another sufferer of jiang cheng brain disease

(Here’s a link to the last post because the threading got weird; scroll up.)

Just some soft Jiang Cheng praising Jin Ling after his first bullseye~🎯

i'm so sorry it took me 5 million years to answer this :'3

i have many uncharitable thoughts about how the fandom approaches MXY, but i'll share just one of them today. idk how to phrase this exactly, but when it comes to approaching MXY as a character, on the part of the english-speaking left-leaning fandom there's almost this sort of....copium? towards what was written in the text?

textually, the story tells us that MXY was accused of sexually harassing his half-brother, faced heavy homophobic abuse from his family, and committed suicide, with the intention of killing his abusive family as well, as a result. the story never refutes the allegations that MXY sexually harassed his half-brother.

let us call a spade a spade. this is a homophobic writing decision. this writing decision is based on and reinforces preexisting, deeply bigoted stereotypes about gay men - the gay man as a sex pest, the gay man as someone who simply cannot stop himself from sexually harassing other men, male homosexuality as a perverse abomination on the same level as incest. the fact that MDZS is a BL novel (a genre aimed primarily at straight women) does not change this fact.

now, more controversially - in my opinion, the fandom is actually fully aware of this.

but the fandom doesn't want to admit this fact. they, especially the more discourse-brainrotted ones, want to position MDZS as a perfectly woke and morally pure work of Ideal Gay Rep TM, and MXTX as the perfect author of a perfect work. in order for this to be true, MDZS cannot have any blatantly homophobic writing decisions in it. MXY, the only non-w/angxian canonically gay character, having actually sexually harassed his half-brother, would be a homophobic writing decision. therefore, the only way out of this conundrum is to conclude that Actually, MXY didn't sexually harass anyone at all - this way, MDZS as a work can be cleared of charges of obvious homophobia.

the reasoning goes:

in the story, MXY is accused of having sexually harassed his own half-brother.

if MXY - the only non-w/angxian gay character - had actually sexually harassed his half-brother, then that would be a pretty homophobic writing decision.

i don't want MDZS to be a book that has a homophobic writing decision in it.

therefore, MXY did not actually sexually harass his own half-brother.

QED.

and like. i can fully buy the theory that MXY did not actually sexually harass JGY. i think this is a fully valid reading of the text, especially given the story's themes surrounding the unreliability of rumors.

however, if you are going to make this argument, then you need to answer some fairly obvious questions. such as: if MXY did not actually sexually harass JGY, then where did this specific accusation come from? was it invented by the lanling public after learning that MXY was gay, due to them putting homosexuality and incest in the same bucket (a reasonable theory imo)? if you want to argue that JGY himself falsely accused MXY to get rid of him, why did JGY choose incest specifically, given that JGY logically would have incredibly negative feelings about the topic himself? if you want to argue that JGY himself sexually harassed MXY and then spread rumors of the converse, then why would JGY do that ("for the evilz" is not a valid answer)?

my read on it as per always is that certain sections of fandom are...ah, how to say it. kinda prudish isn't quite the right word? but it's close? and believe that this is a story about every character getting their just desserts, generally speaking? it's about drawing moral lines?

(yeah yeah I know this is a gay romance with kinky sex hold on bear with me).

in reg to the punitive pov: look, if MXY had sexually harassed his half-brother, that would be a morally wrong thing to do, right? and if this is a book about characters getting rewarded or punished for their actions, that means that he should suffer for it, narratively speaking.

if he did sexually harass a family member, then his family would've been correct to punish him for it. If his family was correct to punish his sexually immoral behavior, then his attempt to revenge himself on them would've been immoral. wrong. he's not learning and doing better, he's doubling down on his immoral behavior.

but if the accusations are false, we're in the clear. if the accusations are maliciously false, even better! if mxy did nothing wrong, if he was harassed and abused by an evil man spreading lies and a family all too happy to believe and punish him for those evil lies, then it is in fact morally right for him to revenge himself on his tormentors. he wanted to kill his whole family? it's fine! they were Bad People who believed Bad Rumors and did Bad Things. mxy has the right to punish them for it. it's tragic that he dies while getting his revenge, but his revenge is fundamentally moral.

the sex-negativity/purity wank: look, I'm dragging the lan parent wank into this because I think it's relevant. fandom is very...protective...of the morality of the lead characters' romantic and sexual relationship to the nth degree.

the book originally implied that the love interest was the product of coerced sex & his awareness of that dynamic affects the way the love interest approaches his own romantic relationships.

the fandom response was: absolutely not! the idea cannot be considered! the love interest can't be tainted by [anything from inherently dubiously consensual sex to marital rape]. the love interest must be morally pure and come from a morally pure family.

siiiiimilarly: the protagonist gets shoved into mxy's body almost immediately. now. if mxy is innocent, this is fine: the protagonist is morally pure and exists in the body of an innocent and morally pure victim of false accusations. well and good.

if mxy is guilty of incestuous sexual harassment, that is not fine! the protagonist (morally pure, innocent) hasn't done anything that deserves the punishment of being forced to exist in the body of a sexual harasser. the love interest (morally pure, innocent) does not deserve to be tainted by fucking the body of a incestuous sexual harasser.

*Almost* any book about writing.

Jesus christ, people. So I finally got stuck enough in the Afterimage rewrites – I’d been putting off buying or tracking down the book because I *knew* it’d send me off into major restructuring. Any new book about writing does, if I read it during a writing project. But I finally got stuck enough that I was like “fuck it, maybe that’s what it needs”. At the very least, Aaron’s advice shouldn’t clash too badly with Aaron’s characters, right?

Jesus *fuckwaffles*. This thing is so packed with information. It’s readable, which is what they say about his game supplements too; you’re not quite sure how something whose lists have to be category-coded with bold *and* asterisks is such a page-turner. I’m not gonna be wringing out the available learnings from this one in a couple of readings.

He keeps it focused, too. There are a lot of books on writing technique. Ursula LeGuin’s “Steering the Craft” has a segment on omniscient POV that did *things* to my brain back in the day. This one focuses specifically on *plotting* and novel structure – though he doesn’t mention the story specifically, this is a window into How I Wrote Wraith Squadron With Practically No Lead Time. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a whole book specifically about plot structure before; I’m *damn* sure I never read one that taught me more than your basic “rising action” doodle. The most I ever knew about story pacing, I learned from a writer of Man from UNCLE casefic, who knew things about TV show commercial break placement. This? This is a goddamn masterclass.