#jgy defence league ⚔️

[duohensheng]

yes he is turning on the full power of his manipulation abilities here but hear me out: the feeling of betrayal is (obviously imo) real

if i were jgy i would be devastated. not just devastated. enraged. zewu-jun barged in here with everyone because he believed jgy had da-ge’s head on a shelf? I’m sorry, ZEWU JUN? BELIEVED?? the depth of the betrayal of that is nauseating to me. what the fuck has jgy ever done for lxc to believe that?? *checks notes* ah yes.. the lifesaving watchtowers.. making sure lwj’s reputation survived wwx.. helped everyone he could at every turn… definitely the marks of a guy that has their sworn brother’s head in his closet. dude. that is HEARTBREAKING.

(I mean, he did. he very much so did have his head in his closet. but for lxc to be willing to believe that????? devastating.)

this is the guy that lxc watched/helped REBUILD THE ENTIRE JIANGHU FROM DAMN NEAR SCRATCH. how many late nights?? how many months of quiet, gentle company at the Cloud Recesses (that he helped rebuild and paid for)??? like, this went on for TWO DECADES. TWO DECADES of night hunts and unwavering loyalty and reading each others’ minds and being each other’s closest person. it’s canon that they tell each other everything. jgy gives no one else earnest, unguarded access like he does lxc* (at the very least, earnest). I understand that lxc is reeling (and that this game only works if played fast, and was organised to give no one time to reflect or think anything through) but HOW is his first reaction not more defensive in a situation as extreme as this?

(I think the answer is that if this is his A-Yao that he knows so well, A-Yao will understand that lxc needs to give everything fair consideration and will honour that/not take it personally. which, in fairness (as proven by the Jade token cloud recesses scene where jgy is saying he’ll make sure lwj’s reputation is safe and gives lxc a chance to see da-ge before burial) he seems to do. soooo lxc gets second chances! good to know)

(cut to jgy asking why he doesn’t get another chance to get things right. why lxc won’t give it to him)

that feeling is… exhausting. even if jgy has been devoted to this man (and highkey the jianghu) body and soul for two decades, his first reaction is still mistrust in a situation like this.

(yeah yeah i know he defends him with wangxian and that he’s mild-mannered and introspective but SIR. this is JGY. WHERE is the outrage)

anyhow. this isn’t me trying to decide whether it’s “fair” for lxc to react the way he did. my thesis statement stands: i think in that moment, after the violent despair of Qin su dying, jgy’s feeling of betrayal at realising the extent of what’s going on finally bleeds through. it’s not just him and his clever words. it’s genuine (justified imo) betrayal

(cut to the fucking 3zun ceremony where they say we will not betray each other)

*not sure if i stand by this (su she??? what about our boy) but that merits a whole post in and of itself

[duohensheng]

#yep#there’s no defending what jgy does to that brothel or the sex workers#contextualizing? understanding its narrative significance? absolutely!#likewise there IS no actual defence for wwx’s murder-torture bender in the novel#or his brutal and highly sexualized killing of wlj and wc#but again—the goal shouldn’t *be* defence in these conversations#neither of these guys are real and they aren’t actually on trial for anything#bringing up what wwx does in relation to what jgy does isn’t to point fingers and be like#‘see?? your blorbo is naughty too!!’#it’s very specifically about the narrative parallels and understanding *why* the characters do what they do#and also challenging some readers about why they don’t define wwx by what he does while at his lowest#but won’t extend the same grace to jgy#anyway wwx’s naughty yiling-laozu era is his sexiest era imo#let him be bad and fucked up he’s earned it

@thatswhatsushesaid tags re putting fictional people in fictional jail

characters have to be a little bit awful in ways that you cant defend. its good for the ecosystem. your honor he did do that. He did in fact do that

[duohensheng]

watching cql w my sister for the first time and I’m consolidating my adherence to the theory that people who don’t Get jgy’s perspective simply are not (being given the time to) apply their critical reading skills

[duohensheng]

going through it in real time here

I spoke for 2 and a half hours so we’re 🎶condensing🎶 but she’s coming along nicely!

