“The Jin Guangyao in my eyes and the Jin Guangyao in your eyes – as well as the Jin Guangyao in the eyes of the world – are all completely different people.”

Lan Xichen says these fateful words in episode 43 of CQL. And honestly, I think it’s really interesting to see the varied “Jin Guangyaos” in the eyes of different people in fandom! 

Everyone weighs differently — how much Jin Guangyao’s varied motivations (from ambition to the search for dignity) contributes to the choices he ultimately makes; and even the choices available to him in the first place! 

But in the English-speaking part of the fandom, I think what’s less explored is how much of a hold the traditional Chinese virtue of filial piety (孝 xiào) (deference to one’s elders, usually parents) had over Jin Guangyao’s motivations and choices available to him. 

I suspect that an appreciation for how deeply entrenched the virtue of filial piety is in Chinese culture might make one more likely to be sympathetic to Jin Guangyao as a character. After all, the many self-defeating decisions that we see Jin Guangyao make regarding his father and mother — so much of it feels startlingly similar to stories of filial piety celebrated in Chinese culture. In countless other parables and proverbs about filial piety, Jin Guangyao would be valorised. But in MDZS, what we have is a tragedy.

In this post, I’m going to try to get at this, through exploring how filial piety might have influenced Jin Guangyao, namely through two of his fateful decisions — to continue serving his father even as he was being abused and going back for Meng Shi’s remains. I’d like to suggest that both can be read as a deconstruction of filial piety, as part of MXTX’s broader deconstruction of traditional family values as a modern author. But caveat as always that this is heavily coloured by my own experiences with the value of filial piety :P And this post is going to be long….

ᴄᴏᴍᴇʙᴀᴄᴋ: ғʀᴏᴍɪs_9

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There is an indescribable pain to all of this, and I don't know what Israel thinks it's doing by ripping everyone's heart out like this if not to make the whole world resent the mere mention of it.

I don't think the question we should be asking at this point is "how do you justify this?" anymore, even if rhetorically. We need to understand that it is simply irrational to expect an occupying power that built itself on ethnic cleansing to provide any means of reasoning.

This is genocide, you don't debate genocide and you don't rationalise genocide.

Paul Delaroche

French, 1797-1856