#that said: this fun feature of Empathy is muddled by A-Qing's Empathy flashbacks

[poorlittleyaoyao]

ruminating on ur tags about empathy being a flawed primary source bc i love that so much. i think empathy shouldn't be considered a good primary source for anything other than the general gist of events that took place. eye witness testimony is one of the most inaccurate ways of providing evidence, if not THE most inaccurae . Not even out of malicious lying, but just how unreliable memories actually are. Especially tinted with nostalgia or other strong emotions!

Yes, yes, exactly this! One of the reasons I love CQL is that they take full advantage of the change in storytelling format to break away from WWX's limited POV and show us what the other characters are experiencing, and one of the most interesting choices to me is their decision to make NMJ's Empathy flashbacks clearly unreliable. While they do show us additional content that we hadn't seen previously (ex: the confrontation on the Jinlintai stairs, the continuation of the 3zun scene in Nightless City after MY kneels), they also show us versions of events that are just straight-up not what we saw happen in real time. @xiyao-feels has detailed write-ups and side-by-side video comparisons of the scenes we see twice that are worth a look.

And yeah, as you said, NMJ's bias doesn't make him a lying liar who can't be trusted at all. The events in question happened over a decade ago and all of them elicited intense, complicated, often-unpleasant emotions. Besides, while his CQL self is more intact than his MDZS self both spiritually and physically, he's still a dead body choked with resentment when WWX encounters him. Of course his cognition isn't crystal-clear and perfectly objective! That set of scenes lives in my mind rent-free because it tells us as much about NMJ as it does about JGY, and there is sooooo much to unpack about da-ge's experiences and the mark they left on him.

#that said: this fun feature of Empathy is muddled by A-Qing's Empathy flashbacks #which ARE framed as What Definitely For Sure Happened bc we don't have anything to compare them to #nor do we have any reason to doubt A-Qing since she exists in CQL to spectate the Yi City drama on the audience's behalf #(rare instance of a female character who had MORE agency/personality/importance in the novel) #whereas NMJ and JGY and their convoluted divorce have been recurring secondary fixtures in the story and we know they both have issues