i love the way wei wuxian and jin guangyao have no relationship at all. like you’ve got your hero and you’ve got your villain and they’re highly complementary characters who wind up being instrumental in each other’s downfalls, and also they met like, what, four times? with zero one on one conversations? jin guangyao barely even bothers to manipulate wei wuxian during the temple showdown and wei wuxian watches jin guangyao die with all the emotion of someone who just noticed a dent in their car and is wondering how it got there
I feel like in response to everyone being a massive jerkwad about it in canon fandom has gone the complete opposite way with JGY’s background, practically erasing it except when it is used for drama or angst.
Like, I’m pretty sure that being raised in a brothel gave him a ton of useful skills and probably some he finds useless in his occupation as JGS’s right hand man. A lot of his mannerisms and actions read very feminine to me, and i don’t mean that in a bad way, but just like in a “I know I am smaller and weaker than everyone around me, how can I A. prevent myself from being hurt and B. turn this situation in another direction without people getting angry at me?”
Like the shy, cute, looking at you from under his eyelashes thing that charms LXC and NMJ on their first meetings in the cql? definitely learned at the brothel. The conflict deescalation he uses literally all the time? brothel. The fact that he is constantly pleasantly smiling regardless of how much of a jerkwad people are being to or about him? brothel. The subservience and ego-stroking? brothel.
I would really love to read a fic that explores this idea.
That the Guanyin temple was built on the territory where Meng Shi used to live, and the statue has her face
That JGY was trying to recover his mother’s remains to take with him into exile
JGY telling LXC how his mother spent all her money on educating him (ch. 49)
JGY complaining to LXC that his “mother couldn’t choose her fate” and putting blame on people who look down on him for that, but not Meng Shi herself (ch. 50)
Isn’t it interesting how the show erases all evidence of Meng Yao’s love and respect for his mother, but focuses a great deal on him being painfully ashamed of being her son?
and here we see again Jin Guangyao: underappreciated comedian of the cultivation world. like I get that the circumstances here are not ideal for a comedy experience but still
pharahsgf
