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veliseraptor · 1 year ago

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I'm interested in your thoughts about the different way the show vs the novel cuts the timeline, and specifically in terms of how Jin Guangyao is framed. With the show, we're first introduced to Meng Yao as a young man making heart eyes at Zewu-jun and there's a very slow build up of suspicion over time, which allows viewers to get to know and like him more at first before...*ahem*... putting the villain hat on him. In the novel on the other hand (assuming I'm remembering this correctly), we're basically presented with Jin Guangyao as the antagonist almost from the beginning, setting him up for the reader's suspicion and dislike. On the other hand, there's a much more nuanced portrayal of his crimes (e.g. he's not responsible for Every Bad Thing Ever like in Untamed) and the reasons behind them, and an even more clear parallel with WWX as the protagonist. What are your thoughts?

Ohhh this is a super interesting ask and I actually found it an interesting counter to the prevailing Jin Guangyao narrative about his framing in the drama, which holds that he is straightforwardly being painted as The Villain, and while I don't think that's incorrect I do think in some ways it overstates its point. however, I actually think that something specifically about narrative framing (as in, not taking any content changes in mind) here might, perhaps unintuitively, contribute to why the Jin Guangyao of the novel is a more sympathetic figure than The Untamed (tries to) make him.

(once again I came out of CQL like Jin Guangyao Made Many Valid Points, Was If Not Right At Least 75% Justified so like. I actually don't think The Untamed was as good at making Jin Guangyao a Straight Up Villain as it was trying to be. I have thoughts about Zhu Zanjin actively acting against script and how you can feel him pulling against the prevailing narrative and I have thoughts about how that actually interacts very nicely with the way Jin Guangyao in every version of the story is pulling against a prevailing narrative that wants to relegate him to the margins in one way or another. but that's a major sidebar.)

holy hell I wrote an essay so putting the rest of this under a read more.

The point is that I think there's a few things happening here - I will note, first of all, that I don't think we actually are introduced to Jin Guangyao as a villain in MDZS. I believe the first mentions we get of him are actually fairly positive. I went back and checked, and he's mentioned a couple times early on just to note his position as Chief Cultivator (in pretty neutral to positive terms), then identified as the person who gave Jin Ling Fairy, and a few other times including the explanation that he executed Xue Yang to "show that things were going to be different." Pretty shortly after that is the scene where Wei Wuxian finds the kids playing Sunshot Campaign to see how Jin Guangyao is portrayed there (because that's a solid proxy for perception more broadly) and it's pretty complimentary!

"In these types of games, the role of the now-grand-beyond-measure Chief Cultivator, Lianfang-zun, was naturally very popular. Though he had come from a background that most people found too embarrassing to even mention, it was for this very reason that they sighed in admiration over how he'd succeeded in climbing to the top of the cultivation world. [...] He fully deserved the title, and could even be considered a legend of his time. If Wei Wuxian had been playing this game, he also would have wanted to try being Jin Guangyao." (Dew, Part 5)

I do think that's worth remembering, that it's not an immediate jump into "Jin Guangyao bad"; it happens pretty fast but not immediately.

However, it is true that by the time we actually meet Jin Guangyao on page he is under pretty heavy suspicion, and pretty shortly after that is the Empathy sequence, which involves a lot of heavy judgment on Wei Wuxian's part (a very unbiased narrator! of course!) of Jin Guangyao's badness. though that's also the sequence that reveals Jin Guangyao's involvement in saving Lan Xichen, his maltreatment by cultivators in general and Nie Mingjue in particular. So it's...complicated.

But in general, this kind of arc (starting with a character who seems fishy/suspicious or even evil, gradually revealing later on the more sympathetic aspects and drawing a fuller, more nuanced picture of them that's very far from a blanket condemnation and also gets a lot of sympathy from the narrative) is very characteristic of MXTX. She does it all the time, in all three of her books, with pretty much all her antagonists.

(SPOILERS FOLLOW: Shen Qingqiu in SVSSS starts out as a lecherous scum villain who deserves his horrible death and ends as a decidedly tragic and fairly miserable figure that even his #1 hater feels pity for, Tianlang-jun in same is an all-powerful demon lord, terror of the cultivation world -- and he was wrongly accused because the Old Palace Master coveted Su Xiyan. Xue Yang is introduced as a mass murderer and closes as a hand clutching a treasured candy. Jun Wu in TGCF receives the bamboo hat after Xie Lian's beaten him in a truly remarkable gesture of compassion.

