LAURA

"Does Scum Villain have a teacher/student romance?" And every time I want to answer with: No, But Also Yes, But Also Not Really, It's Complicated (And That's On Purpose.)

Which is an answer that's too long to fit in a tweet or a YT comment, but fortunately tumblr has no (effective) post limit! So here I go.

1 - No

In the very straight forward porn cliche sense of "oh but professor, I really ~need~ to pass this class or my life will be ruined, can't I do ~anything~ to get you to change my grade?" *bats lashes* and "Hoho, my pretty young teen student, I've got your good grade right here in my pants, if you ~apply~ yourself..." then no.

No sex or romance between a teacher and their student in the bounds of a teacher-student relationship happens in this book. No deliberate grooming of an underage student on the part of a teacher occurs in this book. No sex or a romance between an adult character and an underage character occurs in this book, nor is the adult 'waiting' for the minor to reach adulthood to initiate one.

2 - But Also Yes

No sex or romance between a teacher and their student in the bounds of that relationship happens in this book. Two people who were formerly in a teacher and student relationship do enter into a sexual and romantic relationship by the end of the book. Also the nature of the society they're in further means that even though they are no longer in the schooling environment, it is socially assumed that the deference owed by a student to their teacher lasts forever, even after the student leaves that environment, and they continue to regard themselves and refer to themselves in those roles even though the teacher no longer strictly speaking has authority over the student.

Also, the student was really hot for his teacher even when he was still a student. (The teacher was oblivious to this fact.)

3 - But Also Not Really

By the time sex and romance is even on the horizon for these characters, their relationship has so drastically changed from that of a "teacher and student" that it is barely recognizeable as such. The power/authority dynamic between a teacher and their student is subsumed pretty much entirely by the facts that:

A. The 'student' has become a medeival fantasy warlord of such unsurpassable magic and might that literally no other person in this world can stand up against him, 'teacher' included, and the 'teacher' is well aware of that.

B. Also, the 'student' is metaphysically endowed (heh) with the Protagonist Halo, a literally active force within the setting they're part of, which means that not only can he not be defeated, he ontologically cannot be denied anything that he desires; what he wants, he gets, and what he doesn't want, cannot be forced on him.

C. ...But also, the teacher in this setting is a metaphysical outsider to the world order the student is part of, which means that he is aware of all of the above, and can and does manipulate it to suit his own agenda, which may or may not align with giving the student what he wants at any point in time. Assuming that the teacher has the correct understanding of what the student wants. (He doesn't.)

D. ........But also also, for all his power, one harsh word from him can destroy him. For all his knowledge, one tear can devastate him. (Which one? Both.)

4 - It's Complicated (On Purpose)

*throws the chalk against the wall*

Between a teacher and their student, who has the power? Between an emperor and a scholar, who has the power? Between a hero and the villain he is predestined to destroy, who has the power? Between a character and the reader who's read ahead to the end of the story, who has the power? Do we find some of these power imbalances more acceptable than others? And if so, why do we?

Trying to track Who Has The Power or Who Has An Unfair Advantage socially, physically, and metaphysically between this particular pair of characters is damn near impossible and that's on purpose.

The Scum Villain's Self Saving System is a lot of things, but one thing that absolutely defines it is that it is a parody. It's a parody and a deconstruction of a lot of things -- the 'stallion' genre, the 'isekai' genre, the 'pay-per-chapter webnovel' genre, the 'gay drama' genre and, most relevant to this conversation, it is a deconstruction of teacher-student romance.

What kind of a teacher-student romance has a clueless, fish-out-of water NEET in the role of the Wise Old Mentor? What kind of a teacher-student romance has a black-hearted, demonic, domineering feudal warlord in the role of the Blushing Virginal Student? What kind of a teacher-student romance has the two principals so close in age -- by the end of the book, they may be as little as a year apart -- that they're more like peers than teacher and student? What kind of audience are we, going into a story like this one and finding ourselves cheering for the teacher to fall in love and lust with his student, only to be disappointed when that doesn't happen because the teacher fails for three books straight to recognize love and lust when it's literally looking him in the face and crying?

- Luo Binghe

"'Dying together' also included a 'together'. It didn't seem that bad."

