#nhs gets caught when he starts to have fantasies of jc reading his novels and saying ''huaiang-ge your prose is so refined''

[spriteofmushrooms]

More of the Succubus Curse!AU. I’m just imagining the Spider-Man pointing meme when all three major Lan’s realize they’ve all fantasized about the same man. Of course all of their fantasies were very different, LQR was imagining a sweet ingenue JC begging to thank him for all his hard work teaching him by letting himself be further taught dual cultivation one on one. LXC thinks JC would be as firm as he is in the war room and would show LXC exactly how he wants to use him. LWJ mostly imagines putting a mouthy JC in his place or being dual seduced by both Jiang boys. Of course the other two legs of 3zun aren’t spared embarrassment. NMJ mostly likes to imagine JC dressing and acting like his mom. Being viscous and steam rolling any weakness. JGY mostly imagines setting himself up to be JC’s savior from Wen imprisonment and being thankful enough to heap praise and respect on JGY. He follows whatever JGY wants because he trusts him that much.

I imagine there’s a lot of arguments about characterization once people get over the initial embarrassment since it seems like JC just naturally inspires these feelings. Maybe there’s some latent Yu succubus blood the people think. The amount of spite RPF jumps Sky high and JC never knows peace again.

It would be very funny if NHS was immune to Succubus-jie's very helpful curse, because he had never fantasized about being personally involved with JC. JC should treat him like a refuge because FINALLY someone who isn't nasty!! NHS, importantly, is responsible for a minimum of 20% of all Hot Sect Leaders In Your Area RPF booklets. Because JC's hanging out with him, he's close enough to view at least a few of these fantasies displayed, and make perfect replicas of the others from gossip.

JC: Lan-laoshi thinks I'm a delicate maiden.

NHS: And how does that make you feel? 📝

JC: It's nice that he thought I was such a good student. 🥺

NHS: Bleak, yet inspiring!

[crossdressingdeath]

I think that the reason of why we don't quite undestand JC is bc we are not used to read villains like him. In general the hero makes it clear that they hate or have not sympathy for the villain and we have that, from the pov of wwx we know who are the bad guys and he doesn't like them, he really hates WC and with XY he said thag he had to die but with JC is little more subtle, mainly bc wwx still cares about him and yes he try to kill wwx but the protagonist make it sound like a minor issue, its easier to justify his actions like yes he was sad bc he lost his parents and wwx and his sister and he only kill bad people instead of understanding that he is not a nice person, talking about YA is not hard to find this character than is not evil just misunderstood and needs love and sometimes is the love interest of the protagonist and the end of the day he was a good guy I think that's what the fandom try to make JC but in this case he ends being bad guy just not the typical one I mean the stereotypical villain that wants to conquer the world but he wants to be the best and abuse his power and try to kill wwx. What I'm trying to said is that maybe everyone would know that JC is the bad guy if wwx said so or the cultivation world but wwx is just tired of JC and the cultivation world knows he is the sect leader that no one likes but not an threat as jgy.

But that’s not actually the case? I mean, I've just been talking about Outlast: Whistleblower and how Waylon explicitly feels pity towards and even empathizes with people who want to murder, rape, mutilate and/or eat him (in varying configurations) because he knows they’ve suffered, and that’s far from the only example out there. The thing people often fail to grasp is that there’s a difference between a villain you (and/or the protagonist) pity or even sympathize with and one you’re supposed to see as in the right and not really a villain at all. Hell, villains who started out (either in-story or some time prior to its beginning) as the hero’s friend and then turned to evil are incredibly common to the point of being a trope, and despite how YA generally seems to go that... doesn’t always end with them being redeemed or turning out to have never been evil at all. Stormlight Archives comes to mind, although I won’t go into detail Because Spoilers. It doesn’t mean the hero stops caring about their former friend or even necessarily that that former friend no longer cares about the hero, but that care doesn’t make the villain less... villainous.

I think it’s another one of those things with people assuming MDZS is YA because it’s gay fantasy written by a woman so of course it’s YA (no I will never be over how often that happens), because... yeah, ‘sympathetic “antagonists” who the hero genuinely likes will never turn out to be a real villain’ is way more of a thing in YA than it is in adult fiction. Same with the stereotypical villain; you’d be surprised by how often the main villain of a story is a personal threat to the protagonist(s), rather than a universal one. Back to Outlast, the danger is very much localized and you’re not trying to stop the antagonists you face; you’re just trying to get away from them. The fact that a lot of them die in the process is incidental and the player character probably wouldn’t have cared all that much (beyond having to deal with the chance of them showing up again) if they hadn’t. In Les Mis the world isn’t conquered when Les Amis fail, and wouldn’t have ended if Javert caught Valjean. Fantasy is more given to world-ending or world-conquering threats, but in media as a whole it’s not really the norm. Hell, in MDZS the only world-conquering threat is the Wens, who... if you think about it, as characters aren’t really in the novel. They’re flashback villains who only really show up in person once or twice. The biggest villain in MDZS is JGY, who’s already in command of the sects and... actually doing a very good job of it, he’s a good ruler and only a villain in the story because NHS dragged WWX into his revenge plot. This isn’t a story about stopping someone from taking over the world, so why would that be a secondary antagonist’s position? JC actually reads very much like your standard secondary antagonist; he will for sure kill our hero if he manages to capture him, and he does manage to get at WWX now and then, but overall he’s very much a manageable threat. To put it another way, he’s the active threat to JGY’s puppet master, like SS or XY. He’s a threat and he’s keeping the tension high... but WWX removing him from the board wouldn’t actually stop the plot, just change a few details of it.

Basically, JC... very much is a typical villain for the type of villain he is. It’s just that villains aren’t always big, overwhelming, world-ending threats. People seem to forget that someone only being a threat to the hero doesn’t make them not a villain.