#it died with NMJ
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lgbtlunaverse · 1 month ago
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So I've said multipe times now (here and here) that thinking nmj is just so blinded by privilege he doesn't undertand that acting out of line gets people killed is, in my opinion, a misunderstanding of his character that ignores the part where he's, you know, actively dying the whole time and thinks that's a good thing. But that doesn't mean I don't think privilege plays no role at all in how he views the world.
Specifically, his view that death (at least premature or violent death) means something.
Death isn't always a tragedy to NMJ, but it is always meaningful. If you kill an evil dangerous person for your righteous cause, that death had meaning. There was evil in the world and now there is less of it. Similarly, if you die in the pursuit of your righteous cause, that death has meaning, because the sheer dedication you gave to it that you were willing to die for it will further that cause, and your bretheren will be invigorated by your sacrifice to fight even harder.
If a death isn't meaningful, that's an injustice and it is up to the living to give it meaning. That's what cuts so deep about his father's murder. There were no consequences, no changes, no meaning. Wen Ruohan was just going to get away with it! He fights and wins an entire war to make it mean something, to make it so that the unjust murder of Nie Mingjue's father is part of Wen Ruohan's downfall.
But this is a view he can only hold because he's the kind of person who's death will be meaningful. Most ordinary people's deaths are meaningless. Not ontologically, not inherently, but they are made meaningless because no one cares. For death to be meaningful you either have to be so powerful that anything you risk your life for will be impacted in some way. (Like, say, if you sacrifice a long life for immense martial power in a faustian bargain with a blade) Or if people with that kind of power care enough about you to do so for you. For most people, this isn't true. A starving street kid has no power to change the unfair world that put them there, even if they risk their life trying, and no one will do it for them once they die.
Nie Mingjue knows this in abstract, and of course rightfully believes it's wrong. But all that does is make it yet another righteous cause people should be willing to die for. Everyone's deaths should mean something, we'll make it so or die trying!
This is what the conflict between nieyao is about at its core. Because Jin Guangyao, fundamentally, cannot conceive of his own death as meaningful. Nie Mingjue grew up around powerful men who could change the world but refuse to do so because god forbid they risk a single hair on their perfect heads. Meng Yao, on the other hand, grew up in an environment where no one of importance would blink twice if you died. He was surrounded by meaningless death. Indeed his entire early life is defined by that lack of care.
Meng Shi dies and no one cares. Meng Yao gets thrown off a flight off stairs and no one cares. He has to be the one to do the caring, and once he's gone no one else will do it for him.
So he has to live.
Jin Guangyao eventually gets far enough that he actually does aquire the power to change some things... as long as he's alive. If he changes too much, holds on too tightly to his ideals, he'll die and it'll all be for nothing. He can't sacrifice himself for his goals because doing so would immediately render those goals unobtainable. No one will care about what he tried to do. He won't be a heroic sacrifice, he'll just be trash that finally cleaned itself up.
And well... Nie Mingjue dies, and someone makes it mean something. Makes it mean so much that the entire story of mdzs would not exist without it. Jin Guangyao dies and it doesn't mean anything. Most people are glad to be rid of him, and the few that are not don't do anything to change that.
