#salty peak sect 🧂

[thatswhatsushesaid]

“um, you are actually supposed to hate this character with your whole chest, the text is EXTREMELY clear that he is terrible and you should not like him”

well i like him anyway. what are you going to do about it, tell my mom?

#salty peak sect 🧂 #this is not just about jgy but it is mostly about jgy #(and nhs to a lesser extent) #also the text is NOT clear that he is evil or that we should hate him #and no amount of snippy and self-important commentary is ever going to change that #also go ahead and tell my mom!! rip whoever manages to get her on the phone #you’ll never get those 3.5 hrs of your life back again

[thatswhatsushesaid]

man, but like.... why is there a contingent of jiang cheng stans who are incapable of stanning their special guy (totally justifiably! i support you!!) without shitting on jin guangyao in the process? why are these fans capable of doing deep narrative dives to understand and contextualize jiang cheng's justifiable actions re: wei wuxian and the wen remnants pre-timeskip, who write thoughtful screeds in defence of his feelings of anger and betrayal vis-a-vis the golden core reveal, but lose that capability entirely the second jin guangyao shows up?

is it because jin guangyao is mean to jiang cheng while trying to not get murdered as his whole life collapses around him? jiang cheng is a big boy, jin guangyao's carefully calculated spiel to provoke him during the guanyin temple confrontation doesn't even make the list of top ten most traumatic things to happen to him, he'll be fine.

feral jc stans should be friends with feral jgy stans because nobody else likes us 🥲

#salty peak sect 🧂 #he did crimes??? good for him 😌 #knife mouth and tofu heart #editing to AND ANOTHER THING about this because i'm never done when i think i'm done #i think jgy stans have a tendency to do this to xue yang too actually! i know i've done it in the past #like i'm not nuts about xy and jc the way i am about jgy obviously #but that DOES mean that the people who ARE nuts about him have undoubtedly done a lot more thinking and reading and rereading about him #than i have #and i appreciate how their hard work has helped me develop a better understanding of xy's character #tl;dr jc and jgy and xy stans should all hold hands

[thatswhatsushesaid]

@anotheraffair i need you to know that i spat out my coke zero laughing at this

#OP dropped some wordy nonsense about jgy in the general tags today too and i just could not be bothered #so glad someone else stepped up #salty peak sect 🧂 #jiang cheng #knife mouth and tofu heart

[thatswhatsushesaid]

any analysis of jin guangyao that asserts his key motivations stem from a desire for power, rather than from fear and filial piety, should probably be revised to at least acknowledge the role that fear and filial piety played in creating a desire for power.

#mdzs meta #jin guangyao #i don’t even disagree that he had ambition and needed power to accomplish it #he absolutely did #but jgy recognized that power was a tool not a destination #and he could use that tool first and foremost to achieve his birthright #which would grant him safety and security that nothing else in the cultivation world #and no *one* else in the cultivation world #could conceivably give him #salty peak sect 🧂

[thatswhatsushesaid]

man okay like. i am not trying to be an asshole! i'm really not! but when you add tags like this onto my meme post about nhs having to do jgy's job post-canon

while my initial reaction is mostly just annoyance, i'm also just... really tired. because just based on what we know about nhs and what he does to the qinghe nie in the intervening years between nmj's death and the guanyin temple confrontation, he is... not. going to do a better job than jgy as xiandu. he's not even going to do an equally good job as jgy as xiandu. i'd argue that he's going to do a much, much, much shittier job, because he ran his own sect into the ground.

"ohhh see he was only pretending to be a bad sect leader to lull everyone into a false sense of security!!"

listen. at some stage, after you have spent a decade and a half committing to the bit of being a bad sect leader for the purpose of furthering your revenge quest, to the point where completely unaffiliated strangers on the street know that the qinghe nie are languishing under your leadership, you're not just pretending to be a bad sect leader anymore. you are a bad sect leader.

nhs is not going to be a good chief cultivator. he's not even going to be a more-or-less okay chief cultivator. he's going to be bad at it.

