Maomao: Kinktober Day 7, Aphrodisiacs With Maomao

EVERYONE IS 21 AND OLDER

Appearance: Maomao is a petite adult woman with a short stature in all versions of the story. She has dark forest-green hair and blue eyes). Her hair is typically tied back with a light blue ribbon, though two strands are left to frame her face. These strands are sometimes decorated with small red and sky-blue beads.

Her curiosity and passion for medicine often have physical consequences. For example, she hides self-inflicted scars on her left forearm under a bandage—the result of testing various remedies and poisons on herself. Her chest is notably flat and her face has freckles.

Attire and Style: Maomao’s signature outfit is an aoqun (a style of hanfu). It consists of:

Top: A light green robe over a white inner robe with a dual-toned green collar.
Bottom: A long burgundy skirt
Footwear: Simple dark green flats.

She prefers simple, practical clothing and generally avoids jewelry and makeup. Because of this, most people view her as plain. However, she intentionally applies clay-and-oil "freckles" across her nose using a needle to disguise her appearance as homely.

On the rare occasions when Maomao removes her fake freckles and dresses in elegant clothing, she is remarkably attractive. In fact, she looks so different when posing as a noblewoman or a courtesan that most people fail to recognize her.

Expressions: Though she usually maintains a stoic, impassive expression, Maomao’s demeanor changes instantly when she encounters rare ingredients or poisons. In these moments of excitement, she is often depicted as a chibi (in the manga & anime) with cat ears to illustrate her curiosity

Personality: Maomao's approach to life is very practical, focused on learning to survive and thrive in whatever way her environment demands her to. She is rarely tricked or charmed by others: she is one of the few to be unaffected by the beauty and charm of Jinshi. Her mindset has helped her come to terms with matters that many would find scarring; for example, she considers her near-rape and her kidnapping as enraging situations, but also as inevitabilities of living in the red-light district. She is a pragmatic individual who is well aware of her position in the world as someone with no status who can be considered expendable at a moment's notice if it means to indulge a noble. She often follows direct commands without outward protest and forces herself to not acknowledge (and even withhold) significant events she had witnessed in the Imperial Palace as a form of preservation to herself and others, such as the fact that Jinshi is not the Emperor's brother but his son by Ah-Duo. In part because of her own self-preserving attitude, she finds people who will help others to their own detriment painful to watch. Despite her pragmatism, Maomao's insatiable curiosity often leads her to involve herself in the problems of others. It is also stated that she has a strong sense of justice, empathy, and compassion, which makes it very hard for her to ignore misdeeds and injustice once she has witnessed them. The first examples of this tendency of hers is subtly revealing the truth behind the illness of Gyokuyou's daughter Lingli and interfering when the younger Lishu was being harassed by her own ladies-in-waiting. Fortunately, Maomao is well-equipped to expertly navigate the inner palace, which she herself notes has more or less the same nature as the Red Light District she was raised in. She is sharp-witted, calm and mature enough to know how to read people and situations, and how to placate or intimidate aggressive peers and superiors without making them direct their ire at her.

At the start of the series, Maomao tried to be an extremely detached individual who avoided making any sort of close connection or deep attachment with the only exceptions being her adoptive parent and mentor, Luomen, her Granny, her "older sisters" (known as the Three Princesses of the Verdigris House: Pairin, Meimei, and Joka), and her fellow servants Xiaolan and Shisui. She refused to accept the fact that she is highly favored by the High Consorts or utilize any special treatment, such as assistance for a current "case" she is working on or wanting to return home for a few days, despite that the high consorts are happy to extend some of their power to her for her accomplishments. She maintained a firm wall between those around her, refusing to reciprocate any attempts of people trying to get close to her and appearing to prefer having transactional relationships with people rather than those built on kindness. She was very stubborn in her willful denial about obvious sincere concern and affection for her, be it platonic or romantic. She notably refused to acknowledge her close friendship with Loulan and her own attraction towards Jinshi due to inevitable political trouble those feelings caused, even trying to literally run away in the latter case because she particularly finds romantic dreams as foolish and more likely to lead to someone's ruin rather than bring true happiness. As the series goes on, however, she begins to, slowly but surely, open up to people. She even went so far as to shed tears and try to stop Loulan from enacting her self-sacrificing plan as she did not want to lose her.

A large part of Maomao's perspective and hesitancy towards accepting kindness and forming relationships is due to being raised in the Red Light District where she never received unconditional love, as well as the knowledge that someone sincerely loving another doesn't ensure that they won't be tossed away if it is necessary. While she was well-loved by her adoptive parent and "older sisters", she realized that she came second to their jobs. As an infant, her cries would not be answered until they have completed their work for the day, to the point so she eventually stopped crying and asking for help as she knew no one would come. Even the "Madam", or "Granny," as Maomao refers to her as, had no qualms about charging her for taking care of her and trying to force her into becoming a courtesan, despite being genuinely fond of the girl. She has stated she does not believe she has the capacity to love somebody or let them get close to her. This experience is what caused her aloofness-to-a-fault personality and resistance to forming close relationships as a defense mechanism to protect herself from the (unfortunately high) possibility of that despite being close confidants, the members of the inner Court would throw her out of even kill her for something as small as being associated with the wrong person.

