#ethical revenge

[philosophybits]

Hatred is increased by being reciprocated, and can on the other hand be destroyed by love.

Baruch Spinoza, Ethics

[khattikeri]

maybe a controversial opinion but while i really love jiang cheng as a character he is deeply self-centered as a person. and seeing people fight tooth and nail claiming he isn't, or is just misunderstood, or that he has genuine valid reasons to be selfish when plenty of other characters make the difficult choice to forego status and opportunities for what they believe is genuinely right to do (read: wei wuxian, wen ning, wen qing, lan wangji, jiang yanli, mianmian, etc.)

it's just odd to me. especially if they're talking about the novels.

mxtx didn't give jiang cheng the name "sandu shengshou" as a quirky coincidence. there's a REASON she named him & his sword after the 3 poisons of Buddhism (specifically ignorance, greed, and hatred). it's crucial to the story that jiang cheng is NOT selfless and that wei wuxian IS.

it's important to accept that wei wuxian is, by their society's standards, not morally gray; he represents several Buddhist ideals in direct contrast of jiang cheng and multiple people attest to wei wuxian's strong moral character, which is a lot of why jiang cheng even feels bitter about him to begin with.

it's crucial, because by the end of the novel jiang cheng realizes the extent of this and begins to let go!

the twin prides thing wasn't jiang cheng wanting them to 100% mirror the twin jades. he does care about wei wuxian, but he wanted wei wuxian to stay his right hand man, in part the way wei changze was for jiang fengmian.

and if there's one thing you can notice about wei changze in the novels, it's that literally nobody talks about him. he is only ever mentioned when his cool mysterious mountain sect wife cangse-sanren is mentioned, or (even more rarely) when they discuss him as a servant to jiang fengmian. regardless of jiang fengmian's own feelings, wei changze was considered lesser to him and didn't seem to outdo him, since nobody's out there years later still waxing poetry about wei changze's skills.

it may not be the only thing jiang cheng wants out of a twin pride dynamic, but it is a big part of it. regardless of his parents' intentions in taking wei wuxian in and treating him certain ways, this twin pride right-hand man thing is what jiang cheng has felt owed since childhood. he gave up his dogs for wei wuxian, people gossip about his sect heir position with wei wuxian there... jiang cheng wants the reciprocation of what he views as personal sacrifices.

he is ignorant to the depth of what wei wuxian must've suffered for over 6 years as a malnourished orphan child on the streets. he hates how wei wuxian's intelligence, witty charm, and cultivation abilities are naturally stronger than his own. he does care about wei wuxian a lot and want them to be together as sort of-brothers, sort of-friends, sort of-young master and sect servant...

...but if it's between that unclear (yet still caring) relationship and being able to save himself just a little bit more, jiang cheng nearly always manages to clam up in the face of danger and choose the latter, which ultimately benefits himself most. maybe it's a stretch to call that sort of thing greed, but it certainly isn't selfless.

there are of course plenty of justifications for this. it's his duty as sect heir. his home and sect was severely damaged by the wen attack and subsequent war; he had to protect himself, etc.

but doesn't that prove the point?

wei wuxian may be charming, but in terms of pure social standing, he is lower and far more susceptible to being punished or placed in harm's way by people who have more power and money. to protect wei wuxian, yunmeng jiang's long-term head disciple and semi-family member, even in the face of backlash and public scrutiny would've been the selfless thing to do. this is what wei wuxian does for the wen remnants in the burial mounds.

jiang cheng does not choose this. it's not even an unreasonable choice for him to make! nobody else in the great clans is doing such a thing, stepping out of line to take on a burden that could weaken them in the long-run. wei wuxian himself doesn't hate jiang cheng for it; he lets go of these things and focuses on what good he can do in the present.

jiang cheng thinks further into the future - what would happen to him if he continued vouching for wei wuxian and taking his side? what about jiang cheng's face, his sect's face? would wei wuxian even care to reciprocate somehow? everyone expects him to cut off wei wuxian for being dangerous, for threatening his position, for...

do you see what i mean? to call jiang cheng selfless for falling in line with exactly what people expected him to do after the war is not only wrong, it's foolish.

