#it's relevant

[fincalinde]

you’ve mentioned a few times in your meta that you view nmj as being hypocritical, and i’m inclined to agree with you! would you share some specific quotes from the text that you feel especially support this reading of his character? 👀

It is one of my favourite words to apply to him, isn’t it! I think that’s because a) it’s true, and b) NMJ’s reputation for righteousness (and his belief in his own righteousness) grant an in-universe illusion of consistency that often bleeds through to external readings of him. So I press the point, because it’s fundamental to his character and I usually see it elided or reduced to all-bark-and-no-bite-grumpy-bear-with-a-heart-of-gold fanon NMJ.

And oh yes, there’s an absolute wealth of quotes supporting this. As always, I use the EXR fan translation because I’m old school.

Christ, this got long. Click for more.

It’s all relative, man

First we need to establish what NMJ’s principles supposedly are.

[Nie Huaisang’s] brother, Nie Mingjue, was extremely resolute when carrying out orders, quite renowned in the cultivation world. […] Nie Mingjue had always taught his younger brother with extreme harshness, particularly caring for his studies. (Chapter 13)

[…] he took over the Nie Sect before he even reached twenty, doing everything in a direct, forceful fashion. (Chapter 21)

When he lived, Nie Mingjue was often exasperated by the fact that his brother didn’t meet expectations, so he disciplined him strictly. (Chapter 21)

In spite of Nie Mingjue being a junior to Jin Guangshan, he conducted himself in a strict manner and refused to tolerate Xue Yang no matter what. (Chapter 30)

Without any hesitation, Nie Mingjue scolded, “Drinking the water he brought you while speaking such spiteful words! Did you join my forces not to kill the Wen-dogs but to make idle talk?!” (Chapter 48)

“A proper man should carry himself with proud righteousness. There’s no need to care for the talk of those idlers.” (Chapter 48)

As we can see, NMJ is all about righteousness, but we don’t get too many details confirming what that righteousness entails. We’re expected to make assumptions based on context: that his values are in line with the ideal values of his society, and that he’s living his life according to those principles (and enforcing said principles on others).

This is worth keeping in mind. We know NMJ is ‘righteous’. We know, in a general sense, what societal standards for morality are in this setting and we see the tension between society’s theoretical standards, its actual standards, and the moral frameworks of characters such as WWX and LXC. And there’s tension between those standards and NMJ’s moral framework, too. But though WWX attempts (and fails) to opt out and LXC attempts (and fails) to find a better way through open conversation and consideration of context, their failures are not due to hypocrisy but instead larger forces at play. In other words, they go up against society and society wins.

NMJ has a problem with society too, but for him the problem is not with its rules and assumptions—it’s with the individuals who make it up. He has no problem with the system. To NMJ, the system is a good thing. If only the people in it would rigidly conform to the rules, everything would be fine. And an outlook like that can only ever lead to hypocrisy, not just because human beings and their actions don’t fit into rigid categories, but because by not attempting to navigate the system (LXC, JGY, JC) or even attempting to opt out (WWX, LWJ, XY), NMJ positions himself above society, as a moral arbiter.

This is why he feels entitled to upbraid JGS, who is a generation above him. It’s why he feels entitled to harass and attempt to murder JGY for not being loyal to NMJ over and above his filial duty to his father. These actions are after he’s reached the point of no return with the sabre spirit, yes, but they didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s just the nadir of a path he’s been on presumably his entire life.

All the information is on the task

NMJ is very good at bending his supposedly rigid principles when it’s convenient for him, while not offering any grace or understanding to others who do the same. And ‘others’, let’s be real, usually equates to JGY. The horror vortex of NMJ’s obsession with controlling JGY really cannot be escaped.

Let’s start with the biggie. JGY is naturally the one who calls NMJ out, because he’s the only one who can see the emperor has no clothes, and by clothes I mean leg to stand on.

“But, Brother, I have always wanted to ask you something—the lives under your hands are in any regard more than those under mine, so why is it that I only killed a few cultivators out of desperation and you keep on bringing it up, even until now?” (Chapter 48)

“Are you saying that all of the people you killed deserved their deaths? […] Then, may I ask, just how do you decide if someone deserves death? Are your standards absolutely correct? If I kill one but save hundreds, would the good outweigh the bad, or would I still deserve death? To do great things, sacrifices must happen.” (Chapter 48)

Chifeng-zun, my man, he has nailed you. The point is not to start drawing equivalences in quite the way JGY is doing—I would certainly argue that if you’re killing undeserving people for the greater good you’d better have one hell of a greater good to be aiming for, even in the crapsack world of MDZS. JGY’s argument is partly a numbers game, but I want to set that aside, because it’s a distraction from his core point, to which numbers are irrelevant: can NMJ truly justify every single murder he has ever committed? Because if he can’t, he’s condemned by his own supposed standards. Note JGY’s use of the word ‘absolute’. NMJ is a moral absolutist! Is he absolutely sure? And if he is sure, does it matter that he’s sure? Why is his certainty more important than anyone else’s?

