#Mu Qing stans ruined the character

[supportershy]

#mu qing #this is why I say his fans are worse than his haters #at least his haters are at least somewhat correct about his personality and things he has done in canon #mq stans just made up a whole separate guy (themselves as a self insert) and get mad at anyone who views him differently #and that’s without even going into how they mischaracterize xl & fx as a result of shit they made up

via (@taihua)

This is petty fandom salt, BUT... I've been chewing on this phenomenon that I've been calling "Fandom's Darling". It is related to things like "Author's Darling" and "Mary Sue / Gary Stu" and "Protagonist Halo" and all that jazz, where one character gains a peculiar narrative weight in a story.

"Author's Darling" is when a writer has a favorite character, and the world and all other characters sort of get... warped to put the Darling in the spotlight. It's most noticeable in TV shows with multiple writers, when a character you personally like suddenly has their previous characterization destroyed to make another character look good somehow. Every other character might become weirdly incompetent. The Darling's feelings are treated as The Most Important Feelings in any given situation. The logic of the fictional world seems broken past suspension of disbelief in order to validate this one character's beliefs or skillset or some other fantasy. And so on.

"Fandom's Darling" is what I've been calling the pattern where a fandom essentially crowns a New Protagonist for their fanfiction stories (it's often a side character rather than the original protagonist, but it can also happen to protagonists). This character becomes the self-insert for all sorts of indulgent fantasies, gaining special powers or backstories, and/or becoming the focus of extreme whump, and/or hooking up with all the various hotties, starring in all sorts of tropey AUs, and so on. They're not always an obvious Mary Sue version of themselves, but the character's original personality and interpersonal relationships tend to get warped or dropped completely, and other characters tend to become a little flat around them. I call it "Fandom's Darling" because it's not just one self-indulgent fantasy fic (you do you! Have fun!) with characterization choices that I don't vibe with (I have neither the time nor the desire nor the authority to police anything, I am just venting), but rather a prolific mini-fandom of sorts revolving around this empty doll / fanon version of the chosen vessel character, so it becomes a little unavoidable.

I am salty about this (mildly frustrated) (imagine a soft sigh of disappointment before I just go do something else) because you are FUCKED if you actually liked the canonical version of this character and their interpersonal relationships. It's almost worse than liking an obscure character that no one cares about. There's about a thousand fics starring your fave, but maybe only about a dozen of them are actually rooted in any kind of recognisable canon.

[mxtxfanatic]

Okay, honest question. Why do you think there are some fans who dedicated only to Jiang Cheng, Mu Qing, and Shen Jiu (and said they are secretly 'nice & kind characters')? I love how MXTX wrote those characters, but based on canon, they are not the best character, right? From those 3, who do you think is the worst? For me is Shen Jiu.

Oh, I don't know if you've been said it before, but what do you think of Tian Lang Jun (he is in my top 5 fav SVSSS characters ever, just love him)?

Based purely on the stans I've interacted with, it is because through heavy projection, these characters represent something fundamental about those individuals' sense of self or their beliefs that to dislike them means to dislike those irl individuals in their eyes. You have people who identify so heavily with these characters' different modes of suffering that they must defend them for their actions against any and all criticism lest they be made to introspect on their own personal beliefs, which would ruin the fantasy of the abuse award that I discuss here, the thing that probably most draws them to stories like mxtx's. Unfortunately for them, mxtx is not an author that awards characters based on their ability to withstand abuse but based on their ability to persevere as a good person despite hardship. Unfortunately for us, stans are in denial about this reoccurring theme in mxtx novels and so insist that these characters must be "secretly good/kind" in order to pretend that they are deserving of the abuse award that they (and thus, the stans themselves) "unfairly" never received.

