#where he doesn't even need to do anything to have wildly different and frankly wrong personas bouncing in people's heads bc he's so stoic

[eorzeashan]

Eight's big detriment is whenever he's in business mode/around unfamiliar people he wears the flattest expression ever and makes no effort to improve his 'image' as well as talking either very little or not at all, so this usually gives people the wrong impression...or they have to make an interpretation up for him because it's like looking at a wall.

[sleepy-aletheas]

I wonder if the reason Alhaitham is so wildly mischaracterized is because of the words used to describe him. In the eternally baffling and frustrating game of telephone, it's easy to lose sight of a character's (or a whole story's, really) point and meaning, because the way we perceive them can be twisted by specific wording that can easily evolve into more harsher versions than they were meant to be.

Example: Alhaitham is blunt. He doesn't mince his words, he doesn't avoid pointing out a problem (be it of a person or a situation), and he doesn't sugarcoat it.

That already can sow discord around him, because to a lot of people, that's rude, or even cruel. It's taught to not do these things, to always run around a problem or tentatively hint at it to not overstep never established boundaries. It's also because it can feel like an attack on a personal level; it can feel like a gut punch to have pointed out all the ways we "lack" or where we could have done "better".

So it's easy to discard what these blunt statements or opinions are, and label it all as "bad" and "mean" or even "cruel". But the thing is, using these steadily more negative words to describe something (or someone), it paints a particular picture that is hard to look over or not see as The Truth, because they seem so deliberate, it shouldn't be an over-exaggeration.

We could go in a deeper discussion on if it's because of "neurotypical vs neurodivergent" misunderstandings (even if imo no one knows how to properly communicate anyway, be it by naturally struggling or just never being able to know social cues, or because the social cues are such a convoluted mess that even a "socially adept" person actually cannot do it themselves at this point), or that it's a rampant misuse of words that all have specific meanings but it's all lumped as one and the same. Maybe it's truly just a bad game of telephone where one person jokingly made a hyperbole once and someone who just came into the conversation without any context or knowledge of the source material takes it as fact and runs with it. Or maybe it's still just demonization of autism and asocial tendencies (be it deliberate or subconscious differs from person to person and I won't make any definite statements on that, cause that's not for me to decide without proof, a conversation, or frankly being my business to begin with...unless it's very obvious, then we need to talk, cause no. just no).

I mean, my personal frustration comes because Alhaitham's way of speaking is very close to mine, and to the way we speak in our household, and how my friend talks, so it being called mean or cruel feels like I jumped into a different dimension, cause it doesn't make sense to me. Someone just saying something in a neutral or even clinical way is not mean. Someone pointing out a thing without covering it in layers of "but you're *positive statement* and *positive statement*, so don't take this wrong!" is not cruel (especially when someone is asking for explanations or help; if anything, there needs to be a conversation about setting the boundaries with friends and close people for such situations - if you just want to rant and be comforted without actually discussing it, or if you need a softer approach, or if you actually want someone point out all the facts you can't or refuse to see by yourself; those are important, and no one can know what you need without you saying it (and strangers absolutely won't know or even are obligated to care, so that's another thing to keep in mind)).

This annoyance also comes from the fact, that the way Alhaitham talks is clear to me, so it being called all these negative ways is...weird..? I understand what he says from the get go, and I understand the almost constant layer of sarcasm and deliberate annoyance-inducing way of wording stuff, so it makes me feel at home (it makes it feel like he's me for a moment with all that snark). It makes sense if someone can't pick up on it, or doesn't really understand it; but we also need to take into consideration that Alhaitham is known by the characters he interacts with more than by us, however much we can have direct connection to character stories or read dialogues about him. Even as players, his desire to be Just a Guy with a firm boundary between work-social-private life, we aren't privy to see beyond what we're allowed to peek at. So even if we perceive a character's wording as bad, I think to then push our own feelings about it on the other characters (and usually also mischaracterize them alongside it) is a disservice.

All in all, please, also save Alhaitham from old toxic yaoi tropes, he just wants to read and drink coffee at home with his roommate, and give books to all the kids he knows for their own good.

[imaginaryelle]

I just re-watched THAT scene and a thought hit me: Lan Wangji just stands there watching Wei Wuxian fall from the cliff... Why doesn't he jump onto his sword and swoops down to at least try to save him? Or is he all out of spiritual power? Or does it simply take to long to start and rev the sword? Not saying it's a plothole, I was just wondering...

