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qiu-yan · 8 months ago

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there is no such thing as a singular "true nature"

recently saw a (or rather, yet another) post dunking on jiang cheng for blaming wei wuxian and trying to strangle him after the fall of lotus pier. which is fair, because that honestly was rather terrible of him.

however, one specific aside in that post stood out to me:

as i saw in the post i'm now being a hater about, antis have the tendency of boiling down an entire character to just their worst moments. but the section i highlighted above interests me precisely because i think it sheds light on what logical fallacy causes the anti tendency towards this boiling-down.

one common thread i've seen across antis of all sorts of characters - whether the characters they're bashing be jiang cheng, jin guangyao, su minshan, or wei wuxian himself - is this idea of a singular "true nature." the idea is that people have a "true nature," which is typically hidden by polite manners and civilized society, but may then be exposed during moments of stress in which those manners are stripped away.

the implied corollary to this idea of a singular "true nature" that is only revealed on occasion, then, is the existence of "false natures": if the self that is exposed during moments of high duress is one's "true nature," then the self that is seen during moments of normalcy is not one's "true nature." one's "true nature" is determined from solely these moments of high duress; the "nature" implied by one's actions during all other times does not count. if we follow this framework, then the you who goes apeshit after a bad day is closer to your "true nature" than the you who has a normal day of fun with your friends; the you who goes apeshit after a bad day is more real than the you who has a normal day with friends; the you who goes apeshit after a bad day matters more in the cumulative assessment of your existence than the you on every other day of your life.

as you might expect, i don't agree with this worldview. i don't condone boiling an entire person down to their single most extreme moments, not only because it is uncharitable, but also because i don't accept this idea of a "true nature" to begin with. to make such sweeping statements about an individual's "true nature" is overly simplistic and reductive of the full complexity of humanity. furthermore, in order for the idea of [a true nature that is only revealed in moments of duress] to work, one must rank all of the actions and behaviors of an individual from least to most "true," as described above - but, in fact, everything an individual does makes up who they are.

there is no such thing as a singular "true nature." you are not some fundamental "true nature" hidden away under layers and layers of pretense. everything you do - not just the things you do in moments of duress - makes up your character. you are the sum of all of your actions, both mundane and extreme: the you who has a normal day with friends is very bit as true, as real, as the you who reacts in extreme ways in extreme circumstances.

jiang cheng is the person who blamed wei wuxian for the fall of lotus pier and tried to strangle him for it. jiang cheng is also the person who spent his childhood shielding wei wuxian from dogs. jiang cheng is also the person who loves jiang yanli and sincerely wishes for her happiness. jiang cheng is the person who repeatedly tried to warn wei wuxian from messing with lan wangji and who carried wei wuxian after he got beaten by the lan. jiang cheng is the person who feels his father loves wei wuxian more than him. jiang cheng is the person who failed to stand up for mianmian out of concern for his own sect. jiang cheng is the person who ran restlessly for seven days to rescue wei wuxian (and lan wangji) from the xuanwu's cave; jiang cheng is also the person who resented not being thanked for his hard work. jiang cheng is the person who spent 3 months tirelessly looking for wei wuxian. jiang cheng is the person who allowed wei wuxian to secede from yunmeng jiang without any support in order to keep yunmeng jiang safe. jiang cheng is the person who helped jiang yanli sneak into the burial mounds so that wei wuxian could see her wedding clothes. jiang cheng is the person who blamed wei wuxian for jiang yanli's death. jiang cheng is the person who led the first siege of the burial mounds. jiang cheng is not the person who killed wei wuxian.

jiang cheng is the person who blamed wei wuxian for the downfall of lotus pier and then tried to strangle wei wuxian for it. jiang cheng is also the person who, barely a few hours later, sacrificed his everything in order to save wei wuxian from the wens.