"but they faked their falling-out!" okay. why fake it to begin with, except to protect jiang cheng and the jiang sect's own face? is that selfless? who does it ultimately serve to protect? wei wuxian canonically internalizes the idea that he stains all that he touches, including lan wangji, and agrees to the fake fight because he doesn't want to cause the jiang sect harm. regardless, it eventually slides into a true falling-out, and in the end jiang cheng is more or less unscathed reputation-wise while wei wuxian falls.

that isn't selfless. it's many things! it's respecting his clan and his ancestors, it's making a good plan for the future of his sect and cultivation... but it isn't a truly selfless in the interest of what's right rather than in the interest of duty and what's good for him and his family lineage.

that brings me to my next point: even though wei wuxian hid the truth of the golden core transfer, jiang cheng spent nearly 20 years believing that the golden core "renewal" he was given was a birthright gift of wei wuxian's from baoshan-sanren, an immortal sect teacher of wei wuxian's mother's and a martial elder to wei wuxian.

of course we all know that's a big fat lie, but jiang cheng believed that wei wuxian gave up a critical emergency use gift to him for decades! he was lied to, yes, but jiang cheng immediately agreed without even needing to be convinced. the light in his dead eyes came back with hope the moment wei wuxian even said baoshan-sanren's name. he accepted wei wuxian's offer to give that up to him and take it via identity theft without missing a beat.

with how mysterious and revered baoshan-sanren is, that's obviously not a light sacrifice to just give up to anyone, no matter how close they might be to you. pretending to be wei wuxian to take the gift could even be considered dangerous. what if she found out and got offended? could wei wuxian be hurt by that?

jiang cheng doesn't even hesitate. wei wuxian is the one who mentions that if jiang cheng doesn't pretend to be him, the immortal master could get angry and they'd both be goners. and funnily enough, the day they do go to "the mountain", jiang cheng is the one worried and suspiciously wondering if wei wuxian was lying to him or had misremembered.

of course they've both been traumatized like hell prior to this point. but still: it speaks to how broken he was at the moment as well as to his character overall.

i digress: jiang cheng "gets his golden core back" via what he believed was a gift that should've been wei wuxian's to use in serious emergencies. rather than use it for himself, wei wuxian risked his own safety and gave it to jiang cheng... and jiang cheng still ends up embittered and angry, believing that wei wuxian is arrogant and selfish.

if he truly views them as 100% brothers and equals with no caveats, why would he think that way? it's not like he needs to grovel before wei wuxian for doing that, or to reciprocate... but this is what i mean when i say jiang cheng feels he is owed things by wei wuxian. wei wuxian's actions hold a very different weight in jiang cheng's mind, and jiang cheng himself doesn't ever act the same way, except once.

is it wrong for him to feel like he is owed something? it depends. many asian cultures, including my own, feel that a person owes their family in ways that may not make sense to westerners. for example, it's considered normal for a child to owe their parents for giving birth to them, or to other caretakers for feeding, clothing, sheltering, educating them, etc.

however, something like verbally saying "thank you" or "i'm sorry" to family is considered crazy- why would you owe that? you're supposed to inconvenience your family; saying thank you or sorry is the sort of thing you say to a stranger or acquaintance. i get half-seriously lectured by my elders on this a lot even now, even though they know such phrases are just considered good manners in the US.

this muddies up the idea of wei wuxian being jiang cheng's family vs his family's charge or servant even more. jiang cheng wants wei wuxian to be close... but ultimately doesn't really choose to use what power he DOES have to protect wei wuxian. he considers himself still owed something that in his mind wei wuxian flagrantly never repays.

this isn't even getting into how despite spending a majority of his time with the yiling patriarch he never once noticed that wei wuxian stopped using any spiritual power-based cultivation. even lan wangji, who met them far more rarely, realized that something was wrong and that wei wuxian had taken some sort of spiritual damage, hence the "come with me to gusu".

of course manpain is fun and i'm not immune to the juicy idea of them reconciling and talking things out... but jiang cheng is deeply mired in his own desire to be "above" wei wuxian in multiple ways, and doesn't realize the extent of wei wuxian's actions, the intentions behind them, and the consequences wei wuxian knowingly faced for them.

to not recognize this about jiang cheng, especially in the novels, is really revisionist if you ask me. i reiterate that i really do like him a lot. he's flawed, angry, traumatized and has poor coping mechanisms, an overall fascinating character... but he is not selfless nor ideal, and i seriously draw the line at people saying he is.