NMJ never once grapples with these questions. If he did, he might be able to pull the teeth of his own hypocrisy by acknowledging it and engaging with it. But of course he’s not capable of that, certainly not by the time of this scene.

And speaking of NMJ’s hypocrisy re: who does and doesn’t deserve to die…

“Very well! I’ll kill myself after I kill you!” (Chapter 49)

But Roquen, you cry! NMJ says such an utterly mad thing because he’s battered and beaten and not thinking clearly, not to mention past the point of no return with the sabre spirit as he’s been cultivating with resentful energy intensely throughout the war! That’s why he walks it back after LXC intervenes!

To which I say: it is almost as though context matters!

And yes, I’m aware of the context. I’m aware that just before this bit of dialogue the narrative claims JGY pointing out ‘if I hadn’t killed them you’d be dead’ is a subtle way of saying ‘you can’t kill me because you owe me your life’ as though that’s purely manipulative rather than being, you know, true. ‘Even if you refuse to accept I acted for the best, please don’t kill me and I’m going to subtly remind you that you owe me to maximise my chances of getting you to not kill me (after I just risked my life to save yours when it would have been 100x better for me personally if you died)’ is hardly an outrageous position.

It’s interesting, though, isn’t it, that NMJ never again mentions taking his own life as a matter of principle, despite the fact that he subsequently attempts to murder JGY again for the apparently unforgivable crime of … not being able to overrule his abusive father about XY, and then having the temerity to complain to LXC about NMJ’s attempt to murder him.

Obviously the Jin are a huge threat after the war, but these are all pretty feeble reasons for piling on JGY. Sure, maybe JGY would also have tried to protect XY if JGS weren’t around, but the fact is that JGS is around and he’s calling the shots. Besides, once JGS is out of the picture JGY has no issue disposing of XY (with Dr Evil levels of ineptness, apparently), so that’s a fairly decent indicator he’s not ride or die. As for the fact that JGY is making nice to NMJ’s face but complaining behind his back, well. Regardless of any genuine desire to vent to his only friend, I have no doubt he was indeed trying to drive a wedge between NMJ and LXC as a strategic move. But is it wrong of him to do so, considering NMJ is a genuine and present threat to his life and LXC is just not getting it? And does any of the above, including his struggle to maintain his position and all the other work he does for his father mean he deserves death—immediate, extrajudicial and violent death?

Let me put it this way. NMJ is making JGY responsible for his father’s actions and his father’s orders—the question of whether JGY is on board with his father’s instructions is academic, because he has no choice in the matter. JGY cannot opt out of his situation. The only opt out is death, and that is not a meaningful choice because no one else is getting vilified for having the audacity to fight for their place in their world rather than lie down and die. And even if JGY really were a cackling supervillain 100% on board with his father’s diabolical plans, NMJ’s focus on him to the exclusion of JGS is driven by emotion and not by a rational evaluation of the morality and logistics of the situation.

And when he’s insisting that JGY deserves death (and trying to mete it out to him) NMJ never again considers for a moment whether, if JGY really deserves to die, then maybe he does too.

As a third example, to make it a hat trick, we have this:

However, Jin Guangyao wasn’t his subordinate anymore. Only after they became sworn brothers would he have the status and the position to urge Jin Guangyao, like how he disciplined his younger brother, Nie Huaisang. (Chapter 49)

“Brother, it really was my father’s orders. I couldn’t refuse. Now. if you want me to take care of Xue Yang, what would I say to him?” (Chapter 49)

NMJ is perfectly aware that according to the rules of their society and the moral framework he himself subscribes to, JGY’s highest authority is his father. But NMJ can’t accept that. He thinks he should be the ultimate authority over JGY, and though he couches it in moral terms about wanting JGY to follow the correct path, what he really means is what he himself considers to be the correct path. As always, he doesn’t listen to JGY’s perfectly valid points about how it’s not possible for him to do the ‘right’ thing as he just doesn’t have that kind of authority and will only end up making his own life worse. I don’t have a quote demonstrating this, but considering everything we know about NMJ, I think we can infer he would not take kindly to JGY ordering NHS to do something futile and self-destructive in the name of the correct path, purely on the grounds that JGY is now his elder brother.

