#the politics of revenge

[carolinemillerbooks]

New Post has been published on Books by Caroline Miller

New Post has been published on https://www.booksbycarolinemiller.com/musings/a-paeen-to-humility/

A Paeen To Humility

If life feels frustrating, there’s a reason. Frustration is a condition throughout the universe.  Even electrons are vulnerable. Because an imbalance exists between the places for them in one layer of the quantum soup and another, each time the layers interact, the quantum particles must scramble for positions like players in a game of musical chairs.  Though existence is hard for electrons, scientists suspect they can use that frustration to increase reliability when encoding digital information. In politics, frustration is a boon for antacid manufacturers. Each new poll in our divided nation sends many to the drugstore. Current tallies for the 2024 election show Donald Trump leads Joe Biden by a few percentage points, a difference that keeps Democrats awake at night worried about the return of a failed president whose agenda is political revenge.    Logic suggests the polls are wrong.  In 2020, Joe Biden defeated Trump by 7 million votes. Is it reasonable to suppose that 4 years later, these 7 million find Trump’s 91 felony charges an asset?  Should we suppose that women, even in red states like Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, and Ohio, who have voted to enshrine abortion rights into their state constitutions will find Trump’s call for a national ban irresistible? People are more complex than the polls can reflect, it would seem.   This morning, a  friend in California surprised me with a phone call. We haven’t met for several years but we’ve stayed in touch with birthday cards and holiday messages. He opened our conversation with a few lines from my memoir,  Getting Lost to Find Home.  His speech sounded urgent, as he feared I’d missed the importance of what I’d written. Afterward, he thanked me for reminding him that friendships needed nurturing, and he resolved to do better with ours. The sweetness of his remark stuck in my throat like a  lump of hard candy. I doubted my friend could have foreseen the feeling of communion that rose within me or fathom the compliment he’d paid me by reading my words with feeling.  When our conversation ended, I returned to the blog I was writing, compulsively, the way a crow returns to a crust of bread at the side of the road once traffic has subsided.  My thoughts returned to an interview with David Brooks I’d just read. (“Q&A,” AARP  Bulletin, Nov. 23, pgs. 40-41.)    Brooks is a columnist whose political views are more conservative than mine. Many times, I’ve crushed his commentaries from my easy chair, though he never knew it.  Even so, over the years, he seemed to have mellowed, and I am gratified that in his interview, he confirmed my assessment.  I’ve learned to be more relational and humbler, he confesses. Time’s passing has a way of changing perspective.  For example, I have rid myself of the notion that humans rule the planet.  As a species, we are no more in control of the ground beneath our feet than were David Thoreau’s warring red and black ants in Walden Pond.   China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin may imagine otherwise and hope to find a place for themselves in the pantheon of great leaders. More likely the pain and distrust they sow will grow like graveyard weeds to one day blot out their memory. Jews and Palestineans are at war again, the historical residue of tyrants and old men bent in prayer who exhort their followers to slaughter non-believers.  Do these disparate sides not see the absurdity of that call? No other mammalian slaughters its own in greater numbers than our species. That isn’t Nature’s way.  It is human vainglory. With both sides drenched in the blood of their enemy, the time has come for all to see no triumph lies in war. A dead child pulled from the rubble of a bombed building is the universal source of human tears.     We can do better.  Let there be no more learned hate. Frustration may exist in the universe, but we can choose our response.  We either yield to it or build a wall of defiance.  If we choose the latter, let imagination be the bricks of our fortress and communion its mortar. When we fill the cracks between oblivion in service to one another, we give our frail and inauspicious species primacy and establish compassion as human law throughout a deaf, dumb, and blind cosmos.        

#abortion rights #communion #David Brooks #David Thoreau #Donald Trump #frustration in the universe #Geting Lost to Find Home #Israeli/Palestinian war #learned hate #political polls for 2024 election #the politics of revenge #vainglory #Vladimir Putin #Walden Pond #Xi Jinping

[uncanny-tranny]

"Treatment" for addiction that requires you to lock up, confine, coerce, or otherwise strip addicts of their autonomy, it isn't treatment. It is a revenge fantasy that prioritizes your desire for subjugation over the actual betterment of addicts.