I mean, I think this is a fair question and I know I’ve seen it discussed elsewhere. I just can’t seem to find the post or remember if any conclusions were reached, so I’m excited to dive into this. As always if anyone has insights or headcanons they want to add on to this, please do.

Because I like pictures, here’s ep 33 Lan Wangji holding his sword and staring in horror as Wei Wuxian falls (what is Jiang Cheng thinking? Who knows.) 

Why isn’t Lan Wangji doing anything? He just stands there for long enough that Jiang Cheng backs away and leaves him on the outcropping, all alone.

Poor guy.

Okay, moving on. I think there are at least two ways to approach this, and one is from the production perspective (since this cliff encounter is a thing that only happens in the drama) and the other is from the in-universe perspective (aka, Doyalist vs Watsonian), so I’m going to look at both.

For the production pov, there’s really only one scene (I think) where we see anyone actually riding a sword in the drama, and it’s when they’re confronting the water demon/abyss in Caiyi (ep 5). At that point there’s no prep time, everyone just jumps up and then steps onto their swords (which is actually even more ridiculous to me than the image had already been in the novel because I thought they were at least riding on the scabbard but no! Riding the bare blade like a skateboard. I love it.)

How majestic.

Lan Xichen is the only graceful and cool person here. The only other sword-riding shot in this scene that shows more of a person’s body than their head and shoulders is when Lan Wangji drags three people into the air at once and we get a brief glimpse of Su She’s feet kicking wildly.

So, based on this scene’s execution and the general scarcity of other sword-flying scenes (even with the Nightless City confrontation, Lan Wangji just flies in with his quqin, no sword under his feet), my out-of-universe theory would be a combination of budget and aesthetic at play. If the production can get by on wire work with super extra long jumps that don’t seem to require actually riding the sword, they will. It’s logistically simpler, and it frankly looks better on screen. It’s also a staple of the entire film genre, whereas this sword thing is not, so the crew and effects people would have more experience with it as well. (In-universe I have a lot of questions about Wei Wuxian’s retained ability to do those jumps. Do they not use spiritual energy? Does he still have spiritual energy, just not a golden core? Is he using resentful energy instead? How does this work?)

From a more story-side view on the production, they’re working against the fact that they changed the plot to add Lan Wangji’s presence at Wei Wuxian’s death and they want to capitalize on that relationship, so having Wei Wuxian knock himself over the edge as he destroys the seal (or something where he steps back as Jiang Cheng rushes him or any other number of possibilities) no longer fits with the emotional beats they’re trying to hit. Also they really need Wei Wuxian to die here for the plot to function. Having Lan Wangji mount a sword and swoop down to try and save him again just adds extra complications and delays the desired outcome of WWX = dead and LWJ = distraught. In that sense, it really does start to look like a plot hole, because it feels like they’re ignoring the capabilities of a character in order to get the result they need. I do think they try to address this, but since multiple people have this question and I personally had to watch the scene more than once while actively thinking about it to notice all the relevant details… the efficacy of those efforts is maybe questionable. (Also like.. why does Jiang Cheng wait three days to go look for Wei Wuxian’s remains? Why is anyone waiting at all? Why is anyone surprised they can’t find a corpse when the visual we get implies Wei Wuxian is falling into lava? There are many, many questions that can be asked here and for a lot of them the out-of-universe answer is probably going to resemble “because the plot/original source material demands it” without much helpful in-universe support.)

In-universe (and probably more pertinent to your question), yeah, Lan Wangji could be low on spiritual power (and upon rewatch, I think he genuinely is). He could be physically exhausted as well as injured, too. For someone who carried three people in two hands 2-3 years ago and canonically has only gotten stronger since, he sure is having trouble pulling one person up over the side of a cliff. And that exhaustion really isn’t outside the realm of possibility, no matter how strong and powerful he is. He just traveled pretty far! If the theories that he found A-Yuan before coming to Nightless City are true (since he’s not injured in those flashbacks), he likely spent a ton of spiritual power even before getting into this battle where he first confronted Wei Wuxian and then started fighting pretty much everyone on the field by himself. Then, in a moment of fear-induced distraction, he gets injured! He’s actively bleeding! So yeah. He could definitely just be physically exhausted.

