“Rather than blame yourself, blame others instead”

“Rather than blame yourself, blame others instead” is Shen Tang’s most pointed formulation of a recurring ethic: self-reflection should not become automatic self-sacrifice. She uses the expression to redirect blame toward the people who actually caused a problem, making it at once comic, consoling, and quietly defiant. In the scene where it is spoken, the phrase transforms a gaming dispute into a broader statement about how Shen Tang intends to live amid hostile spectators, careless allies, and an entertainment industry eager to make her the scapegoat.

Origin in a Hostile Game

The expression arises after Shen Tang joins Miao Miao for a game of King of Glory. Miao Miao is already a gaming companion, and another player, Cool Tyrannosaurus Rex, is present in the room. Shen Tang is placed alone in the bottom lane, where the opposing marksman and support repeatedly harass her while the enemy mid-laner and jungler also gank her, nearly diving her beneath the second tower. Miao Miao helps several times, but the couple on Shen Tang’s team never comes to the bottom lane.

The imbalance is reflected in the score. With the team standing at 0–3, Shen Tang asks the jungler to come and gank the bottom lane. Instead of helping, Hao answers with insults, questioning how she could have died so many times and crudely implying that her rank was obtained by using sexual favors. The exchange therefore contains two kinds of attack: a tactical refusal to cooperate and a gendered attempt to discredit Shen Tang’s competence. Her later maxim responds to both at once.

Consolation Through Reassigned Blame

Miao Miao feels guilty because she believes her wording was clumsy and that she failed to defend Shen Tang during the quarrel. Shen Tang rejects that misplaced guilt. She tells Miao Miao not to overthink the incident, identifies the couple as the problem, and insists that Miao Miao should not blame herself. The quoted expression gives that reassurance its memorable shape: instead of accepting responsibility merely because she feels bad, Miao Miao should recognize who behaved badly.

The line is humorous because it reverses the familiar moral instruction to examine one’s own faults first. Yet it is not presented as an excuse for refusing all responsibility. In this particular conflict, the evidence has already established that Shen Tang was isolated in her lane, repeatedly targeted, and denied assistance before being insulted for the resulting deaths. The maxim is consequently less a defense of selfishness than a demand for accurate moral accounting. It distinguishes genuine self-criticism from the submissive habit of apologizing for another person’s aggression.

Cool Tyrannosaurus Rex immediately praises Shen Tang after hearing her speak, calling Sister Monkey awesome. That reaction shows how the expression functions socially: it converts an embarrassing confrontation into a moment of solidarity. Shen Tang’s advice does not merely settle Miao Miao’s emotions; it creates a shared attitude among players who recognize the absurdity of blaming the person who was abandoned and attacked.

A Principle Against Scapegoating

The expression gains additional force from Shen Tang’s wider circumstances. In this life she is a Z-list celebrity whose public image has been consumed by persistent online rumors. Her company’s public-relations team pairs her with every male celebrity she has worked with in order to exploit attention, while scandalous labels portray her as a disruptive presence whom the entertainment industry avoids. She is preparing to leave the business, but the pattern surrounding her is already clear: public narratives assign fault quickly, and Shen Tang is repeatedly positioned as the convenient object of condemnation.

Against that background, “Rather than blame yourself, blame others instead” sounds like a miniature rebellion against the machinery of scapegoating. It refuses the assumption that the most visible or vulnerable person must be responsible for every disturbance. The phrase also explains why Shen Tang’s response to insults is more forceful than conciliatory. She does not allow the language of reputation, rank, or public hostility to dictate the truth of an encounter; she examines conduct, identifies the aggressor, and then acts on that judgment by pulling the couple back into the room, cursing them out further, and kicking them from the game.

Relation to Shen Tang’s Everyday Defiance

The same preference for concrete judgment appears in other aspects of Shen Tang’s life. Her marriage agreement with Gu Huaian is structured around appearances rather than conventional marital duties: she receives five million per month, charges living expenses to her husband’s card, and is promised a 200-million settlement when the two-year agreement ends. Its supplementary terms require her, except when necessary, to remain at least three meters from Gu Huaian and prohibit physical contact. These arrangements make visible the gap between social performance and private reality, much as the gaming scene exposes the gap between a player’s visible score and the actual causes of that score.

Shen Tang also handles ordinary pressures through active rather than submissive management. After sleeping until noon, she eats too much of Tao Sister’s sumptuous low-fat meal and then exercises on a yoga mat while checking Weibo. When hostile private messages appear, she logs out and creates a small account whose recommendations are filled with attractive men and women. The gesture does not solve the entertainment industry’s rumors, but it shows the same instinct as the expression: do not let an external judgment dictate the entire emotional field.

Her gaming identity continues to develop through repeated matches. Miao Miao invites her to play again, and when Shen Tang logs into King of Glory after several days away, she discovers that Gu Huaian is online and has already reached the King rank, though she does not know whether he achieved it himself or had someone boost the account. In another match, Shen Tang and Gu Huaian are paired with two girls who main mage and support and a boy who has three jungler heroes. The boy begins scolding as soon as he enters, recalling the earlier pattern in which gaming language becomes a vehicle for status judgment and abuse. The maxim therefore belongs to a recurring social world, not to a single isolated joke.

Meaning and Narrative Function

The expression condenses Shen Tang’s method of survival into a deliberately memorable reversal. She does not deny that mistakes exist; she denies that remorse alone proves responsibility. In the King of Glory episode, the phrase protects Miao Miao from absorbing the couple’s wrongdoing, protects Shen Tang from accepting a misogynistic explanation for a structurally bad game, and gives the bystander Cool Tyrannosaurus Rex a reason to admire her.

Its larger narrative role is to establish Shen Tang as someone who resists imposed identities. She is publicly branded a scandal magnet, privately bound by a marriage contract whose terms regulate distance and touch, and repeatedly placed in situations where other people expect her to perform the role assigned to her. Her maxim answers those pressures with a simple redistribution of attention: look outward, inspect conduct, and hold the responsible party accountable. What sounds like a comic piece of gaming banter thus becomes a concise statement of her refusal to confuse guilt with virtue.