#politics #addiction #addiction tw #addiction mention tw #and like i understand the desire for revenge when you feel wronged. but addiction isn't one of those circumstances #i hold a deep hatred for my abuser but i was celebrating when they weren't being criminalized for their addiction #because if that had happened that would have destroyed so many lives in such a brutal and unnecessary way #and yes they held responsibility for their actions. but that doesn't mean you can go from 0 to 1000 because of it

[projectcatzo]

Monkey Man is a movie about--and I mean this in the most literal way possible--how the kindness and wisdom of trans people can alter the trajectory of not only your life but also society

#monkey man #movies #you think i'm fucking with you--it's just an action movie about revenge i hear you say--but without getting into details this is real #my film school would've haaaaaated this movie not because of the politics but because it's the opposite kind of movie they teach you to mak

[leulahart]

the alayne sample chapter from winds is actually something that can be so personal

#the vale plotline is truly the one im looking forward to the most #forget blood magic and revenge and resurrections #i want secret identities and political intrigue!!! sorry to the haters #sansa stark art #sansa stark #asoiaf #asoiaf art #my art #mine #artists on tumblr #alayne stone #twow #i guess #valyrianscrolls

[kaladinkholins]

shoutout to taigen for being the most expressive character in the entire show.

you will never not know whatever the hell he is feeling or thinking at the moment because he will literally tell you (either very earnestly like when he traumadumps to mizu or very sarcastically which is the other 99% of the time he talks to mizu) or you will see it plain as day on his face.

this is the textbook definition of a man wearing his heart on his sleeve. look in the dictionary for what a "simple man" means and you will find taigen's face there.

like once you cut through the massive ego and pompousness he uses to mask his own insecurities and traumas, he is literally just some guy. he's not evil or stupid. not super kind or super smart either. an asshole but not the worst there is. he's incredibly skilled but he's not the strongest ever or even the most skilled. he is literally! just a guy!

y'all can hate him all you want but let's be real, taigen is actually the most relatable character out of everyone. like this man is POOR, he is PATHETIC, he is COMPLAINING ALL THE TIME, and most of all he is OBSESSED WITH MIZU. if that shit ain't relatable idk what is.

#taigen blue eye samurai #taigen bes #blue eye samurai #taigen is literally just some guy and i think that's hilarious #he's a pathetic wet rat but he's MY pathetic wet rat #also he's hot and sexy <3 #also if any of us lived in that era and society. chances are we would be more like taigen than anyone else lmao ykwim #what? you think youre as badass as mizu to get adopted by a master swordsmith and craft your own space sword and go on a revenge quest?? #what you think you'd be born into royalty like akemi and go on to marry the shogun's son and deal with political manuevering? #you think you're kind and brave and useful enough to meet mizu and train under her as an apprentice? #if you do then more power to you. but i know i would be piss poor and bisexual. born and raised in the boonies. and very bitchy about it. #shut up haydar #fandom.rtf

[kevyeen]

#Monkey man #Everything was so so good about this movie #The hijra kicking ass The knife teeth scene The politics The REVENGE Everything omg

[thatswhatsushesaid]

cql out here redefining daddy issues one agonizing microaggression at a time

#c'mon system choose me to transmigrate into the jianghu just as some nameless jin sect NPC #let me take just one or two things with me #i'll just walk up to jgs and very politely ask him 'excuse me jin-zongzhu but could u tell me if this handkerchief smells like chloroform' #'smells like what--' #and then if i can just avoid getting revenge murdered by the jianghu's most filial son long enough to Explain #everything will be fine!! #mdzs shitposting #cql #the untamed #jin guangshan #jin guangyao

[sesamenom]

AU where Aredhel founded Gondolin and Eol nabbed Turgon (and little idril)

(click for quality)

#silm #silmarillion #turgon #idril #aredhel #eol #not pictured: fingon fingolfin lomion caranthir and celegorm off screen #she didnt bring them as backup they all just wanted a turn to stab eol #mostly for revenge except celegorm whos just happy to stab anyone #aredhel is a great deal better at tracking people through the woods than any of her brothers luckily #sorry fingon but hes stuck in a dungeon and not a great singer #note to eol: keeping political prisoners is not a very good idea #when said prisoner has 15 siblings and cousins with no sense of self preservation and far too much sense of revenge