All that blood loss is not a good sign, and it actually speeds up (visually) as he expends this effort. We can see his arm trembling all throughout this scene, and then his grip slips (thus the face). Even after that he slips again, not losing his grip, but losing the strength to hold himself up at all. In the end he’s literally just lying on the rock depending on gravity to keep him in place and putting everything else he has into holding on to Wei Wuxian. He can’t do more than glare in Jiang Cheng’s general direction and tell him to stop.

Bichen is right there. If he had spiritual power left, I think he’d probably be sending his sword out to block Jiang Cheng’s angle of attack. That, or he needs two hands to accomplish such an action (It doesn’t require hand motions later/in the future, but maybe he develops that skill precisely because of these events). So yes. He’s physically exhausted. He’s spiritually exhausted. But I think there’s more going on here, too: He’s also at the end of his rope emotionally, and that’s how he ends up standing there, horrified and unmoving.

He’s had a rough time recently: Everyone hates his best and only friend/love of his life, and he has to listen to them call for his death/judgement at fancy dinner party meetings on and off for over a year. No one will listen to him when he tries to present a different view. Even his own brother is (not unreasonably) much more concerned about Lan Wangji’s personal safety than what his silence on this issue is costing him emotionally, and his uncle is distinctly unsupportive of the friendship from the beginning.

I think Lan Wangji spends a lot of time questioning his upbringing in those months (we see him actually verbally do so when he’s punished after Wei Wuxian’s death, but I think it starts well before that). What is right and wrong? Who decides it, and how? When does justice and holding people responsible for their actions turn over into unjust persecution? What is true, and what is a lie, and how much does that matter when weighed against social/political/spiritual harmony? These are concepts that are buried pretty deeply in the Lan Sect’s teachings but the world is twisting all of them before his eyes, and I have to think that takes a toll on him. Additionally, just as things start looking up (they let him write the letter to invite Wei Wuxian to Jin Ling’s celebration! They listen to him, other people support his idea!), he has to deal with the facts that:

1) His best friend who he’s in love with just killed a bunch of people, including Jin ZiXuan and some of Lan Wangji’s own Sect brothers.

2) Wei Wuxian is clearly losing control of his resentment-based cultivation path, and is thus personally in danger on a spiritual level, and

3) Everyone now wants to kill Wei Wuxian again, possibly even more than they did before, and anyone who supports Wei Wuxian is an enemy of the entire cultivation world.

Later in the series, Lan Wangji says he regrets that he wasn’t at Wei Wuxian’s side at Nightless City. That he didn’t support him, despite what we see of him trying to help Wei Wuxian find Jiang Yanli and then, after she dies, stop him from killing himself. To me, this could very easily imply that Lan Wangji is still trying to walk a tightrope in those scenes, or perhaps trying to be a bridge. He’s deliberately not choosing a distinct side, because he refuses to hate and reject Wei Wuxian, but he’s also refusing to declare open support. He’s acting entirely on his own, in a balancing act between friendship and love vs his family, his entire life’s teachings, and all of his society. Certainly I find that sort of situation exhausting, and I’ve never had to do it for something so high-stakes or large-scale.

Then there’s the actual cliff scene itself, where he’s visibly desperate. How intense does an emotion have to be for Lan Wangji to so clearly show it?

Wei Ying, he says, come back. He knows Wei Wuxian is breaking down. He at the very least guesses that he’s going to do something wild like step off that outcropping, which is why he follows him in the first place. But he has no idea what to do, so he tries the same thing he’s been trying for years: Come with me. Let me help you. This is a bridge, and he’s offering to help Wei Wuxian cross it. But just like every other time he’s tried it since the Sunshot Campaign ended, it doesn’t work.

Note that Lan Wangji actually is flying here, without the sword, so if he doesn’t have any spiritual power when Jiang Cheng shows up, this is probably a last, desperate burst to go with this last, desperate act.

I don’t think he really has a plan here. Not a new one, anyway. This is a still a plea of Let me help you. And, notably, Wei Wuxian doesn’t accept his help.

Not once during this whole scene does Wei Wuxian reach up with his free hand or try to help Lan Wangji help him in any way. He smiles, and he says: Lan Zhan, let me go. Because he doesn’t want a bridge. He doesn’t want to go back. Honestly it’s a pretty explicit and heartbreaking message: Lan Wangji’s offer of help is not enough to make Wei Wuxian want to stay alive. Not right now. He needs more than that. He’s lost too much to believe, right now, that anyone is going to choose him and his side, or that he’s worth that effort. And to be clear, Lan Wangji isn’t even offering that in this situation. Wei Wuxian is one slippery handgrip away from death, and Lan Wangji is still not saying “You, I choose you.” From anything Wei Wuxian can be expected to infer, his offer here is no different than it’s ever been: let me show you the way back to the right path. Let me help you fit back into the world the way you used to. And Wei Wuxian can’t do that; he has no golden core, it’s literally impossible even if the rest of the world would let him try. But at this point he doesn’t want to go back either. He doesn’t even want to try. That world hates him, and willfully misunderstands him, and has taken too many people from him now for it to be worth staying in. He wants to die.