both of these statements are true. all of these statements are true. the fact that one of these statements is true does not stop any of the others from being equally true. the reason why i dislike this "true nature" framework so much is that it cherrypicks certain moments as unique truths at the cost of all others - it centers one specific moment as indicative of an individual's entire nature, and in doing so discards all other moments as mattering less. in favor of a singular, easily digestible statement (eg. "jiang cheng's true nature is one of selfishness"), it erases the full complexities and contradictions true to humanity.

it is erroneous to say that "jiang cheng trying to strangle wei wuxian indicates his true nature," because of all the other shit that jiang cheng did. it is ALSO erroneous to say that "jiang cheng sacrificing himself to save wei wuxian indicates his true nature," because of all the other fucking shit that jiang cheng did. the fact is that jiang cheng did both of those things and also a whole bunch of other shit, and we all just have to accept it.

what's funny here is that this same "true nature" thinking also gets applied to wei wuxian himself in-universe. to the general public in MDZS, wei wuxian is the guy who invented demonic cultivation, who created the weapon of mass destruction that was the yin tiger tally, who killed jin zixuan, who got jiang yanli killed, and who in a moment of extreme emotional distress killed over a thousand people at the nightless city pledge conference. in their discussions of wei wuxian, the public centers these specific acts as indicating wei wuxian's singular "true nature." everything else wei wuxian was - his inventiveness, his kindness, his selflessness, his playfulness, his genius - gets dismissed as "false natures" in comparison to the one "true nature."

but this isn't an accurate description of wei wuxian, because to take just wei wuxian's very worst moments and then make those moments his entire being is not fair. wei wuxian tortured countless wen cultivators during the sunshot campaign, wei wuxian killed jin zixuan and heavily injured jiang yanli before her death, wei wuxian killed over a thousand people at the nightless city pledge conference. wei wuxian also sacrificed his everything for jiang cheng, abandoned the easy way out in favor of protecting innocent people from suffering, and has repeatedly chosen to help others when he could have easily not done so. all of these statements are true. the fact that one of them is true does not prevent any of the others from being equally true. the wei wuxian who chose to help the wen remnants is every bit as real as the wei wuxian who killed over a thousand people at nightless city, and to take either of these moments and assert that it alone reveals a "true nature" while ignoring the other is to commit a logical fallacy.

tl;dr - people contain multitudes.

regarding what the op of the screenshot actually said: they are correct in that jiang cheng does display a repeated pattern of behavior in which he blames wei wuxian for his family's misfortunes and thus lashes out at wei wuxian. but the degree to which wei wuxian is actually blameless for this misfortune, i think, is much greyer than the op said.

#mdzs #jiang cheng #wei wuxian #jc apologism #sort of?#anyways the funny thing is that this “true nature” bullshit is also what su she gets hit with.#like dude did all sorts of stuff in his life but he repeatedly gets boiled down to a few specific bad moments #yanyan speaks

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polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup · 2 months ago

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hello hello!! your fic pez dispenser debris brings me immense joy. and i wanna know if the other nejire and tamaki will be showing up. id love to see their reactions to fucking #leku. and i’d love to hear your thoughts on them in general if you have any to spare. the big three have such a fun dynamic to me.

Tamaki will appear. I’m not fully settled on Nejire. In my mind, she moved to Kyoto not long after she graduated but keeps in very close touch (if you read the battle of Yokohama posts, she was there during that fight because she was visiting Her Boys and insisted on a Big Three Sleep Over, which is why the three of them were together when Izuku called to begin with). They have a group chat that she started blowing up when the Leku news hit. All of them are painfully, violently aware of the fact Mirio is absolutely not dating Izuku and also of the fact that Mirio’s probably close to drowning himself at the mere thought.

I do really like the idea of the Big Three having been sort of outcasts before they were the big three, and I think canon supports this reading. They were all sort of the weird kids. They were each other’s only friends. After they started rising in the ranks, they became more popular, but they all consider the others their main people.

I also like the idea that they became the Big Three because of each other.

They were friends before they were the big three. And it’s not a coincidence that the big three were all already friends. They pushed each other to grow in their skills and surpass everyone else.

