#sometimes you gotta write soft heartbroken JGY and sometimes you gotta write a JGY that's all venom and spite

[guqin-and-flute]

The NMJ/JYL verse... I can’t imagine JGY being very pleased because (and sorry if this is a wrong take, but) it seems like the qualities that people keep using to describe what NMJ likes about JYL are the same qualities that NMJ liked about Meng Yao (not JGY, MY pre-betrayal). I can’t imagine NMJ not having a ‘hold on, this is why it was easy and familiar’ moment and been left feeling off kilter until he manages to re-separate the two in his head so he doesn’t subconsciously expect betrayal 1/2

Meanwhile JGY is seeing Yanli doing what he used to do, but being loved for it where he was scorned and ignored (re- captain public dereliction of duty everyone went along with) and it just reaffirms for JGY that the scorn was about his birth, was about him personally.

(there are just different takes, here! You are a-okay having different ones than me 👌)

Oh, anon, you’ve just made this AU spicy.

So, so easily would underappreciated Jin Guangyao look from afar at sweet, demure, gentry born Jiang Yanli getting on swimmingly with his old flame, his Da-ge who does not trust him anymore, who will not let him stay by his side and just feel the most intense rage. And Nie Mingjue will talk about how she will braid up his hair or help with the disciples or bring him food when he is too wrapped up in his work to remember, and he will say it with such awestruck affection, like no one has ever done this for him before and Jin Guangyao would put on a nice, white smile and see red. Because he has done that. He was that. 

And the one that chose to stop it (in his eyes and more than a little biased and tilted perspective) was Nie Mingjue, who promptly went and got someone else and pretended that he never existed in the first place.

It’s not that he hates her as a person--though maybe he does? Who’s to say. It’s hard to separate such things, after all. Why do some people get the luxury of being soft?--but he hates that when he is at the Unclean Realm  the disciples eyes follow her adoringly, those same ones who’s judging eyes would follow him. She gets to be clean and pure and loved, doing less than he ever had [and whether that is true or not doesn’t really matter, in the end, because it’s how he feels] while he gets everything he ever wanted but everyone in Lanling hates him just the same as they ever did in Qinghe.

Because he is unworthy. Because he is unclean. Because he is unloveable. And so why should he try?

Oof. Oof. An extra nail in their relationship coffin. This is not a friendly!JGY!verse for sure and I love this 👀