wishes
secret intimate wish xm: just wants to be zy's pretty little wife (he is pretty but not little... very tall) but just wants to be hold hands with zy while wearing a sundress flirting and twirling around playfully and in love. nothing else really matters to him, this is his most hidden and unachievable dream. he doesn't care about being powerful. he just wants to be a spoiled helpless little wife who is happy and protected
zy: his wish is that even though life is shit in many ways he cares about the people he's met in his poor peasant gritty neighborhood and life and doesn't regret it. shit Sucks but the people don't. if he grew up with a silver spoon in his mouth, he would never dare look down, and he'd spend his life stepping on the people he loves now.
the only thing he wishes to change is that he could just live as what he thinks a woman should be. which is that nothing effectively changes, except he takes fairy estrogen, not even to "pass" just bc he wants to, and maybe do what xm does and use she/her pronouns sometimes, but unenforced, and be "mostly the same, just with the self-faith to be the ugly and plain woman he wanted to be since he was a child"
shiragiku is very lonely and at heart very childish. her ultimate wish is to have a forever playmate and opponent and rival and Friend
she misses suzu very much and at the end of empress xianming she realizes that she lost, and xianming surpassed her, bc she is a sociopath but xianming is a dragon, a monster, and a berserker who could commit a massacre, and she at heart is just a girl who wants to play. she has a lot to think about and goes off to wander the world
snixiy: this is also very !!!!! for zhouyu, it makes perfect sense that all he wants is to be a woman not even like a gorgeous woman like xianming but rather just. a woman at all, in his own way that doesnβt involve attaining a specific state of being beyond whatever he Wants to be.
he lacks the self-faith to do that π he just wishes he had Enough to be the plain and normal woman he always wanted to be
his only wish is to be satisfied with being. unremarkable
for zy ambition has always hurt him. he doesn't want it anymore
but sometimes in some worlds that looks like defeat and resignation to a hostile and damaging status quo