#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.

[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’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.

[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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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.'

[thatswhatsushesaid]

honestly every time he shows up in a new panel i'm just

all the jgy stans @ today's poorly drawn like tyrarootingforyou.gif

[thatswhatsushesaid]

imagine having the power of the world wide web at your fingertips, and still choosing to spend hours and hours and hours of your limited time on this planet shitting on complete strangers for liking fictional characters you don't like.

[thatswhatsushesaid]

so far my favourite unhinged response to my habitual observation of "it's weird that no one on this subreddit can make a single neutral-to-neutral-positive post about jiang cheng or jin guangyao without summoning the antagonist haters like bloody mary at a 90s kid's slumber party" is "you obviously don't know where you are. you don't understand reddit. no one owes anyone else GOOD VIBES ONLY. maybe we went overboard with these posts but we're just stating FACTS"

like. at least you admitted that you went overboard. we'll get to the rest later but, you know, baby steps.