Jojo🥺

season 1 episode 1

Dustin: not right now, Lucas-

Lucas: BuT wHy ArE yOu KeEpInG tHiS cUrIoSiTy DoOr CLOSED Dustin??

Steve: I don't care-

Dustin and Robin, simultaneously: I don't CARE about Tina, or Uncle Jack's party-

Steve: I WAS STRESSED OKAY

El: Hop wants to talk to you

Mike: oh is it about my SICK FREAKING GRANDMA

Lucas: I need to tell you something, but it's a secret,

Max: should we go to the arcade

Anyone: Who do you work for?

Steve and Robin in unison: SCOOPS AHOY

Mike: I'm going over to the Byers to study with El and Will

Nancy, innocently: Oh, what's your test on, human ana-

Mike: SHUT UP SHUT UP RIGHT NOW

Dustin: I'm feeling low, I could really use a win

Steve: Aw, I'm sorry buddy, do you want-

Dustin: I'm going to challenge you to a fight

Steve: ... what the hell, dude

Mo dao messes with the cycle of reincarnation, which is why the Yiling Patriarch becomes so reviled. The term mo dao is actually used only ONCE in the novel - when Wei Wuxian notes that people called him “the grandmaster of demonic cultivation”

It uses living humans, extracts qi out of them, and involves the destruction of golden cores, brainwashing, and effectively vampiring living beings for the sake of power. It doesn’t use ambient resentment, it creates it by harming others.

The reason we’re continuously told (by people who know nothing of Wei Wuxian’s path) that he’s at risk of going insane is because that’s what mo dao does. It warps the mind and body because the source of resentment is within the user

Wei Wuxian calls his cultivation “the ghostly path” or “ghost cultivation” (gui dao). Hell, the only other person shown to match his expertise on the subject - Xue Yang - also calls it gui dao. Xue Yang !! He’d be delighted to call his actions demonic !! If he’s insisting on calling it “ghostly”, then that tells us that the difference matters

So what is gui dao ? First of all, we know that it doesn’t mind-control people as a baseline - that’s why Wei Wuxian ended up dying the first go around. We know that it utilises pre-existing resentful energy in the world to direct the dead

We know, also, that it requires a certain level of understanding of the dead. One of the spells Wei Wuxian creates is literally named Empathy.

We know that the power source is usually external (the Burial Mounds, the Stygian Tiger Seal), and that it, most importantly, doesn’t create demons. It creates ghosts and fierce corpses. And because of this, it likely doesn’t prevent reincarnation.

Why is the distinction important ? Because the former is what mo dao does. It creates mo.

We’re told the difference - very intentionally - in one of the earliest parts of the story, when Lan Qiren asks Wei Wuxian the difference between gui (ghosts) and mo (demons) and yao, and gets the correct answer

i spent my entire teenaged years fighting for my life. i crawled through the deepest pits of my depression to cling to the promise of a life beyond that pain. i was so convinced that i was going to die young, that i would never see the grace of my age starting with a 2, let alone 3.

this isn't about creators just knowing about fandom in the abstract. this is about creators being deeply involved with their own fandoms. as in, writers of TV shows trawling fansites and using fan theories to formulate plots for their show, or changing plots because fans have pieced together the foreshadowing correctly and predicted the endings. as in, authors engaging in fan forums and discords and discourse on their own works. as in, celebrities reaching out to individual fans to announce that they've been made aware of the fan's work.

this is also about fans inviting those creators deeper into fandom spaces, or pushing fandom spaces at creators, without shame or dignity, all for a few seconds of fame and recognition. all for validation.

when I say "they didn't know we existed" I mean they weren't in it with us. there was a distinct barrier, a separation between the fans and the creators. before journalists and talk show hosts started throwing fanart and fic in actors' faces and demanding reactions. before buzzfeed and its intolerable theft of fan work. before fans were almost expected to have their work found and critiqued by the very people the work was made about.

there has always been a level of communication between fans and creators, and for the most part, that's fine. but when it gets to the point where fans are constantly, relentlessly, pushing fandom content at creators in the hopes that it'll get them noticed, or that it'll sway the creators to their line of thinking, or that it'll mean something, and when creators think themselves entitled to our spaces, or use our work for cheap laughs, or rewrite their own work purely to mock us for getting an ending right, it gets to be too much.

we need that barrier back in place.

I still, to this day, don't tell people that I write fanfic. I don't tell people that I'm in fandom spaces. I don't talk about fandoms outside of fandom spaces at all. a little shame is good for the blood.