#to actually get to the coding bit to use the various classes and methods I've been coding the last two days x'D

[dkettchen]

I've learnt how to input in python I will be unstoppable now

[pargolettasworld]

Yes, and like yours, they're mostly thoughts on the web series rather than the novel, so I'm not sure how well they're relevant to the discussion above.

I suppose I could say that, yes, cultivation society is deeply classist and sexist. I'm not sure I can speak to any homophobia -- the web series has so many censorship issues that it solved by using largely the same method that Franco Zeffirelli used for Romeo and Juliet that you really can't tell if there's any actual homophobia in this heavily homosocial world.

I remember really liking that Jin Guangyao and Su She chose to have their final conversation about classism with Wei Wuxian, given that each side of that discussion represented a different solution to the problem. One side wants to smash a hole in the classist society of just the right shape that the outcasts will fit in, while the other side tries just noping out and setting up a completely different society (which still has some issues with classism and sexism, because pobody's nerfect).

The class issues are very much in the background. Largely, I think, because this is a story specifically about the upper classes. Whatever is going on with them, they're soaking in it like Palmolive. One thing I like about this setup is that you do get a really granular look at what that kind of aristocracy looks like from the inside. The squabbles over rank and inheritance, the outsized importance of matchmaking, the endless etiquette rules designed to show that you know the behavioral code rather than to make life easier for people, the petty, deeply coded games of one-upsmanship, the gradations of power within an aristocracy. That's all extremely well done and keenly observed (again, in the world of the show).

I've spent some time living (very much as an outsider) in this kind of aristocracy, and these characters resonate with me. You can see the appeal of the social structure as well as its flaws -- you know exactly why people like Jin Guangyao, Su She, and Wei Wuxian all made an effort to be part of it to various degrees. And you can also see why -- again, to various degrees -- they failed to fit in. You can see how the aristocracy protects itself and hides flaws to keep perpetuating its surface. It's a really well-done portrait of a certain kind of social class.

One other thing I like is that both solutions to the problem of a ruling aristocracy fail in the end. Jin Guangyao and Su She manage to reshape Society to fit themselves in, but at the cost of so much crime and chicanery that their efforts literally fall down about their heads and shoulders. Wei Wuxian's commune in the Burial Mounds turns out to have been a largely unsustainable project, and almost everyone in it gets killed. I do like that the show leaves Wei Wuxian's future a bit open -- he's never really going to fit into Society, but he's got motive to stick around. How is that going to work? The viewing audience is invited to speculate. I like that kind of ending for this show.

I'm not exactly sure how I want to phrase this yet, but I think a lot of the utterly weird takes I see sometimes float by me on our cursed blue hellsite (esp when it comes to mdzscql fandom) is coming from a refusal to meet the genre where it's at.

Like, why are we trying to interrogate classism in MDZS society, MDZS is a romance, the societal worldbuilding is just enough to support some general big ideas and the provide context for the romance. We can't get ANY kind of read on general classim/sexism/anything else from. this source material. if you think you can get granular when your sample size of characters from various social and gender strata are so small and we don't know how the vast majority of people in here live you are making stuff up.

Like, meet the story where it's at: it's a romance novel.