#based on presumption that doesn't hold up with the actual plot

[jiangwanyinscatmom]

Hi

What do you think of the idea that wwx chrackter arc declined when he come back because he act more carefree and childish than when he was 15, people basically think wwx as a chrackter went 2 step back and that’s why they hate mxy!wwx 😭

Good day, anon.

I don't. Because that's just bad comprehension to even try to say "his character arc declined".

They seem to have taken his Mo Xuanyu shtick, as his actual personality, when that breaks several times in story, even before Lan Wangji admits to knowing it is him. As well as the juniors beginning to believe that "Mo Xuanyu" is not actually a lunatic aside from Jin Ling, who Wei Wuxian is very much trying to keep it from that he is in fact Wei Wuxian and puts on a heavy act, even to his own embarrassment sometimes.

Not sure what exactly is perceived as childish, unless they mean when he teases others, and he always has because that is his personality. And if that's the case, the character probably just isn't for them, but then they really should stop putting Wei Wuxian traits on his lessers in story.

There is no MXY! Wei Wuxian. It's the stupidest thing ever much as fandom trying to act like "Meng Yao" is a separate person from Jin Guangyao.

[splendidemendax]

muse fucks even more severely when you read it as a response to ancient greek drama specifically

the story doesn't reproduce or retell any particular drama,* but it is absolutely steeped in the tradition. kelis' plays were, imo, at least influenced by (if not outright based on) the style and form of greek drama. like, i straight up would not believe that that level of similarity (e.g. in production elements like the masks and stylistic elements like the particular use of the chorus) was coincidental.

for me, this makes b'elanna's role even more fun. after an entire story about the creation of a pseudo-greek drama, b'elanna pulls off the most technical of greek dramatic spectacles in reverse: instead of a god appearing from the mechane** to speak to the characters or the audience (the one thing which sometimes restores belief and order at the end of a particularly messy tragedy†), an starship engineer uses her technnical prowess to disappear back up into the sky,†† inspiring belief and restoring some sort of order.

the only reason this ending happens, the keystone holding the narrative in place, the only reason b'elanna is even around to play the god at this critical moment‡, is her belief in the power of narrative. without that, the whole thing collapses under its own weight.

so yep! this episode can get it.

*though (and this is more speculative) i would be 0% surprised to find that whoever wrote that story had read and enjoyed the comedian aristophanes in general and in particular his frogs* (which [trekkie bonus!] is the source of alexander's song in the tos episode "plato's stepchildren"). frogs is fundamentally a debate about what kind of poetry can inspire Actual Good, starting from the presumption that some form of poetry has that ability. it was written during the later years of the peloponnesian war, the decades-long on-and-off conflict that would eventually end what's now known as the classical/golden age of ancient athens. it's fundamentally kind of a pessimistic play: it posits that poetry can save us, but not all poetry, and those even arguably capable of producing the right sort are already dead. with the benefit of hindsight we can see that aristophanes' pessimism was justified: if there were a poem that could save athens, it was certainly not a poem that anyone wrote.

**yep, this is where deus ex machina ("god out of the machine") comes from. it's a particularly fitting mechanic (pun intended) for b'elanna to make use of.

†this is, for example, one available interpretation of the ending of sophocles' philoctetes. it's also what happens in euripides' orestes; as anne carson puts it in her intro to her translation of the play, "all the lines of the plot have been pushed to impasse and categories like good/evil, happy/unhappy, mortal/ immortal are sliding around so crazily that only a god can make things clear" (an oresteia, 177)

††fun note: the character who comes to mind as famously leaving via mechane (and the only non-god to use the mechane in extant greek tragedy) is medea at the end of euripides' medea. having murdered her husband's new wife and her own children, she leaves via a chariot pulled by dragons.

‡the dea in machinam, ig

I keep seeing posts about b'elannas like love of passion and stories and I think that sude of her really got to shine in muse like even though she was stranded on a strange planet and injured with z broken ship and obviously alot if her attention was devoted to that she still became engrossed in kellis' play and made sure it had a good ending and the way she adapted all the stuff she knew about voyager to an epic style was so smooth and cool AND it was obvious she was doing it continuously and with dedication even when she was trying to fix the shuttle because of the way kelos described everything, like the way he described vulcans and the way he told his performers to play the crew made it clear that b'elanna didn't just give him a simplistic explanation of the stuff on voyager he was asking about (which would have been alot easier! She was trying to do complex engineering work on a damaged ship and Kelis was definitely stressing her out!) but she told him a story. Anyway muse fucks severely