[duohensheng]

made the mistake of scrolling through character tags and I’ve come to the conclusion that some people don’t enjoy fun or having a good time

[duohensheng]

#yes jgy wants power but not for no reason #also please consider what he does with his power once he has it #and i'm not talking about what he does when nhs provokes him into losing his shit and lashing out #i'm talking about the 10+ years he spends improving the state of the jianghu #literally creating a world that allows the juniors to grow up into the precocious little shits (affectionate) that we know and love

via op @thatswhatsushesaid

another day, another failure of compassion/inability to understand the weight of fear and filial piety. YES HE WANTS POWER BUT NOT FOR NO REASON. wanting/needing power is, in my opinion, (one of?) the only logical response to the situation at Jin Lin Tai under jgs. to argue that he wants power abstractedly in a vacuum is missing the point so spectacularly. he is built out of the contrast between his lack of power and his competence at wielding it.

also we all need to have an adult conversation sometime about the perceived morality of desiring power. preferably before i lose it entirely but I’m not picky

nothing enrages me more than people wilfully stepping into the intentional mischaracterisation set up by The Crowd (sponsored by nhs (tm)). i will be gesturing in the vague direction of the watchtowers forever

any analysis of jin guangyao that asserts his key motivations stem from a desire for power, rather than from fear and filial piety, should probably be revised to at least acknowledge the role that fear and filial piety played in creating a desire for power.

[duohensheng]

(unfortunately serious about the therapy thing)

firm believer that xiyao should have had a theme song for when they spend too long sharing eye contact à la wangxian

to be found defending jgy at odd hours

🎥 “in defence of jgy” up soon

tags:

jgy: get jgy with it

xiyao: music and letters and tea

lxc: lan hearteyes

jgy discourse: jgy defence league ⚔️

lwj: (wei ying voice) lan zhan!

wwx: main character syndrome

art that is mine: myart

when I explained the whole plot of mdzs to a friend, I called nmj “big man head of the clan” and lxc “gentle library clan leader”. vibes

[duohensheng]

@poorlittleyaoyao …… now This is an idea for a reframing-moral-choices fic

[duohensheng]

@galadhir tags that stopped me in my tracks and had me staring into the middle distance

every once in a while I'm just bowled over by the fact that nmj told lxc about my killing the jin captain and then feigning suicide to get close enough to seal nmj's qi and lxc is just like 'hm this seems like a terrible misunderstanding!'

like he was straight gone, the babygirl glasses were STRAPPED to his face it's so funny

[duohensheng]

jgy x class fascinates me to the bone. i agree that the crux is that jgy was never afforded an in-group. his mother (and by extension he) never developed class solidarity with the rest of the brothel, which i always read as a coping mechanism on meng shi’s part since she was projecting into meng yao’s future (and she probably also felt she was never going to “fit in” among them either— @poorlittleyaoyao * has EXCELLENT headcannon takes on meng shi and her background working backwards from what we have).

but i don’t think jgy has no class solidarity at all in a broader sense. for one, he’s extremely class conscious, and he lives in constant despair that he’s on the outside looking in re. the upper class. you can read his burning down of the brothel he was born at as an attempt to erase his origins, i guess, but i think jgy knows he can never outrun his origins. guanyin temple is his physical manifestation of the hope for absolution: mercy in his mother’s image, gilded in gold. to me that’s not erasure, it’s the closest he can come at expressing how he feels about the weird denial/rejection of class he grew up in. because meng shi didn’t just “want him to become higher class”. she believed he belonged with the higher class, and wanted him to look the part and know what he needed to know to fit in accordingly.

i don’t think the torture (appropriate imo) of those sex workers means he doesn’t have class solidarity. he proves through everything else he does that he puts the “ordinary people” first. this to me is a case of the personal and political intersecting and the personal winning out. his disgust for jgs x sex workers isn’t a disgust with prostitutes necessarily, it’s personal to the situation. i wish we knew how he interacted with sex workers more broadly so we could see the extent to which he projects his trauma onto them as a group, but we don’t, so this is obviously conjecture. i think the death of jgs is him projecting every twisted feeling of disgust and rage back onto the cause of his upbringing, for one. but also, i kind of read this as a partial embodiment or adoption of the mode of thinking of the upper classes re. sex workers; weaponising that to hit his father for once, not him. but it’s a caricature. he’ll never be like his father, or forget where he comes from. the metaphorical resonance is huge: this is what his father twists him into; what he twists into when he pretends he can stomach him. his last and closest adherence to his father. and after the burning (cleansing fire imagery etc) he is reborn asking for mercy, and as himself, puppet strings cut.

