Cannon-Fodder Identity

Cannon-Fodder Identity is the role Shen Tang believes she has inherited after entering the novel: she remembers herself as the vicious cannon fodder rather than as the protagonist, and this classification initially appears to make her disposable within the story’s hierarchy. Its decisive significance is that it turns plot awareness into a survival problem. Shen Tang must determine whether the identity describes an unavoidable fate or merely the position from which she can alter the story.

Definition and Initial Circumstances

Shen Tang’s understanding of the role is tied to her incomplete memory of the original novel. After returning to the hotel, she realizes that she can remember the protagonist’s name and her own status as the vicious cannon fodder, but can no longer recall specific plot details. The loss is frightening because it threatens to erase not only her knowledge of the book but also her awareness that she crossed into it. She worries that, once those memories disappear, she may be forced to follow the original plot without recognizing the coercion.

The practical circumstances surrounding her new life make the label especially paradoxical. She is a low-ranking celebrity whose manager, Wang Brother, calls her an ever-trending source of scandals. Online rumors attach accusations such as being a “loose tea bitch,” a “plastic surgery freak,” and a “compensation scammer” to her public image, while the company’s public-relations team pairs her with nearly every male celebrity she has worked with to exploit attention. She is treated as an entertainment-industry liability, yet she is preparing to leave the business rather than continue performing the role imposed on her.

At the same time, the marriage agreement placed before her offers an exit from the insecurity associated with that status. Under the agreement, she need only appear occasionally at family dinners and maintain the appearance of a loving couple; she is not required to perform ordinary wifely duties. In exchange, she receives five million per month, has her living expenses charged to her husband’s card, and will receive two hundred million when the two-year agreement ends in divorce. The arrangement gives the supposed cannon fodder financial independence and a route away from the public identity that the plot has assigned her.

Memory, Plot, and Agency

The identity depends on a distinction between being written as expendable and actually being without power. Shen Tang initially interprets her forgotten plot knowledge as evidence that the story may be reclaiming control over her. Her fear is not simply amnesia; it is the possibility that the novel’s predetermined sequence will become stronger than her own judgment. Yet she also recognizes that the people around her are not merely vague side characters described in a few strokes. They possess their own thoughts, and every action they take can send the story in a different direction.

That realization weakens the fatalism attached to the cannon-fodder label. Even the female lead has changed, Shen Tang reasons, so a character positioned as mere cannon fodder should not be permanently bound to the original design. The narrative therefore converts a fixed literary category into a contested social and psychological position. Shen Tang may have entered the story under an inherited reputation, but the living people within it create new causes, new alliances, and new consequences.

Her decision to retire from the entertainment industry further demonstrates this movement from assigned role to self-directed life. When public discussion again speculates about her appearance and possible plastic surgery, she does not allow the rumor cycle to define her response. She calmly turns off her phone and treats the matter as irrelevant, intending to finish the film and then leave the business. Retirement is not presented as proof that the stigma never affected her; it is an attempt to stop allowing the industry’s version of her to determine what happens next.

Social Performance and Reversal

The cannon-fodder identity is repeatedly exposed through Shen Tang’s interactions with others. In gaming, she forms a connection with Miao Miao, receives invitations to play, and discovers that Gu Huaian is already online at King rank. Their gaming rooms and teams become spaces in which status can be tested through performance rather than through celebrity reputation or family background. In one match, Shen Tang is repeatedly targeted in the bottom lane while her team’s jungler refuses to help and insults her, implying that her rank came from using sexual access to obtain support. The abuse reproduces the logic of her public scandal identity: instead of recognizing skill, others explain her presence through sexualized suspicion.

The game also gives her a means to answer that logic. Later, Shen Tang and Gu Huaian are matched with two female players who main mage and support and a boy who selects several jungler heroes. His immediate scolding identifies him as male before any other information does, making verbal aggression itself a marker of gendered social behavior. Across these matches, gaming is not a decorative pastime. It becomes a rule-bound arena where rank, cooperation, insults, and recognition expose how Shen Tang’s assigned identity is constructed and challenged.

Publicly, she can also move between imposed scandal and chosen presentation. At a formal banquet, she enters arm in arm with Gu Huaian, and he introduces her to older guests as his wife. The event is organized around cooperation rather than vulgar conflict, so the marriage performance functions as social legitimacy instead of merely as a contractual disguise. The same woman whom entertainment gossip presents as a malignant tumor is, in this setting, received through a controlled and respectable public role.

Narrative Significance

Cannon-Fodder Identity supplies the novel with its central contrast between textual marginality and lived consequence. Shen Tang begins as someone who believes that the protagonist’s story has already assigned her a destructive ending, while the surrounding world treats her as a scandal-producing object whose value lies in the attention she attracts. Both systems reduce her to a function: the book needs a vicious obstacle, and the entertainment company needs a profitable target for association and rumor.

The plot repeatedly undermines that reduction. The marriage agreement gives the allegedly disposable character unusual economic leverage. Her relationship with Miao Miao develops through play rather than through the original hierarchy of celebrity and scandal. Her encounters with Gu Huaian place her inside family and social spaces where she is publicly acknowledged as his wife. Her forgotten knowledge of the original plot becomes frightening, but it also prevents her from treating every future event as predetermined. The identity remains important because it explains her vulnerability, yet it no longer determines her limits.

In this sense, the cannon-fodder role is less an ending than the narrative’s starting pressure. Shen Tang’s survival depends on refusing to confuse a description of her original fictional function with the full reality of the person she has become. The more the characters act as flesh-and-blood people rather than as fixed story pieces, the more the category loses its authority; the supposed expendable character becomes one of the forces capable of changing the story itself.