*slams Down 8 Bucks*

Song lan: For 24 hours all crimes are legal , what crimes will you be commiting?

Xue yang: none, because they are now legal

Song lan: listen here, you little shit

Of course they do

Matka Boska Ostrobramska

A Polish lithograph of Our Lady of the Gate of Dawn in Vilnius, Lithuania.

sometimes you can tell when somebody who likes a ship just likes one of the characters and is simply using the other half as a vaguely ooc vehicle to make content for their fave which is whatever. not against the law. until the other half theyre using as a vehicle is YOUR fave. and then you want to explode them with your mind

So I've said multipe times now (here and here) that thinking nmj is just so blinded by privilege he doesn't undertand that acting out of line gets people killed is, in my opinion, a misunderstanding of his character that ignores the part where he's, you know, actively dying the whole time and thinks that's a good thing. But that doesn't mean I don't think privilege plays no role at all in how he views the world.

Specifically, his view that death (at least premature or violent death) means something.

Death isn't always a tragedy to NMJ, but it is always meaningful. If you kill an evil dangerous person for your righteous cause, that death had meaning. There was evil in the world and now there is less of it. Similarly, if you die in the pursuit of your righteous cause, that death has meaning, because the sheer dedication you gave to it that you were willing to die for it will further that cause, and your bretheren will be invigorated by your sacrifice to fight even harder.

If a death isn't meaningful, that's an injustice and it is up to the living to give it meaning. That's what cuts so deep about his father's murder. There were no consequences, no changes, no meaning. Wen Ruohan was just going to get away with it! He fights and wins an entire war to make it mean something, to make it so that the unjust murder of Nie Mingjue's father is part of Wen Ruohan's downfall.

But this is a view he can only hold because he's the kind of person who's death will be meaningful. Most ordinary people's deaths are meaningless. Not ontologically, not inherently, but they are made meaningless because no one cares. For death to be meaningful you either have to be so powerful that anything you risk your life for will be impacted in some way. (Like, say, if you sacrifice a long life for immense martial power in a faustian bargain with a blade) Or if people with that kind of power care enough about you to do so for you. For most people, this isn't true. A starving street kid has no power to change the unfair world that put them there, even if they risk their life trying, and no one will do it for them once they die.

Nie Mingjue knows this in abstract, and of course rightfully believes it's wrong. But all that does is make it yet another righteous cause people should be willing to die for. Everyone's deaths should mean something, we'll make it so or die trying!

This is what the conflict between nieyao is about at its core. Because Jin Guangyao, fundamentally, cannot conceive of his own death as meaningful. Nie Mingjue grew up around powerful men who could change the world but refuse to do so because god forbid they risk a single hair on their perfect heads. Meng Yao, on the other hand, grew up in an environment where no one of importance would blink twice if you died. He was surrounded by meaningless death. Indeed his entire early life is defined by that lack of care.

Meng Shi dies and no one cares. Meng Yao gets thrown off a flight off stairs and no one cares. He has to be the one to do the caring, and once he's gone no one else will do it for him.

So he has to live.

Jin Guangyao eventually gets far enough that he actually does aquire the power to change some things... as long as he's alive. If he changes too much, holds on too tightly to his ideals, he'll die and it'll all be for nothing. He can't sacrifice himself for his goals because doing so would immediately render those goals unobtainable. No one will care about what he tried to do. He won't be a heroic sacrifice, he'll just be trash that finally cleaned itself up.

And well... Nie Mingjue dies, and someone makes it mean something. Makes it mean so much that the entire story of mdzs would not exist without it. Jin Guangyao dies and it doesn't mean anything. Most people are glad to be rid of him, and the few that are not don't do anything to change that.

Kind of obsessed with takes abt Jin Guangyao's manipulativeness (which I'm not even refuting! He is manipulative!) that also refuse to take into consideration the context in which his manipulation exists, which proceeds to net you awesome takes about who in 3zun was The Abuser and people showing up to the comments sections of good postcanon Xiyao reconciliation fic to passive aggressively talk about how it's sad that Lan Xichen is getting manipulated back into a toxic relationship

Sect leader Yao: *firmly believes that WWX is the devil incarnate who is raising an army in secret, and Wen Ning is a murder machine controlled by the murder maniac that is WWX. The number of people Sect leader Yao believes that WWX has killed includes Sect Leader Yao himself.*

Sect leader Yao: *thinks that the Guanyin statue has JGY's own face and immediately concludes that this is because he's a narcisstst proclaiming that he's a god who should be worshipped*

(Immediately followed by WWX thinking that there's no use saying that it's his mother's face 'cause anything JGY has ever done will now be twisted to something evil and added to the pile of his sins.)

Sect leader Yao: *says that JGY has killed Jin Rusong immediately after the tea about JGY's shady shits is spilled*

Everyone: *gasps in JGY anti* THAT MONSTER KILLED HIS INNOCENT BABY ACCORDING TO THE BIBLE THAT IS SECT LEADER YAO! BURN THE BITCH!

I am seriously concerned by the danmei-confession anons that seem to think that murder and extreme torture are okay as long as it's done to 'bad people'

Darling, dear, you need to see what a slippery slope of superiority thinking that is. That is in fact the kind of hard lined morality that lead to inprisonment and eventual massacre of the Wen Remnants. Because they were 'bad', they were on the 'wrong side' of the war, part of the invading force of Lotus Pier (Wen Ning said that his people didn't kill people at random, doesn't mean they didn't kill.) But it doesn't matter if they were good or bad, because to murder a bunch of people is still wrong.

The cultivator that accidentially killed Jiang Yanli, only attacked Wei Wuxian because Wei Wuxian had just killed his brother. The brother was killed because he fired the opening shot at Wei Wuxian. The guy and his brother were there, probably because their sect leader told them that they had to defeat a dangerous villain with dark magic, which did appear to be true because Wei Wuxian did invent a whole new type of fierce corpse and killed the heir to of of the big sects. So did they deserve to die?

Y'all need to let go of this storybook idea of good and bad. Morality is so much messier and complex.

And if MXTX really does think that Wei Wuxian is the ideal of goodness, I am allowed to disagree with her. While it is her story, she did put it out in the world, and readers are allowed to form their own thoughts and opinions based on the story she has written.