The Red Light District, as well as the tragic events surrounding her own conception, gave Maomao a skewed, although fairly accurate, view of romantic relationships. She would often see women being sold as property, the horror of cheap brothels, courtesans being madly in love with clients who promised them the world only for it to end in lies and cast them aside once they ran out of funds, the abandonment and abuse of unplanned or "inconvenient" children, numerous rapes and femicides, and how even high-ranking courtesans who brought fortune and fame to their brothels would be tossed out back to be common prostitutes the second they lost their economic value. Her hesitancy to hope for something more lest she be hurt if it fails was heavily influenced by the fate of her own birth mother Fengxian, who intentionally conceived Maomao with Lakan, the client she was in love with, in order to bring her price down to one he could afford. However, he had (seemingly) abandoned her for many years, which forced her to work on the street for the lowest paying clients to feed her daughter and herself, which led to her getting syphilis. As a result, she took her anger and frustration out on Maomao, which only got worse as the illness ravaged her brain, going as far as yelling in horror every time she saw her and even cutting her pinky off. Maomao came to view Fengxian, who was wasting away in a back room, as stupid and foolish for her actions, as her pursuit of love had turned from the highest-ranking courtesan showered with luxury to a rags clad walking corpse. This experience presented her with the harsh reality of how expendable people can be and how even being loved doesn't guarantee safety.

Having been personally taught by the genius pharmacist Luomen, Maomao is fascinated by medicines, especially poisons. She adores venomous animals more so than with any commonplace pet like cats, but comes to appreciate some; such as snakes, spiders and centipedes due to their unique medical properties. She has the habit of experimenting with substances to observe their effects, primarily on her own body. Due to her passionate love of poisons and her enjoyment when consuming them, as well as her incredible high intellect and ability to master anything as long as she is interested, she is considered uniquely talented, eccentric, creepy and obsessed by many characters in the series, traits she shares with members of her father's side of the family: the La Clan. Her obsession over medicines is a major motivation for her actions throughout the series, as Jinshi learns to bait her to solve court mysteries with the promise of giving her rare medical ingredients.

Maomao is implied to be agnostic (or possibly atheist) due to her grounded belief in science. She doesn't believe in superstitions or religion, reasoning that people make up stories to explain phenomena they cannot understand. As a child, however, she was once obsessed with the idea of finding the panacea to heal all diseases, which motivated her excessive self-experimentation, but later she became cynical of the possibility.

Abilities: Intelligence: Having been raised by courtesans in the Red Light District, Maomao is very good at dealing with people, sometimes bordering in manipulation. Along with her own experiences and her knowledge of medicine, she is able to deduce situations, solve problems and uncover mysteries more effectively than most people. Some major examples are her uncovering of Fengming's plans and the Shi clan's conspiracy. In spite of this notable trait of hers, while she confidently recognizes her cleverness, she doesn’t consider herself as highly intelligent by academic standards as the only thing she can bring herself to properly study is medicine.

Medicine: Having been taught by Luomen, one of the best physicians and pharmacists in the country, Maomao is an excellent user of herbs for numerous medical purposes, and she often experiments with the intention of creating her own unique medicines, which she often tests on herself. For example, she prepared cold remedies and anti-chapping ointments for the rear palace servants in winter, and antidotes for Zulin's food poisoned family. She also has recently read her mentor's books about Western medicine and learnt all the trades of a physician, including surgery, a skill in which she became capable enough to treat the Emperor himself.

Cooking: Maomao is knowledgeable in cooking as it shares similarities with making medicine, and her good memory for poisons also makes her good with food ingredients. This is seen in various instances such as when she prepared chocolate bread, ice cream, and grilled matsutake mushrooms and snakes.

Dance: Maomao was taught how to dance by Meimei as part of her education as a courtesan. Conditions

Poison Resistance: Because she constantly experiments with poisons on her own body, Maomao has developed a mithridatic resistance against drugs and poisons, whether afflicted by large quantities of alcohol, poisonous snakes, aphrodisiac, and hallucinogenic mushrooms, or even two of these substances mixed. She has even administered rescue breaths on a poisoned victim's drooling mouth. Despite her many resistance to poisons, her immunity doesn’t extend to her buckwheat allergy, which she has given up attempting to overcome.

Alcohol Tolerance: Maomao has an unusually high metabolism for alcohol and stimulants compared to most people in the setting, including Basen and her own father. She once proposed and won a drinking contest with the sole intention of crushing her opponent, who was thrown off guard due to her lightweight appearance.