hello and welcome to my cnovel/cdrama (mostly mdzs/untamed) sideblog! this is a villain apologist zone, I am Jin Guangyao obsessed, but in general I am fond of most characters and there will be very little hate here. every character is my terrible fave
if you are here for my hunger games au, everything related to it can be found in this tag.
my main blog is @venndaai, my ao3 is also venndaai
Added note: this is a side blog and I do not reblog donation/awareness posts here.
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The first rule of MDZS is don’t take Nie Mingjue’s word about Jin Guangyao. The second rule of MDZS is don’t take Jin Guangyao’s word about Nie Mingjue. The third rule is don’t take Lan Xichens’ word about either of them
wait, i'm curious, i can easily think of examples of nmj being wrong about jgy and lxc being wrong about both of nieyao but how is jgy really wrong about nmj?
I don't think that the way Jin Guangyao thinks Nie Mingjue sees the world is accurate to how Nie Mingjue actually sees the world. At multiple points in the book, Jin Guangyao very calmly and clearly explains to Nie Mingjue how life is made difficult for him and he will suffer more consequences from them commiting the same actions, both implying and outright saying that Nie Mingjue doesn't understand him/see his plight. Nie Mingjue, however, seemingly does understand him, he just thinks Jin Guangyao should go through with whatever he's demanding of him anyway, damn the consequences (and a small note that NMJs' requests may be ridiculous, but he is not a hypocrite when he does so, as he actively chooses death every day he cultivates. He's holding his ridiculous standard to everyone else). Nie Mingjue is more blatanly wrong, both because he makes more sweeping statements and because he doesn't have a calm way of speaking the way Jin Guangyao does. Jin Guangyao does, however, seem to be wrong about what Nie Mingjue is actually thinking. His beliefs are not ungrounded, mind, but neither are Nie Mingjue's about Jin Guangyao. Nie Mingjue is just more blatantly wrong (probably).
(Small disclaimer that I've been busy with my thesis until a few days ago so I haven't had the time to go back to the source material,,, I'll do so when I have time! I think I could come up with concrete/more examples if I did. Or maybe I'd prove myself wrong but hey then I learned a new thing)
!!!! i have many thoughts on this specific issue :3
you might find some example i've forgotten that problematizes this and i would be glad to hear it if so but i'm of the opinion that jgy is right that nmj does not understand him or his situation.
my evidence for this isn't so much any particular situation as a pattern that we see in the scenes featured in the empathy section. in these we see that 1) nmj tells off the soldiers who are bullying meng yao in a way that wwx thinks could actually make things worse 2) wwx notes that nmj does not notice the way that the other cultivators are treating meng yao as unclean while he's serving tea* 3) n/y have a split over the jin captain fiasco where nmj is blindsided and confused over meng yao's actions 4) jgy tells nmj that he doesn't get it and doesn't have moral high ground he thinks he does and gets kicked down the stairs for his trouble. there's other scenes--multiple of which involve lxc intervening to try to explain something about jgy that nmj doesn't get to him--but these are, to me, the most important.
the problem with the first two examples is that it's wwx who's noticing these things, and to take wwx's observations as objective and correct is, at many parts of the novel, a mistake. wwx is hunting for reasons that n/y fell out right now. he has reason to be looking at all of nmj's actions and wondering where he went wrong, and that could, potentially, lead him to wild speculation. however, my thing is (and this might be where you could set me right if i've forgotten something), where is this conclusion of wwx's contradicted? for simple conservation of detail, these scenes have to be important, they have to be telling us something, and if that something has no textual reason to be taken as "wwx is an unreliable narrator" (and what would that do for the narrative? it's a point made effectively in other places. we would learn nothing new about him or about nmj or jgy) then i think it has to be that in this case, he's just right.