#mdzs#mdzs meta#nie mingjue#jin guangyao#meng yao#nieyao#of course the inherent tragedy is that nmj is totally THE guy to ask if you want your death to mean something#nmj's reaction the the fact that most ppl's deaths are meaningless is to go: yes and I should change this.#If everyone thought like me this wouldn't happen anymore I simply need to get EVEN MORE HARDCORE about justice to MAKE them care#and this quality- which makes him the one person perhaps capable of making jgy's death mean something- also makes him a threat to his life#so jgy kills him because he needs to live. And then his beliefs about the meaninglessness of his own death are doomed to be true#what else was he supposed to do? just die and TRUST that someone would make it mean something?#like his mother trusted that his father would come back for them?#of course he can't do that.#just like how nmj's upbringing means that by the stairs he can't see how jgy- son of a sect leader and extremely capable-#is any different from the men who wrung their hands and told him that wen ruohan is just *too powerful* they can't do anything about him.#(*guy who killed wrh and wil go on to kill jgs voice* i just can't do anything about my dad being evil)#if jgy had agreed to risk his life and asked nmj to make it mean something if he died nmj would have said yes.#which is why he can't understand jgy wouldn't just ASK that.#jgy meanwhile has not been informed that was a fucking option and if he was wouldnt be able to trust that it'd actually happen.#for reasons outlined above#ahhh tragedy and inability of characters to understand each other i love you
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prince-liest · 1 year ago
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some recent thoughts on Nie Mingjue and Jin Guangyao, and why even though I find Nie Mingjue very frustrating in the midst of his Baxia-induced anger issues, I think he’s also a pretty sympathetic character as a whole and it’s really understandable why he thinks the way he does
(as someone who ships 3zun and nieyao, and through the lens of “Jin Guangyao is my blorbo”)
I’ve seen a tendency to paint NMJ and JGY’s relationship in black and white in terms of who was fundamentally more in the right, which to be honest is not really the approach I take to fandom in general. to me the tragedy is that NMJ and JGY before JGY's casting-out had immense respect and perhaps even love (platonic, romantic, whatever) for each other. in the end, a lack of mutual understanding of each others' circumstances that could have otherwise eventually been overcome was driven, by bigotry, Jin Guangshan, and the Nie cultivation style, into becoming an insurmountable difference that eventually killed them both
NMJ definitely Did Not Get where JGY was coming from when JGY was making survival decisions and keeping secrets. he was simply not raised in a way where he ever even had to think about the types of choices that JGY has been forced to make since he was quite young. but at the same time, NMJ was a teenager raising his brother and his sect from a very young age and I think it's a disservice to his character to fail to acknowledge that his entire life he expected to die a young and horrific death, just like he watched his father die, and that this expectation deeply colors his approach to the world. JGY plays the long game. NMJ does not get to think about that, he just has to raise his brother, win a war, and try not to drive his sect into the ground before he kicks the bucket in a violent and gruesome manner. he does not have a choice about any of these things.
and said things are extremely difficult to do, especially as a teenager, which I think is a reflection of MDZS's whole thing where their entire generation is just traumatized by war and conflict and a dearth of genuine, honorable guidance and leadership, which leads to such fractures
but it's also a series of tasks that required the kind of attitude that Nie Mingjue develops, and that in combination with Baxia’s influence gives him this really immovable perspective on life that he just won't budge on with JGY. I think it’s really significant that when Jin Guangyao does regularly play Clarity for NMJ, they get along quite well. and I also think it's really understandable why NMJ is so stubborn and headstrong - he's had to fight his way through being sect leader and not take "no" for an answer, because what the hell else can a young, new leader do to avoid being taken advantage of? frankly even if he had taken up a bit of whatever guile Nie Huaisang didn’t hog from the Nie gene pool... why would he direct it towards self-preservation? he has no room for that kind of fear because he is going to be dead in a few years.
importantly as well, Nie Mingjue unjustly judges Jin Guangyao because he is unable to understand the context that JGY is coming from, but that same righteousness is the reason that he's the first person to have given Meng Yao a fair shake and rewarded his hard work and labor, and that matters a lot to Jin Guangyao and their relationship as a whole. you can’t really have one without the other unless you give Nie Mingjue time to grow up.
unfortunately, Nie Mingjue died his 20s, and was in his teens when the Sunshot Campaign began. look me in the eyes and explain to me what kind of behavior you expect from a 20-something with a magic rage sword.
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jin-zixun · 6 months ago
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Reasons Nie Mingjue tries to kill Jin Guangyao:
JGY saved his life (while being unable to do the same for others)
He didn't think working as a spy to win the war would actually include having to do bad things (unlike the killings NMJ performs which are always 100% justified because NMJ is 100% moral and has the right to make that call)
JGY won't kill himself
JGY won't perform extrajudicial murder of his shidi, favored by his father (which would also get him killed)
JGY won't die
JGY talked back to him and won't just completely agree with his assessment (that JGY should just die)
It's the only way for them to have peace (says the guy who suffers from extensive murderous rages and came back as a corpse to continue killing people against the guy who oversaw the biggest public safety project and expansion we know of and kept the peace for over a decade)
JGY tells their mutual friend/sworn brother that he's concerned about NMJ suffering from said extensive murderous rages
JGY bought nice things for NHS
Reasons Jin Guangyao tries to kill Nie Mingjue
Doesn't want to be killed by Nie Mingjue who keeps trying to kill him
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mxtxfanatic · 5 months ago
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I know wwx having too much power for the wider cultivation world's liking was part of his problem, but do you think there is a world where thru some deus ex machina or another he could gain enough power for the burrial mounds settlement to survive?
