Saw a clip from 2.5 patch

[cashew]

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.)

Comments

[tanithryudo]

My interpretation is that Dan Heng had come to a change of mind about his own feelings about his reincarnation in the aftermath of the Luofu crisis.

At the beginning of the Luofu arc, he says "I'm not him" because at that point, he actually didn't have a lot of Dan Feng's memories, and doesn't have any point of reference to *feel* that he is the same person, aside from everyone else blaming him for Dan Feng's crimes, even though legally speaking, crimes are not supposed to carry across rebirth.

Then, starting from when he had to delve into the dragon powers and unseal the Arbor, more and more of past incarnation memories started to unlock for him. IMO it may have also helped that he was now able to walk openly on the Luofu, and seeing familiar sights may also be potential triggers (unlike his childhood spent in prison).

Then the events of that PV where he faces off against his heart demon with Dan Feng's face happens somewhere in there. By the time Jingliu's companion mission rolls around, at the end when Jingliu and Blade here having it out, his question about whether he should be held accountable of his past, may honestly be him starting to waver from his original stance.

After that quest, he pretty much locked himself in his room, I guess to navel gaze. It's also why he didn't come out for the Penacony adventure. He needed time to further digest everything that happened on the Luofu.

Then, in the current arc, when revisiting the Luofu, I assume he's finished his introspection and come to a new stance on how he wants to treat his past. Which is what he displays now in the current updates.

[tanithryudo]

My beef with this conversation isn't with Dan Heng, though. It's with Taoran.

There's a few lines preceding this clip, where he outright admits to providing aid in sending the sabatoged mechs into the Shackling Prison, providing maps of the prison to the Borisin jailbreakers, as well as invisible assassins to cover their escape. He didn't say outright, but it's also clear that he was also responsible for helping get the Stellaron to trigger the Ambrosial Arbor, and helping Phantylia betray the Luofu.

Note, at this point, the Hoolay jailbreak incident alone had already caused deaths, and Hoolay is just about to start a massacre of civilians to sow further chaos / distract the generals from his next goal. So this bodycount should also be on Taoran's hands as well.

However, he's clearly confident that all he'll get is a "fixed" rebirth which will preserve his memories. That no matter what, he'll "live". There doesn't seem to be any worry about what happened to Dan Feng, where his original sentence was death. And only after intervention by the other high elders was it commuted to forced molting.

Just... I have to question what is the reason for the difference in treatment here. Is a Preceptor more valuable/important than the High Elder, despite the fact that it's the latter who's spent multiple incarnations serving the Xianzhou as warden for the Arbor? Is Taoran's crimes somehow lesser than Dan Feng, when they both fiddled with the Ambrosial Arbor? Is handing the Arbor to an Emanator of Destruction (who's on her way to become the Xianzhou Alliance's next Hunt target, btw) somehow less severe than using the Arbor to create a monster that was able to be killed?

Or is it just a matter of Taoran being able to play the political game better? He knows the right dirt to pull the right strings and make the right deals? Whereas Dan Feng, maybe he was in PTSD mode still and didn't try, but you'd think that being a political leader he should automatically come with associated social links and power structure ties and stuff that would make others be cautious of how to sentence him.

Also, Taoran is clearly certain that if he does get sentenced to forced molting, it's the equivalent of getting off scott free, meaning he also wouldn't get held accountable for his crimes after the rebirth, despite the fact that he outright admits that he's going to bypass the memory wipe. Dan Heng, however, still gets stuck growing up in jail, chained up for torture after his forced rebirth. The dichotomy here is... stark.