#but miss me with the surprised pikachu jpegs

[transatlantic-reads]

I just think that when a famous 3rd wave feminist inevitably goes down the rabbithole of various conspiracy theories and straight into far right, white supremacist ideology, we should all stop acting so damn surprised (like, this is the exact same shit that happened with Joanne, why are we still so blindsided by what has clearly become a pattern?)

these are the people who constantly reference Gender Trouble, but refuse to gender Judith Butler correctly; who celebrate Ms Magazine and Gloria Steinem, while conveniently forgetting all about Dorothy Pitman Hughes; who insist that sex workers are inherently oppressed, that sex work is inherently demeaning, regardless of what actual sex workers have to say; who are so quick to treat racism like a hypothetical intellectual debate; who like so much to claim that anybody with a penis is inherently a wannabe rapist, a predator by nature, by birth; who say that womanhood is inextricably linked to victimhood, that heterosexual sex is (nearly) always akin to rape;

they're carceral feminists, gender essentialists, (trans-exclusionary) radical feminists, they are anti porn, anti sex work, anti sex worker.

their entire philosophy is predicated on what women deserve - yet the equality they want isn't for everybody, it is for the ever-shrinking category of what they consider a 'woman' (read: not trans, not black, not a sex worker, not muslim, etc.)

is it really so surprising then, when one of them decides to yet again move the line on what constitutes a righteous cause, on what constitutes a real 'man', an acceptable 'woman'?

[poorlittleyaoyao]

@lansplaining​ and @crithir​ coming in with good clarifications:

@lansplaining​ says:

“We don't find out for sure-- Wei Wuxian guesses that the corpse had too much resentful energy to be calmed or controlled, so they had to dismember it. So pretty much the same as in the book, minus the amulet.

Ah found it! “I think that the dismemberment of the corpse probably wasn’t simply to seek revenge and vent hatred, but a malicious way of suppression. The person who cut up the corpse intentionally chose those places haunted by evil beings to place the body parts.” (he goes on to connect this to how the Nie sabre spirits are appeased and conclude that it was done by someone who knows the Nie-- this is before they've realized who the body belongs to)“

OHHH, so THAT’S why he hides them in those particular locations! (Or rather, those locations that are not his secret home office. I figure that’s mostly for the Gothic capital-R-Romance of it all, but given all the Cursed Objects he’s got stowed away in there + what Xue Yang gets up to, it’d be funny if NMJ’s head is also functioning as like, a roomba for demons.)

The show’s Technically They Aren’t Zombies policy makes the attempt at controlling him much more sinister, IMO, because he’s not subduing a resentful ghost in that case; instead, it comes off like he’s attempting to do what Xue Yang later does to Song Lan. D:

@crithir​ says:

I recently discovered that there was a cut scene from the Empathy bit in the first version of the novel in which a frazzled JGY is about to hack NMJ’s fierce corpse up with an axe and he says something like “Please stop searching for me” so I take that to mean that NMJ was buried but broke out and went after JGY after he became a fierce corpse, and when attempts to control him failed cutting him up and suppressing all the pieces separately was the only way to stop him from continuing to hunt JGY.

I could be mistaken though because the events surrounding the immediate aftermath of NMJ’s qi deviation have always been fuzzy to me in general without even considering any variations in different canons 

OH MAN. I’ve read that scene, but I took “stop searching for me” as a simple “please don’t look at me while I kill you. I really like the idea of the dismemberment being reactive to NMJ’s resentful corpse being a very real danger. And if NMJ were buried and then busted out of the grave, it would account for why nobody finds the missing body suspicious.

I’ve wondered why JGY didn’t just burn the body, and the best I can figure is that with no body to anchor it anymore, NMJ’s spirit would be COMPLETELY off the chain and that much harder to subdue. (JGY also has a pattern of being juuuust sentimental enough to leave loose ends, so maybe completely obliterating NMJ’s body was a bridge too far.)

Regardless. I just love that JGY methodically destroys NMJ’s soul so it becomes consumed by rage and warped beyond control, and then is like [Surprised Pikachu dot jpeg] when he has an angry uncontrollable spirit on his hands.

Genuine question for those of you who are awake: does either canon give a reason for why JGY dismembers NMJ?* The whole point of making him qi deviate was so his eventual death would appear natural, and hiding/destroying his body sort of, uh, completely counteracts that. I have a vague headcanon (beyond “JGY wanted a trophy” which is also true), but I wanna know if there’s a textual explanation.

*I know in the show he tries to control him with the amulet and then just has Xue Yang kill him when that doesn’t work, but having a ZOMBIE CHIFENG-ZUN shambling around would also be highly suspicious, and JGY could have still have killed him in a way that was less obvious.