#until finally at least xxc’s soul fragments are freed from xue yang

[mxtxfanatic]

I know I'm kinda late but Happy Birthday month !!!🎉🎉🎉🎉

I was wondering if you wanted to talk about the parallels between A-Qing and Wei Wuxian in the Yi city arc ?

💜

Thank you! As long as it’s November, it’s never too late 💝

I kind of compared them in this wwx bday meta, but I didn’t get too deep into the parallel. While I said that A-Qing represents Wei Wuxian’s adaptability and unwillingness to passively accept evil simply because it’s cloaked in civility, I would like to highlight here another shared trait: their tenacity towards doing the right thing.

A-Qing is in a position of powerlessness in the trio due to her lack of cultivation skills and cultivation world knowledge, similar to how Wei Wuxian is made powerless—despite being a part of the cultivation world—by his lack of status and faithful allies. Yet despite this, both characters thrive in their environments and use their situationally-acquired skills to protect those around them. A-Qing did not have to stay with Xiao Xingchen, especially after Xue Yang came along, but her own sense of morality made her stick around to ensure Xiao Xingchen’s safety, something she was only able to do by feigning blindness. Even when she fails, she, Xiao Xingchen, and Song Lan die, and Xiao Xingchen’s spirit disperses, she uses the last moments of her life to doggedly seek help. After dying, she uses the entirety of her afterlife to scare ignorant strangers away from Yi City (mind you, she didn’t even die there. She made her spirit go back) and try to find ways to stop Xue Yang. Even at the risk of destroying her soul, she goes against Xue Yang to the very end, no regrets in any of her actions.

In the same way that A-Qing used her “blindness” as a shield, Wei Wuxian weaponized the cultivation world’s fears of him first to protect the sovereignty of the newly rebuilt Jiang then to protect the Wen remnants liberated from the Qiongqi Path labor camp. When he was still schemed against and the Wen siblings told him of their plan to turn themselves in, he still never thought to abandon them or let the punishment fall on anyone else’s shoulders, just as A-Qing refused to abandon Xiao Xingchen. After his resurrection, Wei Wuxian still goes out of his way to rescue and protect the junior cultivators, entering back into the lion’s den of the cultivation world for no benefit of his own just to continue to help others, in the exact same way that A-Qing went back to Yi City to guard against passersby wandering in to their deaths. And just like with A-Qing, at no point in time does he regret having rescued the Wen in his first life or having endangered himself in his second life to protect the juniors (or later their bloodthirsty parents).

Even though they faced negative consequences for following their morality to the bitter end (and even beyond), even if the people they wanted to protect were still murdered before their eyes, their reputations tarnished and legacies buried, at no point do either A-Qing or Wei Wuxian stray from their course nor regret their actions. This is their shared tenacity. There’s a reason, after all, that Wei Wuxian experiences the Yi City arc as her.