- Shen Qingqiu

i’m not necessarily interested in re-litigating which of JGY’s worst acts were, which ones were justified, which ones he maybe didn’t do, which ones were okay because they were sexy, how unforgivable any of them are, etc, but i think we can all agree that if he simply avoided killing NMJ, his other deeds would not instantly become fine. so NMJ is not the golden snitch of fucked-upness in his repertoire. it is far from The Worst Thing He’s Done.

but it is the reason that NHS hunted him.

JGY’s punishment was not about justice on a moral scale, but on a personal scale. (this is a narratively valid reason to destroy someone, btw. JGY clearly did not kill his own father because his dad was a graceless abusive imperialist sex offender and war profiteerer who ordered the slaughter of dozens of innocents and ruined countless lives. he killed JGS because JGS insulted his mother. so while i sincerely believe that NHS wanted personal vengeance, with moral justice being relatively unimportant to him, that’s not at all meant to be a criticism of him.)

to further cement it, the final blow dealt against JGY was explicitly for a deed he did not do. narratively, it would have been SO EASY to write him making a last desperate attempt to run and getting caught on a sword, or lunging for some final hostage and missing. this would be completely in line with his behaviour leading up to that point: the author created COUNTLESS opportunities for some hero or another to run him through when he was actively scheming and manipulating. but she deliberately didn’t.

she deliberately made JGY, a person who had committed so many vile deeds that anyone in the jianghu could accept his execution as just, die an unjust death, slaughtered for something he didn’t do.

(do you think the characters cared that JGY had killed some nameless working women, btw? even LXC was more concerned about his scumbag father. that time he slaughtered an entire family of civilians as enrichment for Xue Yang? to the best of my recollection, that wasn’t even brought up in the main book. that was just for us.)

i’m making this post because a lot of people have told me point blank that JGY “earned” his miserable ending by doing bad shit, that Jiang Cheng/JGY/LXC/whoever the person thinks is an antagonist because they were mean to wangxian were “punished” with horrible fates, and this is how MXTX is codifying who the villains and who the heroes are, and the story is actually explicitly about moral uprightness prevailing over repugnance. and i just think that’s kind of a lackluster reading for a text that’s so blatantly explained that in this universe, good or bad things will simply happen to people completely regardless of whether or not it’s fair.

friend izzy points out that in the world of MDZS, “justice only happens on a personal scale”. there is no societal change. there is no large-scale justice. guilt is basically determined whenever some powerful people get in a room together and agree on it. and neither of the protagonists actually bother to change this. WWX’s big heroic stand was to save a village of a few dozen family members and retreat from larger society completely. LWJ’s heroic deeds account to literally just vigilantism. and this is good. the Wen ghosts coming out of the blood pool said: that was enough. sizhui’s whole existence says: protecting a handful of “unimportant” people for a year was worthwhile.

(XXC, SL, Mianmian etc also just kind of peaced out and wandered around helping people on an individual basis. and since I’m being petty anyway, I’ll once again throw out the fact that the person who affected the largest-scale positive societal change was in fact JGY, whose watchtowers were repeatedly praised for saving countless civilian lives, by the narration and by WWX himself.)

NHS committed himself to vengeance, neglecting his duties to his sect, killing animals, catching Qin Su in it as collateral, endangering children, desecrating the grave of an innocent woman, traumatising Jin Ling and thrusting him into a massive power vacuum at age 14, and destablising the politics of the entire Jianghu because there was no other way to get the piece of justice he personally needed.

any family member of any of the 3,000 people that Wei Wuxian killed at Nevernight have exactly as much right to do to Wei Wuxian exactly what Huaisang did to Jin Guangyao.

for instance, he doesn't quite have a grasp on the usage of flowery, poetic speech yet, so he uses it in ways that are more suggestive than he means to. he compliments liu qingge's fighting style but the words he uses are "dancing like a snow lotus in the high mountain gales" and liu qingge turns so red shen qingqiu thinks he has a fever. he also said to wei qingwei that if only he was better a guqing player he would capture the sound of his laughter (wei qingwei has a boisterous laugh and this was meant to be teasing) and wei qingwei lay awake for three nights thinking about that.

‘You are his one mistake’ - LXC:

The thematic purpose this serves

There is a fair beat of hate around Lan Xichen telling WWX that he is LWJ’s one mistake… and ok, fair, as a character, he is quite ironically mistaken, though, as an elder brother, he is completely within his rights to harbour some anger towards WWX aa the one who broke his baby brother’s heart.