I’ll acknowledge again that JGY is absolutely an accomplice in his father’s schemes, and the originator of a fair few of them since he’s politically gifted. But it’s just not possible to untangle JGY’s complicity from his need (and his right!) to survive. NMJ is correct to be concerned about JGY as a risk, because he’s a huge asset to JGS. But once again, making JGY a target is not the moral or even the sensible thing to do. We know JGY enjoys aspects of what his father asks him to do. We also know that once his father is out of the picture he gets rid of XY, purges the Jin of corruption and pushes through the watchtower project. When he has agency as a clan leader he doesn’t follow his father’s political agenda to the letter, to say the least! So there is certainly a large dollop of truth in his claims that he has no choice and he’s unhappy and vulnerable.

And then a bonus, something not linked to JGY to demonstrate that NMJ’s hypocrisy extends beyond his personal vendetta.

Nie Mingjue spoke coldly. “If she responded with only silence and not opposition when the Wen Sect was causing mayhem, it’s the same as indifference. She shouldn’t have been so disillusioned as to hope that she could be treated with respect when the Wen Sect was doing evil and be unwilling to suffer the consequences and pay the price when the Wen Sect was wiped out.” (Chapter 73)

Charming. Funny how NMJ says this after spending the war fighting on the same side as the guy who invented demonic cultivation and controls an army of desecrated corpses, violating every possible social and cultural principle they have. But the Sunshot Campaign would have failed without WWX’s contributions, so I suppose NMJ thought that compromise was acceptable. It’s all right for him to stay silent and not oppose WWX, since WWX has been useful to his own agenda. What’s not acceptable is staying silent when the consequence is your own violent death and literally no good whatsoever being achieved thereby.

Aside from being a hypocrite, NMJ is also pathologically incapable of self-reflection.

Finish him!

At the end of the day, NMJ’s principles are inherently contradictory because he’s living in morally relative world where the narrative expects us to take context into account and root for a protagonist who brutally tortures his enemies to death and a romantic lead who find+replaces his ethical framework with ‘Wei Ying’.

It is simply not possible for NMJ to be both righteous and rigid, so when he chooses to be rigid he foregoes being righteous. Even in his moments of flexibility, he continues to apply harsh standards to others that he refuses to apply to himself. That’s what makes him a hypocrite. He isn’t a bastion of absolute morality in a sea of corruption. He’s in denial about the nuanced reality he’s living in, and placing himself on high as a moral authority with no actual mandate. Hypocrisy inevitably results, and the consequences are hugely damaging to everyone around him.

[httyd-art-requests]

Quick post to let you guys know that I'm going to be closing the ask box while I work my way through the current requests. You guys gave me almost 2 weeks worth of prompts!

I see everyone's asks and I'm going in the order that they were sent in, so it might be some time before I get to some of the newer ones ^^" Your patience is appreciated!

Thank you everyone for being here and for supporting my silly little project <3

(Expect the ask box to open again sometime next week)

[tenojan-in-tevinter]

Lavellan post!!!! Aaaa I love her ok. Her name is Mirevas and she really wishes she hadn't agreed to go to the human politics meeting. She's very stubborn and headstrong and will speak her mind. She distrusts humans, but not enough to be actively hostile to every human she sees. She will beat you up if you call her "knife-ear" or if you insult her friends. She's also a lot stronger than she looks, she's fairly small even for an elf.

Pics of her pretty face:

She has complicated feelings about her clan and believes they sent her on the "shit job" (the conclave) to get a break from her. Even though 70% of the perceived beef they have with her is half in her head and half from one or two individual clanmates. They love her and miss her and hope she's okay. And she misses them so bad sometimes it aches. But that's probably just the mark...

The actual 30% conflict she has with her clan mostly has to do with her ideas about elven culture and how stupid it is that they all act like they know so much when it's clear they know so very little about their past. Among other things. Like spirits and demons. She is fascinated by them to a degree that disturbs her clanmates a bit. And also anyone outside her clan who gets her talking.

She does not like Solas at first. She thinks he's super annoying. He thinks he knows everything, doesn't he. He won't shut up. And he's bald. And he talks like some puffy human noble guy. What's up with that. And he has opinions about spirits and demons that... make sense?? And sometimes he says something and suddenly she can't look at him anymore or she'll start smiling. Ass.