Wei Wuxian himself, who is introduced in the first lines of the novel as a terrible evil that has been defeated - this one gets quickly overturned but the fact that it begins there is still significant. I could keep going.)

and while I feel like that's led to some problems in the discourse (namely, people make up their mind about who Jin Guangyao is right off the bat and then dismiss anything that doesn't suit that initial assumption as either false or irrelevant), I also think it's a pretty compelling way to lay out her characters, and does some very interesting things in terms of...challenging the reader to be willing to overwrite some of those early assumptions, being willing to make that change in how they assess a character (or person). I mean, that's a big part of the plot of SVSSS, actually: many of the problems are caused by Shen Qingqiu's unwillingness or inability to see that Luo Binghe is not the character he knew him as from PIDW - that Luo Binghe has changed because of Shen Yuan's decisions. The misunderstandings after Luo Binghe's plunge into the Abyss stem, in a lot of ways, from Shen Qingqiu continuing to assume that Luo Binghe is thinking and acting exactly as his counterpart would, instead of looking at the person who is actually in front of him.

So too, I think the reader is meant to do those same kinds of reassessments in MDZS as character details are parceled out. Notably, the information about Sisi and the Guanyin Temple statue is only revealed after Jin Guangyao is already dead. Everything has already happened, so why put that information in the text? It's one more signpost that says you thought you knew everything but there's still more to complicate the picture and make this even more of a tragedy. You see the same thing with Jiang Cheng and the golden core reveal at the very end - everything has already happened, the great confrontation has already gone down, but here's one more thing. Maybe it doesn't change anything in terms of the narrative, but it's there, it's important.

Now, the problem comes, I think, when people are unwilling to flex on that initial unfavorable impression, and I feel like particularly right now in general a lot of people are unwilling to...change their minds? on things? or to admit they were wrong or maybe making a judgment prematurely? And most obviously this is an issue irl all over the place but I think it happens in fiction, too. The irony here is, of course, that it's replicating exactly how cultivation society in-text responds to Jin Guangyao, namely by taking one thing about him and deciding that says everything about him, regardless of what he does.

To turn to CQL, now...I'm going to be talking about narrative structure from an Anglophone perspective because that's what I know, and that's the part of fandom I primarily engage with, recognizing that what I'm going to say about story patterns may not hold true in Chinese literature; I've read too little of it to say.

I actually think it's interesting that I actually think, while CQL is on the face of it presenting a more sympathetic look at Jin Guangyao to begin with, by putting it in a linear order where the viewer more or less knows what's going on with him through the course of the whole story in chronological order is actually in some ways a villain edit in and of itself without the extra dumping of all the bad things ever being his fault. I say that because that's actually, as a narrative arc, a very familiar one in terms of the path it follows. "Innocent young man falls into villainy" is a classic villain creation trope - and while often it can make for a sympathetic villain it is very much a story that arcs from good > bad > dead.

When it's set up in that linear sort of way, aligned with that sort of familiar path, the reader (viewer) is almost set up to expect what comes; as soon as episode 10 rolls around and Jin Guangyao does something questionable, there's an easy and immediate jump to "oh, so he's going to be one of those" and from there everything he does must be, by the logic of that familiar story, part of that path. He can't get better from there; that's not how it works. He can have a redemptive moment before death, perhaps, but overall once that downward arc begins, the expectation isn't that it'll reverse, and it's a challenge to convince people not to view the rest of the character's story - and potentially back-read into their previous actions - in a suspicious light at best or an actively hostile one at worst.

(Interestingly, I have thoughts/feelings on the way that Wei Wuxian's arc interacts with that sort of story path, which is to say as I've talked about before Wei Wuxian's first life is classic villain origin story. "A smart, clever young man with a healthy dose of hubris acquires sinister powers, gradually gets more unstable and separated from society, and ultimately goes full villain" is the basic outline of Wei Wuxian's story before his resurrection, and that is, I want to emphasize, a villain story. Obviously it doesn't end up framed that way, but viewed from outside that's what it is. The fact that he's extricated from it and gets another chance doesn't actually unwrite that - it gives him another chance.)

So CQL!Jin Guangyao might start out as a more sympathetic-seeming figure than MDZS!Jin Guangyao does, but by virtue of the linearity of his arc on screen (following a familiar narrative path to an inevitable end), I think he's pre-set up to be intractably cast in the villain role, where MDZS!Jin Guangyao, because the reveals of information about him are non-linear, wobbles more. Because the reader doesn't have all the information it (potentially) forestalls making final judgment, or at least calls for a reexamination of judgment. That interrupted arc, with its side trips and detours and glimpses of another story in which Jin Guangyao could've been the protagonist (the brothel flashback occurs to me), makes it potentially a little less easy to mark Jin Guangyao in the villain box and keep him there for forty episodes.

I would say, in general, that the novel encourages a more sympathetic read of Jin Guangyao. But I do think what you've noted here is worth remembering: CQL doesn't present him as a villain or even as sketchy from the start, and the difference is clear in the form of two characters who project "I'm a bad person!" in every scene they're in from the beginning: Wen Ruohan, and to a lesser extent Jin Guangshan.

#conversating #flamingwell #jin guangyao #lise does meta #the sad queer cultivators show #thanks for giving me the opportunity to spend FAR too long writing this and looking up quotes and shit #much appreciated way to spend my afternoon #instead of working

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