spend rotting in prison.
I don't think it's likely, but then again, I don't think miHoyo themselves know when any of this stuff happens either, so they just handwave away everything and end up with weird timescales.
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> I thought Dan Feng named her the successor?
Sure, but there's a log of wiggle room to interpret when it happened, because it was all so vague and mysteriously stated.
Like, we don't know if she was an egg at the time, hatched, or some other weird state...
> If her becoming the successor was automatic due to having powers
No, it's not automatic. Dan Feng naming her successor was important, in terms of internal Vidyadhara tradition/law/whatever. That action has to be locked in, for her to have the current high elder position. It's not something anyone else other than Dan Feng can confer, and it was specifically Dan Feng who conferred it.
> If Dan Heng is only 30 years old, then Vidyadhara development is much faster than fans thought
Or has greater variation in growth rates per rebirth...
I mean, there was one readable who had a dude complaining about being defeated by a fellow Vidyadhara cloud knight trainee who only came up to his chest (so child-sized similar to Bailu), but was over 80 years old. But if Dan Heng is only in his 30s, he's definitely not child-sized.
There's also a kid-sized Vidyadhara on Herta's Space station, a fully accredited researcher and everything. But I find it hard to believe she's actually a kid (mentally), since I doubt the Xianzhou would've allowed actual minors (mentally) to go off-world by themselves without a chaperone.
Let's throw Taoran in there while we're at it... He presumably went through natural rebirth some time after Dan Feng's molting. But he now looks older than Dan Heng. *shrug*
> I don't think it's likely, but then again, I don't think miHoyo themselves know when any of this stuff happens either
Yes, I expect we will end up with self contradictory timeline in the end. Maybe it's best they stop trying to fill in the blanks. -_-
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Hm...interesting. I guess that's more an implication due to that medication existing on the same item that contained the entry on the memory potion, but there's nothing explicit.
Yeah, so the most likely time this happened must have been while he was in jail, as I mentioned it doesn't make sense to name his experiment the successor before he can confirm it was a success.
Based on common sense, someone would have to inform him that his abomination dragon turned into an egg and it shows signs of becoming a viable Vidyadhara or that Bailu already hatched to confirm the success of his experiment. At which point Dan Feng can name her the successor since he's...well, in jail. But that's reasonable and logical, so miHoyo probably will write something completely different.
Very fair point. Maybe traveling on the Express stunted Dan Heng's growth.
Or maybe the reality is miHoyo sucks at writing.
This is my constant ambivalence when it comes to Xianzhou. Lore-wise it's the most interesting, but the more story happens there the worse the story gets.