"Maybe you were doing it in a straight way"—definitely not—"but for me it was in the way where I want to lick my king's throat. I did not make Bingge gay on purpose, though. That's so fucked up. In my original outline, he was just supposed to end up alone—I guess maybe I was thinking of him as gay? Like, that's an obvious reason why he never would have gotten married? And it would explain why he felt so displaced. You know, like him being a demon is kind of a metaphor for a queer identity, because he's an outsider. So maybe after I made it a stallion novel, that persisted?" Shang Qinghua didn't know things he deleted could still make it into PIDW. That's harrowing. He doesn't want to think about how many Mobei-jun sex pollen drafts he has in his laptop trash.