[onebizarrekai]

ok but like people always say "don't trust anything you believe about yourself or or your life or your work after insert season-relevant time here" or more simply "it's late and the weather sucks, don't trust yourself" and while that is true what do you do when you feel that way during the day too. nobody warns you about this

[readyforthegarden]

FRIENDLY REMINDER: any one of you who meets Danny Wagner in 2023, you still have to ask him if he makes a good grilled cheese for me. It didn't happen in 2022, and I'm disappointed.

[iron-shears]

And my second gift exchange gift for UncertaintyCrossing! This one’s for the Wanderers’ Library exchange. Another html5 piece!

Owlpede’s Disaster Scrapbook

[unmellowyellowfellow]

Happy WBW! What part of your world would your protagonist (& others if you want) change? Aaaand go! ♥️

Dixie would probably want to change the fact that she never gotten her tonsils taken out ❤️

[chronicparagon]

[niobiumao3]

Chapter length consistency? lol what's that

2500 - 3900 - 4700 - 4800 - 4900 - 6200 - 5200 - 3500

I was trying to find a place to split the really long one and I could not do it. I was finally like does anyone care? no. no one cares. or maybe they do but do I care. I guess I do, but not enough to make up weird narrative breaks.

fuck it. it's a big chapter, idc.

[littlemut]

[elljayvee]

buckle up I've been thinking about this because of this post by @padmestrilogy

because it managed to clarify some things about the strategic worldbuilding of the prequels and how that worldbuilding -- which IS present! -- is failed by the storytelling level in a lot of places.

It goes like this: what if the strategic worldbuilding of the Prequel Trilogy is "There are bad wizards, who work secretly, and good wizards, who work openly. Long ago, the good wizards agreed to become an arm of the government."

Now your strategic worldbuilding is aligned with your metaphor, George Lucas, let's go. That makes your operational level things like "The Jedi are not in control of what jobs they do" and "Politics interferes with work that the Jedi probably should be doing" and "The Jedi keep being sent into Situations by the government". You will 100% get things like the Trade Federation's "I'm not going in there with two Jedi" and their worries about forcing a settlement with this sort of operational environment.

You will ALSO lead very naturally into tactical worldbuilding such as Dooku's choices (image by @425599167)

Legends canon has Dooku leading a strike team, with faulty Senate intelligence, on Galidraan. This strike team kills most of Jango Fett's Haat'ade; a number of Jedi are also killed. This sets up a lot of the mess of the Clone Wars, and it is grounded in the mess caused by the strategic and operational worldbuilding levels. Dooku has a VERY good reason to object to the Jedi's ties to the Senate, and to the Senate as a whole, and a really, really clear story to point to.

We don't get that story in the Prequel Trilogy, though. We get a few hints of it -- Dooku isn't shy about telling people his point of view -- but this is a tactical worldbuilding failure + storytelling failure that something like the Legends canon isn't explicit. And no -- you don't have to go back in time all the way to Galidraan for that! You can still start with The Phantom Menace timeline, but make other storytelling choices.

Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon could talk about how their assignment to negotiate an end to the blockade was another Senate intelligence failure that almost got Jedi killed, for example -- HOW did no one know about the invasion force until the Jedi discovered it on the invasion ship itself? We spend time with the Senate, and with the Council, but it isn't till Attack of the Clones that we see the government actually pressuring the Jedi to do something they don't want to do. But a lot of it is there -- you can see the shape of it, in the metaphor Lucas is using -- it's just not made explicit. You have so many hints: Sidious saying "I will make it legal" about the invasion -- that all but states that Sidious is within the government in some way. Great! Our worldbuilding says that the Jedi are vulnerable to the government in certain ways, and here's a bad guy clearly embedded in the government! Now we're up against the storytelling decision of...this gets dropped on the floor. Except. It didn't HAVE to be dropped on the floor. Sidious is playing both sides against each other, and could have continued to do that ON SCREEN instead of everyone ending up in a shaggy dog story about how to get a broken starship off of Tatooine. The bad wizard is working secretly, just as the worldbuilding implies.

If you view The Phantom Menace through the lens of the above strategic and operational worldbuilding, you can see a set of things that flow from and don't flow from that worldbuilding. Some things that do: Obi-Wan complaining that he has a bad feeling about something elusive, Sidious's government role, choosing a Hutt-controlled planet over literally any Republic planet, Palpatine's shenanigans in the Senate and manipulation of Amidala, Qui-Gon's death. But because no one seems to NOTICE any of these things -- except Obi-Wan, who is outright told to ignore his noticing of these things -- they end up obscured in the storytelling. Which leads me to the things that DON'T flow from the worldbuilding. One of the big ones is that Maul's initial appearances (on Coruscant and Tatooine) really fall apart at this level. Maul talks about at last letting the Jedi know the Sith have returned -- ok, why. Why would the Sith want this, at this moment? It works better for Palpatine's whole scheme if he gets Amidala to Coruscant alive and gets her to spearhead the removal of Valorum; killing her and the Jedi on Tatooine is straight-up worse for his public persona and ability to manipulate the government! The only reason Maul goes to Tatooine is to give Qui-Gon something to tell the Council about. This is a bad reason.

Now, a darksider, maybe-Sith, turning up on Naboo the second time -- THAT, as with Qui-Gon's death, can definitely flow from the worldbuilding. Senate intelligence failed to see that a darksider was at work! The Jedi were blindsided! A Jedi Master is dead as a result, and --

hey look at that, we're back to Dooku's choices. His former padawan has just been killed due to that damn government control/inadequate intelligence issue that he's already mad about, that he himself has suffered under.

My point being, TPM is missing story beats that flow from the worldbuilding in a TON of spots, and those missing beats obscure what's actually going on in ways that make the whole movie feel kind of pointless and unsatisfying. Missing story beats continue into the next two movies, which leads to a trilogy that genuinely could have been good but instead is a mess.

Anakin Skywalker is like 50 cans of worms I haven't opened yet, but he is (among other things) a cautionary tale about sick systems and high control environments, and fits into a secondary layer of metaphor and worldbuilding about how a) institutions co-opted by government won't save you but b) neither will violent revolution because bad actors are going co-opt that too. In this essay, I will--

I've been reading Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros, and it's gotten me thinking about how worldbuilding is multilayered, and about how a failure of one layer of the worldbuilding can negatively impact the book, even if the other layers of the worldbuilding work.

I don't want to spoil the book for anyone, so I'm going to talk about it more broadly instead. In my day job, one of the things I do is planning/plan development, and we talk about plans broadly as strategic, operational, and tactical. I think, in many ways, worldbuilding functions the same way.

Strategic worldbuilding, as I think of it, is how the world as a whole works. It's that vampires exist and broadly how vampires exist and interact with the world, unrelated to the characters or (sometimes) to the organizations that the characters are part of. It's the ongoing war between Earth and Mars; it's the fact that every left-handed person woke up with magic 35 years ago; it's Victorian-era London except every twelfth day it rains frogs. It's the world, in the broadest sense.

Operational worldbuilding is the organizations--the stuff that people as a whole are doing/have made within the context of that strategic-level world. For The Hunger Games, I'd probably put the post-apocalyptic nature of the world and even the existence/structure of the districts as the strategic level and the construct of the Hunger Games as the operational level: the post-apocalyptic nature of the world and the districts are the overall world that they live in, and the Hunger Games are the construct that were created as a response.

Tactical worldbuilding is, in my mind, character building--and, specifically, how the characters (especially but not exclusively the main characters) exist within the context of the world. In The Hunger Games, Katniss has experience in hunting, foraging, wilderness survival, etc. because of the context of the world that she grew up in (post-apocalyptic, district structure, Hunger Games, etc.). This sort of worldbuilding, to me, isn't about the personality part of the characterization but about the context of the character.

Each one of these layers can fail independently, even if the other ones succeed. When I think of an operational worldbuilding failure, I think of Divergent, where they took a post-apocalyptic world and set up an orgnaizational structure that didn't make any sense, where people are prescribed to like 6 jobs that don't in any way cover what's required to run a modern civilization--or even to run the society that they're shown as running. The society that they present can't exist as written in the world that they're presented as existing in--or if they can, I never could figure out how when reading the book (or watching the film).

So operational worldbuilding failures can happen when the organizations or societies that are presented don't seem like they could function in the context that they are presented in or when they just don't make any sense for what they are trying to accomplish. If the story can't reasonably answer why is this organization built this way or why do they do what they do then I see it as an organizational worldbuilding failure.

For tactical worldbuilding failures, I think of stories where characters have skillsets that conveniently match up with what they need to solve the problems of the plot but don't actually match their background or experience. If Katniss had been from an urban area and never set foot in a forest, it wouldn't have worked to have her as she was.

In this way (as in planning), the tactical level should align with the operational level which should align with the strategic level--you should be able to trace from one to the next and understand how things exist in the context of each other.

For that reason, strategic worldbuilding failures are the vaguest to explain, but I think of them like this: if it either 1) is so internally inconsistent that it starts to fall apart or 2) leaves the reader going this doesn't make any sense at all then it's probably failed.

[muffinlevelchicanery]