it is horrible that he kills them after. he doesn’t give them the chance symbolised in the razing of the brothel and construction of the guanyin temple— he doesn’t give them mercy. you could argue he felt he didn’t have a choice or that politically it made no sense to let them go since he was trying to cover up his own involvement, and jgy certainly makes political decisions with personal protection at the forefront, but i think he did have a choice. i think it was the last bad choice of the rotten cycle begun by his father, and i think he made it with relish, in a sense. i read it as the last raging scream. to him the sex workers weren’t an opportunity to give mercy. they symbolised the thing he needed mercy from, and wasn’t afforded. they were “what” he burned to build guanyin temple. what he needed mercy for. like prev said, they were him at his absolute darkest and lowest, giving in to the greedy vengeful need to watch the horrors of his childhood burn to make way for cleaner air. he didn’t associate them with the mercy he wished his mother was afforded. jgy made decisions (until the day after this, when he became Jin Zongzhu by rights) not like a member of the upper classes but like a straining, desperate, cornered man with nothing but cleverness and ruthlessness to pull on. given a calmer sea and the reigns, his characteristic temperate kindness takes over. but no, there is no excusing it. they were real human beings, not objects to be used for revenge or symbolic extrication from the harmful system they were victims of first. excusing it would pull its teeth, and there was nothing but teeth here

tldr: you need empathy and identification for class solidarity and jgy has plenty of the former, but possibly not for sex workers as a whole (projection of trauma) and certainly not for those specific sex workers with jgs because the symbolic weight took over. still inexcusable but so interesting.

* https://poorlittleyaoyao.tumblr.com/post/712797760014942208/care-to-share-your-backstory-for-meng-shi highly recommended reading

Need me a JGY fan to explain to me why killing the sex workers after having them kill his father isn’t deranged and excessive. That’s what gets me about his character. I can get everything else he did (not what I would have done but I get why he did it) but that one is kind of beyond justification to me

Which sucks because I like characters who are objectively kind of terrible people!! Lan Xichen is my favorite mdzs character after all and Nie Huaisang is a close second, but I can’t get over that

Please talk to me about it, I love analyzing characters!

[duohensheng]

#Not even nmj (in the middle of qi deviation) could come up with some of the things that this fandom believes wholeheartedly

via @random-mdzs-thoughts-dumpster

every so often i'll just be hanging out minding my own business, and then i'll remember the time i read some commentary about cql episode 41 that insisted jgy was using nhs as a human shield against nmj during his qi deviation. then i get mad and stomp around complaining about it to my lovely husband (who does not know/does not care about this nonsense but patiently listens to me anyway). at some point in the recent-ish past i could have sworn i wrote up a thing specifically detailing why nhs-as-crybaby-meat-shield doesn't track, but since i can't find my own post about it, i'm just going to make another, shorter one with some visual references.

here they are. (zanzan stop looking at the camera, you're supposed to be a professional.) i wish i could make gifsets because the stills don't quite show you what's happening. but imo this is a perfectly analogous moment to the 'beguiling boy' section of the novel, where nhs is fully prepared to throw himself onto the burning pyre of all his most treasured personal possessions after nmj has set them on fire. the only reason he doesn't burn more than his hands is because jgy is there to grab him and hold him back.

in this moment, nhs is struggling to get out of jgy's grip because he wants to go to his da-ge--the same da-ge who just finished hallucinating that jgy was pulling a mcu loki maneuver, and was wildly swinging baxia around trying to kill him. if jgy had let go of nhs in this moment, nhs would be badly injured--just like what happens in the novel during nmj's qi deviation--or worse.