#salty peak sect 🧂

[thatswhatsushesaid]

“um, you are actually supposed to hate this character with your whole chest, the text is EXTREMELY clear that he is terrible and you should not like him”

well i like him anyway. what are you going to do about it, tell my mom?

[thatswhatsushesaid]

Jin Guangyao

Credit for pic: here

[thatswhatsushesaid]

even if he was objectively guilty of every single crime levelled at him at any point in the narrative, the cumulative influence of jin guangyao's time as a spy for the sunshot forces during the war and his tenure as xiandu is still orders of magnitude more substantive, and positive, than anything else accomplished by any other named character in the text.

even if you believe he did every single foul thing he is accused of doing, he still saved the life of the gusu lan heir and ensured irreplaceable sect knowledge wasn't lost during the razing of the cloud recesses. he still killed literal tyrant and megalomaniac wen ruohan and ended a war. he still pushed through his watchtower program, which saved countless commoners' lives, and rooted out corruption in jinlintai to the point that no jin sect disciple would ever think about accepting a bribe in the city. he is the reason why wangxian get to fuck nasty on every surface of the cloud recesses post-canon--because jin guangyao used his influence to ensure the cloud recesses were rebuilt. he is the one who pulled nie huaisang's hands out of the fire after nie mingjue set all of his precious belongings on fire. he's the one who arranged to have those burn wounds tended to. he still built a temple in his mother's image and interred her body beneath guanyin so that all those prayers would go to meng shi, to grant her a better afterlife. he still gave fairy to jin ling.

even with the least charitable, worst faith interpretation of his character, these things remain true.

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this post has been added to my dreamwidth meta archive here: https://thatswhatsushewrote.dreamwidth.org/4496.html

[thatswhatsushesaid]

me: sigh i think my jgy hyper-fixation is finally fading. oh well i knew this would happen eventua—

some idiot on reddit: it was totally within jin guangyao’s power to execute xue yang, and also he should have done this because he SWORE an OATH to nmj, it was nmj’s RIGHT to make this demand of him

me:

[thatswhatsushesaid]

since the mdzs subreddit is once more proving that no one in this fandom can go one week without being weird about jin guangyao, i’ve decided to do my part to also be weird about jin guangyao. but in a fun way, obviously.

anyway, come have fun spitballing all of jin guangyao’s most shocking crimes with me, wrong answers only edition 👀

[thatswhatsushesaid]

he wasn’t right tho. that’s… that’s the whole point of this inevitable tragedy. nmj was not right—not in the way you and OP are saying he was anyway—and it ultimately got him and jgy both sealed away in the get-along crypt for the next hundred years. nmj’s self-destructive cultivation method, which he had to double down on during the sunshot campaign to ensure the sunshot forces weren’t wiped off the map, directly contributed to his inability to see anything that jgy did post-sunshot within its proper context. he was blinded by both his resentment and his pride.

remember that post-timeskip, jgy’s actions as a spy in wen ruohan’s court are not considered problematic or duplicitous; those kids wwx encounters acting out the different heroes of the sunshot campaign are so proud to be all different members of the venerated triad, and that includes lianfang-zun. he is seen as a hero, not because he doesn’t do terrible things, but because he does them for a very good reason: to funnel intelligence to lan xichen and the sunshot forces.

i bring this up because it is important to recognize that lxc isn’t siding with jgy in this conflict for no reason. he saw for himself the risks that jgy was willing to take, and understood the necessity of the brutality and violence he had to engage in during a time of war and societal upheaval. and lxc also sees what jgy does with power once he comes into his own: he roots out corruption within the jin sect; he pushes through the watchtower program that vastly improves the lives of the common people; he reins in the most egregious examples of demonic cultivation within the jin sect; he ushers in a period of unambiguous peace and stability throughout the jianghu, which allows the junior quartet to grow up into the precocious little shits that we know and love them to be.

nmj wasn’t right about jgy. he was personally hurt and betrayed by him, yes. but that is not the same thing as being right about who he was as a person.

