#and jc showed up as an active participant in the murder party

[mxtxfanatic]

All of your examples fall apart when you realize that 1) jiang cheng literally does blame wei wuxian for the both the deaths of the jiang family and the fall of lotus pier. He blames wwx for this so much that jin ling tells the other juniors that wwx ordered wen ning to kill his parents. Yes, both of them, despite jiang yanli sacrificing her life to save wwx, a sacrifice that jc witnessed but still chose to murder wwx afterwards. If jc “didn’t really mean it” or only believed it “when he was a child,” then why is he literally still accusing wwx of this 13 years later in the 11th hour of the novel in guanyin temple up until wwx is finally like “sure, think of my golden core as ‘payment’ for the deaths of your family, as long as we part ways”? Why does he never at any point in the 2,000-page story ever retract any of his accusations? You’re right that jc logically knows that wwx isn’t actually to blame for any of these issues, but the point of his character is that he blames wwx anyways because it’s easier than self-reflection and personal growth if he can just make himself the victim of malicious intent rather than unfortunate circumstances and his own actions. He never thinks outside of his temper. It’s a trait he takes up directly from his mother.

And 2) that civilian man who came to talk to jc while he was in a “bad mood” didn’t just show up, get scared at “rumors,” and leave. He showed up, saw jc flaying a man alive on the training grounds that face the outside, was then told “the sect leader is in a bad mood because he caught the wrong one again,” and decides to not come back. Jin Ling says that his earliest memories are jc torturing people. Jc literally tortures wwx with a dog in the story, and jin ling has to lie about running into the ghost general to rescue him. Jc also isn’t torturing demonic cultivators; he’s torturing people who remind him of wwx. Every example of his torture and murder sessions is him being obsessed with the idea of finding wwx’s spirit possessing someone so as to be able to kill him “again.” He stops doing this completely in post-canon when wwx marries into the lan clan (though this doesn’t stop him from trying to kill wen ning, a man who saved his life a total of three times in the story and saved his last living relative twice).

But even if any of your points were true, people are allowed to not like a character who lashes out at others for issues not their fault. People are allowed to dislike a character who commits torture and murder for the sake of vengeance against a man who did nothing to him. At the very least, people are allowed to dislike a character who willingly planned and led a massacre of a bunch of harmless people, including elders and a child, just because his childhood servant told him that he wouldn’t let them die just to continue working for him. That’s not “twisting the story” to dislike a character. That’s just not liking his character. “Twisting the story” is strategically ignoring certain scenes that show us his character to make an argument that he’s “misunderstood, actually.”

People really twist the story to justify their hate for Jiang Cheng.