I want to write something about Xue Yang but canât decide on a topic, so if you want me to yap about something Xue Yang/Yi City related, feel free to comment or send asks
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I want to write something about Xue Yang but canât decide on a topic, so if you want me to yap about something Xue Yang/Yi City related, feel free to comment or send asks
Darker topics are also welcome

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"Xue Yang did all that to avenge his finger" is such a funny take, like. Did you listen to his story? Did you put yourself in the shoes of his 7yo self for ANY seconds at all?
Because lets recap: He was tricked, and used, and hungry, and beaten repeatedly, and treated as worthless and disposable, all by a man fully capable of paying him for his work. He was sent alone to deliver a taunt to a dangerous man. He was seven. He accepting the beating he received without complaint, and was further beaten for asking for the payment he'd been promised. He was whipped, and knocked in front of an ox cart.
Chang Ci'an didn't AIM the cart at his finger.
Chang Ci'an deliberately knocked a seven year old orphan child to the ground in front of an ox cart and ordered the driver to drive over the child.
And the driver did.
He manage to escape with ONLY one crushed finger (and, we can assume, many less permanent injuries). Crushing injuries are incredibly serious, and even one so small can be deadly. An orphaned child can't afford decent medical care. Adult Xue Yang has a SEVERED finger, which means that at best he managed to find a doctor who would amputate it for him, and at worst he cut it off himself. At age seven. Xue Yang is INSANELY lucky to have survived to age 8 after this incident.
This is why Xiao Xingchen's suggestion that Xue Yang should have merely cut off Chang Ci'an's finger, or hand, or arm, is so upsetting to Xue Yang. Yes, the revenge he did take was abhorrent and excessive, but Xingchen totally misses the point of the story (understandable in the moment, everything is happening SO MUCH at that point).
Xue Yang, at age seven, had done nothing wrong. He was a child, he was innocent, and he didn't deserve to be treated like his life was worthless by Chang Ci'an, or the cart driver, or the message recipient, or the restaurant owner, or every observer on the street who did nothing to help. And every person who tells him it's "just a finger" further treats the very real devaluing of and threat to his life as normal and fine.
If he, any time after age 7, had been able to exact revenge by cutting off Chang Ci'an's arm, there is nothing equivalent about that revenge. A severed arm is not a crushing injury, and is less likely to produce life-long chronic pain. Chang Ci'an would have good medical care-- a doctor, medicine, pain killers. His life would not meaningfully be in danger. Chang Ci'an had family (and money) to help him with whatever tasks being one-handed made difficult. Chang Ci'an was an adult, who's already lived a life without pain and disability, and who's prospects will not be impacted. Chang Ci'an was an ADULT and therefore better able to understand what was happening and why. And beyond all of that, Chang Ci'an would DESERVE IT.
To say that Xue Yang did everything he did to the Chang Clan in revenge over "losing his finger" is to betray an utter lack of willingness to empathize with Xue Yang. Even the 7yo version of him.
And he knows it. Which is why the suggestion is so upsetting.
Sometimes I think of that quote about polyamory, how if you have a certain type it can become extremely obvious,
and I just hope that Xue Yang never stops to think about what his type is, because if he realizes that his type is a tall, kind, righteous Taoist cultivator, he would most likely end himself right then and there.
I love that Xue Yang never thanks (nor rejects) Xiao Xingchen for the candy he gave him and A-Qing every day, but kept the last piece Xiao Xingchen gave him for seven years. He even held it tightly in his hand as he died, presumably to eat it in his last moments. He had kept it so close to him that he could grab it even as he was dying; the candy was probably kept as close to his body as he kept Xiao Xingchen's spirit pouch. He knew that he was dying, that these were his final moments, and the last thing he clings onto is the piece of candy he always dreamed of having every day as a child, given to him by someone who had cared.
Starting to get tired of all the âXiao Xingchen canât use a phoneâ jokes that Iâve seen, because with the technology we have, accessibility is better than ever.
You can go to your own phones settings, to the accessibility section and find all kinds of text to speech, speech commands, and audio description options. Even braille is possible to use on phones.
Like jokes are fine but when theyâre based on such misconceptions, I canât help but be a little annoyed.

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[Yi City] Xue Yang, to Xiao Xingchen: Sorry for threatening to eat you alive I was trying to flirt.
it's so important to me that xxc is younger than wwx. yes, that's wwx's shishu, yes, he's about five years younger and yes, he still makes the similar choices that wwx made before him. there is always someone, somewhere, who will follow your footsteps, even if you don't know each other at all
yet, you wish you did
Xue Yang: They say never meet your idols, because you might end up dissapointed with them. I say never meet your idols, because they end up saying you must die.
