Butterfly Shadow's Special Issue: The Ten Best Butterfly Immersias of the Millennium

No. 3: Last Evenings on Luofu Director: Wu He Screenwriter: Wu He — I sometimes feel that life is thirty percent disappointment, thirty percent panic, thirty percent helplessness, and ten percent shared by suffering and love. — If you were given another chance, would you want to live life over again? — Of course. Hai Yuan is a Xianzhou merchant who lived to be 1100 years old and is on the verge of being stricken with mara. Now, he is almost unable to think about anything smoothly, and can only endure the nibbling away of the plague. On the eve of going to the Ten-Lords Commission to accept his end, Hai Yuan had a long dream. He dreamed that everyone who appeared in his thousand-year life was waiting for him in a vast wasteland. In the long dream, Hai Yuan discussed life, philosophy, religion, and art with the people in his memories and finally achieved reconciliation with himself. At the end of the immersia, Hai Yuan woke up at dawn and walked into the Ten-Lords Commission with a smile. Wu He is the youngest director and screenwriter to be selected for the Millennium Top Ten. He won the Best Newcomer award at the Exalting Sanctum Immersia Festival with Mount Dingjun, and won three awards of Best Immersia, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Substitution Experience at the Exalting Sanctum Immersia Festival with Last Evenings on Luofu. However, compared with the explosive box office performance of Mount Dingjun, Last Evenings on Luofu might even be considered to have not been a big hit. This is completely understandable as many people are willing to go to immersias to realize their dreams, but how many people are willing to go to immersias to really have a long dream? But there is no doubt that Last Evenings on Luofu is a truly great piece of work. It dives deep into people's hearts, explores fears and desires, and shows how a person can achieve self-consistency and reconciliation even in the last moments of their life. It can be said to be closer to an autopsy on the human condition than an immersia. Some harsher critics believe that Wu He, as a foxian director, has a wrong understanding of being mara-struck, and that there are some unscientific aspects in his treatment of dreams. In reality, Wu He didn't intend to base his work on scientific principles at all. What this work tells is by no means a "mara-stricken dream" in the literal sense, but a highly conceptualized and symbolic analysis into the psyche. It's true, foxians and Vidyadhara won't become mara-struck, but we can all see a reflection of our own lives from this immersia... All our disappointments, our sorrows, our unwillingness and reluctance — but also, an answer to the most difficult question in the world: "Why should we carry on living?" "For that percent of love."