No, because the problem isn’t that he didn’t have enough power to survive, it’s that he was being schemed against by both enemies he didn’t know he had and enemies he didn’t know how to guard against. At the same time, the Burial Mounds were never sustainable. A group of 50+ people cannot permanently survive on badlands that only 2.5 people (Wen Ning and Wei Wuxian, plus A-Yuan sometimes) can ever leave for short periods of time to top off supplies. They were being hunted and everyone knew it, which is why they were more immediately accepting of their deaths than Wei Wuxian was.
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tavina-writes · 1 year ago
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I am going to be rotating Xichen's recontextualization of NMJ's death and his part in NMJ's death and the fact that NMJ was murdered and how he was murdered and who murdered him and Xichen's own culpability in that after Guanyin Temple from now into the next century because it's just!
It's awful. It's horrible. It's unrecoverable brain disease.
HOW do you recover from that. Is there potential to recover from that. God. Anyway.
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labyrynth · 2 years ago
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*deep sigh*
don’t make me tap the sign
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guqin-and-flute · 11 months ago
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More Nie riding Yao/spiritual animal!Mountain Goats. For fun ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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winepresswrath · 1 year ago
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trying to plot out a xichen/huaisang emma au solely for the purposes of slotting jin guangyao and nie mingjue into the already married siblings role. in theory this leaves us with no one to play emma's dad but no they're both emma's dad for maximum impact. and obviously jin guangyao is also the nanny. and it ends with huaisang vowing to be worse, actually.
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stiltonbasket · 2 years ago
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nmj and jc absolutely have bro solidarity because they will both cry in the movie theater if the dog dies. someone (lxc and jyl) have to check the special website "does the dog die" before they go to the movies now.
Nie Mingjue and Jiang Cheng both cry in the theatre if a dog dies, but Nie Mingjue nopes out the second a spouse dies, and Jiang Cheng does the same when a sibling dies. The one time they go to a movie without telling LXC and JYL, they end up watching a film in which a dog, a husband, and a brother die; NMJ and JC spend the next week clinging to Lan Xichen & Jiang Yanli and Wei Wuxian, respectively.
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kuntya · 4 months ago
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adhdo5 · 4 months ago
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Bro why did JGY literally write the character guide
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lgbtlunaverse · 1 year ago
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I'm a little bit insane about how in novel canon the whole xiyao ending where Jin Guangyao wants to die with Xichen, who accepts, which then makes jgy change his mind and pushes him away at the last second isn't actually explicit. A lot of adaptations chose to make it so but in the novel this is all VERY up for interpretation.
Here's what actually happens in the text: Lan xichen stabs jgy, jgy moves away from lan xichen, xichen follows him, wwx realizes jgy is about to open the coffin and calls "watch out!" to lan xichen. Jgy unseals nmj, pushes xichen away, nmj kills jgy and they are both dragged into the coffin which is sealed again.
Here's what wei wuxian, our narrator, thinks is happening: Jin Guangyao wanted to lead lan xichen to his death out of revenge for stabbing him. Lan Xichen, unaware, simply followed Jin Guangyao to try and stop him from getting away. Wei wuxian's warning came too late, but Jin Guangyao- for an unknown reason- changed his mind at the last second and pushed lan xichen out of danger before lan xichen had any idea of what was going on.
Here's what most fans as well as the teams behind several adpatations think is happening: Jin Guangyao leads Xichen to nmj's coffin to die with him, Xichen accepts, because of this acceptance, proof xichen still cares for him, Jin Guangyao pushes him out of harm's way. Wei Wuxian just doesn't get that gay people who aren't him or Lan Wangji exist.
Here's what ALSO MIGHT BE HAPPENING: Jin guangyao wants to die in a different way than he is currently dying. Maybe he's afraid of what'll happen to his body after his death like he was scared for his mother's, maybe he wants to confront nmj one last time now that there's nothing more for him to lose, maybe - if he can't take her body with him- he'd at least like his final resting place to be where he buried his mother. Lan Xichen thinks he's trying to get away and follows but Jin Guangyao, who despite everything doesn't want him to die, pushes him away. Xichen doesn't know what happened until it's already happened. What he would've wanted if he had known remains up in the air.
