Most Unhinged Act of Devotion in MDZS
Wei Wuxian giving his golden core to Jiang Cheng
Xiao Xingchen giving his eyes to Song Lan
Lan Wangji fighting 33 Lan elders + getting lashed for Wei Wuxian
Lan Xichen being willing to die with Jin Guangyao
Wen Ning + Wen Qing sacrificing themselves for the other Wen Remnants & WWX
OP you're forgetting... (specify)
#I think I gotta go with the eyes thing simply because there was just no reason to do all that #The golden core was crazy dgmw. But the tactical/political reasons were there. Now I don't think WWX did that for those reasons really #But they were there. (tags via @adhdo5)
So I actually voted the same way for very similar reasons. And I think what it comes down to for me is that with a lot of these, the character was backed into a corner where they had to do something or there would be terrible consequences.
If LWJ had not fought to protect Wei Wuxian, WWX would likely have been arrested and killed. WQ and WN gave themselves up because otherwise everyone they cared about would be killed (and tragically, it didn't protect them anyway, but they believed it would). It's debatable whether Jiang Cheng would have been suicidal without his golden core, but WWX seems to have absolutely believed he would be and acted like his life was literally at stake.
(LXC is the other outlier here, but you can also argue LXC was motivated by genuinely not wanting to live anymore as much as by selfless devotion to Jin Guangyao. And how exactly it all goes down also varies a lot between the book and its adaptations, with book!LXC not really making an active choice at all.)
With the eye transfer though... Song Lan certainly wasn't going to enjoy suddenly being blind, but he could have lived with it, just like XXC learned to. There's no reason XXC needed to do this, and I think that makes it a special level of unhinged.
I would in fact argue losing his eyes was probably secondary to Song Lan compared to having lost literally everyone he had grown up with at his temple, so this didn’t even fix the main source of SL's trauma. But of course I think that's exactly why XXC did it - he couldn't bring all those people back, but he could give this.