Jiang Cheng is the worst for me because he suffers the least but causes the most amount of damage through his massacre of the Wen remnants, abuse of his nephew, serial killing, and general terrorizing of the communities under his jurisdiction. Mu Qing, as much of an asshole as he is, does not deserve to be grouped in with those other two. Tianlang-jun is fine as a character, but I pray that the svsss fandom doesn't latch onto him or start making serious meta cause from what I've seen so far, I do not think too many people understand him deeper than his surface level image of the "carefree lordling who only cares about trashy romance novels and soap operas who'll destroy the world if you look at him wrong" that he projects to others to cover his actual traumas. He's not in my top 5 as a character, but his story arc is good.

[mikkeneko]

For choose violence ask game: 6, 12, 21, 24 (I was thinking mdzs but if you prefer to do them for another fandom go for it!)

Lots of options! Starting from the top!

6. which ship fans are the most annoying? ... for SVSSS.

I considered this for MDZS, but nothing really fit the bill. Other people doing this meme have named some subsets of WangXian stans, and while I can see the frustration, my OTP is also WangXian so those don't usually annoy me personally. XiYao and other 3Zun combos don't impinge on my enjoyment any, various F/F shippers are fine, juniors shippers bounce right off me... there are some specific types of character stans that annoy me but not so much ship fans.

However, I'd say that there is a specific subset of ship fans in SVSSS that do annoy the heck out of me -- LiuJiu shippers who seem to have decided that Shen Jiu is the actual one true hero of SVSSS and Liu Qingge is the one sole, shining source of reason who Understood Him (what?) and every other character is a horrible monster for doing him dirty. This character assassination starts at Luo Binghe (okay fair) extends to Shen Yuan (he didn't even get there until SJ was dead!) and Yue Qingyuan (c'mon, really?) and around the point where the ship thesis was explaining how Mu Qingfang was actually a horrible monster who denied medical care to all the disciples on Qing Jing Peak out of unfounded malicious spite against Shen Jiu, I was turned off this particular mindset quite permanently.

12. the unpopular character that you actually like and why more people should like them... also for SVSSS

I dunno that I've got one of these. I think I don't tend to get into fandoms where the characters I like are broadly unpopular. There are characters who are divisive, but they tend to have fervent defenders as well as detractors (Anders from DA, Jiang Cheng from MDZS.) And characters that are broadly unpopular, well, I don't usually like them much either.

How about Zhuzhi-lang? I like Zhuzhi-lang. I don't know that he's unpopular so much that generally just doesn't seem to get much attention overall. Same for Tianlang-jun, maybe. Anyway what I like about ZZL specifically is that particular combination of sweet, good-hearted nature and absolutely blue and orange morality. You showed kindness to me and I love you! Now I will repay you by completely ruining your life. This step is completely logical and I can't see how anyone else wouldn't get it.

21. part of canon you think is overhyped... for MDZS

Guanyin Temple. I will not elaborate.

24. topic that brings up the most rancid discourse... for MDZS

Absolutely everything relating to the Jiang family dysfunction. You can get takes in a spectrum running from "Yu Ziyuan was right to treat Wei Wuxian as she did because he was a bad seed and it doesn't count as abuse because it was normal for the setting" to "suggesting there's any kind of complex dynamics at play or that any of the people involved are any more complicated than a 2d papercut monster is abuse apologism" to "Jiang Cheng should simply have Understood that everything his parents and culture taught him was completely wrong, on his own, in a vacuum, as a teenager" to "Jiang Yanli should have made her parents stop being abusive, this is a reasonable thing to expect a teenager girl to accomplish" and they are all very bad

🔥 choose violence ask game 🔥

[plan-d-to-i]

I have to say, seeing the mess in the mdzs fandom (still relatively new here!) has me genuinely worried for any possibility of tgcf (main fandom!) ever blowing up in popularity like that (hopefully not). There are already many shitty takes around, especially wrt HC (is it just a black-red character thing? Ppl are so desperate for them to be actually evil or morally grey 😐), we don't need any more... I guess I'm mainly wondering if MQ stans would ever get as bad as JC stans. MQ as a character is definitely better than JC with actual redeeming qualities as you've pointed out yourself in the past (and he admitted to his faults in the end, ergo he is aware that he has them and made mistakes), but you still see many stans trying to take away his flaws and make him a purely soft but misunderstood poor boy who gets antagonized unfairly by everyone. Wwx and lwj barely even did anything to JC and ppl act as if they are devils incarnate, compared to that HC is fully hostile to MQ (with good reasons, imo, and I actually try to see both sides) and XL often points out MQ's shortcomings and ofc, FX's... everything, lol.

