Dragon's Hoard

dragon's hoard

More fanart of The Untamed

“Why do you ship Jingluo” I’ll ship Luocha with just about anyone interesting enough but Jing Yuan and Luocha have a fascinating dynamic in the fact that Luocha outsmarted Jing Yuan. Sure we see Jing Yuan soften when faced with his old friends again but he never loses control of the situation. He truly is deceiving, seemingly uninvolved until you realize just how many of these events he's orchestrated like a chess match. In the end, all the characters are merely pieces.

Yanqing gets clowned on a lot for getting bullied by other characters but it’s really no wonder when you understand it’s because he’s yet to realize that it isn’t necessarily Jing Yuan’s physical power with a weapon that makes him formidable but his strategic plannings. Of course Yanqing can’t beat Blade or Dan Heng or Jingliu, he’s constantly trying to go the route of brute force because he thinks that’s how the General usually does it when we've really only seen him overpower an enemy with brute force once and it was Cirrus and even then he toyed with her beforehand to achieve his intended outcome.

But Luocha? Luocha kept him on his toes. He didn't have a tie to Luocha that let him in and Luocha doesn't have an openly shared goal like Kafka and Blade. Jing Yuan could let them go because he recognized they weren't there to harm the Xianzhou and he needed them but Luocha truly is a mystery, a man who's suspicious and even more suspiciously clean. Lucoha can't be pinned down, his behavior is baffling, and even from a more meta standpoint I see a lot of people who like Luocha say they were drawn to his character because he's so shrouded in unknowns. And Luocha is well aware of the effects he has, he acts off enough to keep the General distracted by him but innocent enough to keep him at bay. By the time Jing Yuan makes his move it's too late because he played into Luocha's hands, because unknown to the General, Luocha was the one on the other side of the chess board all along not Phantylia or Kafka. They were both on equal footing all along and Jing Yuan was non the wiser until Luocha declared checkmate.

Going into this chess analogy Luocha was never the king piece and that was Jing Yuan's mistake. He didn't realize Luocha was one of a pair and assumed him to be the king piece and as such didn't notice that Luocha was actually protecting and helping a different king piece: Jingliu. The queen is the most powerful piece on the board, she can move the most spaces in any direction she wants, and that's exactly how Luocha operated.

I'm so excited to go back to the Xianzhou to continue this storyline because not only is Luocha my favorite character but also his interactions with others are just so damn interesting and I don't think Jing Yuan is going to let him go to trial knowing what he knows now. I don't think the two of them are done with each other yet.

A few days late, but I wrote a silly jingluo oneshot for mid autumn. ao3 is not loading for me so I will add the fic tags later