the problem with the third is that now (and really, from now on) wwx is on nmj's side, and condemns meng yao. at this point i know *i'm* in danger of contradicting myself. we're supposed to take wwx seriously when he's critical of nmj, but to question him when he's critical of meng yao? however. i DO think i can defend this. for one thing--wwx is connected to nmj's perspective and even his emotions. he is biased in nmj's favor in a way that he isn't in jgy's. secondly, what is the empathy sequence doing structurally? imo it's setting up something to be subverted, and that something is nmj's perspective, the idea that jgy is a villain. through this sequence, wwx takes on this perspective of nmj's. it's corroborated by things that we learn about jgy after. but then, the closer we get to the end, the more the idea that jgy is a villain is complicated and problematized. wwx begins to have a lot more sympathy for jgy, and to see himself in him. i think that in these moments, wwx is pretty unambiguously supposed to be right. in those moments, he's saying something that is corroborated by the very structure of the narrative. this plotline in mdzs is about wwx witnessing his own fall again, this time from the outside, and the repeated lines at beginning and end (my favorite being "that's what you call karma") place these echoes outside of the characters' subjectivity and into the realm of a plain fact about how the story they inhabit is constructed. point being, the more wwx condemns jgy with nmj and the rest of the world, the more he's supposed to be wrong, and the more he sympathizes with him and understands the similarity in their situation, the more he's supposed to be right. it's nmj's beliefs about jgy that are set up to be toppled, not jgy's about nmj. (i feel particularly justified in saying this because of how much mxtx loves this subversion. she does it with jgy, but also with jiang cheng, mu qing, jun wu, shen jiu, tianlang-jun, the list goes on...)
anyway, that's a bit tangential--the jin captain incident i have talked about a bit in the past, in this post and in my last two replies on this post, you can read it if you like, but the tl;dr is that i think nmj doesn't understand that meng yao doesn't want to play by the rules because the rules are unfair to him and actively prevent him from succeeding. lxc does understand this and it's why the jin captain incident isn't a big deal to him. he doesn't like it, but he understands why meng yao did it and why he couldn't trust in societal justice and turn himself in to be judged. it's another instance of nmj not getting jgy's situation, just like the first two.
and then yknow later jgy says as much and also says that nmj doesn't really have a right to criticize because has he acted according to his own absolute standards, can he say that he only kills those who deserve it? instead of answering this in a satisfactory way, nmj accuses jgy of being self-interested in a way that he, nmj, is not, and gets super mad and tries to kill him. nmj doesn't have a way of refuting this accusation and i don't believe it's ever refuted anywhere else in the text.
to the point that he applies his insane standards equally--on some level i think that's quite true. jgy *is* more self-interested and concerned with status than nmj is, nmj is quite as willing to die as he is to have jgy die. but the problem with that, which nmj doesn't see, is that status means something different to jgy than it does to him. death means something different to jgy than it does to him. for instance--i'll set aside the question of whether what jgy does is for himself or for his mother for the moment and just call it self-interest, it's not important here and i don't think it's easy or necessary to draw a firm line between the two in the first place--what need does nmj have of self-interest in order to have power and respect? what he has he was born with. he doesn't know what it is to be without it. jgy was born with disadvantages that make it necessary for him to fight to have power and to be treated with respect, and that requires him to act with self-interest. to demand both a rich and powerful heir to a great cultivation sect and the impoverished son of a prostitute not to be self-interested is completely unfair, and nmj's insistence that it *is* fair is imo what pisses jgy off so badly. if jgy were not self-interested, he would not be able to confront nmj as an equal, and for nmj to want him to be as un-self-interested as nmj himself is, is, whether nmj intends it or not, the same thing as telling jgy that he doesn't have the right to be nmj's equal. it isn't because nmj is bad or anything, he just doesn't understand jgy's situation and therefore doesn't understand how it comes off. and while i don't think that nmj consciously means it that way at all, is it a coincidence that this is the same scene where nmj loses his head and says what else could i expect from the son of a whore?
anyway, it's similar with the issue of dying. nmj's death is different than jgy's. i think that this is proved by what actually happens when he dies--nmj's death is something that needs to be solved and avenged. he cannot be murdered without a reprisal. for jgy, no matter how high he rises in the ranks, his death is just not as important as nmj's would be. he can be killed with no fear of reprisal. jgy, wwx, and xy are all people who are divorced enough from the social body, from a legitimacy of status, that they can just be eliminated and nobody will be able to do anything, even though jgy and wwx at least have people who do love them and mourn them. it's not at all the same for nmj, who's an integrated part of the social body. because he can't be killed, it means something for him to die. it's not the same and jgy knows it's not the same. nmj doesn't! again, he equally imposes fundamentally unequal standards.
