Birds of a Feather Flock Together

“Birds of a Feather Flock Together” is a proverb about perceived affinity: people who resemble one another tend to gather, and outsiders often judge an individual through the companions associated with them. In Shen Tang’s story, the expression becomes more than a general saying. It is a compact way of describing how scandal, publicity, friendship, professional association, and even online game teams make identity appear collective. The proverb is therefore both a social observation and a joke at Shen Tang’s own expense.

The Expression in Shen Tang’s Self-Description

The clearest use occurs in Shen Tang’s conversation with Hou Jingjing. Hou Jingjing cannot reconcile Shen Tang’s present behavior with the actress’s former reputation and tells her that she is completely different from the rumors. Shen Tang answers by distinguishing between her earlier image as a rogue and her current image as a pervert, treating both labels as unstable public judgments rather than reliable descriptions of character.

When Shen Tang adds, “Birds of a feather flock together. I just can't find any normal people around me,” the proverb becomes deliberately self-deprecating. She does not claim that she has literally chosen only abnormal companions. Instead, she turns the logic of guilt by association against herself: if the people around her seem eccentric, troublesome, or otherwise unlike ordinary social types, then perhaps the observer will conclude that she belongs with them. The joke also exposes her awareness that reputations are produced relationally. Hou Jingjing’s attempt to separate Shen Tang from the rumors is answered with a line that folds the surrounding cast back into the same comic ecosystem.

Reputation, Association, and the Entertainment Industry

The proverb also illuminates the earlier structure of Shen Tang’s career. In this life she is a Z-list celebrity whose online image is dominated by continuous rumors and hostile epithets, including accusations of being a loose tea bitch, a plastic surgery freak, a compensation scammer, and a troublemaker. Her company’s public-relations team repeatedly pairs her with male celebrities she has worked with, apparently to ride their coattails. That strategy makes her seem like an enormous malignant tumor in the entertainment industry, someone from whom others try to keep their distance.

Here, “Birds of a Feather Flock Together” describes an imposed association rather than a chosen friendship. The company groups Shen Tang with other celebrities for publicity, while the public interprets those pairings as evidence of shared character, shared scandal, or mutual opportunism. The proverb’s apparent simplicity thus conceals an unequal system: Shen Tang’s image is shaped not only by her conduct but also by corporate publicity tactics and the circulation of online rumor. Her decision to prepare to quit the business follows this pressure, even though Wang Brother reminds her that bad publicity is still publicity and that visibility can be valuable in an industry where being ignored is more dangerous than being slandered.

Gaming Circles and Social Sorting

The same principle appears in Shen Tang’s gaming relationships. After Miao Miao asks Shen Tang to play, Shen Tang opens King of Glory and waits for Miao Miao to finish her match. Miao Miao then pulls her into a room containing another player named “Cool Tyrannosaurus Rex,” showing how a casual invitation creates a temporary social group through the game’s matchmaking space.

In another match, Shen Tang is repeatedly attacked in the bottom lane while the enemy marksman and support harass her, and the enemy mid laner and jungler gank her several times. With the score at zero to three, she asks the jungler to come help, only to receive an insulting response that attacks both her skill and her sexual reputation. The exchange demonstrates how quickly game performance becomes a judgment of personal worth: rank, deaths, gendered assumptions, and accusations of being carried are collapsed into one hostile identity assigned by a teammate.

Later, Shen Tang notes that she can tolerate ordinary teammates but worries when the players are as inexperienced as Gu Huaian and his two friends. Another team consists of two girls who main mage and support and a boy who has three jungler heroes available. Shen Tang identifies the boy not through a profile detail but because he begins scolding immediately. In these scenes, the proverb operates as an implicit rule of social recognition. Players are sorted by role, rank, language, skill, and conduct, and a person’s companions become evidence for what kind of player that person supposedly is.

Comic Reversal and Narrative Significance

Shen Tang repeatedly refuses to perform innocence in the conventional way. During the agricultural livestream, black fans flood the room and sharply increase its popularity, while she maintains a professional smile as though the comments were directed at someone else. She privately recognizes that the stream will bring her a share of the company’s revenue, even as the shopping cart is filled with agricultural products intended to help remote mountain regions clear an oversupply of fruit. The scene places public hostility, commercial calculation, and socially useful work in the same frame, making any simple judgment based on appearances inadequate.

The proverb’s force lies in that tension. It can describe genuine affinity, as when Shen Tang forms connections through games or finds herself surrounded by unusual people; it can also describe manufactured proximity, as in the company’s publicity pairings. In Hou Jingjing’s conversation, Shen Tang turns the proverb into a protective comic mask. Rather than argue at length that she is unlike her reputation, she acknowledges the absurdity of the social world around her and lets the joke expose the weakness of rumor-based classification.

“Birds of a Feather Flock Together” consequently becomes a recurring interpretive key for the story’s treatment of identity. Shen Tang is judged by associates, teammates, publicists, fans, and antagonistic commenters, yet the narrative keeps showing that association may be voluntary, accidental, strategic, or forced. Her line to Hou Jingjing is funny because it accepts the proverb’s premise while undermining its certainty: the people around someone may reveal a community, but they do not automatically reveal the truth of the individual.