[go-see-a-starwar]

Because Star Wars has had the cultural impact that it has, these characters almost become public domain, where people feel a sense of ownership over them. The character was criticised, my performance was criticised, and that part sucked. But I also felt like I had some context that perhaps helped a little bit. When Episode I came out, there was a lot of excitement that they were making a new Star Wars, and it was going to be the backstory of Darth Vader. But I had friends that were upset that the character was starting off as this young kid. And I watched the film, and I loved it. It was everything I wanted and more. And I didn’t understand the disconnect between the movie that I saw, and the negativity in some of the reviews. In a way that sort of criticism, I think, comes from a certain failure of their own suspension of disbelief. If you’re gonna go sit in a theatre, and the opening scroll starts with, “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away”, that’s setting the stage that anything is possible. These people don’t need to sound and behave the way that we might expect. And if you’re going to sit down and think that you’re getting something that is of our current zeitgeist, then you’re setting yourself up for something else. You know what I mean?

Hayden on the backlash the prequels and his performance received, Empire Magazine

#go off king #this is the closest we’ll get to hayden telling the critics and fanboys to shove it #of course it’s still very well worded and polite #hayden christensen #sweet Canadian farm prince #anakin skywalker #empire magazine #rots #revenge of the sith #aotc #attack of the clones #Star wars #photoshoots #interviews

[spurgie-cousin]

i ask this in 100% good faith as sometimes who's just read over Trump's 2025 manifesto: what the fuck are we supposed to do

like i know the big call is to not vote for Biden or Trump and trust me I do not want to vote for Joe, but the manifesto is going after the rights of women, pregnant people, every type of person under the LGBTQ umbrella, POC, and in a political climate where Roe v. Wade was overturned i feel like it's completely possible that he'd be able to achieve at least some of that so

is there a 3rd party candidate I don't know about?? or what is the plan here bc tbh as a queer person and someone who was planning to be pregnant in the next year I'm scared as hell like are we really just not voting? It's 7 months out and I feel like no one is agreeing on what to do

#I'm 100% sincere I've honestly been avoiding politics unless it's absolutely necessary for me not to like the situation with Palestine etc #so i might have missed out on some things here but like i can't believe this is our situation right now and everyone I've seen says the #solution is to not vote. which part of me understands but i don't understand how we make any head way under a trump presidency when he's #had years to plot his revenge essentially. and again I'm not a Democrat not in the slightest #politics #2024 elections #Donald trump #joe biden

[tokyo-daaaamn-ji-gang]

Butler Hakkai is now here! He looks so polite here, bet he'd try his best as a butler.

#ngl kinda wanna see how he'd react if he had to serve a girl though him getting too embarrassed vs trying to still be polite #tokyo revengers #tokrev #tokyo rev #hakkai shiba #shiba hakkai

[cantsayidont]

Recentish movies of note, or not:

BOTTOMS: Ridiculous "teen" comedy about two gay high school losers, PJ (Rachel Sennott, who also co-wrote with director Emma Seligman) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri), who seize on a rumor about their having been in juvenile detention to start an after-school "self-defense club," in the hope that introducing the school's hottest cheerleaders to the cathartic thrill of girls beating the shit out of each other will finally give these hopeless (and ho-less) virgins a chance to score. So silly that complaining about the stupidity of the plot seems a tad churlish, but the story misses some obvious comedic opportunities, and despite the premise, the film eventually becomes far more interested in cartoonish violence than sex. If you dig the overall vibe, you might not care, but as a gay teen sex comedy, it's ultimately less successful (and less outrageous) than BOOKSMART, even though only one of the latter film's teen loser heroines is gay.