And then Jiang Cheng arrives.

Wei Wuxian’s reaction to his brother’s presence is to smile, say his name, and just–accept his hatred. He closes his eyes and waits for the sword to fall even as Lan Wangji calls for Jiang Cheng to stop. The only time he shows distress between stepping back off the cliff and his actual death is when Jiang Cheng twists his sword and compromises the stability of the outcropping so that Lan Wangji is also in danger.

I think it’s possible that if Jiang Cheng had also reached for him and tried to pull him back up, things might have gone differently. Maybe that would have been enough to alter Wei Wuxian’s thinking. But as it is, when Wei Wuxian falls, he falls with his limbs relaxed and a smile on his face. There’s no flailing and screaming like when he was thrown into the Burial Mounds (in ep 33. There’s some arm-waving in ep 1). And I think that moment of him pushing Lan Wangji back and then letting go, more than anything, is what stops Lan Wangji in his tracks, because Wei Wuxian could have saved himself. He had strength and energy left. Enough to push Lan Wangji up and back and nearly to a standing position. He could have accepted Lan Wangji’s help, easily. But he didn’t, because he wanted to die, despite all the effort and inner turmoil Lan Wangji has gone through on his behalf (most of which Wei Wuxian doesn’t know about but, still).

That’s a pretty serious emotional kick in the head. Lan Wangji cannot ignore, at this point, that even if he did have any physical or spiritual energy left, Wei Wuxian doesn’t want to be saved. And that’s when we get this face (actually from ep 1):

He has nothing left. He has at this point spent over a year, maybe two, trying to save someone who, when it came down to the final moment, didn’t want to be saved. There’s nothing more he can do, in this state of exhaustion and despair, and it wouldn’t matter if he tried.

Personally, I think he looks like he’s about to be sick, and I don’t think it’s just the image of Wei Wuxian falling and dying that’s working on him here. It’s also the knowledge that he fucked up. He didn’t do enough, or more accurately, didn’t do the right things, in order to encourage Wei Wuxian to keep fighting for himself or anyone else (I’m not saying this is a healthy or reasonable thought, I just think it’s a thought he’s having). And I think this realization plays directly into how he treats Wei Wuxian when he comes back sixteen years later. He knows that questioning Wei Wuxian on his path of cultivation doesn’t go where he wants it to, so he doesn’t do it. This time is going to be different. He’ll break rules. He’ll drink alcohol. He doesn’t scold Wei Wuxian for making dumb, selfless decisions like transferring the curse mark from Jin Ling’s leg to his own, he just accepts it and expresses concern over Wei Wuxian’s well being. He stops asking if he can help and starts just doing it: Wei Wuxian can’t walk so he’ll carry him. Wei Wuxian needs someone to speak for him, so Lan Wangji will do that, with his brother and with the whole cultivation world. And then we come to this:

This is exactly the same move. Wei Wuxian will protect Lan Wangji, but not himself.

But.

Lan Wangji is no longer trying to be a bridge. He’s not going to hold out his hand for Wei Wuxian to accept or disregard. He’s crossed over to be on Wei Wuxian’s side. And that’s what makes the difference.

[laundryandtaxes]

I appreciate that you engage with vegan arguments in good faith as a meat eater. I do think you're missing part of it, though. Re: meat as a "normal part of animal life", vegans would say that something being "natural" doesn't necessarily make it ethical. Many animals kill their young, rape, and cannibalize, which humans are against because we're capable of moral reasoning and aren't driven by pure instinct. We are animals, yes, but we experience life quite differently from other animals.

I think it's pretty presumptuous of the animal experience (especially when thinking about other mammals here) to assume that we experience the world in a terribly different way than most animals do- neither you nor I can know how animals experience the world, but I'd be surprised if a wolf killing a deer fawn never saw and noticed its visibly upset mother. I think every animal that hunts is aware that its prey would like to be alive rather than dead. But my point is not about the naturalness of the behavior, it's about the real lack of moral meaning in of the behavior of killing and consuming animals.