The reason why they haven’t been more present in pez is actually the same reason why I didn’t have them open a hero agency together: they all need to grow separately from the others for a bit.

Like. Here’s Mirio, with two very skilled and experienced heroes at his side, waiting for Izuku to graduate so he can start his agency. Why not go into business with the friends he’s already been fighting with for years?

I see the Big Three as people who all, for one reason or another, decided that they needed to learn how to be strong on their own at the start of their career.

Take Tamaki. He’s childhood friends with Mirio. He was briefly referenced in one of the tumblr posts as one of Mirio’s staunchest advocates after he lost his Quirk. So why isn’t he heroes with Mirio?

Well, he sort of is. He’s got a mutual support agreement with him.

Time to derail into my favorite topic: the economic models underpinning fictional societies. As you can probably guess I’m great at parties.

Mutual support agreements are contractual devices that I came up with in response to the convoluted economic structure of heroics compensation I discussed a few posts ago. In that post, I discussed independent/underground v. agency models with respect to public compensation and how I think that there’s an impossibly complicated matrix that grants heroes portions of the local budget based on their statistics. Briefly, I discussed how that calculation would cause conflict with big name heroes taking credit for their sidekicks’ work because agencies would necessarily need to be counted as one entity for the purposes of public funding.

What happens when multiple agencies are involved in the same incident?

As a reminder, the reason why they need to assign credit for a bust to one individual is because agencies are funded as a whole. This is a grant system that’s meant to be more than just about paying a salary—the government is providing funds meant to go towards an office space, supplies, everything. You could not give everyone in an agency public funding separate checks under that model. Public funding is made out to the agency as a whole and it’s up to the agency as to how to use it. But if you have six people from the same agency who all register the exact same take down because they all participated—well now you’ve got the one job reported six times over for the same filing entity. That’s going to horrifically skew the funding calculation. The government’s paying for the same bust six times over and you just incentivized hero agencies to send their people all to do the same job because it pays the same to have six guys stop one criminal as it does to have six guys stop six different criminals separately.

But hey—sometimes it’s a six guy job. That would more appropriately be considered an enhancement to a job’s relative difficulty than it would be to giving credit for a takedown. After all, the same job could require “six guys” or “one All Might.” If you focus on the number of heroes an agency uses in a job than you do on how difficult that job actually is, then you’re inadvertently penalizing better heroes because Mid Tier Agency needed six guys to handle what you did on your own, but since they needed six whole guys they get paid more for the same thing that you could do solo.

But the reason for this one man credit structure is because you’re getting one check for the government per agency. But what about when heroes from different agencies team up? Big Hero is not sharing a government funding check with Even Bigger Hero, and there’s absolutely no way that every single team up is just fucking pro bono for everyone but one guy. That’d make it impossible. So the same job would have to get counted multiple times when it involved different heroic entities.

The fact that you were teamed up instead of solo would go into the relative value calculation of each independent job. You get the full pot if you’re solo, but if you’re sharing the load, you’re sharing the credit. But at the same time, how much credit you get would also have to be determined on a case by case basis. Like. A hero that evacuated three civilians contributed to a fight, but they in no way should get equal credit and compensation to All Might, who fought the entire villain team solo.

So say Big Hero Agency and Bigger Hero Agency are doing a team up for the good of Japan. Big Hero Agency initiated the investigation, did most of the legwork, and invited Bigger Hero Agency onto the job. However, when it came to actually fighting, Bigger Hero Agency absolutely carried the day. Big Hero Agency would have been dust if Bigger Hero Agency hadn’t been there.

Who deserves more credit and compensation?

There is probably some kind of governmental dispute/appeal board to settle disputes about compensation, but like. As someone who does government work. The government’s absolute favorite thing to say is “we are not babysitting you, fucking figure it out like big boys.” They’ll have a way to resolve disputes, but they will also heavily incentivize voluntary agreement amongst the parties.

Planned team ups probably have legal working shit out ahead of time. Spontaneous team ups or heroes stealing each other’s fights a la Mount Lady and Kamui Woods in the pilot are probably the biggest headaches.