ig i only have one more thing to say about this and it's just about my way of interpreting the text--i think that it's important to keep in mind that everything that we don't actually see happen could be untrue, and the ambiguity is important in itself. storytelling is untrustworthy and always lies, even if only by omission. to me that is a big mdzstheme. HOWEVER. i do think that when something is included that we have no textual reason to believe is false then, if we are not supposed to interpret it as true and significant, it would not exist.
my special nmj disclaimer just bc i don't want anyone to think i'm a nmj hater TT
*we also see lxc intervene for meng yao in a way that accounts for the nuances of his situation, in contrast to nmj's actions in point 1
@woobifiedvillain this is the other, the part about "equally imposing fundamentally unequal standards" being subconsciously anti-equality and that being present throughout the empathy sequence is the relevant part of the argument here
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The first rule of fandom is have fun. The second rule of fandom is find an enabler and become an enabler. Yes you should write that fic. What if it was even hornier? What if it was angstier? What if you wrote it just for me?
I decided that this would be titled “Rulan” rather than “Jin Ling”, with the thought that the setting of the painting, somewhere in Koi Tower, is one where people are more likely to call him Jin Rulan. I also considered titling it “(New) Sect Leader Jin” but I thought that would be confusing, and “Rulan” better parallels the original painting title.
Initial sketch is here!
Do you know how hard it is to find a reference for Fairy? I liked the fluffy slightly dopey (for a husky) looking version in the live action drama, only turned up two blurry dog images in my searches (everything else was a winged humanoid fairy), so went looking on Pexel for “red husky” to try and get some better reference so she didn’t look too whack. Here are a few!
LXC doesn't think selfcest is incest because he already has a brother who looks like him and this is way different from that. JGY does think selfcest is incest because he's kind of really vigilant about the whole thing these days
Also because LXC considers his role in his family to be kind of explicitly defined by the fact that he's not replaceable and JGY's role in his family is constantly threatened with replacement or supercession and so as such LXC recognizes his alternate self as fundamentally foreign to the family structure (no one in his family is like him) and JGY recognizes his alternate self as fundamentally analogous (multiple members of his family that are kind of Him But Different, there but for the grace of his mom goes he)
i can see why people want to gloss over it i do get it but i think the conditional aspect is a necessary part of what's so compelling to me about xiyao and dare i say it's what compelling about xiyao to xiyao. they're both people who care about performing and enacting and embodying goodness and the fact that somebody who would leave if they were not good wants to have this relationship with them is an enduring confirmation that they're doing it right. their relationship constantly reiterates to them that they are the people that they want to be, that they're seen the way they want to be seen. i think this is especially potent for jgy for obvious reasons. that lxc likes him proves that he is, if not good, something so like it that even a judge like lxc can't tell the difference
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I feel pretty strongly about Nie Huaisang remaining a genuinely shitty cultivator and fighter his whole life. he's very smart and good at many things! these things will never include jock shit
Au where Su She doesn't get kicked out of the Cloud Recesses
Ooh, good one! Let’s go mostly with show canon here.
1) so I think overall, changes to Su She’s fate just... wouldn’t affect any other members of the cast very much. And isn’t that the ultimate tragedy of his life? That he’s inherently interchangeable? He wants to be a Jin Guangyao or Wei Wuxian, someone who drastically alters the story just with his mere presence, but... he’s not and he never will be. There’s nothing about him that’s special. JGY cares about him, a lot I think, but not because of anything to do with Su She as a person. JGY just wants to be loved, and in an AU where they never met, he’d find someone else with class insecurity to manipulate into adoring him. Maybe without the Moling Su, he wouldn’t be able to use evil magic to depower everyone at the second Burial Mounds Seige, but he’s a resourceful guy, he’d have come up with something else.
You could argue that if Su She hadn’t given up the secret of the Cold Cave, the Wens wouldn’t have gotten their hands on LWJ and the Yin Iron, and Wei Wuxian would have either died in the turtle cave or escaped without the sword of eeeevil, but. Come on. The Wens really wanted that Iron, they weren’t going away, and there were loads of dead disciples and their headbands lying around. They would have figured it out eventually.
If Su Minshan never founds the Moling Su, that does make a difference to the people who joined his sect, who he taught even though they weren’t talented or wealthy. But being important to them wasn’t enough for him.