Or, alternatively: Jin Guangyao's reasons are as above, but unbeknowst to Wei Wuxian, Xichen DOES know what jgy is about to do and either misinterprets this as an invitation to all die together, or inidividually decides he, too, is done, and wants to join his sworn brothers in the grave. To Jin Guangyao this has nothing to do with Lan Xichen, and he still doesn't want him to die, so he pushes him away against Lan Xichen's wishes.
Every single one of these interpretations is unhinged and they are all supported by the original text. It's like a choose your own adventure of tragic gay endings.
#mdzs#mdzs meta#meng yao#jin guangyao#lan xichen#nie mingjue#3zun#xiyao#rs: i wish it could've been you#honestly which is worse for xichen. Being denied his wish explicitly or only realizing he wanted it after it'd already been denied for him#OR genuinely not wanting to die but being forced to live with the fact that even after he essentially killed him jgy still saved his life#just another way he's in his debt#like no matter what he's not coming out of here okay#i switch between a bunch of these all the time but actually favor the last 2 because they're very underexplored in my opinion#I like it when 'i never even thought about hurting you' remains true to the bitter end. He never even considered it#also I just... have a lot of feelings about that being his mom's coffin#do you remember that in the novel the coffin was so heavy only sect leaders could bear the weight?#so for the burial a group of sect leaders had to be the pallbearers... the SYMBOLISM GUYS!! THE SYMBOLISM!#jgy dies in infamy but despite everything it's the highest of cultivation society who carry the coffin he's buried in#he's in the same coffin as a great sect leader!! As nmj!! After a whole life fighting an uphill battle finally in death they are equal#it's not justice and it's not fair but it's... something#wwx's interpretation is the one i favour the least. sorry bro you remain an unreliable narrator to me.#it feels rather uncharitable towards jgy which makes sense for wwx's pov but makes it not my favorite#there's an alternative version of that intepretation where jgy THINKS he's doing the coffin trio pact and thinks xichen accepts.#and has the same realization of oh no he still cares I don't want him to die and pushes lxc away#meanwhile lan xichen hasn't actually processed any of this because it all happened in about 0.4 seconds#i like that one slightly more but it's still not my favorite#there's tragedy in the misunderstanding but it's a bit convoluted.
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3cosmicfrogs · 1 year ago
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in the righteous fight for da-ge more facial hair, i tragically lost myself to the sauce and accidentally acquired a moustache of my own.
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jin-zixun · 6 months ago
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I'm sorry but if you, as my friend, introduce me to one of your other friends and then your other friend tries to kill me and ends up killed by me, to avoid me being killed by them... I have not wronged you. If anything you have wronged me by introducing me to someone who tried to kill me.
Especially if you insisted it was a misunderstanding after having to stop them twice and then continued to push for reconciliation, between the two of us in private no less, without even acknowledging the possibility of a third time happening while your other friend is literally screaming about how they will definitely be attempting to do it a third time. Please don't be coming to me years later like "why didn't you say something I could've helped" because like. Seriously? Are you serious?
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mxtxfanatic · 6 months ago
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@transparent-internet-maker I feel bad about going back and forth on op’s post, especially since I can’t comment in the notes, so I’m just gonna make a new one. It’s come to my attention that idek if we’re discussing the same source material, so just to put it out there: I am discussing resentful energy as presented in the novel.
With that said: Wei Wuxian couldn’t have survived 3 months without food while heavily injured, but the Burial Mounds is never described as a land where no life can live. In fact, we at least know it’s wooded area. He very likely scavenged whatever edible (or at least non-fatal) plants he could find and hunted whatever meager animals may have wandered in. What he most definitely could not do, however, is survive off of resentful energy. In the novel, it is not conscious. It is not sentient. It’s not “deciding” to preserve him, and it’s not making any sort of contract with him like this is jjk, whether Wei Wuxian knows it or not. The overwhelming presence of resentment in the Burial Mounds would only have the power to make him feel terrible, and Wei Wuxian’s survival can be solely attributed to his life’s goal of living and living well without holding on to resentment, thus preventing the resentful energy from breaking him as it had likely done to others before him who may have initially survived their entrance into the cursed place. Resentful energy does not in any way, shape, or form benefit living beings when residing in them. That’s both the moral of the story and the physical mechanics of the world.
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catilinas · 2 years ago
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for real the Evil Music is possibly my favourite plotline in all of mdzs i enjoy it an indescribable amount
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