DO REVENGE: Black comedy homage to the teen comedies of the '90s and early '00s, inspired in part by the 1951 movie version of STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, about a disgraced prep school popular girl, Drea (Camila Mendes), who joins forces with gay weirdo Eleanor (Maya Hawke) to avenge herself on her former friends and find out who leaked her sex tape — a plan that involves giving Eleanor a makeover so she can infiltrate the popular kids. Hawke is a delight, Mendes is very good, and the homoerotic tension of their odd relationship makes the movie fun for a while, especially if you appreciate the many self-conscious homages to prior teen movies. However, a major reveal late in the second act makes hash of the already sloppy plot, and the finale is both nonsensical and as antisemitic as STRANGERS ON A TRAIN author Patricia Highsmith, which leaves a sour aftertaste.

IT'S A WONDERFUL KNIFE: Bizarre slasher movie pastiche of IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, about a teenage girl named Winnie Carruthers (Jane Widdop of YELLOWJACKETS), who kills the masked serial killer who's been terrorizing the small town of Angel Falls and murdered her best friend (Hana Huggins) at Christmastime. A year later, everyone in town seems to have gotten over it except Winnie, who's miserable. On Christmas Eve, she's magically transported into an alternate timeline where she was never born and the masked slasher has continued murdering people, including Winnie's brother (Aiden Howard). To set things right, Winnie has to stop the villain all over again with the help of Bernie Simon (Jess McLeod), the town outcast and the only one who believes her story. Not scary, gruesome, or suspenseful enough to be much of a horror movie, but there are enough grisly murders to make the comedic holiday fantasy aspects seem a trifle sociopathic, and a late reveal that the killer has supernatural powers beyond just stabbing or slashing people feels like one ingredient too many in an already convoluted plot. The main redeeming feature is that it's ultimately a gay love story, which I wasn't expecting, but appreciated nonetheless.

THE KILL ROOM: Uma Thurman, Samuel L. Jackson, Joe Manganiello, and Maya Hawke go slumming in this dumb black comedy about a handsome hitman named Reggie (Manganiello) who becomes the sensation of the art world after his mob intermediary (Jackson) concocts a scheme to launder Reggie's payments by selling his abstract paintings (under the nom de plume "the Bagman") through a burned-out, Adderall-snorting art dealer (Thurman). Intended satire of the cutthroat vacuity of the art world lacks bite and no part of the plot makes any sense, but sheer star power gets the movie through about half its 80-minute running time before the banality becomes terminal.

POLITE SOCIETY: Silly British action-comedy by Nida Manzoor (creator of WE ARE LADY PARTS) about Ria Khan (Priya Kansara, delightful), a Pakistani teenager who aspires to be a stuntwoman, and her quest to save her flaky art student older sister Lena (Ritu Arya, radiant) from marrying a handsome doctor (Ashay Khanna) who seems a little too good to be true. It looks great, and the characters are very charming, but the story waits much too long to clarify the stakes of the plot: Until the finale, we don't know if Lena is actually in any danger or if Ria is just letting her imagination run away with her, and that uncertainty becomes an unwelcome distraction in the later action sequences. As a result, it feels more like an update of the John Hughes perennial SIXTEEN CANDLES than the over-the-top action movie it obviously aspires to be.

SHIVA BABY: Low-key but vivid comedy of manners, written and directed by Emma Seligman, starring Rachel Sennott as Danielle, a bisexual 20something Jewish girl who secretly pays her bills as a sugar baby. When she goes with her parents (Fred Melamed and Polly Draper) to a shiva, she finds herself trapped with not only her most annoying relatives, but also her disgruntled ex-girlfriend (Molly Gordon), her current sugar daddy (Danny Deferrari), his gorgeous blond wife (Dianna Agron), and their new baby. Seligman milks every awkward nuance of this uncomfortable social situation for maximum dramatic effect, and the tension of the final scene (which is nothing more complicated than the characters trying to squeeze into the back of Danielle's father's minivan) will drive you right up the wall.