2) if Su She doesn’t give up the secret because he makes it to the cave on time, LWJ still leaves the cave and gives himself up so his uncle and the others will be spared. Su She is left with Lan Qiren in the smoking ruins of Cloud Recesses. I’m not clear on exactly what happened after that- I assume the Wens left some soldiers there and occupied it for much of the rest of the war, and that they allowed LQR and the surviving disciples to leave, since they meet up with Wangji and Xichen later?
3) anyway: Su She fights in the war, and hates it, and ends up with even more fun trauma. He survives, and as a veteran of the Sunshot Campaign he gets a bit more respect. But he doesn’t do anything outstandingly heroic, doesn’t make his name, and he resents how much glory the Twin Jades accumulate. How they seem untouched by all the death and horror.
4) After the war, Jin Guangyao visits Cloud Recesses to assist with the repairs. Su She has heard of the lowborn hero of Nightless City, and finds some way to meet him, maybe serving him or showing him around, and he takes the opportunity to express his admiration. Jin Guangyao is nice and respectful to him, because Jin Guangyao is nice and respectful to everyone, and maybe it leads to something more, but... I think probably not. Without that moment of seeing Su She disrespected the way JGY was often disrespected, JGY has no empathetic connection. And I think Su She in this universe, despite his secret resentments, is not disillusioned with the Lan. They never left him to die, so that initial loyalty of his that we see in canon the first time he is asked for the secret of the cave, that’s never broken. He still holds onto a hope of getting respect.
5) He’s still there at the Burial Mounds to get rhetorically murdered by Lan Wangji, he’s just in the Lan party this time instead of the Jin one. Since he’s with the Lans, he’d get first crack at pocketing some of Wei Wuxian’s notes, before Jin Guangyao gets there, so maybe he does stumble into demonic cultivation in this timeline, but I’m not sure what he’d do with it?
+bonus 6) After the events of the final episode, Su She becomes a secret Jin Guangyao truther. Obviously it was all a frame up to replace the Chief Cultivator with a supporter of the status quo.
sorry for vagueposting i just don't feel like arguing nd sorry for banging on the same drum all the time but if nmj saw jgy as his equal he wouldn't have pushed him down the stairs and called him the son of a whore. not even just in a psychological sense i just believe that if that was what we were meant to take from the book that scene would not have been included
i think there is a mutual fantasy of equality just as there is with xiyao but the difference imo is that with nieyao that fantasy is destroyed pretty early on and most of the relationship we see is something of an explicit mutual struggle for dominance which xiyao for its own reasons avoids fully becoming
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"Please, forgive the interruption, Jin gongzi," said Zewu-jun, smiling politely, "but if your conversation isn't urgent, there is something I would like to discuss with Su... Minshan."
The pause was probably not detectable to anyone who hadn't spent significant time dealing with the Lan. But Su Minshan caught it. Was it that her former sect leader didn't remember her courtesy name, didn't think she was worth the courtesy but didn't want to be rude in front of a peer, or that she had settled on the courtesy name to avoid having to recognize Su Minshan as a peer and sect leader in her own right? Typical Lan condescension no matter which one. Su Minshan didn't have time to decide whether dealing with the withering contempt and hatred of the person she had looked up to for so long was better or worse than dealing with Jin Zixun's direct insults and posturing. Jin Zixun looked between the two of them, his permanent sneer giving his face an ugly cast. Clearly he hadn't listened when his mother warned him about making faces and getting stuck like that. "I was just educating this upstart on the proper etiquette towards her superiors. As her former sect leader, shouldn't you have done a better job?"
Zewu-jun's smile was no longer polite. "Please, Jin gongzi, allow me to remedy my error now. Su Minshan?" She gestured for Minshan to join her and turned to indicate she was leaving. This was like being in a burning house and bandits waiting outside. On the one hand, maybe if Minshan insulted Zewu-jun in front of Zixun, helped him put her in her place as he so clearly wanted to, maybe it would earn her points with the Jin. On the other hand she would have to deal with Jin fucking Zixun.
Minshan gave the most cursory of bows to Jin Zixun and followed Zewu-jun across the plaza, scowling to herself. Probably she was going to be sternly told all the reasons she shouldn't dare ever raise her head in public again, and she might even have been willing to take it from some other headbanded lout, but she genuinely was not sure she had the patience to pretend that the sect leader who had abandoned them all to die had a leg to stand on when it came to righteousness.
"Please don't mistake me," said Zewu-jun, softly, no longer smiling, "I have no desire, now or ever, for your company. Nor have I forgotten what you did. But nobody deserves the attention of Jin Zixun."