Xue Yang, to Xiao Xingchen: Unfortunately, for the both of us, I really like you.
i think all the time about how xue yang's entire conception of the world is built around violence. power is violence. survival is violence. the division isn't between good and evil or between loyalty and treachery or even between power and the lack of it; it all comes down to "you're alive" or "you're dead."
and then i think about xue yang in love, and the way that love becomes another form of violence. not in the sense that "xue yang thinks violence is love", not that at all, because xue yang isn't equating anything to love, he is equating everything to the only language he's learned to speak fluently, which is violence.
when i'm writing about xue yang's experience of being in love, i turn to violent metaphors, because those are the metaphors he has.

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spiritual successor to my email post
in general I feel like xue yang's emotional modus operandi with all feelings that are not identifiable as a very basic one is to go "huh. that's weird, not going to think about it"
like. if it's good he'll try to make it continue and if it's bad he'll try to make it stop but as far as trying to figure out what it is and what it means? nah. he's not paid enough for that
Xuexiao is just a competition between Xiao Xingchenâs âI can fix himâ and Xue Yangâs âI can make him worseâ
Recent tumblr post got me thinking, I get that itâs a funny joke to say that Xue Yang did all of that because he lost a finger, I say that joke too, but if you genuinely think that it was just a finger, then here is a simple post breaking down why that is definetely not the case;
Xue Yang didnât suddenly lose a finger, he didnât just wake up one morning without a finger. His whole left hand was crushed under a wheel, and his little finger was crushed so badly that one can only assume it started to rot and was cut off. He was a seven year old without money, he couldnât afford a doctor, so obviously next comes all the infections, itâs a miracle he didnât die from those.
And secondly, he didnât lose just a finger, he lost 50% of the strength in his left hand, and thinking that his other fingers were broken and most likely healed wrong it might be even more. And all the chronic pain that comes after that incident.
And letâs not forget that he was beaten by not one, but three adult men in the span of a few hours, he was taken advantage of by Chang Ciâan and was publicly humiliated. His missing finger is just a reminder of all of that abuse.
So no itâs not just a finger, I hope this clears it up.
People treating Xue Yang's whole deal as being just a finger honestly shows such a horrific apathy to the genuine issues of the disadvantaged that it boggles the mind. A lot of the same people are quick to defend the Wen remnants, who actually did do the things they were accused of (namely, being related to Mr. World Domination and being complicit in his nonsense) and Wei Wuxian's homeless phase but so few people have sympathy for the boy in the street who was tormented so greatly in ONE SINGLE DAY. If you (correctly) have sympathy for the former, you ought to have sympathy for the latter. I'm sorry but it's impossible that it was the only time he was treated poorly, it was just the most painful one because it left a lasting injury. Like. How can you understand that Wei Wuxian should not have had to suffer homelessness and the Wen remnants should not have had to live in corpse island but somehow fail to realise that Xue Yang (and Meng Yao) should also not have had to suffer the way they did. Xue Yang becomes the way he is because there is no Jiang-shushu or Yiling Laozu to save him. That's literally what the book is saying. Multiple times. A-Qing is taken (mostly) out of living entirely off the streets by Xiao Xingchen, which is why she is as good as she is. Do you think the a-Qing who would be beaten by the guy who groped her would be the same a-Qing that we see? The people who are well-intentioned in spite of having a disadvantaged background are so because they were given space to just be, and because they were loved and cared for, however measly it might have been. Xiao Xingchen is my baby, but he also lived on Mount. Utopia for a large part of his life. He does not understand Xue Yang's core problem, because it is not a life he has lived, because he has probably been rescued from that life by Baoshan Sanren, and it is unfathomable to him especially given the atrocities he has been personally made to commit. But the reader hasn't been made to kill anyone. The reader has the benefit of an objective perspective. If the reader, after receiving these privileges, simply refuses to understand where Xue Yang is coming from in the Chang case, it must be said that either the reader is biased (fair enough), or deliberately blind to the possible injustices the poor and the homeless can face (which is honestly not the best look for anyone).
fully agree with this, and i do think that the prevalence of the "it's just a finger" hot take has something to do with the way this fandom (and fandom in general) approaches the idea of victimhood. the dominant narrative across modern society is that "victim" and "perpetrator" are two separate classes: a victim is primarily defined by the harm they have suffered and a perpetrator is primarily defined by the harm they have caused others. victims are Morally Good and perpetrators are Morally Evil. victims are passive objects and perpetrators are active agents. victims lack any agency at all, and perpetrators always have complete freedom to act. the idea that a victim can also be a perpetrator is disconcerting; the idea that a perpetrator can also be a victim is discomfiting.