wen ning shoves this all into his face at lotus pier to disastrous results. it is the reason why jiang cheng's a total mess at guanyin temple, and the reason jiang cheng ultimately doesn't tell wei wuxian about the fact that he ran towards the wens on purpose.

for that one last act of his to have really been selfless, he needs to not seek anything in return. he did it purely because it was right to do to protect someone else. if that means wei wuxian never finds out about it, so be it.

that moment that ended up causing jiang cheng irreversible harm is not a debt that wei wuxian owes him. it hurts, but no matter how bitter it is, that realization is so important to him changing in the future.

[ourflagmeansgayrights]

not to tempt fate or anything but one thing i’m glad to not have to deal with as much in the post s2 ofmd fandom environment is people arguing that the crew is lazy and useless and izzy is the only one keeping things together

anyway it’s so weird how in s2 once the gang was all back together again everything ran smoothly and they didn’t make a big deal out of all the work everyone needed to be doing constantly and we actually mostly just saw them hanging out and chilling the whole time. the only time the show made any sort of commentary about work it was in episode one when we learn ed has been working his crew to the bone doing back-to-back raids with no stop. it’s almost like in s1 izzy was characterized as being all work and no play as part of the writers’ goal of making him an unpleasant antagonist and not because this show actually cares about telling a story about how hard work is an important part of being a pirate.

[broodcoffee]

I'm really glad that Suletta and Miorine got their unambiguously happy ending. I get its significance as it portrayed a queer female couple with one of them a PWD WOC, both living a full, happy life especially after all that they've been through. I can see it has touched many people and that's good. And considering this was done in a big IP such as the Gundam franchise, it is a win.

That said, it really is appalling for me how war crimes and human experimentation go unpunished (with the exception of Shaddiq and Nika) in this series. Yes, Delling (and Sarius) are facing trials for Quinharbor and the Space Assembly League wipeout and Miorine is talking to the family of the victims of Gundam. But. The old hags of Peil Technologies don't exactly pay for experimenting on humans and vaporizing them when they have outlived their usefulness. Delling instigated the massacre at Folkvangr and Kennanji played a part in wiping out Elnora's family, comrades, friends, and mentor but they don't get to reckon that. There is no reckoning, no proper apology, no comeuppance. And considering Japan's shoddy history with apologies for its own war crimes and their honestly infuriating insistence that reparations = apology, especially when it comes to the issue of "comfort women"--not to mention their shrines dedicated to war criminals and their own record of human experimentation--G Witch's take on accountability is both unsurprising and yet still so disappointing. And before anyone goes off that this is just anime, media informs and is informed by society. Just as we can argue the significance of the happy ending of Suletta and Miorine, so too G Witch's treatment of accountability for perpetrators of massacre and human experimentation.

[moodr1ng]

were all for prison abolition and transformative justice until i say "the man who abused me as a young teen is not in a place where he has access to children or women so i dont want to pursue any judicial action against him, and also i understand that while the abuse he put me through was extreme and awful, he was young, traumatized, endured abused himself, and abusing multiple substances and i dont believe he is the same person he was at the time", at which point everyone looks at me with pity and concern and tells me i dont have to make excuses for him and im allowed to hate him and etc etc. like yeah i do hate him. im capable of thinking past hatred, being reasonable about the situation, and maintaining my political ideals even when it comes to things personal to me, so that when i say "everyone deserves a chance at rehabilitation" i dont conveniently make an exception for the guy who hurt me personally.. anyway.

[philosophybitmaps]

[1-8oo-wtfbro]

i just saw someone say that Hama was ‘unfairly vilified by the narrative’ girl did we watch the same show???😭😭😭😭

[theidealistphilosophy]

We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

[nullcanary]