--- this reblog has been added to my dreamwidth meta archive here: https://thatswhatsushewrote.dreamwidth.org/4866.html

no

but the way i'll never forgive lan xichen for constantly siding with jin guangyao over nie mingjue

no betrayal in that story hurt me the way this one did

it didn't help that i watched the show before i read the books and i thought nie mingjue and lan xichen had something going on before jin guangyao started meddling

[thatswhatsushesaid]

he’s definitely not a working class hero, but if your critique of jin guangyao’s ‘ambitious social climbing’ at all hinges on arguments that boil down to ‘not knowing his place,’ then boy do i have news for you about where you yourself might fall on the ‘union man’ to ‘union buster’ spectrum.

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this post has been added to my dreamwidth meta archive here: https://thatswhatsushewrote.dreamwidth.org/2230.html

[thatswhatsushesaid]

jin guangyao’s tremendous capacity for both cruelty and compassion is core to his character. trying to insist that he is one to the exclusion of the other (and let’s be real: it is normally the former rather than the latter) does a disservice both to mxtx for writing him that way, and also to jin guangyao's role in the story.

[thatswhatsushesaid]

imagine being so bereft of joy that you cannot stop yourself from leaving this comment on a benign "look at this fun fandom mug my spouse bought me, enjoy this funny personal anecdote to go with it" post

sorry for existing i guess???

[thatswhatsushesaid]

I had literally never given much thought to Jin Guangyao before, except for the fact that the man has had all the audacity and more–

But as I am mostly done with the second book, I feel a burning hatred towards him.

How fucking dare he? Who the fuck does he think he is?

His heart is a nasty, shriveled, and blackened piece of useless coal because how does he bite the hand that reached out to him and held him up when he was nothing?

He truly had no shame, absolutely none, and neither did he have a human soul because what he did to Nie Mingjue was sickening. I can't stand him. I would personally like nothing more than to run a sword through him, then rip him apart.

[thatswhatsushesaid]

please god not the “the problem with jin guangyao is he just did not accept His Place in society” argument again.

this argument is certainly proving a point, dgmw, i just don’t think it is proving the point you think it is proving.

[thatswhatsushesaid]

/swirls the scrabble pieces in my martini glass imperiously

actually villain character stans HAVE already talked about that thing you insist villain character stans never talk about. we just don’t want to talk about that thing with you. because you’re mean.

[thatswhatsushesaid]

i think it bears repeating (again) that nie mingjue was a clear and present danger to jin guangyao’s life, every day, from the date of their confrontation in the scorching sun palace to the moment of his qi deviation over four years later. four years, where every single minute that jin guangyao spent in nie mingjue’s company, he was taking his life into his own hands, and they both knew it. lan xichen knew it. completely uninvolved third parties who were witnesses to nie ningjue’s increasingly unhinged and violent behaviour knew it.

nie huaisang may have been compelled by filial piety to avenge his brother’s murder, but let’s not pretend that jin guangyao killed nie mingjue just because daddy said jump. because if he hadn’t killed nie mingjue first, it was only a matter of time before nie mingjue killed him.

[thatswhatsushesaid]

benafflecksmoking.jpeg

anyway we did it, everyone, we found what is objectively the shittiest and most offensive opinion ever vomited into the universe about these books.

Having already done critical physicic damage to @thatswhatsushesaid this morning by sharing this, allow me to share it with the rest of Tumblr also.

From this tweet:

https://x.com/Kazyllz_/status/1749293247636402570?s=20

[thatswhatsushesaid]

re: my last reblog, while i'm never going to be a jiang cheng stan (because i'm just not that emotionally invested in the main characters of this novel, sorry), i am straight up never going to understand the disproportionate amount of hate and blame he receives from the canon jiang cheng crowd. mainly for his actions as a teenager and an adult, of course, but especially for the apparently unforgivable crime of /checks my notes, expressing his valid feelings about the observable difference between how jiang fengmian treats him vs how he treats wei wuxian.

but then again, this type of character hate comes from the same group of people who delight in seeing newly orphaned meng yao kicked down the jinlintai steps by his father's goons because of crimes he hasn't even committed in the text yet, so i probably shouldn't be that surprised.

[thatswhatsushesaid]

i think fandom spaces would become much more enjoyable across the board if people stopped flipping their pancakes over other fans enjoying characters that they don't like. or, god forbid, like them but in 'the wrong way.'