#salty peak sect 🧂 #slowly drags my fingers down my face #i'm not dropping this in the tags because i do not want to experience The Horrors of this discourse unprovoked today #edited to add: this is not an invitation to dunk on nhs wholesale just ftr #i love nhs and i enjoy his descent into madness #but he is what he is #and what he ISN’T is a good sect leader or chief cultivator

[thatswhatsushesaid]

not the "mo xuanyu never sexually harassed jin guangyao, jin guangyao made it all up" discourse again

#mo xuanyu gets so few opportunities to have his own voice heard in these books #one of the first things he confesses to is sexually harassing jin disciples #in the notes he leaves behind for wei wuxian to find at the very beginning of the novels #we find out later that the person he is harassing is jin guangyao #and while wei wuxian IS initially skeptical #he later changes his mind and decides that no actually mo xuanyu probably did do the thing #so this + mxy literally writing down the words 'i sexually harassed jin disciples' #is pretty concrete evidence #salty peak sect 🧂

[thatswhatsushesaid]

if people who dislike jgy get to cherrypick across different versions of the canon to create the meanest, most evil possible version of him to suit their agenda, then it follows that jgy stans now get to cherrypick across different versions of the canon to create the most sympathetic meowmeow to ever scratch his claws on da-ge's furniture. frankencanon to the rescue.

#salty peak sect 🧂

[thatswhatsushesaid]

it does not actually matter how badly you personally want jin guangyao to be responsible for every single awful thing that ever befell wei wuxian in his life. you can want it to be true just as badly as jiang cheng wants his childhood dogs back, of course. but, like other wishes that are totally divorced from reality or any grounding in the source material, it's still not going to happen.

#salty peak sect 🧂 #jin guangyao #yeah this is going in the tags today

[thatswhatsushesaid]

“nmj would not be ashamed of how nhs achieved his revenge, why would you say that”

because even leaving aside whether or not he would care about what nhs did to meng shi’s remains or his choice to lure the juniors to yi city or his choice to convince mxy to sacrifice himself or any of his actions leading up to qin su’s suicide (because all of those things involve harming jgy and people nmj does not care about), nmj would absolutely be furious at nhs for using lxc as a tool to commit murder.

if there is one person in the jianghu that nmj genuinely cared for and never wanted to harm other than nhs, it was lxc.

#even tho he did very clearly harm nhs #he could have killed him while qi deviating #salty peak sect 🧂 #nie meangjue 🤯 #flute solo 🎶

[thatswhatsushesaid]

lan xichen’s consistent support for jin guangyao is grounded in logic and a realistic understanding of jin guangyao’s limited options as presented to us in the text. he isn’t willfully blind or ignorant; he just straight up does not agree with nie mingjue.

#i’m so tired #salty peak sect 🧂 #lan xichen #flute solo 🎶 #jin guangyao #he did crimes??? good for him 😌

[thatswhatsushesaid]

"mxtx's genius knows no bounds, she created such a wily villain in jin guangyao that he's convinced half the fandom to believe in his propaganda!!!!"

the propaganda:

#glad I made this meme because it is very useful #also that's just straight up not what propaganda is but whatever #salty peak sect 🧂 #jin guangyao #he did crimes??? good for him 😌

[thatswhatsushesaid]

It still sends me how some ppl insist WWX is a straight up peasant. Like the fact that both JFM and JC cut him quite a bit of slack aside (and that he was favored by JFM for most of his life!!), no actual peasant or servant in that era would be as arrogant as WWX is lmao. There's a reason that WWX's luck ran out eventually because he made the mistake of assuming his arrogant bravado would carry him (but forgot that without others able to back him up on it, it's basically useless) - which is part of why he cringes at his past self too

he is the child of two rogue cultivators! he is the head disciple of the jiang sect! while i absolutely believe that he occupies a strange niche in cultivation society (imo jfm actually does not do him any favours by making his place in the family as nebulous as he does), this is such a far cry from being a child who grew up on the streets, as is the case with xue yang, or the illegitimate child of a sect leader and his dalliance with a sex worker, as is the case with jin guangyao.

he's not a peasant. lmfao. come on.

#asks answered #salty peak sect 🧂

[thatswhatsushesaid]

"maybe meng shi WANTED to work in a brothel"

#salty peak sect 🧂 #i don't. i don't even know where to fucking start #like i'm not going to name and shame the OP #there's some interesting stuff in the rest of that post #but for fuck's sake

[thatswhatsushesaid]

dear diary

will today be the day that the mdzs fandom collectively recognizes that the novel frames every act of revenge--whether it is perpetrated by xue yang, wei wuxian, jin guangyao, nie mingjue, or nie huaisang--as an indefensible act of violence and violation with far-reaching consequences, even if the acts themselves are narratively consistent with each character's core motivations and values?

is today the day we will collectively stop and acknowledge that one of the novel's core themes is that the cycle of vengeance is both unsustainable and inherently self-destructive, and that there is no 'right way' to carry out a revenge killing?

