drive-by Guardian thoughts

[riventhorn]

 I was watching ep 3 today, and was struck once again by ZYL's people skills. The first time he meets Professor Zhang, he notes how she is overly apologetic and connects that to either low self esteem or past trauma. In contrast, Shen Wei keeps insisting that she has nothing to do with the crime, and that one of the three students who we find out later was involved in raping Professor Zhang is a "sincere and warm" person. ZYL comments that although Shen Wei has studied many living things, he is lacking in the area of studying human beings. 

Other moments also support the idea that Shen Wei does not always have great interpersonal skills. For example, the way he "comforts" Zhu Hong about her unrequited feelings for ZYL. I think he is really trying to comfort her, but is obviously doing a terrible job. 

However, I think his relationship with Li Qian is quite different in this respect. He notices that she is stressed and unhappy; he finds ways to comfort her about her grandmother, etc.  And of course, his relationship with ZYL, where he is quite observant of ZYL's emotions. 

So, I'm interpreting Shen Wei as the sort of person who does better in long-lasting, deep relationships where he spends a lot of time with an individual and comes to know them and feel comfortable with them, as opposed to ZYL who can connect with people much faster. For this interpretation, I am assuming that Shen Wei has known Li Qian for a while and she has been his grad assistant for a while too. 

In a related note, I love how swiftly Shen Wei becomes super concerned over Zhao Yunlan's health. We're only on ep 3, but Shen Wei is already chastising ZYL for eating sweets when he has a cold. <3<3<3

Comments

[extrapenguin]

Oh, yes, Shen Wei is very much better at human-ing than certain biology professors - he's not a wanky fuck who has feuds over mitochondria, he is capable of basic human interaction, he cares about things beyond his research - but when we get out of his comfort zone of how to be a human in academia, if he can't do a quick swap into the Envoy mask, he cracks in, ah, interesting ways. Like "I'm used to being hurt." He's learned to fake it and he now makes it, but he is still a space alien from 10k years ago, and that shows. (If he hadn't been handicapped like that, either he'd be a bit better due to being able to relate more instinctually to people's backgrounds, or he'd be worse due to not having to study human interaction.)

[rheasilvia]

he's not a wanky fuck who has feuds over mitochondria

LOL!! I love that - and now I really want to see the other professor in the department who IS the mitochondria-feuding wanky fuck. ;-)

Also, I have Shen Wei writing a paper about mitochondria in story #1 - I hope his colleague doesn't disagree with his conclusions!! ;-)