#yes he was directly responsible but like if you're holding Jiang Cheng responsible for the siege- NO ONE ELSE WAS STOPPING IT EITHER

[ultfreakme]

Look I’m not going to say Jiang Cheng is not an absolute ass for deciding to lead the siege to Burial Mounds where he KNOWS only like a bunch of old people are there. BUT. They won’t have been fighting Wei Wuxian plus like 50 people. They’d be fighting Wei Wuxian’s corpse army which, btw, KILLED HUNDREDS IF NOT THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE.

and also:

Jiang Cheng thought Wei Wuxian had complete control of the corpses and had no reason until Nightless City to consider otherwise(this information that he learned while his sister was bleeding in his arms)

He has no clue when Wei Wuxian had control, and when he lost it, so for all he knows, Wei Wuxian was in perfect control when Jin Zixuan died and the whole Qiongqi path thing happened. That entire event is now personal for Jiang Cheng. His brother-in-law, his sister’s husband-- just died.

Then, in the middle of the confusing and messy fight in Nightless City, Jiang Yanli got hurt, in Jiang Cheng’s view BEACUSE of Wei Wuxian like he’s screaming at Wei Wuxian “I thought you could control this” and when he finally manages to gain some control, Jiang Yanli dies anyways.

Throughout his attempt at controlling the corpses, both Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian are scared for JYL, panicking, neither of them are in the right state of mind and WWX is trying to make things better, make this work, and he’s realizing he’s lost control but he can’t say that. This is his thing to fix so he says “I don’t know” and tries. But it isn’t enough.

So Jiang Cheng still doesn’t know the extent of Wei Wuxian’s control.

By the time the Burial Mound siege happens, Jiang Cheng is grieving, angry, most definitely being influenced by people like Jin Guangshan and Nie Mingjue’s discussions, and also has his personal grudges against Wei Wuxian because in his eyes, Wei Wuxian is why his sister and his brother-in-law are dead, and why is his nephew is an orphan. He also knows the kind of damage Wei Wuxian’s demonic cultivation can do.

So yeah, we the reader know that Burial Mound Wen remnants won’t cause any harm. We know they stand no chance and are innocent and they are being unfairly targeted when by all accounts the sects should’ve only aimed for Wei Wuxian by their dumbass logic that Wei Wuxian purposefully killed Jin Zixun and his lackeys with personal motives(once again, Jiang Cheng doesn’t know that event was a set-up for Wei Wuxian to be framed).

But after Nightless City, Burial Mounds + Wei Wuxian is seen as too powerful. All of the people leading the siege had different motivations. Jin Guangshan just wanted to get rid of the Wens and Wei Wuxian and Nie Mingjue has a personal grudges against the Wens for what happened to his family.

Jiang Cheng’s has little to do with the Wens and is almost entirely about Wei Wuxian. After Wei Wuxian’s death we know he has this obsession with demonic cultivators and specifically thinking Wei Wuxian is still alive. Burial Mound was all about his grief and mourning.

Was it right that he doesn’t give a shit about the Wens? Nope.

But he wasn’t marching in because he was gung-ho about torturing and destroying Wen remnant lives, like we have canon evidence where Jiang Cheng’s the type to kill and keep going. Wei Wuxian’s the ‘make the death linger and torture’ type. I doubt he gives a shit about them.

By this point even if Jiang Cheng thinks Wei Wuxian was losing control, he’s already labeled demonic cultivation as the absolute worst thing ever because it’s the reason why his remaining family got killed. This entire siege was about Wei Wuxian for Jiang Cheng.

And we know Jiang Cheng didn’t kill Wei Wuxian. The events surrounding the Burial Mound siege are so fragmented.

(side note: Jiang Cheng was there in nNghtless city when JGS was declaring they’re going to do the siege and people say ‘oh how dare Jiang cheng do nothing and condone this, how awful’. Lan Xichen was there, he was cool with it. So was Nie Mingjue. The first time this ‘let’s kill the Wens and wwx’ happened, it wasn’t solely a JC effort. It was a JGS thing. It only became a Yunmeng-Jin led siege when Jiang Yanli died, which of course it did a Jin heir and a hugely important Jiang died.)

I’m not saying Jiang Cheng was justified like you’ve gotta be an ass to go into the siege ready to kill innocents and what happened was a tragedy. He was also wrong in not trying to defend their lives in a moral sense. But the siege wasn’t just him hating wei wuxian for unjustified reasons, it was a tragic falling out built up throughout the book.

#jiang cheng meta #yes he was directly responsible but like if you're holding Jiang Cheng responsible for the siege- NO ONE ELSE WAS STOPPING IT EITHER #if you're hating on jiang cheng saying he's a monster because he approved of it #consider everyone else who approved- like lxc and nmj to the same standards too