But what about heroes that are always teaming up? They’re your go to. Your homeboy. The daredevil to your Spider-Man. You don’t file your paperwork together, but you’re still always fighting side by side. Are you renegotiating who gets credit for what in every single little fight?

Fuck no. That’s a huge pain in the ass. Enter the mutual support agreement. It’s a contract that has a bunch of clauses meant to help streamline deciding who gets credit for what and resolve disputes before they happen.

You wouldn’t just want this for compensation purposes. Say Big Hero commits the hero equivalent of police brutality. Now he’s being sued. He’s apparently not that big of a hero as the name implies, because he’s got no fucking money. You want more money for your client, so you need a deeper pocket to pull from. At the time of the incident, he was working with Bigger Hero Agency. They’re not the same agency, but it was Bigger Heroes bust, and they work together all the time. Big Hero is basically one of Bigger Heroes employees hidden behind a different corporate structure. Should Bigger Hero be liable for Big Hero?

That’s a big fucking court case that can be headed off at the pass by the fact that Bigger Hero put indemnification and liability clauses in its mutual support agreement. There’s a lot of issues that would arise from the practice of heroics that you’d want to govern ahead of time with a contract. So you sign a mutual support agreement.

But the silly little fake tumblr post also said they weren’t popular and mostly agencies like Idaten used them. So why is that?

Frankly, because it’s not very worth agencies while to team up with other agencies on the regular. The system doesn’t incentivize it.

If you have all of your own sidekicks on a job, you can steal credit from them. The same is not true for heroes from other agencies. You get more public funding if you staff a job with all people from your agency instead of having part of the credit go to other agencies. And you get to stand in front of the cameras and say “Big Hero Has Saved The City Again” instead of having to say “Thank You To Our Dear Friends From Bigger Hero Agency Who Carried This Team.”

Idaten is the exception because, well. It doesn’t care. Idaten’s priority is cultivating the necessary talent and teamwork needed to get the job done. It doesn’t care if it has to go outside of the agency for that. Fuck, Tensei’s canonically willing to reach out to vigilantes. Its genuine focus is saving people, so it goes against the grain of what the system incentivizes.

Mirio and Tamaki have a mutual support agreement. They’re out working together so much that Fat Gum’s agency approved an overall disliked mechanism to facilitate their team ups. They are heroes together—so why aren’t they in an agency together?

I think Tamaki wanted to spend his first year in heroics forcing himself out of his comfort zone so he’d improve. Fat Gum will force him in front of the cameras. He’s focusing on learning how to communicate effectively with the public and with the media, and Fat Gum has the sort of resources and infrastructure where Tamaki can devote the time to learning that and improving. If he was in an agency with Mirio, he’d use Mirio as a crutch to hide from something he genuinely wants to improve in. Fat Gum forces him to grow.

Mirio himself sort of had to go independent. For one, he and Izuku decided to start their agency not too long after Mirio got his license. It was before Mirio debuted. Izuku had just finished his first year. No one knew who either of them were, and they had no clue just how famous they’d both become before Izuku graduated.

They both figured they’d be a couple of nobody heroes with a dinky little agency right out the gate of Izuku’s graduation and were sort of genuinely excited at the prospect. They’d just be heroes together, which is all they wanted. They’d figured no one would give a shit about them until well after they started their agency and started working and that Izuku would have 0 offers to work elsewhere because he wasn’t even going to apply to agencies. So Mirio decided he’d stay independent until Izuku graduated so he wouldn’t be tied up in an agency contracts and they could just start fresh.

