#swap jin guangyao with zhao jing in this moment if you want to see a real scum villain in action tbh

[thatswhatsushesaid]

I just re-read the whole guanyin temple sequence for the sole purpose of finding and sharing that devastating piece of official xiyao art with the rest of the class (as one does when one resides full-time in xiyao hell, like I do), and that re-read just drilled home for me just how easily jin guangyao could have killed or at the very least seriously injured literally everyone who converged on the temple--if he had wanted to. case in point:

jin guangyao has lots of jin sect disciples with him on-site exhuming his mother's remains. it would absolutely have been possible to tell them to stop digging and start helping him clean house instead;

lan xichen's spiritual energy has been sealed;

as soon as lan wangji shows up, jin guangyao manipulates him into sealing his spiritual energy as well by threatening wei wuxian. ...and then he lets wei wuxian go so that he and lan wangji can have their Moment, to go oversee the exhumation process instead (say 'thank you, xiandu,' you wouldn't have that heart-felt love confession without his leniency);

as soon as su minshan shows up, that's one more armed and capable (shut up sms critics, there will be no sms slander on this post; he's cringe, not incompetent) cultivator on his side;

when he provokes jiang cheng into leaping to wwx's defence (something that even wwx points out is unnecessary, since wangxian could easily have leapt out of range of jgy's guqin string strike), he stabs jiang cheng right in the chest--but intentionally does not deal him a mortal injury. instead, he just seals his meridians and basically sends him to go sit the corner to stew impotently next to poor, emotionally traumatized jin ling;

all of this happens before nhs's trap is triggered. jgy has the upper hand, he is in complete control of the situation, and while he is on a pretty tight deadline, it is absolutely clear at this point that his priority is not in sowing more chaos and bloodshed, but in retrieving meng shi's remains and stopping additional interference. sure, he's spilling all the tea to provoke his opponents into making mistakes so that he can take advantage of their weaknesses to disable them. but that was his goal: to disable.

like... killing all of these conveniently disabled captives would have been the logical next step for someone hellbent on mass murdering the whole jianghu to cover up his dirty little secrets, and he absolutely could have done it, if he'd wanted to.

but he didn't.