But, what if we ignore the character LXC and instead, focus on the thematic purpose this statement serves.

With our thematic lens on, this statement appears to capture a curiously fatalistic view towards romantic love.

Bear with me now for a while.

To start off, I think the vitriol around ‘his one mistake’ comes from a lack of understanding of how romantic love has traditionally been perceived in the Asian cultural context (broadly speaking, across East, South-East and South Asia).

You see, in the Asian culture, by and large, the collective is always expected to take precedence over the individual. In the context of the ancient world, it amounts to not just deprioritising oneself, but a subjugation of one’s personal desires and wishes so completely that it ceases to exist. You see this social standard clearly play out in LXC’s speech: when LXC refers to the one mistake, he contrasts it with LWJ abiding by the rules of the collective in every other way: ‘model Lan disciple’: complete subjugation of self to the expectation of the collective- that is what is expected to be celebrated.

Romantic love is the biggest threat to this desired order of things: it makes people commit the ‘mistake’ of going against the collective, disregarding it, disobeying it and thus, as a result incurring its worth.

But, a Lan is -uniquely and ironically- allowed to commit this one mistake- the gravest mistake of all, in a life otherwise bound by rules.

Fandom often portrays the Lan sect as ‘romantic’- and yes, they are, but in the uncontrollable, insurmountable, beyond-reason, beyond-sanity sense of the term. There is an element of fatalism here- you cant control who it is. And there is a certain spirituality in it: they become your north-star, above everything and everyone else.

For the Lans, and especially for the Twin Jades, given their parents’ history, romantic love is thus the ‘fatal flaw’ of their sect- as mercurial and as inevitable as the curse of the sabre for the Nie sect. The Lans live in a state of perpetual hope and fear around it- this is why LQR is so perturbed with the possibility of WWX ‘corrupting’ LWJ. The insinuation is far deeper than just bad company.

(And a bit of digression, but, I would argue that it is because as a sect, the Lans would already be well aquatinted with ‘cut-sleeve’ love as well- it must have had its share amongst the stories of ill-fated tumultuous love: thus, the blossoming of those early feelings between LWJ and WWX are not brushed under the heteronormative carpet. In the scheme of things, the Lans, I would argue, are in fact possibly more inclined to accept ‘cut-sleeve’ love as long as it does not end in tragedy or jeopardise the collective. LQR is worried not because it is ‘cut-sleeve’ love but because it bears all the early warning signs of a fatal Lan devotion. Anyway...)

This motif of the fatal flaw in fact appears even with Lan An- while he may have had a successful marriage, and established a powerful sect, the idea of a monk, who grew up listening to Sutras, leaving that life to embroil himself in worldly affairs is not exactly a ‘not-mistake’ either. In the spiritual order of things, it is definitely a fall- a literal climb down the mountain.

All the rules of the Lan since then, all their emphasis on righteousness, on propriety, on elegance and on kindness: all of it is to guard against this eventuality, that ‘one mistake’ that a Lan must succumb to: it is a bank of goodwill, of unshakable credibility, created specifically to beg for grace and mercy from the collective when that fatal transgression eventually occurs. It’s to allow LWJ the chance to become Hanguang-Jun despite fighting for the YL patriarch (especially in the novel canon). It’s to allow LXC to withdraw into seclusion after an earth-shattering scandal. Both of these would have caused the mob to demand a far more severe retribution for the person, had it been anybody else but the Lan.

Really, it seems like it’s a well-known secret in the jianghu: every once in a while, there would be a Lan who, in an otherwise blameless and measured life, would take complete leave of his reason and commit to that one person: that one irrevocable ‘mistake’, that will set the course of the rest of his own life, and sometimes even impact that of the sect itself.

For LWJ, WWX is that- it is the blade that the Lan sect waits for to fall amidst themselves: a fate-ordained mistake that is terrible and yet glorious in the sheer intensity of experience that it bestows on the particular Lan in question.

So, when LXC says WWX was LWJ’s ‘one mistake’, he is not using it to signify that it was an error of judgement on LWJ’s part or that it was a wrong choice. Because he understands that it was not a choice at all… LXC is referring to the ‘mistake’ of LWJ feeling so intensely for WWX that everything else stopped mattering to him. The possibility of it is a burden that all Lans must bear. The experience of it is an exaltation that not all Lans are fortunate enough to attain.