..yeah I didn't think so either.

#salty peak sect 🧂 #mdzs meta #the deepest of exhausted sighs

[thatswhatsushesaid]

nobody has to like su minshan—my guy admittedly does not make it easy to like him—but i am endlessly baffled by the sheer number of mdzs fans who actively hate him.

i have to assume this hatred comes from a place of envy, because sms is the one who cursed the absolute shit out of jin zixun, and that’s something none of us will ever get to do.

#salty peak sect 🧂 #su she #su minshan #emotional support henchman

[thatswhatsushesaid]

i think it is extremely weird that parts of this fandom have just definitively decided that the principle antagonist is an irredeemably evil monster because he has his minion burn down a brothel (where said antagonist was born and abused and watched his mother suffer and die) with people still inside it, then hires a bunch of sex workers to rape his rapist dad (who raped so many women that he lost track of who his victims were, and ended up approving of a marriage between said antagonist and his own half-sister as a result) to death

when the protagonist’s chosen means of killing the people who razed the only home he’s ever known and murdered his foster parents involves 1) choking a woman to death by forcing a table leg down her throat, 2) forcing that dead woman to bite off a man’s genitals, and 3) forcing that man to eat his own legs. this plus the protagonist’s multiple day-long murder-torture bender where he kills and tortures a bunch of other wen sect disciples in front of each other, and owns doing this because it was fun and would have been too boring to kill then quickly. like jiang cheng and lan wangji find wwx by following the trail of bodies he leaves in his wake ok, that’s pretty awful

if wei wuxian can do these things and and still be considered good, then that only makes it harder for me to understand why jin guangyao is denied goodness

fun fact: when i describe both of these characters to people who are totally canon-blind and know nothing about mdzs, cql, or any of the other adaptations, the initial response from most people isn’t “hmmm but what was the protagonist’s interiority while he was making that woman’s corpse eat that man’s junk? was he very sad about it? that will surely tell me whether his corpse desecration and autocannibalism is morally defensible or not.” most of the time what they say is “ray what the fuck are you reading, both of those guys sound like evil people, i don’t care what their motivations are! also get help”

it just seems weird!! that certain corners of this fandom have decided that goodness is not only a quality that wwx intrinsically possesses (something i don’t necessarily disagree with fwiw), but that he gets to be defined by this goodness above all else. wwx gets situated at the centre of all subsequent discourse as the moral lighthouse of the whole novel—even though he has done objectively heinous shit entirely to satisfy his own desire for vengeance. doing all of those things does not detract from his fundamental goodness, in their estimation. or if it does, it doesn’t detract enough to significantly impact his role for them as the goodness barometer in the novel.

and that’s fine with me actually! if this is where the bar for what it means to be good in this novel is set, then it should logically follow that jin guangyao’s heinous actions can similarly be ‘offset’ by paying the appropriate ‘goodness tax’ through his other canon actions (e.g., loving and remaining filial to his mother, saving and protecting lan xichen, saving nie mingjue, funding the rebuilding of the cloud recesses, caring for his orphaned nephew, etc). he has done yuckydisgusting things, yes, but so has wwx! and as we all know, wwx is not evil! so jgy isn’t evil either!

…but this isn’t what happens in these conversations, because jgy seems to begin all fandom discourse at a goodness deficit that is depressingly reflective of the goodness deficit he experiences in the novel post-canon. (or, honestly, at the beginning of his life as meng yao.) and unlike wwx whose character gets to be defined principally by his goodness in spite of his genuinely horrendous acts of violence, jin guangyao’s whole character becomes defined by his horrendous acts of violence in spite of his goodness, even though the text demonstrates clearly that their capacity for both good and evil is evenly matched.

tl;dr it would be nice if the goodness goalposts would stop moving around so much in these discussions. maybe we should just get rid of them entirely.

#mdzs meta #salty peak sect 🧂 #jin guangyao #he did crimes??? good for him 😌 #i’m tired