#anyway also like I am Not A Fan of the blaming WWX immediately after Lotus Pier burns

[heavymetalchemist]

I agree w/ some points u made in ur meta abt jiang cheng, but wwx wasnt just a sworn brother. they literally grew up side by side and yet he was wilfully blind to wwx's nature that should have made jc trust him: wwx's goodness, his tenacity, his selflessness. jc knew him and yet in his grief and anger and haste to blame someone he pours it all on his brother who, as selfless and self-loathing as he is, accepts all the blame. It's not abt the lie, but that jc chose to believe the lie.

I’m guessing this is in response to this post and to clarify, Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian ARE brothers, and I didn’t mean to diminish that by comparing the blind trust to Lan Xichen and the Venerated Triad.

However, here’s the thing, like, what lie are we talking about? Because the lie I’m referring to in that post is multifaceted:

Your golden core has been restored by Baoshan Sanren

I’m totally fine

I can absolutely control all this resentful energy and this new cultivation method isn’t hurting me at all

I don’t carry my sword any more because I don’t feel like it, even though it is very publicly rude of me not to

You cannot rely on me to help you run the sect because I am off in a tavern drinking all day, stumbling home drunk, but again, I’m totally fine and have nothing to discuss with you about my mental state at all, I swear I am just a fun-loving guy!

I have said before on my blog that I don’t like good person/bad person dichotomy, for a number of reasons, but primarily because it implies a static state of being and causes a willful blindness to harm people cause. People are complex, and while I do think intent matters, it’s not magic. Wei Wuxian gives up his golden core for Jiang Cheng, with all the good intentions in the world, but he does this without consulting Jiang Cheng, lying to him about it, drugging him to perform experimental surgery, dealing with the trauma of three months in the burial mounds and not having a core alone and absolutely refusing and rebuffing every overture Jiang Cheng makes trying to figure out what’s wrong with him, causing a lot of political problems with his behavior that Jiang Cheng then has to smooth over (and the Jiang sect is in a very fragile place, politically), then busting into a prison camp and killing ALL the guards with a fierce corpse and running off to the burial mounds with the last of the Wen cultivators.

And even with all of this, Jiang Cheng still defends and cares about him, they have that entire staged fight after Wei Wuxian insists on leaving the Jiang sect, which to Jiang Cheng is a betrayal of his promise to be with him in leading the sect, but Wei Wuxian does not tell Jiang Cheng about the whole surgery thing so he really doesn’t have a clue about how much Wen Qing and Wen Ning did for him (although, of course, if he had known about it he would never have let them do it, I’m sure).

From Jiang Cheng’s perspective, how is he supposed to trust in this goodness and selflessness? WWX is throwing the Jiang sect under the bus. WWX is not helping rebuild the sect, he’s drinking all day. (Of course he’s traumatized, they’re ALL traumatized, but he’s not talking about it so how can JC help?) WWX murders a bunch of Jin sect cultivators, running off with a bunch of prisoners of war, from the sect that attempted a full-scale genocide of the Jiang sect. (And to be clear I do not condemn this action and think that Blood Feuds Are Bad, however, in context this is a world where blood feuds are a very real thing. Personally I like the AU where they get Nie Mingjue on their side, as the Nie sect actually has a lot of power that the Jiang sect simply doesn’t, and therefore they can protect the Wen remnants that way. But I digress.)

Not to mention, WWX is using demonic cultivation, corpses are running around, he’s thrumming with resentful energy. Not a good look.

And then Jin Zixuan gets his heart punched out. In CQL there’s a second flautist, but in the book he simply loses control (the control he SWORE he had) and even in CQL it’s not like we find out about the second flautist until the end. How is JC supposed to trust in WWX’s goodness when he’s just murdered his brother-in-law? When he’s abandoned his family and sect for the people that murdered them? (YES I know the Dafan Wens weren’t involved in actively killing people but this is the whole blood-feud-thing, audience knowledge is not character knowledge, etc.)

And then at Nightless City, WWX loses control AGAIN (or at least appears to), three thousand people get murdered, Yanli dies, and JC STILL can’t actually stab him. JC was DESPERATE for any sort of explanation or reason of why this was all happening, but over and over WWX said it was fine, and the real takeaway for JC by the time Nightless City rolls around is - this man is not the boy I grew up with, this man is no longer my brother, my brother would NEVER do this would NEVER hurt Yanli, so it can’t be him any more.

It’s not unlike knowing someone who becomes addicted to drugs. Someone you knew and loved becomes an alcoholic and their whole life goes up in flames and then they’re drunk driving and then they kill someone doing it, and how long are you supposed to sit there while they destroy themselves, telling yourself that you know they’re a good person on the inside?

Now all that said, on the OTHER hand, if you’re talking about the lies that the other sect leaders were spouting, about how WWX was speaking against JC, about how he doesn’t respect him, etc?  You are SO right and it pains me so much that JC didn’t have the ability to stand up to those assholes and say “He’s my brother, shut the fuck up” a la Yanli to Zixun at Phoenix Mountain. Even with all the crap going on in the background, it was obvious to the other (older!) sect leaders that WWX was very powerful and very close to JC and they deliberately tried to undermine the Jiang sect and I hate them. That plays into a lot of the trauma that JC personally has but yes, I think that’s one of the failings that haunts him - how could I have listened to their poisoned words at all?