that's just, like, your opinion, da-ge

[originally posted here on december 16, 2024.]
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re: my tags about jgy and qin su in my reblog of that "does your blorbo have ptsd" tumblr poll, can we revisit that excruciating conversation in the jinlintai treasure room in cql? because one of my least favourite reads on jgy's expression and body language here is that he's being "creepy." and to be clear, i'm not trying to say you're wrong to draw those inferences here, because his behaviour is deeply, deeply unsettling, and i also find this scene hard to watch and to read in the novel. but i think if that's where your examination of him begins and ends here, you're doing yourself--and zhu zanjin's exquisite performance--a disservice.

so the 'creepy' bit is preceded by what jgy says to qin su while she has her back turned, and i find his words heartbreakingly sincere and very reflective of a man who has spent his life forced to feel shame and embarrassment over his mother, who he loves dearly and who he watched suffer right up until the moment of her death:



there are a few more very poignant lines in there about his mother and the depth of his gratitude to qin su (these show up in the novel, too), but i think the above encapsulates the same message. then the atmosphere shifts, and so does jgy's expression when he talks about jin rusong and how his death would have been inevitable--essential, even. this is also where i most often see him described as acting like a creep, and i have two separate responses to this that i don't really have the time to get into right now, but which have both doylist and watsonian components to them so 👀 you can probably make some guesses about what my arguments would be. if there's enough interest, i might come back to this later and put together a separate post about it, idk. anyway, i'm not going to get into the 'is he a creep' argument here because tl;dr no, i don't think he is, and also--



i find jgy's expressions here to be more indicative of a man who is, shall we say, Not His Best Self At The Moment 🫠 rather than a man who is intentionally trying to make a wife who, by her own admission, he has treated very well for the entirety of their marriage, uncomfortable. his attention isn't even on qin su or the hell that she is experiencing right now--because he is re-experiencing his own hell. because he, too, is traumatized by this knowledge! he's just had a decade and change to develop some deeply unhealthy coping mechanisms and masking techniques to hide it.

at this point qin su whips around and slaps him, which i know everyone likes to gif and fistbump and holler about in a positive way, but given there is no one in this scene who isn't enduring profound trauma in this moment, i, uh. you know. won't be doing that. i will focus on his face journey in the expressions that follow because they are just so



dissociating



dissociating



dissociating



/executive function switch is flipped in his superbly wrinkly brain, and then "qin su :) we still have so many guests to attend at the discussion conference :)"

a-yao? sir?? hello??? also i do not have the quote from the novel directly in front of me, but iirc he says something very similar here to what he does in the novel, which i'll have to paraphrase: that this revelation is only bothering qin su so much because she is actively thinking about it! it's only thoughts, you see! just don't think about it! haven't they actually been very happy all this time, while only one of them had to live with this knowledge and could not share it with anyone?

to which i can only respond with abject, horrified shock because, like. have you, jin guangyao? been happy and unperturbed by this devastating knowledge? because i think the answer is a pretty definitive no.

anyway i just wanted to quickly keymash my thoughts on this before they fled my brain completely but tl;dr yes, while jgy would not use this language to describe himself, he's absolutely got ptsd specifically around his marriage to his own half-sister, and their son.

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my OG tag commentary:

#mdzs meta#a bit disorganized and not as polished as i like to produce normally but i'll probably just come back later with quotes from the novel#this is mainly cql canon but i think it applies to the novel too#jin guangyao#qin su

[originally posted here--today!]
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re: my tag essay in my reblog of that poll about what influenced nmj's anger at jgy more, his morals or his cultivation

i also want to add that unfortunately, by the time the war is over and nmj actually has the time and bandwidth to have those conversations with jgy... it's too late. not because of anything jgy has done by this point, but because nmj is already ~4 years away from qi deviating naturally even without jgy's intervention (both to prevent it and to accelerate it). his mind and his judgment have been permanently altered by the resentful energy of his chosen cultivation method. there's literally nothing that jgy could have said or done at that point to alter nmj's mindset. it was set in stone, whether it was reflective of reality or not.

