#mdzs
Serious question: why do people hate JGS so much? He’s 120% evil to be sure and has zero redeeming qualities, but he’s a bland-ass, generic, cookie cutter villain and doesn’t really inspire any strong emotions in me. He’s a static character like WC and he’s just there to be evil. I’m sure I must be missing something but I’ve read/seen a zillion other books and movies with a zillion other villains just like him, and mdzs/cql has many other antagonists like XY who are more compelling than him.
I think there’s a really big difference between hating a compelling villain like XY and hating a flat villain like JGS. You’re not really meant to just flat-out hate XY, there’s too much complexity there– and in a story like MDZS/CQL where so many of even the side antagonists like Su She actually have some complexity and reasoning behind what they’re doing, it’s sort of relaxing to have someone like JGS around where you can just unreservedly be like, “fuck that guy.” (I realize this is directly contrary to many of the themes of the story itself, shhh.)
I also think the depth of one’s hatred for JGS probably depends a lot on which characters you like best. I really love JGY, as has been discussed, and JGS does him a lot of active harm. If you’re only on the wangxian train he’s probably easier to ignore, and if you’re all about Yi City he may as well not exist. Because you’re totally right: he’s a rich, smarmy guy who uses his position of power to rape women and abuse his subordinates/one of his children who he sees as a subordinate. There’s no there there, he just sucks. But he directs that malice towards one of my favorite characters, and thus I hate him.
I totally get what you mean, though– I have absolutely zero feelings about Wen Ruohan. I think it really comes down to which characters you care about most and which characters JGS has hurt– and also, maybe, all those semi-jokes that point out that a lot of the problems of the series would have been solved in advance if JGS just didn’t suck so much.
Not disagreeing at all with any of your points, and this below is all stuff you know, but in terms of why I hate him so much and why I think he resonates as a villain:
I’m going to offer that JGS’s type of flat banal evil is also a hell of a lot more relatable to the real world than most of the other characters’. Rich powerful man who mistreats people who are weaker than him, and everyone in his social circle of rich powerful men knows it and has settled on an attitude of “well, that’s not very nice of him, but what are you gonna do, and by the way did you hear about the kid who showed up and actually thought guangshan had cared about his mom, i mean honestly she’s a whore so who even knows.” Yeah he’s a dime a dozen in stories–because he’s a dime a dozen in the real world.
I’m very much in camp The Villain Is Society–and it’s not a coincidence that Jin Guangshan, careless rich asshole who uses and discards people, is the cause of so much plot. He’s embodying all the parts of society that are making things suck. What if he didn’t rape his subordinate’s wife and then go on with his day, and she didn’t feel the need to hide it because it would just get her and her husband in worse trouble? What if he’d bothered to chip in some financial support for his children out of wedlock? What if he didn’t use his unwanted son to do all his dirty work so he could go fuck around in brothels all day?
The political ambition is a huge issue with him as well, which is something he shares with Wen Ruohan, and of course those are big plot drivers too. But JGS in particular hits that everyday real-world banal shittiness that works on more personal levels than coveting the power of the evil mcguffin.
LIke yes, I agree that in terms of storytelling and audience reaction it’s nice to have some flat villains kicking around so that you can uncomplicatedly hate on someone without getting into “but his backstory…” But Jin Guangshan’s flatness is also compelling: he’s just a rich asshole, why does he get to ruin so many lives? You can fill in that blank with a lot of people in the real world–which I think is quite relevant to the story’s themes. Society is the villain because of dudes like this.
All this is correct; just to add my own two cents;
The reason I peg Jin Guangshan as the main villain in the story is that at the end of the Sunshot Campaign, there were four remaining Great Sects. Three of them were headed by young, idealistic leaders who actively aspired to make the world a better place.
And the fourth was Jin Guangshan.