so when fandom encounters a character who has both been victimized and has perpetrated harm against others, they end up classifying the character as either a victim-primary or a perpetrator-primary. in the case of the victim-primary, the harm the character has caused others is minimized in order to center the character's victim status; in the case of the perpetrator-primary, the harm the character has suffered is minimized in order to not dilute the character's status as a perpetrator of harm. hence we see the prevalent fandom belief that "xianxian did nothing wrong," and hence - as seen here - the fandom repeatedly minimizes the real harm that xue yang suffered before he committed any murders.
regarding xue yang specifically, someone here (i cannot find the post at the moment) has also written an excellent meta pointing out that what xue yang received that day was not just the loss of a finger, but rather the knowledge that his suffering does not matter. that, due to the mere fact of his class, he can be openly abused and disfigured in public, in broad daylight, and it will not matter. that so-called righteous cultivators - who think of themselves as righteous people, who are recognized by society as righteous people - can freely harm him without any damage to their reputation as righteous, because in the eyes of society, harming a low-class street rat like xue yang does not constitute any moral wrongdoing.
all of xue yang's subsequent characterization is informed by this realization.
Tbf, wrt to the xue yang thing. Itâs not only readers who say he did those things âjustâ because of his finger- xue yang himself says so as well:
âXiao XingChen spoke as though he couldnât believe Xue Yangâs words, âChang CiAn broke one of your fingers in the past. If you sought revenge, you couldâve simply broken one of his fingers as well. If you really took the matter to heart, you couldâve broken two, or even all ten! Even if you had cut off an entire arm of his, things wouldnât have been like this. Why did you have to kill his entire clan? Donât tell me that a single finger of yours was equal to more than fifty human lives!â
Xue Yang actually pondered upon the matter, as if he found Xiao XingChenâs questions strange, âOf course. My finger was my own, while those lives were other peoplesâ. They wouldnât be equal no matter how many lives I killed. It was only around fifty. How could it have possibly been equal to one of my fingers?ââ
Yes itâs really interesting how Xue Yang only mentions his finger when talking about this. My post was more of a âthese are the factsâ and not what Xue Yang thinks about it.
(Also in this scene Xiao Xingchen is having a pretty bad mental breakdown so he might not remember all details of Xue Yangâs story and therefore only mention the finger)
Heavily traumatised people donât always realise all the parts of their life that were traumatic, or at least not ânormalâ. Xue Yang lived this life, itâs normal for him, and while he can notice when people have different lives apart from his, he still might not realise all the experiences in his life that were wrong. (And to add, living without any type of adult guardian in your life is a guarantee that your emotional and social skills will be lacking). A missing finger Iâd say is the most noticable thing that sets him apart from other people.
This starts to go into psychology territory, but people with symptoms and traits like Xue Yang donât always view other people as other people, he might not feel that other people think and exist the same way he does (apart from few people like idk, xiao xingchen) and itâs difficult for him to look at things from other peoples perspective, so no life is enough, because heâs still hurting and he still doesnât have that finger back.

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Recent tumblr post got me thinking, I get that itâs a funny joke to say that Xue Yang did all of that because he lost a finger, I say that joke too, but if you genuinely think that it was just a finger, then here is a simple post breaking down why that is definetely not the case;
Xue Yang didnât suddenly lose a finger, he didnât just wake up one morning without a finger. His whole left hand was crushed under a wheel, and his little finger was crushed so badly that one can only assume it started to rot and was cut off. He was a seven year old without money, he couldnât afford a doctor, so obviously next comes all the infections, itâs a miracle he didnât die from those.
And secondly, he didnât lose just a finger, he lost 50% of the strength in his left hand, and thinking that his other fingers were broken and most likely healed wrong it might be even more. And all the chronic pain that comes after that incident.
And letâs not forget that he was beaten by not one, but three adult men in the span of a few hours, he was taken advantage of by Chang Ciâan and was publicly humiliated. His missing finger is just a reminder of all of that abuse.
So no itâs not just a finger, I hope this clears it up.
I want to say so many things about Xiao Xingchen but everytime I think of him I remember he gave his eyes to a friend he knew only a few years, then he took under his protection a little girl who stole from him, and picked off an injured man off the road and never asked for an explanation; for so pure was his heart that he did not even suspect for a moment that his kindness could be made use of. He went and helped a man who he had nothing to do with by standing against the biggest clan of the cultivation world. When Xue Yang tries to disguise himself as Xiao Xingchen, even to an audience who is not acquainted with the legendary cultivator, he offers to sacrifice himself to kill a few corpses before his death because that was what he believed Xiao Xingchen would have done.
And his closest narrative parallel is Wei Wuxian the protagonist, for they both have good intentions but cause harm without intending to, and go mad when they realise the extent of their deeds. They both loved a man so deeply and devastatingly they gave themselves up for it; and it bore the sweetest fruit with the bitterest seed, for while their men too loved them just as deeply, if not more, they could never reconcile.
Xiao Xingchen the man that you are đ đđ