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my OG tag commentary:

#mdzs meta#jin guangyao#nie mingjue#the real enemy was the angry murder swords all along actually

nb: removing this image from its conversational context hurts my heart, but there's just no alternative without signing myself up for bulk copy/pasting meta from a bunch of other people, which i don't want to do. anyway, i made this as a very silly addition to some interesting cql discussion between ohohoho-nyohohoho, holy--milk, and poorlittleyaoyao on september 15, 2024, in which it became clear that cql-canon wei wuxian has good reason to make sure jin guangyao does not leave the guanyin temple alive... because if he does, wei wuxian himself dies thanks to those curse marks!

[originally posted here on october 11, 2024.]
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anonymous asked:

"sometimes i have to remind people that JGS's a horrible and terrifying person. i sigh every single time bc people forget for some reason. is there anything you want to remind the fandom?"

my answer:

oh, many things lol. i suspect the people who most need to be reminded are not particularly interested in anything i have to say at this point, however, if they don't have me blocked already. but in short: yes! jin guangshan is a horrible person who ruthlessly takes advantage of jin guangyao's filial piety to further his own political agenda. he's the selfish, greedy, power-hungry villain that jin guangyao's detractors believe jin guangyao to be, and i think it's a fundamental misunderstanding of jin guangyao's character to state that he "becomes his father" by the time he comes into power. because that just isn't what happens, and there's no support for it in the text.

(edited to add: or rather, the "support" that his strongest detractors rely on to support their arguments falls apart under close scrutiny, because you quickly discover that when acting under his own power, jin guangyao chooses governance and moderation rather than greed and destruction. he's morally complex for sure, and willing to get his hands dirty and bloody, but he is not jin guangshan.)

to anyone reading this who feels tempted to say "but ray, the sex workers, the brothel--" please don't bring these crimes up if you're going to separate them from their emotionally charged catalyst, aka jin guangyao discovering that jin guangshan could have chosen to rescue meng shi from literal sexual slavery, but chose not to because "literate women are too much trouble." meng shi dies from her illness while languishing in poverty, when she did not have to; in jin guangyao's eyes, jin guangshan is his mother's murderer, and there is no one else in the novel that he loves more than meng shi (no, not even lan xichen!). do you hold wei wuxian's several month-long murder-torture bender of the wen sect disciples after the sacking of lotus pier against him years after it has happened and he is no longer vengefully murdering and torturing people? if you don't judge wei wuxian by the actions he takes 1) at his lowest, and 2) when he has been directly provoked into trying to protect himself, why do you choose not to extend that same grace to jin guangyao?*

* this is not actually an invitation to @ me with discourse on this post unless you're going to be normal about it. if you can't be normal, please save us both the time and energy we'd otherwise waste spatting with each other, and just, idk. go play the sims or something.

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[this post didn't include any tag commentary, shockingly enough.]

[originally posted here on september 27, 2024.]

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anonymous asked:

It's funny that the hubris of characters like Zhao Jing is always pride (he's greedy, too, sure, but that's just to feed his huge, fragile ego), while Jin Guangyao's downfall was actually his mercy.

Also as far as WoH characters go, I think Jiggy has more in common with the little scorpion.

my answer:

truly it is jin guangyao's compassion and mercy that come back to bite him in the ass. evidence:

• everyone who ultimately contributes to killing him are people whose lives he has literally saved in the past, or whose lives he has devoted himself to improving in some way. he saved nie mingjue's life during the confrontation with wen ruohan in the scorching sun palace; he saved AND protected lan xichen and what was left of the gusu lan library after the razing of the cloud recesses; he doted on and cared for and saw nie huaisang as more than simply nie mingjue's disappointing, childish successor, and solved his problems for him for well over a decade after nie mingjue's death.
• he could have killed sisi after realizing she was among the sex workers who raped jin guangshan to death, but he didn't, specifically because she was kind to him and meng shi; (nobody @ me about the imprisonment, i'm not saying any of that was good. but he could not harm her more than he already had.)
• he has so many opportunities during the guanyin temple sequence to kill every single one of his hostages, which would certainly make recovering meng shi's remains less difficult (before he realizes her remains are missing)--but he doesn't.

i'm sure there are more examples of course, but those are the ones that immediately leap to mind. as for the comparison to xie'er.... hmm. there are definitely some superficial similarities, but i really don't think anyone in word of honour is a suitable comparison to jin guangyao honestly. i'll have to mull it over some more, but as i've said before, jin guangyao is such a unique character in the genre that he is tricky to make these kinds of comparisons about.

