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The first rule of MDZS is don’t take Nie Mingjue’s word about Jin Guangyao. The second rule of MDZS is don’t take Jin Guangyao’s word about Nie Mingjue. The third rule is don’t take Lan Xichens’ word about either of them
wait, i'm curious, i can easily think of examples of nmj being wrong about jgy and lxc being wrong about both of nieyao but how is jgy really wrong about nmj?
I don't think that the way Jin Guangyao thinks Nie Mingjue sees the world is accurate to how Nie Mingjue actually sees the world. At multiple points in the book, Jin Guangyao very calmly and clearly explains to Nie Mingjue how life is made difficult for him and he will suffer more consequences from them commiting the same actions, both implying and outright saying that Nie Mingjue doesn't understand him/see his plight. Nie Mingjue, however, seemingly does understand him, he just thinks Jin Guangyao should go through with whatever he's demanding of him anyway, damn the consequences (and a small note that NMJs' requests may be ridiculous, but he is not a hypocrite when he does so, as he actively chooses death every day he cultivates. He's holding his ridiculous standard to everyone else). Nie Mingjue is more blatanly wrong, both because he makes more sweeping statements and because he doesn't have a calm way of speaking the way Jin Guangyao does. Jin Guangyao does, however, seem to be wrong about what Nie Mingjue is actually thinking. His beliefs are not ungrounded, mind, but neither are Nie Mingjue's about Jin Guangyao. Nie Mingjue is just more blatantly wrong (probably).
(Small disclaimer that I've been busy with my thesis until a few days ago so I haven't had the time to go back to the source material,,, I'll do so when I have time! I think I could come up with concrete/more examples if I did. Or maybe I'd prove myself wrong but hey then I learned a new thing)
!!!! i have many thoughts on this specific issue :3
you might find some example i've forgotten that problematizes this and i would be glad to hear it if so but i'm of the opinion that jgy is right that nmj does not understand him or his situation.
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
*we also see lxc intervene for meng yao in a way that accounts for the nuances of his situation, in contrast to nmj's actions in point 1
@woobifiedvillain this is the other, the part about "equally imposing fundamentally unequal standards" being subconsciously anti-equality and that being present throughout the empathy sequence is the relevant part of the argument here
i think i have a harsher take on nmj saying "what else should i expect from the son of a whore" than other nmj enjoyers. studiers. scholars. w/e. which is that i think that it wasn't just the qi deviation talking. nmj at the end of his life is barely recognizable but all the flaws that qi deviating brings out in him were always there, just held in check by his better angels. in his right mind he would not have burned nhs' things or stood by uncaringly as nhs burned himself trying to save them, but he did threaten it. it was a real locus of conflict between them. all the philosophical and practical conflicts between himself and jgy that terminate in nmj being consumed by an all-encompassing need to turn him to mincemeat #butcherreference were always there, he just thinks they can be overcome or that jgy will "come around". why would this pattern be broken at such a crucial moment?
at the beginning of the nmj empathy sequence we get an impression of him as someone who does sincerely care for the common people even if he's not exactly capable of interacting with them himself. the fact that meng yao also cares for them (and is good at interacting with them) brings him to nmj's notice. he repeatedly sees people as equal to the point that it becomes a problem when he refuses to take into account that others might find themselves with significantly limited options, that he's sort of "class-blind" and therefore can't make exceptions for jgy, that he helps him in ways that could have backfired, that he doesn't notice that when he makes meng yao serve tea he's exposing him to constant reminders that he's considered "unclean", that he finds the wen siblings culpable because they didn't try to *checks notes* die uselessly, &c &c. even the conflict with jgy that he just can't let go of is based on his suspicion that jgy thinks that his and nmj's lives are more valuable than those of the nie cultivators jgy killed to save them both, and in the lead-up to the stairs kick he accuses him of thinking he's more noble than them, that he's different from them, and takes jgy's confirmation of specifically the latter as evidence, though what jgy actually means by this is left ambiguous. that nmj's combined strength and flaw is to see equality even when it's not there is 100% lxc's view. for a long time i think jgy believes it also, or at least wants to believe it. maybe his faith in it starts to slip when nmj repeatedly slides back into calling him meng yao. but either way the turning point imo is that when he's pushed far enough, when he's lost enough self-control, what does nmj do but kick jgy down the stairs and ask him what else he should have expected from the son of a whore. that's the statement of someone who, somewhere in his heart, always thought of jgy as lesser. and that's when jgy decides there is no longer any reason to try to help or reconcile with nmj. the only way forward is to kill him.
the stairs kick is also significant on its own imo. this is the third time that this has happened to jgy--the second time obviously being on his father's orders, and the first, revealed only at the end of the novel, when a john who is a client of his mother's who got violent with her when she tried to get him to pay more than he thought she was worth, fights him off when he tries to intervene in her defense. in both of those cases there's a clear pattern, which is that an abusive person with significant power over him uses violence to put him back in his place, to literally push him beneath them. the third time is the incident with nmj, and i think that at the very least this is telling us how jgy sees this incident. nmj = father = violent john = the thing that will always try to prevent him from rising up in the world or asserting his own value--or, for that matter, his mother's. it's also worth noting that if we go off the timeline established in the villainous friends extra, this happens shortly after jgy also gives up on and resolves to kill his father. nmj and jgs slide together into the same category as the john when jgy gives up hope that they can fulfill his only other model of "man with power over him" which is the fantasized image of his father from his childhood, who would truly see his value and elevate him, a role which at different times both nmj and jgs promised to fulfill. (mayyybe lxc avoids fully falling out of this category into the former one?? though his inclusion within the latter category is. obviously damaged.) now is this FAIR to nmj? obviously not. he's not in his right mind when he does it and the person he is when he is more in control of himself is so much better than jgs and the other guy it almost renders the comparison absurd. i'd bet that jgy knows this on some level. but that it would feel terrible to him i don't think i need to defend. to him, this is nmj showing his true colors. that much i don't think is subjective interpretation i think it's pretty intentional and obvious. the part that is subjective and controversial and that i don't think everyone needs to agree with is that i think that even though nmj is better than the others we are supposed to read jgy as pretty much right, to read a kernel of truth into the comparison. he is better, but when it comes to jgy, he's not really different.
