Xue Yang: He's A 10, But Blind.

Damn this is deep

Goodnight.

My least favourite phenomenon is when a story leaves a lot of details upto interpretation and some people decide to interpret one character with the utmost grace and another with almost biblical hatred, then decide any other interpretation is invalid.

Very few people are truly irredeemable, and these characters are far from the worst people in fiction.

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

wwx: [looks directly into the camera] wow, it's kind of crazy how what's happening to jin guangyao now is so similar to what happened to me 13 years ago! in both of our cases, once the mob made up its mind, it was completely unwilling to consider the truth and instead just freely speculated on crimes the accused could have done until the accused was blamed of everything under the sun! and, in both of our cases, the legitimate grievances the mob had against us often came second to the mob's anger that someone of a lower class was living "beyond their station"!

mdzs fans: Read 5.55PM

mdzs fans: anyways, here's why wwx is Pure Good and jgy is Pure Evil and how if you dare compare then you deserve the chair actually--

Triptychs by Polish painter Kazimierz Sichulski:

1. The Hutsul Madonna, 1909

2. Adoration of the Shepherds, 1938

3. Adoration of the Magi, 1913

4. Spring, 1909

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.

JC: You bring dishonor to the family.

WY: Well at least I'm bringing something.

Dragon Xichen and his A-Yao 💛

Spirited away redraw