I think for svsss, SJ would be this specific character? (More extreme than the other two, though.) Ngl, I was actually surprised how much sympathy and love SJ gets in the fandom (Bing-ge doesn't get even half of it).

Anyway, sorry for rambling! The drama in the mdzs fandom and how much stans villanize actually good characters to defend their flawed favs shocked me, lol. And it's just confusing to me how ppl try to sympathize with their meow meow but never try to understand why other characters treat them the way they do. But blind stans...

ah ramble away!! We're absolutely on the same page. Truly nothing had prepared me for this fandom. I don't really project on characters when I read. I just want to be entertained, so to see so many ppl stan these underwhelming (to say the least) side characters so hard that they feel the need to change canon to make them into uwu soft babies and shit on the genuinely heroic characters!!? can't relate.

Shen Jiu has been almost totally ruined by his own stans 🥲. They just turned him into a generic YA heroine. rip Shen Jiu, you were so much cooler as you were written.

So I can understand the trepidation w tgcf's adaptation. There are already people bitching about how Xie Lian isn't "really that good! and his relationship w HC is toxic"🙃. I don't even think it's Mu Qing stans you have to watch out for. As you said Mu Qing is demonstrably better than jc and is thus rewarded with a reconciliation with the mc. I don't exactly vibe with that personality type but even I had to admit by the end Mu Qing was not in fact a shitbag. Just the fact that he broke the rules to take supplies to Xie Lian means something. All jc gave WWX when he was helping the Wens was a gut wound. Anyway, welcome to my theory : Qi Rong will be JC 2.0 sad angry uwu baby green grape 💚. The "eating people thing" was just mean rumors. He just wanted Xie Lian's love and attention >:-/ they were CoUsinS!! Xianle Bros! Cousins! Look at the way he cared for Gu Zi! # 1 DAD! Also he's known as the Green Ghost! DUH OBVIOUSLY this means he's Aromantic. And the way he helped Xuan Ji get revenge by killing all those women! Can you say FEMINIST KING!

[jiangwanyinscatmom]

Mu Qing is who JC stans wish Jiang Cheng was, and i realized this mainly cause Mu Qing and Jiang Cheng are similar except Mu Qing actually felt guilt and tried to fix his wrongs an didn’t murder people who reminded him of Xie Lian

It is very much an odd comparison since, for one Mu Qing never tried to kill Xie Lian. His complex had started due to their heavy class differences and believing Xie Lian being a prince meant he always had it easier. And once Xie Lian falls twice Mu Qing is very much in distress about not knowing how to reach out to recover his bond with Xie Lian, but hey, he DOES move to repair that. He had reasonable issues stemming from wanting to prove himself beyond a servant and regretted abandoning his friend to ascend.

Mu Qing is nowhere near Jiang Cheng's attitude of cruelty and he also tries to actively help Xie Lian stay safe as much as it is in his power. He may have been jealous of Xie Lian but he ultimately understood what ruined their original friendship, and grew up in his maturity to actually bridge that on his own since he knew, he was definitely in the wrong in his treatment.

Jiang Cheng never had that positive character growth and let's resentment overtake him. The point of his character is that he ironically, let's his tragedy become his scapegoat to hurt others while he stays selfish and self-pitying. Mu Qing did not like that resentment. It ate at him unlike Jiang Cheng. Mu Qing is very flawed but he was willing to actually fix himself first before blaming others again.