su minshan has done nothing wrong, ever,

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