#MDZS spoilers

[imafraidoftomorrow]

I'm rereading MDZS and it just hit me that Wei Wuxian's first impression upon meeting Lan Yuan post-resurrection was that he was a "good sprout"

You guys... you guys... that's his little radish... that's his good little sprout....

[luanna801]

Oh so when Nie Huaisang tricks a guy into stabbing his best friend to death it's ""justified revenge"" and ""very girlboss of him"" but when I, Xue Yang--

[pillow-boi]

“I’ve lied countless times, ki||ed countless times. But I’ve never even thought about harming you.”

[lazycranberrydoodles]

getting back into the untamed and i had a thought. / follow for more yllz babygirlism

[khattikeri]

love how mxtx's books all have a coffin scene. in svsss and tgcf, the main couples temporarily get stuck in a coffin. compromising positions and sexual tension abound. in mdzs, though, the antagonist and the man he murdered thirteen years ago (both zombified) are the ones who get stuck in a coffin, doomed to tear each other's souls apart for the next century. the main couple, coffin-less, fuck off to bang in a bush. unparalleled. 10/10

[benevolenterrancy]

finally in the process of reading the Guanyin Temple scene and holy shit if WWX isn't the protagonist of all time. We're in the Big Final Confrontation and so far my man has done fuck all except cuddle in LWJ's lap while everyone else is losing their shit and when he DOES finally do something he summons an army of naked, writhing, moaning sex corpses that even his allies just desperately wish Were Not There. stupendous, no notes

[enlightningbugs]

When Jiang Cheng stabbed the Yiling Patriarch in the gut, 2020.

[glitteringpoet1685]

Not a day goes by where I don't think about how Sizhui is the embodiment of the Lan principles despite not being Lan by blood, exactly how Wei Wuxian was the embodiment of the Jiang principles despite not being a Jiang by blood. God I forgot how tragic this show was.

[naehja]

Xichen, please...

That's your little brother's privacy.

I'm sure it's against the Lan rules

[muzsmocsing]

The fact that Nie Huaisang has to be sect leader is sick and twisted. Like wdym he's in meetings and has to make decisions??? He should be at the club.

[frankencanon]

you ever think about the fact that nie huaisang's father and brother both died the exact same way — forced into qi deviation via a third party

you ever think about how nie mingjue's obsession with getting revenge for his father's murder might have been foreshadowing for nie huaisang's own obsession with avenging his brother and utterly destroying jin guangyao

you ever think about how nie huaisang is a lot more like nie mingjue than most people realize

[monhiio]

The long awaited.. Nieyao calling out to one another.. bonus Huaisang

[luanna801]

Funnily enough, Jin Guangyao's "Even if he hadn't been murdered, A-Song still had to die" line is actually a significant part of what makes me think he didn't kill him. Because if we assume he's lying through his teeth and totally did murder his son, and he's just saying whatever lie will calm Qin Su down and put her off being suspicious of him... why even admit that much? Why not keep pushing back as hard as he can against the accusation, double down on "Of course I would never have hurt him, I never even considered such a thing, he was my son and an innocent child and I loved him, how dare you even suggest otherwise"?

It just seems like a really weird and counterintuitive move, if he's trying to falsely convince Qin Su he had nothing to do with this, to go the "I didn't do it, but if I'd done it, how could you tell me that I was wrong" route.

(More thoughts under the cut.)

It's not totally out of the realm of possibility - I know of real-life murderers who said roughly comparable things about their victims (see, for example, this infamous statement from historical murderer Richard Loeb, who looked a reporter dead in the eye and said "Yeah, actually, that kid is exactly the victim I'd pick if I was going to murder someone" about the kid he did in fact very much murder). But I don't really think it fits Jin Guangyao's MO - he's not an arrogant braggart seeing how much he can get away with, he's someone who's incredibly careful and doesn't just go blurting out incriminating things about himself.

I guess he could be hoping that if he convinces Qin Su it was ~totally all for the best, actually~ she'll just drop the whole line of accusation and stop feeling like she needs to dig into this any further. But again, that doesn't really seem like his strongest argument if he's just going to lie here anyway. Despite how upset and horrified she is here, he still has fifteen-odd years of her knowing him as a kind, seemingly? decent person working in his favor. I don't think that view of him would have entirely evaporated in an instant (although it's clearly severely shaken by the things she's learned).

So I think if he'd stuck to insisting he was horrified at the very thought and outraged she'd accuse him of such a thing, she might well have backed down and possibly even apologized for thinking he'd go that far. By contrast, him acknowledging that he did think Jin Rusong needed to die, even if he simultaneously claims not to have actually killed him, is just likely to make her feel like she's on the right track by suspecting him and he's probably just trying to downplay his culpability.

It's also true that it's a very emotional conversation that he does not handle well in a lot of ways, so like. He could be lying but just doing it in a really dumb way because he's panicking. But everything else he says in that part of the conversation (about being grateful to her for accepting his background, wanting to lie to her so she'd be shielded from knowing the awful truth, etc. etc.) seems to be an attempt at actual honesty, however warped and incredibly mishandled that attempt is.

And I think it makes the most sense to me that the "A-Song had to die" line is more of the same. He's genuinely trying to explain his perspective to her and get her to understand how he's constructed this in his mind, not getting that this is only going to understandably horrify her even more. And that is very much a thing you see in his confrontations with other characters, for all his ability to lie - he's just as likely to respond to accusations with at least some form of how he genuinely justifies things in his mind, even when it's something the other person is not remotely inclined to accept and ends up backfiring spectacularly (see for example also his confrontations with Nie Mingjue).

So to me, that's the reason that makes by far the most sense for why he'd say this. If he was going to lie, it would make more sense to claim total innocence and deny that such a thing had ever so much as crossed his mind. It's only if he's actually trying to be honest, in his very messed-up way, that saying he thinks this death was inevitable and maybe even for the best makes sense as a thing he'd willingly admit in that moment.

[heebiebeebies]

A life-lasting gift 💝

For day 28 of #MXTXtober23: gift

[lazycranberrydoodles]

sibling bonding moment!

[khattikeri]

my favorite part of the jin guangyao & nie huaisang dynamic that seemingly every fic ignores is that jin guangyao genuinely thought of nie huaisang as incompetent and annoyingly whiny. he didn't realize at ALL until the very end that he was being intentionally played.

he might’ve recognized that huaisang has potential when he actually puts his mind to things. but jin guangyao honestly believed across two decades that huaisang at most was rich, pampered, and pathetically ill-prepared.

it came as a nasty, hysterical shock to jin guangyao that the little brother of the man he killed had actually 1) figured out at any point what he did 2) kept his bitter vicious rage inside and secretly wished him dead 3) brought that to fruition with a skillful mix of planning, improv, and making others do the dirty work of publicly exposing everything for him.