The other reason is that most agencies wouldn’t touch Mirio with a ten foot pole because he was Quirkless, and even with the ones that would, he suspected they’d sideline or coddle him because he was Quirkless. Being independent meant he could do whatever the hell he pleased. So he bought the Mirio Mom Van and, for a brief, glorious moment, convinced All Might to supervise their bullshit so he could start going on jobs with Izuku (students have to be supervised by heroes with a teaching license, which he wouldn’t be eligible for for the first three years of his career, except in exigent circumstances. He couldn’t have Izuku as an intern himself but All Might sure could). For a few beautiful weeks it was just Mirio, Izuku, and fucking All Might in the Mirio Mom Van going on stakeouts, all wearing the world’s stupidest mustaches. The UA internship program revoked permission for this arrangement not long after it started formally out of concerns for the legality of this arrangement since All Might was no longer an active duty hero, informally because All Might, Izuku, and Mirio is the stupidest and most reckless combination fucking imaginable and they are killing Aizawa from the stress they are killing him. So now Mirio works alone while he waits for Izuku to be fully licensed.

Nejire I kind of see as someone who moved away from her hometown right out of the gate of graduation but visited home very frequently, which is why she moved to Kyoto after graduation but was having a fucking sleepover at Mirio’s place when Yokohama happened. She takes the bullet train back at least once a month and spends the weekend bumming on Mirio or Tamaki’s couch. I think she wanted to see who she was away from home and there’d never be a better time to do it. I also think she’ll move back so that way she can work more fully with Her Boys one day, but wanted to push herself out of the familiar first.

All of the trio’s reasons for not working together quite yet are mutable, to be clear. Tamaki just wanted the experience early in his career or he knew he’d never learn the public relation skills he wanted to get. Nejire also just wanted the experience somewhere else before she put down real roots somewhere and is liable to move back to be with her friends and family. And Mirio’s on the verge of opening his own agency, so he doesn’t have to worry about getting sidelined by his boss anymore or getting tied up in a bad contract.

#pez dispenser debris #from the rest of the trios perspective Mirio now has twenty baby ducklings he is responsible for #it is adorable #also does any soulless media conglomerate out there want to pay me to just overthink the mechanics of their fictional universe because that #all I want to do really. I’ll come up with economic structures for you that only I care about #dm me disney #Tamaki and Nejire aren’t as close with class a as Mirio is but that’s because there’s no competing with Mirio #those are His Kids #in the aftermath of Yokohama some HPSC drones try pulling some bullshit with Iida and Mirio immediately gets in their face #those are his fucking kids. like he’s Izuku’s Big Brother but he’s sort of everyone’s big brother just to a lesser degree. he’ll take care #of all of them. those are his little brothers best friends of course he’s got their back too. the entire class loves him.#Nejire and Tamaki were also super involved in Mirio’s retraining process after he lost his quirk. like Izuku was his number one training #buddy because Izuku greeted him with an Energy and a comprehensive training plan and then dragged the rest of his class in on it too #but Tamaki and Nejire supported him and trained with him every step of the way. they were so fucking proud of him and they’re both his #staunchest defenders. they’re the kind of people who are friends forever even if they’re not together #so they both got super involved with class a by proximity because they all were involved in Mirio’s training #ngl both Izuku and Mirio miss the time before they were stupid famous #like they’ve never had more fun as heroes than sitting in Mirio’s fucking mom van with fucking All Might in the backseat with no one in the #world giving a shit about what they were up to. it was peak grunge hero chic they loved it. all might loved it. the only one who didn’t lov #it was Aizawa because they were killing him they were actually killing him. what do you MEAN all might got out of the car too and fought he #doesn’t have a STOMACH. what do you MEAN it was for old times sake and he can still throw a great punch. WHAT DO YOU MEAN they were low #level loser thugs and it was a bonding experience. HE DOESNT HAVE A STOMACH LEAVE HIM IN THE VAN. that was before they told him about all #the bullshit Mirio and Izuku did together. Aizawa got an ulcer from that time of his life. he told nedzu he could revoke the internship #program’s consent to the arrangement or he could bury yagi because one way or another he was putting a stop to this and nedzu could pick #how he did it. Aizawa needs rest he is so so tired he swears to god other classes weren’t like this #every morning he wakes up and Bakugou is a meme okay he needs to address his stress levels where he can. he is gods strongest soldier but #that does not mean he wants this many battles. can he. can he have less battles

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