From the Lan perspective, WWX will be LWJ’s ‘mistake’ no matter where he falls on the scale of morality from society’s perspective: because LWJ will risk it all for him, even if it tears him apart. It just so happens that WWX ends up being on the right side of society’s morality at the end of it all. But to LWJ, that had ceased to be a criteria long ago- he already agreed to walk the lonely narrow path in the dark: deciding to follow his inner compass, or more accurately, WWX’s inner compass, against the collective. The intensity of this dedication is precisely why LXC concludes his speech with the incredulous ‘how could you not realise’. Lan Xichen refers to LWJ’s love as a mistake because it is a devotion so fierce and so complete that it should be reserved for the supreme: the Dao or the Divine, not put in the hands of another human being of flesh and blood.

WWX, I would argue, realises that. He realises that ‘mistake’ in this context is not a signifier of the second jade’s logical or moral lapse. It is a signifier of his utter and complete devotion: only you, nothing but you. WWX is LWJ’s one mistake and he would not have it any other way.

Which raises the question: what really is the role of romantic love in this universe. It serves as courage in a society that is spineless, as truth in a society that speaks in rumours and lies.

Ironically enough, Jiang Cheng follows the same pattern- even if it sometimes appears as a grotesque mimicry of LWJ’s devotion to WWX- but then, JC is not as strong a man LWJ is. If LWJ is the ideal, JC is what the reality often is. But, look what love enables even someone like JC to do: courage in a society that is spineless- JC, the little brother, stepping up to protect WWX against the Wen soldiers, knowing fully well he can not evade them… truth in a society that deals in rumours and lies- this one is beautiful in poetic irony because the truth of that act remains protected within JC- he never releases it to the world and hence, it can never get sullied. And yet, in this case, to keep the truth of his love protected, he needs the world and WWX continue believing the lie that has been set into place. And objectively speaking, both were ‘mistakes’ as well- a sect heir should not be jeopardising his own life because he owes is to his sect to live, a brother should not be keeping a secret so big because he should try to be reconciled.

The logic is sound -- he'll keep Luo Binghe from experiencing neglect and abuse at Shen Qingqiu's hands, raise him away from the pressure of the sects and the likelihood that anyone else might find out about his heritage and try to harm him over it, keep him fully away from the Immortal Alliance Conference, and then Luo Binghe's course will change trajectory because he'll have no reason to want revenge against the world and no access to Xin Mo. Shen Yuan will be able to spare Luo Binghe some suffering and possibly survive in a world less subject to the harrowing whims of a half-mad tyrannical overlord. Win-win!

However, the tricky bit is that he's not sure exactly how far ahead of the novel he is, and also Airplane didn't specify where Luo Binghe grew up. This means that Luo Binghe could be any age younger than twelve and in any number of places along or near to the Luo river.

Shen Yuan decides he's going to approach this by pretending he is looking for the long-lost son of his sister, traveling through the likeliest areas, asking after abandoned children who might fit the protagonist's description. It's a long shot, he knows, and he's mostly relying on the existence of Narrative Destiny. But eventually he is directed by several people towards a particular city, which is not as close to the river as he'd have expected Luo Binghe to grow up, but then again he only knows that was where baby Binghe was found, not where the washerwoman who took him in ultimately lived.

It becomes clear to him, though, that he's been sent to the wrong target. But also why he's been sent astray is apparent in nearly the same breath, because among the slave children living in this area is a little boy who could be his much younger clone.

The Complete Cast Challenge

write one fic per character in the media's cast of characters

the fic should be that character's point of view or a character study of them or otherwise have them as the central focus

no minimum or maximum word count, but each fic should be posted separately as a standalone - you can gather them in a series or a collection for organizational purposes

no maximum number of chapters. all that is required is a oneshot, but feel free to go hog wild

no time limit. This can be a project you take on as your main focus or it can be a way for you to experiment on the side of any other fics you're working on

suggested, but not required: use an additional tag like [character's name]-centric to help fans of that character find your work. If you're writing about a character you dislike, you can warn fans of that character away from your work by using an additional tag such as [character's name]-bashing

I also kind of think this has the potential to be a tiered challenge: