#like if wei wuxian inherits it's going to suck emotionally for jiang cheng but jc is still going to be a favoured and high ranking member

[winepresswrath]

Opinions on why, to my observations, people are more likely to give yzy slack on fics, but do not give jfm any slack at all, even if it’s from wwx’s POV? Idk I get that she’s a natural sexy badass, but sometimes I just feel like if one of them gets the slack then the other one also should get the slack, seeing as they both contributed to the [gestures wildly at Yunmeng sibs]

I think there are a few reasons, maybe one of which is really about fairness. The most obvious ones are that Madame Yu is hot, has a cool spiritual weapon, and gets to do stuff like slap down Jiaojiao and take out the Wen soldiers who accompanied her like they’re nothing. None of these things are redeeming features in the moral sense. Her Jiaojiao takedown is literally just classist slut shaming! But it’s fun to watch and I think that makes people invested enough in the character to be interested in her interiority. Sexy characters are always more deserving of redemption arcs, it’s a rule.

Beyond that, I personally am sympathetic to how trapped she is, even if I think the way she takes it out on the children in her care is inexcusable and speaks to her being a pretty terrible person. She’s not the clan leader and she exists in a fairly patriarchal society, so when her husband shows up with a kid he’s unilaterally decided to bring into their family and proceeds to publicly humiliate her while being a real dick to her children in a way that could undermine their future security and inheritance she doesn’t actually have many options. What’s she going to do, leave him? Putting aside the fact that she’d have to give up her home and career, he functionally owns their children. She is in a position of power and authority relative to the kids and she chose to use that power and authority to abuse them. That is the worst possibly choice she could have made, and that is on her, but she doesn’t actually have any good choices to make.  

Meanwhile, Jiang Fengmian, the person who has most of the actual the power in their relationship (patriarchy aside, he’s the sect leader and she married in) exercises that power just enough to create this shitty situation and then does nothing to make it less terrible for anyone. He could have asked his wife if she was up for fostering Wei Wuxian before he brought him home, and found him another family in the sect if she said no. If he couldn’t stomach that, he could have put effort into reassuring her that he’s invested in Jiang Cheng and Yanli and not interested in replacing them with his rumoured love child. He could have acted like an actual parent and intervened when his wife abused their children, instead of letting it be Jiang Cheng’s job to throw himself in between his mother and the rest of the family and Yanli’s job to do all the actual parenting. How is Wei Wuxian the one chasing after Jiang Cheng and try to convince him his dad doesn’t hate him? Why is Jiang Cheng the one trying to deflect his mother’s verbal attacks on his father, while Jiang Fengmian just sits there when she turns her rage on his kid? What would it have cost him to double back after that one particularly brutal fight and offer them both some reassurance that she’s not actually correct in her assessment and he loves them both?

Madame Yu is an abusive dick because she thinks her children are being threatened and she wants to both attack the threat and make sure they’re strong enough to withstand it. Jiang Fengmian can’t be bothered to refrain from obviously playing favourites and take thirty seconds to reassure his kids he does actually love them because feelings are hard, his personal life is kind of a mess and he doesn’t really know where to get started fixing it.

Anyway, if Madame Yu could have brought herself to be neutral about Wei Wuxian and refrained from trying to abuse Jiang Cheng and Yanli into the people she wanted them to be I would have been very supportive of her murdering her husband and setting herself up as the regent to Jiang Cheng’s child-king. Instead she took out her anger on the people least able to fight back against it and fucked all her kids up so badly 2/3 of them died about it.