[i reblogged again this with the following additional commentary:]

following up on this because i can't believe i didn't include it originally, but as i did the math over here to tally up just how much time passes between when the sworn brotherhood happens and nie mingjue's death (it's over 4 years, for the record), jin guangyao probably spends a substantial amount of time using his very meagre cultivation talents to help lan xichen suppress nie mingjue's baxia-induced problems with his qi! and we know that his efforts were working because wei wuxian tells us it's working in the empathy flashback chapter! so, yet again, jin guangyao is expending a tremendous amount of effort to preserve the life of someone who wants him dead, and who his father does not like, at all.

tl;dr if jin guangyao were as evil and self-interested as his harshest critics believe him to be, he would have survived the events of the novel.

[originally posted here on september 23, 2024.]

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re: my reblog of the song of clarity and the staircase incident discourse--

this is one of the few things about jgy in the text where i just strongly believe that, given the context clues + what we actually see with our own eyes during wangxian's investigation, there's an objectively correct answer about when jgy began playing the altered song of clarity for nmj. like when it comes to whether or not he actually had a hand in killing jin rusong, or the extent to which he might have actually wanted harm to befall jzx during his confrontation with wwx, or whether he intended for xy to be killed or not when was kicked out of jinlintai, i think there is enough room in the text to make an argument in either direction.

but based on what we are shown about jgy and nmj's relationship during the empathy flashback, the evidence provided by wwx that clarity was working on nmj prior to the confrontation on the jinlintai steps, the estimated time it would take for the altered song to take effect and trigger a qi deviation (provided by lxc), and the amount of time jgy gives himself to bring xy's head to nmj, i think the context clues are very clear: jgy doesn't play the altered song of cleansing, or at least does not start applying spiritual power to the altered portions of the song, until after the staircase incident.

[originally posted here on september 13, 2024.]

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anonymous asked:

Sorry if I'm misremembering something you said, (or if I alr sent this ask, I am Forgetful), but why do you think novel!LXC recovers post canon but CQL!LXC commits suicide?

my answer:

big mood re: the forgetfulness, anon, my memory is a tea sieve!

quickly just to give credit where credit is due, i first started thinking about this possibility after reading some meta on the subject first by xiyao-feels and then through some follow-up discussion with confusion-and-more so i am certainly not the first blogger in the jgy stan corner of the fandom to have this thought! the tl;dr version of why some of us think novel canon lxc survives (not recovers--i do not think he ever recovers from jgy's death, and yes, i am being very specific about saying it IS jgy's death that destroys him, but i can come back to that in another post) is because he does remain in that position in the post-canon extras, even if he is definitely aboard the struggle bus (e.g., his body language and detachment from what is going on during the banquet extra).

to enter Speculation Station™️ however, as long as there is a possibility of jgy (and nmj, too, to some extent, but i truly believe jgy would be his priority) either regaining his spiritual cognition, or some other means of helping his soul pass on peacefully, i think lxc would be committed to making one of those two possibilities happen. but also, strictly in terms of what we are given in the text, lxc remains sect leader, even if he's a ghost of his former self in terms of his ability to function normally. if he was no longer sect leader for 'whatever reason, lwj would have to contend with that, and i think mxtx would have written about it because wangxian are her special little guys. ....(derogatory)

in cql, however, here's what we know about the state of the jianghu after the guanyin temple sequence:

• nie huaisang is not the new chief cultivator--lan wangji is, which is... certainly a choice;
• there is no precedent in the canon for a chief cultivator to assume leadership of the jianghu without also being the leader of their own sect;
• sect leaders remain in charge of their sects until their deaths. there's no abdication or retirement;
• it follows, then, that for lan wangji to become sect leader, lan xichen has to be dead.

like... i suppose there are some assumptions at work here; e.g. would his death have to come about as suicide? couldn't it have happened through other means? but i think they are assumptions grounded in what we actually see in the show: lan xichen was willing to die with jin guangyao, and then is not seen or mentioned again after that last devastating glimpse we see of his face while the junior quartet talk around him, right after jin guangyao's death. i can't track down my screenshots now because my collection is such a disorganized mess T_T but if i can find them i'll reblog this post with them included, because it's... it's bleak.

anyway, there you go: my thoughts about why i think novel canon lxc survives, but cql canon lxc does not.

