#I’ll also note here that during the whole burial mounds saga

[mxtxfanatic]

Interesting little tidbit I found while looking for something, but for all the people claiming that LanlingJin was just “sooooo powerful” that everyone else was “afraid to go against them” and that’s why all the other surviving sects post-Sunshot Campaign rallied to eradicate Wei Wuxian and the Wen remnants per their wishes:

This is Wen Ruohan’s assessment of the Jin clan:

Among the four sects, the LanlingJin Sect was on the fence—watching how all of the sects were angrily going on some expedition, it wanted to take part as well, but if it suffered more defeats than victories, it’d soon realize that there was no good in it, perhaps even coming back to hug the Wen Sect’s leg and worship it once more

—chapt. 61, exr

And this is what the Nie clan might was, as per Wei Wuxian’s recollection:

During the Sunshot Campaign, Nie MingJue won almost all battles. The enemy couldn’t even approach him, much less cause him to be so badly injured.

—chapt. 48, exr

The Jin were fence-sitters who would suck up to whoever they deemed the most powerful at the time. Because they didn’t know which way the tides would turn in the war, they didn’t want to commit to an alliance with anyone. They also knew that they couldn’t (or didn’t want to) afford losses in battle. On the other hand, the Nie under Nie Mingjue were near unstoppable. “Won almost all battles” in a war in which you were severely outnumbered? That’s astonishing!

But once the Wen clan fell, a power vacuum was left, one that Jin Guangshan was given the opportunity to fill with the other great clan leaders’ reluctance to take up the political power QishanWen left behind. The problem: his clan was simply not powerful enough to stand against the one clan that was successfully able to hold QishanWen back even before Wei Wuxian’s aid. In that same assessment Wen Ruohan made of the Jin, he noted that while nmj was a tank onto himself, killing him would leave the Nie clan listless, neutralizing them as a threat. Jgs realized this too, which is why he had to resort to trickery and then assassination: there was a higher chance of loss against nmj (especially with wwx’s refusal to join the Jin) than success. And the Jin do not take up opportunities without a guarantee of success.

Had nmj not been willing to cede political power after the war and had kept the Jin in check as wrh had (albeit because he was a tyrant and not for any moral reason), jgs would have had no choice but to stand back and continue playing second fiddle to the powerhouse clan above him. But by the time nmj began to understand the treachery of the Jin as a concretely bad thing, jgs had already gotten bold enough to choose assassination as a solution to his problems.