i am 100% convinced that wei wuxian’s bad memory is a defense mechanism.
he remembers little of his mother, but one of the things from her he does remember is this saying: “remember all the good others have done you, and forget all the good you’ve done others.“
memory is repetition. each time you remember something, you are repeating the experience as well as re-writing it. memory is constant alteration. the only reason wei wuxian would have remembered this lesson from his mother so clearly is that throughout his childhood, he revisited it time and time again, until it is ingrained in his being and has become the foundation of his personality.
the implicit message within that lesson is “forget all the bad in life, and remember only the good.“ and a young, orphaned wei wuxian took that and turned it into a crutch by which he survived to become the young teenager who is able to smile at jiang fengmian even when he is fighting for scraps with the dogs in the street, when he looked through trash piles for nourishment each day.
he forgets. he forgets so that he can survive. this is why wei wuxian has a terrible memory, and the more unpleasant an experience is, the more quickly he forgets about it (i.e. represses it); this is why he remembers little of the later part of his first life; this is why wei wuxian finds it difficult to accept a simple “thank you“, yet says “thank yous“ constantly to others (esp. lan zhan).
though his terrible memory is often played for gags in the novel, the more you think about it, the sadder it becomes how little wei wuxian remembers of his own life - both its beginnings and its end.
this is the reason why, even after everything, wei ying is able to joke and smile like nothing has happened, a quirk that many take to be vapid levity and insensitivity and annoys them, but those who know him well (lan zhan) will know is nothing but surface appearance.
(in light of this, it’s even more significant the way wei wuxian remembers every single encounter he’s had with lan wangji in his first life, all the details he is able to recall, before he lost his mind completely.)
contrarily, jiang cheng is someone who remembers, and who remembers too much. the reason why his sword is called “three poisons“, a fundamental vice in buddhist ideology and a name that has come to be one of his monikers as well, is that jiang cheng is everything buddhism stands against. (note that the jiang family crest is a nine-petaled lotus - the lotus being a central symbol in buddhism and often represents it in various contexts.)
jiang cheng’s sword is called sandu because the emotions that fuel him, the sources of his fierceness, determination, and power, are all negative. the more he uses that power, the more he remembers; the more he remembers, the more powerful and spiteful he becomes. (this is not entirely his fault, per se, but an unfortunate consequence of his upbringing and everything that follows after.)
jiang cheng remembers too much, holds onto too much; he has too much baggage, he is incapable of letting go. unlike the lotus his family is known for, he cannot break through the mud of material existence and reach up into the clean air. he is mired instead in past pains, past regrets, past grudges. he remembers too much until the memories poison him: endlessly mourning everything he has lost leads to greed; ruminating on the blame of everyone involved in his family’s deaths leads to resentment; the bias of his own memories and limited perspective leads to ignorance. thus “the three poisons”.
when he and wei wuxian confront each other for the last time in the novel in chapter 103, what wei wuxian says is:
“Forget it. It’s all in the past now. Let’s not mention it any longer.“
while jiang cheng lists every important person he’s ever lost throughout the years, counting his memories like gems. this is why, when everything he once thought he knew about wei wuxian is turned on its head, jiang cheng almost goes mad from it - jiang cheng is nothing if not the sum of his memories, and wen ning has just upturned almost everything he “knew“ about himself, wei wuxian, and the order of the world.
wei wuxian lets go. jiang cheng holds on. wei wuxian forgets. jiang cheng remembers. this is the fundamental difference between them, and the ultimate reason behind their various disagreements, the reason their relationship eventually broke down beyond repair.
on a side note, it’s also interesting to think about: 1. the buddhist undertones in wei wuxian’s life philosophy, the fact that various characters throughout the novel refers to him as the true inheritor of the yunmeng-jiang spirit, and 2. how that relates to his later relationship with lan wangji, whose whole family is descended from a buddhist monk and who is pretty much the embodiment of buddhist detachment (and who later loses that detachment because of wei wuxian.)
lan wangji, the name of whose sword means “the avoidance of worldly matters“, and who wades into the muck of the world repeatedly, in order to find even a shred of wei wuxian’s existence.
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