#TO BE FAIR some of them could be donghua fans because the donghua did indeed have jgy rip off father fmab. so what do you know

[ohohoho-nyohohoho]

actually the real evidence as to the reading comprehension levels in this fandom is the sheer number of people who think that jgy during the guanyin temple scene was trying to enact some Final Boss Evil Plan, instead of. you know. trying to retrieve his dead mom's remains before fleeing to japan. bit of a misconception there aint it boss

[dornishsphinx]

Jiang Cheng vs Shen Qingqiu (Jiu)

Ahhh, a meanness for a meanness, I see :3 Let’s see, purple JiuJiu or teal JiuJiu… ooof this is gonna get long while I struggle with choosing lmao.

Jiang Cheng was the first MXTX character I properly loved while growing to love them even more as time went on, compared to other MDZS characters I loved at first who I’ve grown… sick of constantly seeing, if not actually disliking them. (It’s overexposure to your dull presence in the present storyline and half of MDZS fan content seeming to be Gusu-based post-canon domesticity, WWX, I promise. I’ll always consider you an interesting character before MXY got involved.) Meanwhile, finally reaching the lategame reveals about Shen Jiu as opposed to vague, MTLed spoilers heard from other people is the most excited I’ve been to read a character’s backstory in like… forever.

It’s a lot easier to get to grips with Shen Jiu as a character, since actual chapters involving him are 2 main chapters and an enclosed series of extras which condense his life into a very short, if fascinating to parallel with the wider story, space, while Jiang Cheng’s appearances are spread more thinly across a far longer novel and period of seen and unseen time (which I have not… finished, which impacts my ability to enjoy the character.) I feel like it’s a bit unfair to give it to Shen Jiu, since Shen Jiu does have the ‘easier to parse’ element, or Jiang Cheng, because I don’t have the proper context for him. There’s no way I can properly understand of the MDZS characters without having read the whole novel.

On that note, I will judge them anyway! The two of them occupy the same narrative role, foil to the love interest, the big vestige of the past confronted by the protagonist at the end (which, again, for Jiang Cheng, I have not yet actually read in proper context.) Let’s just get out the way that Lan Wangji is… not one of my top five, while that I do immensely care about Luo Binghe, but that both Jiang Cheng and Shen Jiu fulfil the role juxtaposing well.

Jiang Cheng isn’t a child abuser, despite what annoying people say, while Shen Jiu undeniably is. Shen Jiu is an example of the cycle of abuse and all his attempts at becoming and being better being thrown back in his face, and on many occasions causing him extreme pain and degradation. Luo Binghe is himself, but with a touch better circumstances, and that’s enough to make Shen Jiu wildly despite him. Meanwhile, Jiang Cheng does his best to help raise Jin Ling well, all his threats being empty, and actively shelters and confers more privilege than is actually fair onto him (the nets. I’m talking about the nets.)

Jiang Cheng is someone born into privilege who had to claw it back from nothing, but was seen by others as having the right to do so due to his family background. Shen Jiu is someone who had the least privilege possible as a slave, who clawed his way up from nothing to also becoming a peak lord. Shen Jiu's revenge is personal and is used to cast him down; Jiang Cheng's is for his family, and he uses it to pull himself back up. They’re both solitary figures, with Jiang Cheng being excluded by every other major sect leader in the region deciding to become a Triumvirate, and Shen Jiu being despised enough by most other peak lords that they cheer his ‘amnesia’, which really is his death. Their brother figures abandon them, and they wallow in bitterness over it for years before their last small token is given over (the forgiveness that takes the form of telling Yue Qingyuan to leave, Chenqing to Wei Wuxian.

They are extremely similar. The main differences are that one isn’t a child abuser, and that the other was born into privilege. One gets the chance to go on living and the chance to change and have his life improve for the better. The other is torn out of the story where everyone else gets the chance to become better people, who always believed things would turn out badly and that he was a terrible person and all his attempts to do good were meaningless (and yet did some anyway, such as with Liu Qingge, which did indeed backfire.)

While you can argue that he got what was coming in PIDW, as Shen Jiu actually said himself in the extras, Shen Jiu’s life in SV is so much more unfair than Jiang Cheng’s. They’re both interesting characters, but Shen Jiu never had a chance at successfully breaking out of the cycle with his mindset and the results of his actions, and was then just killed off for the sake of someone using his body (which, with his backstory of being called an animal, and “goods” and then his new, v privileged passenger also thinking of him as less than human and also “goods”… Well, realising that he is a person and wishing he could return, and that everything might be okay if he did is the apotheosis of Shen Yuan’s character development, so it’s not like it’s a meaningless thing. But still.

They’re both very similar, and very interesting and well-rounded characters. But for the sheer unfairness of his SV fate, I’m giving it to Shen Jiu. Though Jiang Cheng gets kudos for… not abusing children so badly that when they’re all-powerful demon lords, they still try to protect themselves from you when injured. (Even if it is a commentary on masters being really shitty to their students in xianxia novels.) …Maybe closer to a tie then.

(Sidenote since it doesn’t really fit the character vs character vibe: I feel kinda bad about my relationship to MDZS, since it feels like I got really tired of it before I got the chance to finish the novel, when I was… really excited and attached to it in the period immediately after the end of the first donghua, while I got really, really invested in SVSSS and actually reached the end of it. Maybe it’s that I keep getting slapped in the face with content because it’s become such a large fandom (...the idol stans, so many...), maybe it’s that all the new adaptions that make me feel like I’m falling behind in a race rather than actually Enjoying What I’m Reading, maybe it’s because certain subsections within the later MXTX novels fandom tend to be really shitty about the one MXTX novel I haven’t had to force myself to keep on reading and actually go back to on a regular basis… idk, I wanna take a step back and re-evaluate and actually get to grips with the story, but things keep moving too fast for me to be able to do so. Maybe that’s why I’ve ended up really hating a lot of elements from it when normally I feel like I’m fairly chill with stories…)