VOLEUSES (WINGWOMEN): Is it really possible for a 40-year-old Frenchwoman living in the 21st century to not know that lesbians exist? One wouldn't think so, but watching this jokey buddy-action movie suggests that director/co-writer/star Mélanie Laurent desperately needs some kind of educational intervention in that regard. This is for all intents and purposes a lesbian romance: Master thieves Carole (Laurent) and Alex (Adèle Exarchopoulos) live together, routinely sleep in the same bed, and plan to retire together; they constantly express their love and affection for one another, and when Carole discovers that she's pregnant (the hows of which are never explained), Alex immediately assumes that they'll be moms together. Nonetheless, the story not only attempts to no-homo this cozy domestic scenario, but also presumes that there's no way Carole and Alex's relationship could ever be the de facto marriage it obviously already is — indeed, a crucial story moment involves Carole tearfully wishing she were a man so she could love Alex the way she deserves! If the movie had been made 50+ years ago, this might be poignant, but in 2023, it's just weird, and the resulting cognitive dissonance largely overshadows the thin plot, which concerns Carole and Alex trying to persuade their bitchy, cheerfully murderous employer Marraine (Isabelle Adjani, barely recognizable beneath her big hair and oversized sunglasses) to let them retire, while training a younger woman named Sam (Manon Bresch) to become their driver and the ambiguously defined third in their domestic ménage à trois.

#movies #bottoms movie #do revenge #shiva baby #it's a wonderful knife #it's a wonderful life #wingwomen #voleuses #polite society #the kill room #emma seligman #rachel sennott #ayo edebiri #mélanie laurent #nida manzoor #maya hawke #camila mendes #uma thurman #joe manganiello #samuel l jackson #adèle exarchopoulos #priya kansara #ritu arya #jane widdop #isabelle adjani #manon bresch #hateration holleration

[khattikeri]

maybe a controversial opinion but while i really love jiang cheng as a character he is deeply self-centered as a person. and seeing people fight tooth and nail claiming he isn't, or is just misunderstood, or that he has genuine valid reasons to be selfish when plenty of other characters make the difficult choice to forego status and opportunities for what they believe is genuinely right to do (read: wei wuxian, wen ning, wen qing, lan wangji, jiang yanli, mianmian, etc.)

it's just odd to me. especially if they're talking about the novels.

mxtx didn't give jiang cheng the name "sandu shengshou" as a quirky coincidence. there's a REASON she named him & his sword after the 3 poisons of Buddhism (specifically ignorance, greed, and hatred). it's crucial to the story that jiang cheng is NOT selfless and that wei wuxian IS.

it's important to accept that wei wuxian is, by their society's standards, not morally gray; he represents several Buddhist ideals in direct contrast of jiang cheng and multiple people attest to wei wuxian's strong moral character, which is a lot of why jiang cheng even feels bitter about him to begin with.

it's crucial, because by the end of the novel jiang cheng realizes the extent of this and begins to let go!

the twin prides thing wasn't jiang cheng wanting them to 100% mirror the twin jades. he does care about wei wuxian, but he wanted wei wuxian to stay his right hand man, in part the way wei changze was for jiang fengmian.

and if there's one thing you can notice about wei changze in the novels, it's that literally nobody talks about him. he is only ever mentioned when his cool mysterious mountain sect wife cangse-sanren is mentioned, or (even more rarely) when they discuss him as a servant to jiang fengmian. regardless of jiang fengmian's own feelings, wei changze was considered lesser to him and didn't seem to outdo him, since nobody's out there years later still waxing poetry about wei changze's skills.

it may not be the only thing jiang cheng wants out of a twin pride dynamic, but it is a big part of it. regardless of his parents' intentions in taking wei wuxian in and treating him certain ways, this twin pride right-hand man thing is what jiang cheng has felt owed since childhood. he gave up his dogs for wei wuxian, people gossip about his sect heir position with wei wuxian there... jiang cheng wants the reciprocation of what he views as personal sacrifices.

he is ignorant to the depth of what wei wuxian must've suffered for over 6 years as a malnourished orphan child on the streets. he hates how wei wuxian's intelligence, witty charm, and cultivation abilities are naturally stronger than his own. he does care about wei wuxian a lot and want them to be together as sort of-brothers, sort of-friends, sort of-young master and sect servant...