[i then reblogged this with the screenshots from cql episode 50, and additional commentary:]

here we go--the episode 50 screenshots of lan xichen and members of the junior quartet, as promised:







i haven't included every single line of the conversation between jin ling, lan jingyi and ouyang zizhen because i don't think they're necessary to conveying the point i'm currently focused on, which is that lan xichen's expression and affect are completely untouched by what is happening around him. it's actually... so chilling, to be honest, but i don't think it's accidental.

[originally posted here on september 10, 2024.]
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anonymous asked:

Thoughts on qinyao?

my answer:

i don't think my thoughts on them are that complicated or surprising, anon: i think their situation is quite sad and tragic, since it seems clear from what the text shows us that qin su is one of the only people in jin guangyao's life who did not allow his parentage to influence how she felt about him. all told, while i don't think that jin guangyao's feelings for her are comparable to what he felt for lan xichen (whether you interpret their relationship as being romantic or otherwise, it is on a different level from the rest of his relationships), i do think he truly cared for her and wanted to have a family with her.

a lot of other people have already spilled digital ink weighing in on whether he was in the right or in the wrong re: withholding information from her, and i firmly come down on the side of there were no good options. he was going to do her irreparable harm either way, and i think he was trying to spare her the pain and suffering that he had no choice but to endure, alone, for the entirety of their marriage. i think it is very easy, and very tempting from our vantage point, to say what we think he should have done, or what we think we would have done if we were in his shoes. i also think it's... not a waste of time, exactly, but not really a line of questioning i'm interested in pursuing, because one way or another you end up tempted to ascribe blame to someone who shouldn't imo be blamed for any of this.

truly the only person i hold responsible for this tragedy, ultimately, is jin guangshan.

[originally posted here on september 6, 2024.]

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he’s definitely not a working class hero, but if your critique of jin guangyao’s ‘ambitious social climbing’ at all hinges on arguments that boil down to ‘not knowing his place,’ then boy do i have news for you about where you yourself might fall on the ‘union man’ to ‘union buster’ spectrum.

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my OG tag commentary:

#no i’m not done bitching about this apparently#salty peak sect 🧂#i don’t expect class solidarity from jgy#in part because there is no working class the way we envision it in mdzs#i do expect better from readers of these books#tho maybe i shouldn’t at this point

[originally answered here on august 28, 2024.]
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anonymous asked:

Xiyao or Peishui?

my answer:

gotta be xiyao for me, anon.

i love peishui. i love that one of shi wudu's last promises to shi qingxuan is that if he goes to pei ming, pei ming will protect him. the mental image of pei ming being one of the only people to attend the disgraced shi wudu's funeral is going to live in my heart forever. but peishui shared centuries of immortal friendship, and while i obviously stan water tyrant-shixiong's rights and (let's be real, it is mostly) his wrongs, the real tragedy of xiyao is that not only is his life so heartbreakingly short, jgy does not even die for something he has actually done wrong. he did not try to attack lan xichen, and he is not punished for the things he is objectively guilty of, but for the crime of protecting himself in a 'dishonourable' way, and for being different from the rest of the cultivation world around him. and he is dealt his mortal injury by the only person in the jianghu who has always loved him and seen him, from day one, as his peer and equal.

there's just nothing crunchier than xiyao to me. i'll be chewing on it for the rest of my life.

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my OG tag commentary:

#asks answered#xiyao#peishui#jin guangyao#lan xichen#shi wudu#pei ming#i love them both but if forced to choose between them there can just be no contest