#nooottt really putting in the searchable character tags I hope considering it's less *about* them and more ancillary...? aahh

[paradife-loft]

why the nie sect leaders’ inevitable death by qi deviation isn’t (just) about the sabers

(now at AO3!)

So, okay, this is a meta I’ve been working on/wanting to write/dropping hints to various people about now for quite a while! I think it’s significant thematically to some of the main questions MDZS/CQL asks, about cycles of justice and vengeance, the tension between personal agency and aspects of a situation outside one’s control, and good intentions often not being enough on their own, particularly to forestall problems resulting from imperfect or fatally flawed means to an end.

As a fantasy story, I think one of the strengths of MDZS/CQL is how it uses magic to reflect aspects of its thematic questions in certain cases as literal external forces, events that exist in a format outside just a character’s internal journey. The metaphors and proper social and personal orders these characters live by, have very real physical consequences in the world that result from the existence and manipulation of magical/spiritual energies.

And to my view, the part of this that I want to make the case for here, is how this relates to the Nie sect’s cultivation practises, and why I think the clan’s history of leaders succumbing to instability and qi deviation is a more complicated interplay of a few different factors, rather than just an externally-imposed illness whose source is purely their saber spirits.

* * *

Like, okay. The characters and narrative do, in fact, spend a lot of time discussing the Nie sect leaders’ early violent deaths in the context of their sabers’ spirits becoming angry and aggressive and affecting their mental and spiritual stability. So it makes sense to focus on those actual items as the essential reason behind why they qi deviate and end up dying the way they do. But there was something… logically unsatisfying to me about the idea that just the number of edges on your bladed weapon would make such a difference that sword spirits (also generally used for killing! because they’re also deadly weapons!) are apparently morally neutral but sabers, on the other hand, just Cannot Stop with the killing once they’ve gotten a taste of it.

But if you take an experimental step away from the idea that sabers must somehow be Inherently Different from swords in their response to violence - what possible explanations are left? Or, asked a different way - what makes the Nie sect’s ideological cultivation focus distinct from other sects’? The Lan focus on regulation and self-restraint as the path to goodness; the Jiang focus on self-knowledge and following what you know as right even against difficult odds; the Jin seem to emphasise value in beauty and unique rarity… and what the Nie seem to place the most value on, is dispensation of justice and abhorring evil, even to an extent that refuses attempts at compromise.

The only problem is, the justice that they (and plenty of others) seem to focus on most often, is justice for capital crimes - paying with a life for a life - and no matter how righteous and justified the motives, what this still ends up with is a spiritual path that spends a comparatively awful lot of time on seeking others’ deaths. And we see, throughout the story, more than one thematic hint that this is maybe not the best method for moving toward harmony or immortality.

Lan Qiren’s impromptu quiz of Wei Wuxian when the latter is fucking off in class. His example problem specifies the resentful spirit was an executioner in life (societally-sanctioned to kill others for heinous crimes), and Wei Wuxian notes that one who’s killed so many is a very likely sort to become a resentful corpse; meanwhile his many victims also remain tethered to cycles of vengeance and anger, able to be easily stirred up into a force of resentful energy that would target him if their corpses were disturbed.

The dialogue between Wei Wuxian and Fang Mengchen in the Burial Mounds after the attempted siege turns into the major sects being saved from a trap. It’s all very fine and good to hold a grudge, to see a lack of justice for a harm that can’t ever be undone or repaired when the one who caused it gets to be alive and well (or even not!), but as Wei Wuxian says - what are you going to do about it? It’s so easy for there to always be a wrong that needs righting (in a real or alleged guilty party’s blood). But will it get you anywhere? Can a person, can a society, mete out justice or vengeance once and have that wipe the slate clean, or will the wound reopen again and demand yet more suffering? Where does it end?

The discussion about the Nie’s ancestral saber halls with Huisang, where Wei Wuxian notes that the method of suppressing the saber spirits edges rather close to demonic cultivation. In literal terms, that question seems to be directed at the actual use of evil individuals’ transforming corpses to contain the sabers’ power. But I think the entire conversation, and Huisang’s need to swear them to secrecy and enlistment as backup if other clans find out and get angry, contains a certain amount of thematic subtext reflecting not just on the saber tomb itself, but the Nie clan’s cultivation as a whole. These are significant and revered family heirlooms, not easily or justly discarded, but maintaining them isn’t without cost, and the spiritual fallout rests on the edge of a knife, needing the perpetual presence of an evil to fight to remain in balance: the saber tomb is both the literal and metaphorical end result of the clan leaders’ cultivation path.

“But why,” you may ask, “if the principles underlying the Nie sect’s whole culture have an edge that’s sharper and more harmful to the user’s qi than other cultivation philosophies of the rest of the sword-using sects, do we only see “death by qi deviation” as an issue for the sect leaders, and not more widespread among a larger portion of the disciples?”

And that’s where the “(just)” part of the title of this post comes in, because that aspect is where the difference comes down to the sabers - or, specifically, the named sabers that have spirits of their own. The spiritual sabers aren’t bloodthirsty and excited to haunt and/or kill people right out of the gate, but rather, as Huisang explains, they become restless after spending their wielder’s lifetime destroying evil. A cultivator and their spiritual tools develop a relationship over time, as their cultivation is practised and refined - they bond, they recognise one another, and crucially, they seem to be able to share a kind of spiritual feedback loop, with the energies and intentions of one connecting to and ideally bolstering the strength of the other. The Nie clan in general seems marked by particularly strong relationships between individual cultivator and weapon, considering the sabers’ refusal to allow a clan leader’s descendants to inherent them, and both the circumstances of Mingjue’s father’s death and his own trauma reaction to that death.

So in this case, the illness and eventual qi deviations the Nie clan leaders suffer, the way the saber spirits come to weigh on their minds and emotions, make sense to me as a confluence of the particularly close bond and almost spiritual symbiosis between wielder and weapon, and the particular subject of emphasis that the clan leader lives by in how they train with and use that weapon. Focusing on justice as killing, as violent destruction of evil (the last resort one should aspire to after other solutions have failed, per Lan Qiren’s lesson), may not be the most spiritually healthy in any circumstance, but it’s only when you have half a lifetime’s worth of a mental feedback loop between you and this external, semi-sentient part of yourself that’s reinforcing the spiritual toll of that path, that you actually end up with a resulting qi deviation and death.

* * *

So, anyway, I do want to be clear having put forth this argument, that my point here is not to condemn the Nies, nor for that matter blame the sect leaders for their own deaths - that’s very much not in line with how the text itself displays flaws and virtues as two sides of the same coin (at times divided only by the context around them), and shows how destructive consequences can result from the best of intentions. For that matter, each major sect has unquestionably valuable basic principles at its heart, and just like microcosms of any culture, society, or group, displays instances of those principles being distorted, misaimed, or taken to extremes in ways that cause disharmony and pain to those in their path.

I think the way it plays out for the Nie clan just interests me in particular because of the way their uniqueness in cultivation method plays such known havoc with its members’ bodies and minds, and the way it straddles the divide between upright and demonic cultivation. MDZS asks, I think, more questions than it offers definitive answers to, and a significant one of those is, even if vengeance, even if death-as-justice is righteous, where do you balance all the harm done to others (up to and including) the justice-seeker in deciding whether to continue down that path of action?

And if it’s the Nie sect’s spiritual focus in combination with the spirits of their sabers that wear down a slow stream of damage to their qi, rather than simply the external threat of the sabers alone - that seems congruent, to me, with the suggestions offered elsewhere in the story.