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When dealing with the difficulties of being a celebrity couple, there are some things that come more as expectations than proper hindrances.
Interviewers like to spring all sorts of surprising questions on their subjects, but it’s not like Su Mucheng and Zhou Zekai are the first ever couple to face this, and there are whole teams dedicated to managing their public images. The standard questions throughout the history of interviews will obviously have standard answers, planned to the letter so as to best appeal to their fans and maintain popularity. Simple things like “how did you get together,” for example, don’t require any thought. Whatever the truth is, the answer has long since been decided.
If the ready-made answer is fake, though, then what is real? It’s not as if the real answer could be exactly groundbreaking, but, once asked, anybody would at least start to consider it.
Strictly speaking, the answer is simple enough. It starts when one of them asks if they could be together, should be together, for real. It starts like any relationship, with a question and an answer. They’re only human.
Obviously, this is not what reporters want to hear. No one wants a technical answer that applies to anyone, especially when, for these two, by the time they got to asking it was more of a formality than anything else. When people ask where a relationship started, they don’t want to know about the asking, they want to know about the development. Where did it all begin? Easing into a relationship is all well and good, but where did it start?
The answer is simple there, too, though. It’s a celebrity relationship with a tale told a thousand times, anyone could say it.
It starts when Su Mucheng and Zhou Zekai are cast as the leads in the same drama. Their characters have a romance, and then, eventually, so do they. A story so standard in the entertainment industry one might as well not have answered at all, really. Even relationships built just to hype the show get backgrounds like this.
Theirs, of course, really is a little different. This is where PR will take it, but everyone knows it isn’t the whole truth. The fans will obviously piece it together anyway, so it’s no secret, but PR has chosen their answer. For them, it starts there.
Really, any fan paying attention will say it starts with the decision to cast Zhou Zekai as the lead of a drama.
Zhou Zekai is a model rather than an actor, and while he’s done well enough in commercials that it’s clearly not impossible for him to act, no one would expect him to be cast as a lead. But this is a drama based on Glory, so if they can get him onboard, why wouldn’t they? Cloud Piercer may not be made in his image, but the figures of Zhou Zekai in Cloud Piercer’s armor always sold better than the original models, anyway; it’s unlikely anyone will have a problem with it.
Su Mucheng as the female lead is set from the beginning, given Dancing Rain’s obvious resemblance and her own popularity as an actress, so the two former faces of the Alliance are reunited as the faces of this drama, becoming the leads in the plot. The story is actually well-written; neither of them have any complaints about the paths their characters are intended to take. They’re both the type to work hard at things they care about, and they do care about this—about acting, about their characters, about Glory. They rehearse repeatedly, Su Mucheng patient with Zhou Zekai’s perfectionism. She’s well aware he works more comfortably when he knows exactly which words and expressions are expected of him, and she doesn’t mind.
Through rehearsals, they develop the kind of implicit understanding and easy interactions necessary to show off this relationship, and in time spent together they can share looks over inaccuracies, embellishments, or even One Autumn Leaf’s portrayal, a mix of the personalities of Sun Xiang and Ye Xiu that’s just too funny to anyone that knows them. They come from the same background, they fit together like it’s comfortable—their shift into a romantic relationship doesn’t bring much surprise to anyone, really. With how little Zhou Zekai spoke to anyone else and how at ease he is with her, no one at all thinks it strange. The stranger thing, really, is that a man so shy turned to modeling as his main career in the first place.
In a business wild with attention on celebrities, of course he clings to the familiar and the comfortable, but if it’s that daunting to him—why is he even there?
So maybe that’s where it really starts, with Zhou Zekai realizing that he doesn’t have the ability to coach or teach when it comes to Glory, was never really the strategic backbone of Samsara, and doesn’t have the personality to be a commentator or a journalist. So many people joked that he could make a career based solely on his face, though, and Zhou Zekai did enough advertising to know he doesn’t actually hate it. No one needs a model to talk, and there’s so much that can be said with just actions—so much that people want him to say through only actions, just like with Glory. Glory gave him a way to speak with actions alone, and now that he’s moving beyond it, what better way to go than another profession that can give him the same?
But he might not have thought of it, or even known where to start, if it weren’t for Su Mucheng so successfully taking the path of the entertainment industry before him.
Instead, then, it starts with Su Mucheng, finally passing on her Dancing Rain to be taken to greater heights in Happy, fulfilled, nostalgic, but with no regrets. Dancing Rain deserves to rise higher, but Su Mucheng has done what she can in Glory, gone as far as she can go. It’s time for her to move on.
She goes to meet Ye Xiu, as she promised she would. He asks her what she wants to do next.
“What do you think?” she asks him, and his reply is as immediate as it is warming.
“Anything you want,” he tells her, casually bolstering now just as he was as her captain, and in her childhood. “Stay in Glory, a new career, nothing at all—you have the means, and you have my backing. Whatever you want to do, you can do.”
The support from her brothers has always been like this, with the hope that she’ll grow in whatever direction she wishes: She need never doubt Ye Xiu’s sincerity when it comes to this kind of thing.
She takes him up on it—not that she needs backdoors, but it is quite late in her life to enter showbiz, and getting resources with no backing at all is nothing simple, even somewhat dangerous. The entertainment industry is always a little dangerous, of course, but Su Mucheng knows well how to handle dangerous environments. She’s had years of advertising and photoshoots for sponsors and the Alliance, too, so she’s familiar enough with the camera that she isn’t worried.
As an exquisite beauty with the skills, hardworking attitude, and warm socializing ability to match, she does exceptionally well in the circle. She shows the Alliance in no uncertain terms that this is a viable future, too; when Zhou Zekai’s own skill has reached the end of what he can do, he’s inspired to look to her for guidance, and to follow.
How could he have done that, though, if they weren’t already close enough for him to ask in the first place? In fact, it starts a little earlier, in international tournament practices and late nights spent together, working, talking, the team as a whole or in smaller groups. They have to learn coordination then, these two gunners who can’t afford to let their skills and decision-making uselessly overlap on a stage at this level, while representing their entire country. They have to learn to work together, to understand each other, and there they become friends, captains of rival teams come together in mutual respect.
However, being chosen for the international team is nothing easy, and captaining even less so, these things they already share—so it must start earlier. It starts in leading teams and hard work, in pursuing the height of Glory. It starts with becoming the best—or earlier, it starts with their debuts, taking their characters, it starts with playing. It starts with an older brother saying “I’ll teach you,” saying “what do you think of this game, of Glory?”, it starts with wanting to be a little closer to loved ones, a little farther from the rest of the world. Maybe it starts all the way back then, when they know nothing of each other at all, when someone lights a spark of passion, or desire to grow, or even earlier when their caretakers stay up late on computers to give them the chance to have free time, to follow their own dreams, maybe it starts with family, and with love.
Whether or not it starts with family and love, that’s definitely where it ends. It ends in coming home to each other, in tacit understanding and emotion that doesn’t need words to explain. It ends with two people sitting next to each other, comfortable, neither bothering the other. It ends in warmth and home and happiness, in knowing there’s someone to rely on, someone to share a life with, in this, in just them. So maybe it doesn’t matter where, exactly, it starts. They’re happy enough here, where it ends.
(Though that, too, might not be the end. Maybe it ends with a child, and their own little family. Maybe it ends with bringing new life and hope and passion into the world, in a little existence all their own. Maybe it ends with a child looking up at them with bright eyes, asking to learn what they know, asking what game this is, if they can play along, too. Wanting to be just like them.
Maybe that’s where it ends.)
(Or maybe that’s where it starts.)