#mxtx and the interviewer's conversation of jiang cheng's love life had me cackling

[tea-cat-arts]

(Disclaimer: this is a vent post)

Jiang Cheng discourse is frustrating because I feel like it always boils down to a debate on whether he's a good or bad person when like-

Such a central idea throughout all her books is that everyone has the capacity for good and evil. The cannibal who's been sewing political discourse for centuries is also a halfway decent dad, the prince who once tried to save all the common people ended up turning on them and releasing a plague, the guy who schemed and killed his way to chief of cultivation sacrificed himself to keep his best friend safe, the world's most dedicated internet hater also improves the lives of almost everyone around him... trying to force this narrow frame of good and bad people on her stories just doesn't work.

When it comes to Jiang Cheng in particular, I feel like the context for his actions gets completely thrown out the window in favor of focusing on the ways in which he was an asshole, but Jiang Cheng isn't really in a position where he can afford to be kind to everyone. The man has a whole clan to watch out for- as a kid, he couldn't just stand up to the Wens because every action he took would be interpreted as a reflection of the Jiang Clan's stance (and they were not in a position to go to war with the Wens). As an adult, he thought he couldn't afford to stand up for either wwx or the remaining Wens because it would risk putting his very freshly reformed clan who just finished a war in conflict with 3 other major clans. He is shown to have the capacity for love and the capacity for kindness (ex: getting all the hiers out of the cave and running all the way back to Yunmeng for help, putting himself in danger to draw the Wen scouts away from wwx, co-parenting Jin Ling with Jin Guangyao, being an attack dog against anyone who hurts his family, guarding wwx from dogs as a kid, standing up to his mom and asking her to stop when she berates wwx), but he rarely has opportunities where he can just follow all of his own values without it putting his clan at risk. I also feel like the ways in which he's kind get dismissed because he doesn't act nice. Like, he's not willing to put on a smile or be chatty like either Lan Xichen or Jin Guangyao. He's an anxious, rage-filled, asshole who hates losing, and that is on display at all times.

And ya- he's absolutely done some awful shit. He's fallen for propaganda, he's hurt and killed both wwx and potentially hundreds of innocent people, he doubles down on his mistakes instead of reflecting, and he votes with the leapords eating your face party, and he'll be spending a lot of time alone and filled with rage and regret because of it. I do not deny that all that shit is true about him, but what I'll argue against is the idea that it's all he ever was and all he'll ever be

Normally, I believe in death of the author, but in this case mxtx's comments from a 2016 interview support my stance on him, so I'm gonna bring it up (Link to full interview. It's a fun read)

But ya: shout out to my fellow Jiang Cheng fans who like him, but think he's an asshole and want to push him down a flight of stairs