"Why should I give up revenge? On behalf of what? Moral principles? And what of the higher order of things, in which evil deeds are punished? For you, a philosopher and ethicist, an act of revenge is bad, disgraceful, unethical and illegal. But I ask: where is the punishment for evil? Who has it and grants access? The Gods, in which you do not believe? The great demiurge-creator, which you decided to replace the gods with? Or maybe the law? [...] I know what evil is afraid of. Not your ethics, Vysogota, not your preaching or moral treaties on the life of dignity. Evil is afraid of pain, mutilation, suffering and at the end of the day, death! The dog howls when it is badly wounded! Writhing on the ground and growls, watching the blood flow from its veins and arteries, seeing the bone that sticks out from a stump, watching its guts escape its open belly, feeling the cold as death is about to take them. Then and only then will evil begin to beg, 'Have mercy! I regret my sins! I'll be good, I swear! Just save me, do not let me waste away!'. Yes, hermit. That is the way to fight evil! When evil wants to harm you, inflict pain - anticipate them, it's best if evil does not expect it. But if you fail to prevent evil, if you have been hurt by evil, then avenge him! It is best when they have already forgotten, when they feel safe. Then pay them in double. In triple. An eye for an eye? No! Both eyes for an eye! A tooth for a tooth? No! All their teeth for a tooth! Repay evil! Make it wail in pain, howling until their eyes pop from their sockets. And then, you can look under your feet and boldly declare that what is there cannot endanger anyone, cannot hurt anyone. How can someone be a danger, when they have no eyes? How can someone hurt when they have no hands? They can only wait until they bleed to death."

Andrzej Sapkowski, The Tower of the Swallow

[philosophybits]

As long as blow is followed by counter-blow, catastrophe is perpetuated.

Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 33

[thestateofardadreaming]

If you love freedom.... Even if something ends, you cannot mourn it too much because you find freedom waiting for you at the corner of that road.

[torturedpoetemotions]

Actually? I deleted it because I am Tired, but I'm really fucking frustrated with all the people on that post citing rape of all things as a reason not to get rid of punitive justice.

As if rape isn't currently one of the easiest crimes to get away with and one of the hardest to report and prosecute, as if prison sentences aren't extremely short and often made shorter via early releases, and as if the process of prosecuting rape, even when it does work, isn't retraumatizing to survivors.

Like if you wanted a convincing reason why your beloved punishment-based system is SO necessary, you picked the wrong fucking example and the wrong person.

Sincerely, a survivor of CSA whose rapist did 5 years, got out for good behavior, and went right back to living in a house with my 3 younger siblings.

[katierosefun]

I agree, thinking about the potential fallout for Korea and Koreans from Abe's death, it's saddening and concerning. Here's hoping things won't come to the worst. (I have to admit though, I can't help feeling a bit of schadenfreude at Abe getting bumped off. Like, good riddance. Also, thinking about japan more generally, it's a bit of a shame the US had only two a-bombs in '45)

mm yeah, i’m definitely here for “let’s get rid of every single nationalist/imperialist/colonist scum of the earth”, so i do feel that. however, i personally would refrain from wanting japan to get bombed, and i actually lean on the side of thinking it’s a shame that the US bombed japan with atomic bombs to begin with.

is it absolutely disgusting that japan colonized korea (and, i believe, other asian lands), stripped away korean culture, forced korean men into japanese military, and created the system of comfort women and then proceeded to refuse to acknowledge its wrongs even after years of protest? absolutely. absolutely, 100%. as someone whose family is quite literally torn up because of the impact of japanese control + as someone who has had the same anti-korean sentiment tossed at them by japanese folks as a kid, i would like nothing better than to make those responsible beg for mercy that, honestly, i’m not sure they deserve.

however! however, i draw the line at the murder of god knows how many innocent civilians. japan committed horrific crimes against korea—but completely obliterating the japanese is certainly not what i want, and to commend those kinds of actions just feeds into the same kind of “must destroy as many as possible” rhetoric that any oppressor uses in order to feel justified in gutting a group of people.

[p-paradoxa]

lady prospera once again gaslight gmanipulate gundam girlbosses her way into my heart sorry

[trans-leek-cookie]

Ok now that I think abt it that was very shitty of Diane to do

[hansderkluge]

I have been feeling very sick, head and stomach sick, last night I experienced a level of pain I have never felt before. I also feel that my body manifests my spirit, I can see the Evil looking for a place inside me, I have been curious about revenge, about hurting others, I have even finished eating chicken meat. I feel that there is a dark side that seeks to grow inside me and I don't know if I should really extirpate it, tear it out and fight it or use it to defend myself from the world, I really don't know.