I'm rereading my whole #TGCFThoughts liveblogging of my reread of tgcf and there are so many, like, interesting thematic and character conclusions I drew in there that I don't even remember! because there's just SO MUCH in this book that you can lose track of even really important thoughts

and actually, this time going through it all I was able to piece together some bits about one theme's overarching relevance! and it’s about xie lian’s relative experience of power/powerlessness

in arc four you find out that one of bai wuxiang’s explicit goals with xie lian is to teach him that he’s powerless in the face of many things.... and in arc two, with the whole story of the yong’an drought and everything that followed, I’d had the thought that at the time of xl’s second banishment when he deliberately asks for his cursed shackles, in that moment he wants to not have the power to do anything, so that nobody (himself included) will EXPECT him to do things that are beyond his power --