hua cheng and xie lian really like diminishing their traumatic experiences and i thinks it’s interesting how different their reasonings are
hua cheng basically acts like hong honger and his time as a ghost flame never existed. like he could’ve never been such a helpless entity. he has spent basically all of his time as a ghost building up his reputation so he never has to be that helpless and useless again. it’s as if he acknowledges that he was once useless, who’s to say he still isn’t?
xie lian’s case isn’t as explicitly show but i think it’s a mix of two things. the first being his memory. now in the story it’s described as selective memory where he actively chooses to forget the bad so he can remember the good but putting him in a more realistic scenario; xie lian has been severely traumatized through his existence and trauma comes with memory lose. disassociation also commonly happens during traumatic events which would add to the memory issues. it’s possible xie lian, due to a mix of disassociation, selective remembering and general mental capacity for retaining information, simply can’t remember how bad the events in his life were. he obviously knows the events happened but the smaller details, his emotions at the time, the specifics could truly be lost on him so the events don’t seem as severe. the second thing that i think causes this minimizing is that xie lian sees others issues as bigger than his own. paradise manor burning over his injury. the truth of the gilded banquet over his 100 years buried. bc of his self destruction, his problems are smaller than other peoples