Minshan stopped in her tracks. "What?" She was about to ask where Zewu-jun got off, or if she was drunk from that one cup of wine she'd been made to drink earlier, but Zewu-jun cut her off.
"He's still standing there. We should at least pretend to polite conversation until he's gone. Unless, of course you want to--"
"Oh, please!" she scoffed. "He's the worst."
"Mn." said Zewu-jun. "It is a belief off mine that no one is born evil. I must say I am deeply indebted to Jin gongzi in this matter. It is important that, when adhering to a universal principle, one make sure it is truly universal, and not make exceptions. And on the question of whether or not someone can be born evil, Jin gongzi has sorely tested my convictions every time we have met. Really, I should thank him."
"That," said Minshan, reluctantly impressed, "might be the meanest thing I have ever heard." Zewu-jun cut an annoyed face, and any messy hint of camaraderie she had started to grudgingly feel vanished. "Who would guess that the great sect leader Lan is so ready to insult anyone. Not even the Jin sect is safe."
The irritated glint in Zewu-jun's eyes hardened. "Oh, Su She can rest assured that sect leader Lan would never insult an innocent party, and, should she do so accidentally, she would be quick to apologize."
Bullshit. "I bet he hasn't even done anything to you," she said, knowing she was being unfair and not caring in the slightest. "The first jade of the Lan. It’s not like he would dare offend you."
"One thing about Jin Zixun is that he will always dare, provided of course that he is certain he will bear no consequences for his daring. As I think Su She knows quite well."
Zewu-jun's tone was curt, and there was a note of distaste in her voice like she'd stepped in manure. Minshan had never seen this woman be so outrageously and obviously rude before. Hanguang-jun, yes, but everyone knew she thought herself above manners. She felt like she was watching Lan Xichen transform into someone entirely different. Someone more like her than Lan Xichen would like. Someone she would probably be disgusted to learn she was capable of being if she ever had to face it unequivocally. It was fascinating. Minshan wanted, suddenly, to see how far she could push it.
"What if there were consequences?" she mused, glancing at where Jin Zixun stood on the opposite side of the plaza, berating a trembling servant. Lianfang-zun had had that same subdued and frightened look in her eyes earlier, when he'd given her the same treatment.
Smiling wistfully, Lan Xichen said "That would be nice to think about."
"We can do better than think," said Minshan. What better way to get back at this high-and-mighty, holier-than-thou hypocrite who threw her birth name around and looked at her like she was dirt for not doing anything she hadn't done herself than to drag her down off her pedestal, rub her face in the fact that she wasn't any better. "What he did to you at the banquet, such an insult to your sect. You can't let that stand."
Lan Xichen sighed. She considered a moment, opened her mouth to speak, thought better, and closed it again.
"He was bragging, before you got there, about how Hanguang-jun is so weak she had to get someone else to drink for her, and that if she'd drunk even one cup of wine, she'd have turned into a wanton sing-song girl." None of that was true, but who needed truth when she could make Lan Xichen’s nostrils flare in rage, make her lip curl, make her do all these subtle things that made her perfect face look so fucking ugly?
"Do you want to know the worst part?" Lan Xichen muttered, full of venom. "If I wanted to, I could drink him under the table."
"Bullshit," Minshan snorted. "You Lan don't drink, and even strong cultivation can't--"
"There's a trick I invented for handling that. It effects me no more than water unless I want it to. Why do you think I was willing to drink at the banquet?"
Either way, she realized, this would work out for her. Either Jin Zixun would be humiliated in an elegant turnabout, or Lan Xichen would fall victim to her own arrogance. "So then why don't you?" Lan Xichen was about to explain in some patronizing way why she of course could never, so Minshan pressed on. "It would be easy. He'd jump at the chance to get you alone and drunk. He'd never see it coming. And even if he told someone, he'd be the asshole who couldn't keep up with a Lan, and a woman. Besides, nobody would believe him."
Lan Xichen was silent for a long time. Across the plaza, Lianfang-zun emerged from the hall, a flash of kindness in this gilded snake pit. Jin Zixun turned when she spoke. They were too far away to hear what he said, but close enough to hear he was yelling at her in much the same way as he had the servant. "You know, clan leader Su," said Lan Xichen in a pensive voice, "I think you may have a point."