i don't mean this as character bashing and i think that there's actual interpretive stakes in this view, namely that the moral absolutism nmj is an avatar of isn't just fatally at odds with reality, it's impracticable. nmj thinks that he can see everyone as equal and exist above social bigotry, can act as though it doesn't exist, and lxc, for all that he thinks this is wrong and misguided, agrees with him that that's what he's doing. but he's not. he can't. that bigotry creeps in anyway. he is just like all the rest. so is lxc. so is everyone.
like for a really long time i was super confused as to why reylo (two unrelated adults) was considered a proshipper type ship while catradora (two unrelated teenagers) was not when they visited roughly equal amounts of violence on each other but now i really think that it was because the average person who shipped reylo was more of the proshipper social milieu and the average person who shipped catradora was more likely to be of the anti social milieu and it snowballed from there
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"i'm not an anti or a proshipper, i think it was so stupid that we were having nuclear internet discourse about romanticizing bigotry and abuse" closet anti
"i'm not an anti or a proshipper, the whole debate was stupid and juvenile, just block and move on with your life" closet proshipper
like it's true that it was something of a vibes-based and illogical method of self-identification but there was a different vibe and culture surrounding these internet communities and even though it's not a hot button issue anymore you can still very much see the lingering effects in individuals
can't tell you how many times i've seen both "i'm not an anti or a proshipper, i'm a normal fucking person who like all normal people thinks that anyone who writes incest fic is a freak" and also "i'm not an anti or a proshipper, i'm a normal fucking person who like all normal people doesn't think that something like writing incest fic reflects on someone's real life moral values"
"i'm not an anti or a proshipper, i think it was so stupid that we were having nuclear internet discourse about romanticizing bigotry and abuse" closet anti
"i'm not an anti or a proshipper, the whole debate was stupid and juvenile, just block and move on with your life" closet proshipper
like it's true that it was something of a vibes-based and illogical method of self-identification but there was a different vibe and culture surrounding these internet communities and even though it's not a hot button issue anymore you can still very much see the lingering effects in individuals
"i'm not an anti or a proshipper, i think it was so stupid that we were having nuclear internet discourse about romanticizing bigotry and abuse" closet anti
"i'm not an anti or a proshipper, the whole debate was stupid and juvenile, just block and move on with your life" closet proshipper
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sorry for vagueposting i just don't feel like arguing nd sorry for banging on the same drum all the time but if nmj saw jgy as his equal he wouldn't have pushed him down the stairs and called him the son of a whore. not even just in a psychological sense i just believe that if that was what we were meant to take from the book that scene would not have been included
i think there is a mutual fantasy of equality just as there is with xiyao but the difference imo is that with nieyao that fantasy is destroyed pretty early on and most of the relationship we see is something of an explicit mutual struggle for dominance which xiyao for its own reasons avoids fully becoming
zaiapapaya2 could have written the complete works of shakespeare but shakespeare could not have written the line "i'm a transfem but they call me a transmasc the way they've watched my growth from the bottom"
sorry for vagueposting i just don't feel like arguing nd sorry for banging on the same drum all the time but if nmj saw jgy as his equal he wouldn't have pushed him down the stairs and called him the son of a whore. not even just in a psychological sense i just believe that if that was what we were meant to take from the book that scene would not have been included
i think there is a mutual fantasy of equality just as there is with xiyao but the difference imo is that with nieyao that fantasy is destroyed pretty early on and most of the relationship we see is something of an explicit mutual struggle for dominance which xiyao for its own reasons avoids fully becoming
sorry for vagueposting i just don't feel like arguing nd sorry for banging on the same drum all the time but if nmj saw jgy as his equal he wouldn't have pushed him down the stairs and called him the son of a whore. not even just in a psychological sense i just believe that if that was what we were meant to take from the book that scene would not have been included
i think there is a mutual fantasy of equality just as there is with xiyao but the difference imo is that with nieyao that fantasy is destroyed pretty early on and most of the relationship we see is something of an explicit mutual struggle for dominance which xiyao for its own reasons avoids fully becoming
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sorry for vagueposting i just don't feel like arguing nd sorry for banging on the same drum all the time but if nmj saw jgy as his equal he wouldn't have pushed him down the stairs and called him the son of a whore. not even just in a psychological sense i just believe that if that was what we were meant to take from the book that scene would not have been included
let's get bodied into the floor by jc's donghua promo
DRINKING WWX's FAVORITE BOOZE IN WWX'S FEELINGS TREE REMINISCING ABOUT THE PAST!! BETTER TO MEET AGAIN AND HAVE NOTHING TO SAY THAN THOUSAND WORDS FROM THE WORLD!!! ITS NEVER TOO LATE!!!!!
(original for people who don't have to rely on an image translator hdjdjf)
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