I think the ethical implication of a lot of arguments against the eating of animals is that, for instance, if a wolf could be made aware of the fact that it doesn't need meat to survive, the ethical thing for the wolf to do would be to stop killing and eating animals- it sounds silly, but I think the notion that we know better/differently just falls incredibly flat. Take the brown bear (commonly just called a Grizzly, an animal I really really love) for instance- for the majority of the year many of them straight up eat no meat without, to my knowledge, any consequence. In fact, the way that many brown bears eat salmon would be considered deeply unsportsmanlike by human anglers. Many rip the heads off to consume the fatty tissue of the head, brain, etc, and completely discard the carcasses.

Here is where I think my point is most clarified. I think that is acceptable behavior for brown bears, but not for us, because it is not the taking of animal life that concerns me at all. It is the taking of animal life for purposes other than self defense or for the enjoyment you get out of eating the animal. Even in that case perhaps I'm being hypocritical- the bear's enjoyment is clearly in eating the heads. For another instance, mountain lions are known to kill prey, hide them somewhere, and not even eat them. It would seem some animals do in fact kill more or less for fun, or to sharpen their skills for when they need to. Many whales are known to have these hour-long chases of prey animals where they maybe take a couple bites, just for the sake of teaching their young how to hunt. While I don't think these are acceptable behaviors for us, I don't find them to be morally wrong things for animals to do. Certainly I wouldn't consider taking your child hunting and taking only the loin off a deer to be acceptable. I think the common ethics of hunters around "waste" are there for us to feel good about our behavior, but I don't think theyre moral truths. I don't support killing animals you aren't going to eat or donate with the exception of pest and population control, such as in the case of wild hogs or coyotes. But to say that an animal that is killed and left to rot has been "wasted" is not really true to the animals that live in that ecosystem. Kill a deer and leave it, and surely a coyote will come along and eat to sustain himself for a while, and turkey vultures will have something to eat, along with bugs and fungi that thrive on decomposition. So the whole notion of waste is more about what we as hunters and humans feel justifies the taking of animal life, and nothing to do with morals, and frankly nothing to do with the wasting of life. So I'll use hog hunting as an example I've thought a lot about. Again, I don't think there is anything morally wrong with killing a hog and "letting it lie" for other animals to eat. But I really dislike and find the culture around hog hunting to he morally repugnant- a lot of guys get into it just because they want to kill a lot of stuff, and that bothers me. The pigs don't give a shit. And killing them is the correct thing to do- they wreak havoc on any ecosystem as invasive animals. So there is no moral wrong being committed here. It bothers me that some people just want to kill a bunch of stuff for no reason. This has to do with human motivation. The pigs don't give a shit. The animals that would feed on a pig carcass don't give a shit.

Where this comes full circle is that I think humans have very similarly nonsensical ideas about our place in the animal kingdom and our place as these really somehow special animals who just know better than other animals what is right and what is wrong, but the codes we do have are most often not really about ethics- the right and wrong here is entirely about our feelings, not actually whether it is right or wrong to take an action. Few people would find it acceptable to rip a pig apart limb from limb even if you were going to eat it, but that's how coyotes regularly hunt. My thinking is that, even if the coyote had some presence of mind that we are assuming he doesn't have (and I think it would be wildly incorrect for us to think that hunting animals don't know that prey animals want to continue to be alive) about the suffering of his prey, there would not really be any moral obligation for him to stop hunting. Morality is functionally how we make sense of and code interactions between people, how we regulate our own social systems, how it frankly makes us feel best and most just to live. None of this makes a difference to an animal that doesn't want to die. I just think the idea that humans are such different animals that we have this higher moral responsibility to other animals than any other animals is on its face kind of absurd. Because we live in societies where all of us rely on and, theoretically, value each other, there are certain things we do not do to other people because they violate some form of our basic human social contract- basic bodily autonomy in the case of sexual assault, the basic right to live free from undue physical harm in the case of child abuse, etc. I think the idea that morality is a thing that broadly exists among human and nonhuman animals alike is incorrect- it is our creation, and our set of rules. Maybe this will clear things up for you- it's not something I haven't considered and frankly it is not really easy to articulate fully what I'm trying to get at, especially at what is for me 7:21 am, but hopefully it gives you an idea of the kind of things knocking around in my head.