It’s valid to feel frustrated with Song Yi Meng’s emotional opacity, especially when juxtaposed with the ML’s raw vulnerability. But to call her cruel or emotionally arrogant is to overlook the deeper architecture of her character: she is not a cold wall, but a woman surviving a collapse of reality, agency, and identity.
Song Yi Meng isn’t insisting her lens is the only correct one out of pride. She’s clinging to it because it’s the only thing anchoring her in a world that’s fundamentally unreal to her. Imagine waking up inside a story where everyone else treats fiction as life and expects you to play along. Her refusal to validate the ML’s reality isn’t a dismissal, it’s a defense mechanism. She’s not denying his pain; she’s trying to survive hers.
Yes, Song Yi Meng may hold emotional power over the ML, but that doesn’t make her emotionally secure. He clings to her not just out of longing, but because she represents a rupture in his world, a rare figure who saw and cherished the gentler side of him, Li Shi Liu. Yet crucially, SYM has no idea that Li Shi Liu and Nan Heng are the same person. From the very beginning, Nan Heng has consistently presented her with his most manipulative, domineering self, reinforcing her distrust and emotional resistance.
Song Yi Meng is not responsible for his fixation, nor is she obligated to soothe it. Her boundaries, however, imperfectly drawn, are acts of survival, not cruelty. She’s navigating a world where truth is fragmented, and trust is a dangerous luxury. Her emotional distance isn’t a rejection of his humanity; it’s a reflection of how little of it she’s actually allowed to see.
The few glimpses she does get Nan Heng tenderness begin to soften her stance, until he, once again does something to tarnish his reputation. By using Nan Heng as a shield to protect Li Shi Liu’s image, he reinforces the very distrust she’s been trying to dismantle. It’s a tragic loop, just as she starts to reconsider, he reignites the fear that everything kind in him is a lie. Her coldness isn’t indifference it’s the cost of being repeatedly burned by a man who keeps hiding behind masks and manipulating her.
The idea that she “never gave him a chance to come clean” overlooks the psychological stakes for her. She’s not just angry at Nan Heng, she’s terrified of what his deception means about the nature of this world. If she tells him everything, she risks collapsing the fragile logic she’s built to survive. Her silence isn’t punitive, it’s protective. And yes, that protection hurts him, but it’s not born of malice.
The paper world is real to him, not to her. That asymmetry is the tragedy. But it’s also the brilliance of the narrative. Yi Meng’s empathy may seem lacking, but her internal struggle, are profound as shown during the river and campfire scene. She began to feel the weight of these lives. Her journey isn’t about instant compassion; it’s about learning to see beyond her own survival.
Yi Meng speaks in riddles not to confuse, but because she’s translating between worlds. Her language is fractured because her reality is fractured. And while it’s true she makes many decisions unilaterally, that’s not a disregard for agency, it’s a reflection of her isolation. She doesn’t trust the rules of this world, so she acts outside them. That’s not arrogance, it’s desperation.
You’re right that the river scene was a breakthrough. But it wasn’t just a moment of softness, it was a moment of narrative clarity. It showed that Yi Meng is struggling, just not in ways that are always visible. Her pain is internal, quiet, and often misread as coldness. But it’s there. And it’s growing.
Final Thought
Song Yi Meng isn’t a perfect heroine. She’s a woman caught between fiction and reality, trying to preserve her sense of self in a world that demands she surrender it. Her flaws are real, but they’re not cruel. They’re human. And that humanity, however buried, is what makes her so relatable.
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