thatswhatsushewrote | ASKS: character and media comparisons; jin guangyao vs word of honor's zhao jing

[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.