...but if it's between that unclear (yet still caring) relationship and being able to save himself just a little bit more, jiang cheng nearly always manages to clam up in the face of danger and choose the latter, which ultimately benefits himself most. maybe it's a stretch to call that sort of thing greed, but it certainly isn't selfless.

there are of course plenty of justifications for this. it's his duty as sect heir. his home and sect was severely damaged by the wen attack and subsequent war; he had to protect himself, etc.

but doesn't that prove the point?

wei wuxian may be charming, but in terms of pure social standing, he is lower and far more susceptible to being punished or placed in harm's way by people who have more power and money. to protect wei wuxian, yunmeng jiang's long-term head disciple and semi-family member, even in the face of backlash and public scrutiny would've been the selfless thing to do. this is what wei wuxian does for the wen remnants in the burial mounds.

jiang cheng does not choose this. it's not even an unreasonable choice for him to make! nobody else in the great clans is doing such a thing, stepping out of line to take on a burden that could weaken them in the long-run. wei wuxian himself doesn't hate jiang cheng for it; he lets go of these things and focuses on what good he can do in the present.

jiang cheng thinks further into the future - what would happen to him if he continued vouching for wei wuxian and taking his side? what about jiang cheng's face, his sect's face? would wei wuxian even care to reciprocate somehow? everyone expects him to cut off wei wuxian for being dangerous, for threatening his position, for...

do you see what i mean? to call jiang cheng selfless for falling in line with exactly what people expected him to do after the war is not only wrong, it's foolish.

"but they faked their falling-out!" okay. why fake it to begin with, except to protect jiang cheng and the jiang sect's own face? is that selfless? who does it ultimately serve to protect? wei wuxian canonically internalizes the idea that he stains all that he touches, including lan wangji, and agrees to the fake fight because he doesn't want to cause the jiang sect harm. regardless, it eventually slides into a true falling-out, and in the end jiang cheng is more or less unscathed reputation-wise while wei wuxian falls.

that isn't selfless. it's many things! it's respecting his clan and his ancestors, it's making a good plan for the future of his sect and cultivation... but it isn't a truly selfless in the interest of what's right rather than in the interest of duty and what's good for him and his family lineage.

that brings me to my next point: even though wei wuxian hid the truth of the golden core transfer, jiang cheng spent nearly 20 years believing that the golden core "renewal" he was given was a birthright gift of wei wuxian's from baoshan-sanren, an immortal sect teacher of wei wuxian's mother's and a martial elder to wei wuxian.

of course we all know that's a big fat lie, but jiang cheng believed that wei wuxian gave up a critical emergency use gift to him for decades! he was lied to, yes, but jiang cheng immediately agreed without even needing to be convinced. the light in his dead eyes came back with hope the moment wei wuxian even said baoshan-sanren's name. he accepted wei wuxian's offer to give that up to him and take it via identity theft without missing a beat.

with how mysterious and revered baoshan-sanren is, that's obviously not a light sacrifice to just give up to anyone, no matter how close they might be to you. pretending to be wei wuxian to take the gift could even be considered dangerous. what if she found out and got offended? could wei wuxian be hurt by that?

jiang cheng doesn't even hesitate. wei wuxian is the one who mentions that if jiang cheng doesn't pretend to be him, the immortal master could get angry and they'd both be goners. and funnily enough, the day they do go to "the mountain", jiang cheng is the one worried and suspiciously wondering if wei wuxian was lying to him or had misremembered.

of course they've both been traumatized like hell prior to this point. but still: it speaks to how broken he was at the moment as well as to his character overall.

i digress: jiang cheng "gets his golden core back" via what he believed was a gift that should've been wei wuxian's to use in serious emergencies. rather than use it for himself, wei wuxian risked his own safety and gave it to jiang cheng... and jiang cheng still ends up embittered and angry, believing that wei wuxian is arrogant and selfish.

if he truly views them as 100% brothers and equals with no caveats, why would he think that way? it's not like he needs to grovel before wei wuxian for doing that, or to reciprocate... but this is what i mean when i say jiang cheng feels he is owed things by wei wuxian. wei wuxian's actions hold a very different weight in jiang cheng's mind, and jiang cheng himself doesn't ever act the same way, except once.

is it wrong for him to feel like he is owed something? it depends. many asian cultures, including my own, feel that a person owes their family in ways that may not make sense to westerners. for example, it's considered normal for a child to owe their parents for giving birth to them, or to other caretakers for feeding, clothing, sheltering, educating them, etc.

however, something like verbally saying "thank you" or "i'm sorry" to family is considered crazy- why would you owe that? you're supposed to inconvenience your family; saying thank you or sorry is the sort of thing you say to a stranger or acquaintance. i get half-seriously lectured by my elders on this a lot even now, even though they know such phrases are just considered good manners in the US.

this muddies up the idea of wei wuxian being jiang cheng's family vs his family's charge or servant even more. jiang cheng wants wei wuxian to be close... but ultimately doesn't really choose to use what power he DOES have to protect wei wuxian. he considers himself still owed something that in his mind wei wuxian flagrantly never repays.

this isn't even getting into how despite spending a majority of his time with the yiling patriarch he never once noticed that wei wuxian stopped using any spiritual power-based cultivation. even lan wangji, who met them far more rarely, realized that something was wrong and that wei wuxian had taken some sort of spiritual damage, hence the "come with me to gusu".

of course manpain is fun and i'm not immune to the juicy idea of them reconciling and talking things out... but jiang cheng is deeply mired in his own desire to be "above" wei wuxian in multiple ways, and doesn't realize the extent of wei wuxian's actions, the intentions behind them, and the consequences wei wuxian knowingly faced for them.

to not recognize this about jiang cheng, especially in the novels, is really revisionist if you ask me. i reiterate that i really do like him a lot. he's flawed, angry, traumatized and has poor coping mechanisms, an overall fascinating character... but he is not selfless nor ideal, and i seriously draw the line at people saying he is.

wen ning shoves this all into his face at lotus pier to disastrous results. it is the reason why jiang cheng's a total mess at guanyin temple, and the reason jiang cheng ultimately doesn't tell wei wuxian about the fact that he ran towards the wens on purpose.

for that one last act of his to have really been selfless, he needs to not seek anything in return. he did it purely because it was right to do to protect someone else. if that means wei wuxian never finds out about it, so be it.

that moment that ended up causing jiang cheng irreversible harm is not a debt that wei wuxian owes him. it hurts, but no matter how bitter it is, that realization is so important to him changing in the future.

#keri chats #mdzs #mo dao zu shi #jiang cheng #long post #this is NOT anti/crit for him btw i like him a lot i just feel like nobody interprets him the way i perceive him #which even then my interpretation is p nebulous... worth saying i also heavily disagree w ppl who think of him as an evil shithead #he's upper class & steeped in jianghu politics/self preservation. flawed as hell human being but they're all war criminals lbr it's #Magical Genocide and War Crimes: The Novel #anyway this post is messy as fuck but if u read all of it: thank u. if u agree with me: ilu. i wish more ppl understood revenge ethics #as they stand in asian cultures and history vs in western (almost always culturally christian) cultures #it's unclear how far in the future the extras are but at one pt he's ''the same as ever'' which at best indicates slow emotional growth #and like. ykw? i don't think he'll be repressed bitter angry thinking abt his losses n pain forever. i think he can grow i believe in him #i have so many thoughts on this i could've made this post go on forever augh

[kimasousparky]

he's asking politely

#tokyo revengers #kawata souya #doodle #no angy but i'd install some just for you. as a treat #a very polite boy

[republicansaredomesticterrorists]

#political violence #republican assholes #republican hypocrisy #republican family values #traitor #traitor trump #fascism #revenge

[this-acuteneurosis]

I am worried about Palpatine discovering Leia is connected to Tarkin´s death and it would not take him too much to put two and two together to see Anakin being part of the reason she did that. Given he is losing his handle on Anakin himself I could see him trying to kill Leia or making a excuse to be able to put a control chip on Anakin´s head. Awesome chapter and hoping to see the next one soon.

Palpatine has wanted Leia dead for quite some time now, and is definitely actively scheming as for how to make that happen.

Luckily for Leia, he doesn't have enough context to assume she would have Tarkin killed for being close to Anakin. If he did, he wouldn't worry about killing her. He'd expose her as publicly and horribly as possible and use it as grounds to destroy Padmé's career. And anyone else's who was close to Leia. And he'd have Leia executed for treason. He would not waste a chance to make himself look good. Leia is very lucky he doesn't know how deeply personal her hatred of Tarkin is.

#Don't Look Back #Duty Bound #politics #revenge #plotting