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xiyao-feels · 3 years

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Part Four: My thoughts on the effects of these changes on our interpretations of the characters, and some miscellaneous final notes

Intro - Pt 1 - Pt 2 - Pt 3 - Pt 4

Okay, so. That's a list of changes. What kind of effect does it actually have on our interpretation of the characters?

For JGY, it's perhaps more subtle than you'd think. The complaint from JGY stans about FJ I heard most often, prior to watching it, was that JGY involves NHS in his brother's killing—whereas in MDZS, as shown, if anything he functions as NHS' protector. This is definitely obnoxious, but to my eye the worst changes are the perhaps more subtle ones. The JGY of FJ is significantly different from the JGY of MDZS and CQL in two ways: first, he has more options available, and second, without ever making an explicit claim, the text nevertheless sends the strong message that he is /not actually in danger from NMJ/.

What do I mean about more options? To begin with, he teaches NHS the corrupted SoC. This carries some risk of LXC finding out, and a much greater risk of NHS finding out—as, indeed, he does. I don't see how this could plausibly be a risk worth taking for JGY; the narrative's insistence suggests either that he has some way to mitigate that risk, or that he's secure enough he can afford to be so careless. His ability to achieve such strong, immediate affects via musical cultivation, despite his weak cultivation level, adds to the general sense that FJ JGY is much less constrained than MDZS or CQL JGY, as does JGS' complete absence from the narrative; it would be easy to forget that JGY is under any social/political pressure at all, even though this is a constant theme in NMJ and JGY's confrontations in MDZS and CQL, and the pressure and danger from JGS specifically is central to their confrontation at the stairs. The lack of any hint of or history of disrespect to LFZ from the Nie men, given what we see of their interaction in CQL, is yet another example of FJ ignoring the constraints JGY actually has to work with.

And, of course, FJ suggests that he has the option to actually cure NMJ, when the fact that he doesn't is in my opinion central to the morality of the decision, to understanding JGY's character, and indeed to many of the themes of the text. (In fact as a friend pointed out to me it suggests that NHS or indeed anyone could learn the music to cure him, although FJ does not seem to realize the implications of this itself.)

This ties in with point two: that JGY is not actually in danger from NMJ. We never see NMJ attack him—NMJ's violence is reserved for other people. Furthermore, we see him (and later NHS) stop NMJ's violence by the quick application of the uncorrupted SoC; this includes, as I've mentioned in previous sections, a scene where JGY protects NHS from NMJ's anger via cultivation, while in the nearest MDZS scene JGY protects NHS from NMJ's anger very explicitly by being a more appealing target. Watching FJ, it would be very difficult to understand how much danger JGY was actually in, and how much he was a target of NMJ's violence.

Even in CQL, NMJ tries to kill JGY at the stairs, drawing his sabre on him after the stairs kick—and even that first attempted blow, before they exchange words outside, could have caused JGY serious damage. In MDZS, after the stairs—where NMJ would very likely have succeeded in killing JGY if LXC hadn't intervened—though WWX admires JGY's skill in finding the right words to convince NMJ to "give him another chance," JGY is only able to do this by promising he'll do something that would probably get him killed, and then promising NMJ that he can kill JGY if he doesn't do it. Moreover, NMJ ends his own life by kicking down a door to kill JGY on the spot, because he did not like the way he was talking about NMJ to LXC. This is a very, very far cry from anything presented in FJ.

The idea that JGY could actually cure NMJ goes to this as well. NMJ is as violent to JGY as he is because of the sabre curse; JGY's choices are endure this, and hope to survive, or...kill him quicker, and hope to survive. He doesn't actually have a choice that involves not being subject to NMJ's violence. Ignoring this fundamentally changes JGY's character, who is so defined by the constraints under which he suffers, and indeed by the lack of physical security he has until he becomes Jin-zongzhu.

What then about NMJ's character? Honestly I don't even have the words for this; it's a profound insult to his original character. The thing is, it's not just that NMJ doesn't doubt the righteousness of Nie cultivation practices, although he very much does not. It's that NMJ would never do something he secretly thought was unrighteous, never mind /shape his life around it/. If he believed something wasn't righteous, he simply wouldn't do it. This is literally the heart of his conflict with JGY, and it repeats throughout the text again and again.

Further, and less flattering to NMJ: NMJ is absolutely convinced of the righteousness of his own judgement. It's not just that he wouldn't do something he thought in his heart wasn't righteous; he's never the kind of torn he is shown to be in FJ, and he never doubts his own judgement. When NHS challenges him here on whether he's qualified to decide the fate of evildoers, who are after all still evil, part of him clearly thinks NHS has a point. But NMJ absolutely, one hundred percent believes in his right to play—if you'll pardon the phrase—judge, jury, and executioner. It's not just JGY, although it very much is, also, JGY; at no point does he seem to believe anything but that he has the absolute right to kill JGY if he decides to. Indeed, some of his worst violence to JGY is a result of JGY challenging his assertions of righteousness, at the stairs. We see it with XY, both in MDZS and arguably even more clearly in CQL as well: in episode 10 he instantly decides that XY should be executed, and is about to carry out that execution when WWX intervenes—and then he's offended about WWX's intervention! The only reason he doesn't carry out the execution on the spot is MY's argument that keeping XY alive can be used to harm the Wen. And, of course, we see it with his attitude to WQ and WN, although people are so often determined to ignore this. Please note that he argues /against/ JC and LXC's defense of them, both in MDZS and in CQL; if ever there was a single incident that could have changed at all how things came out, it would be the very respected sect leader Nie, whose sect is after the Jin the strongest surviving sect post-Sunshot, speaking out in their defense at the conference convened to determine what to do about the fact that WWX just made off with them.

Now, thematically, I think part of the point of his character is that his inflexibility is...well, inflexible; his condemnation of people who are in bad positions does more harm than good. Returning to JGY for a moment, I also think it's telling that NMJ doesn't take effective action to accomplish his goals re: XY. This isn't even just because JGY killed him—if he had actually killed JGY instead, then he would have found quite suddenly that he'd killed Lianfang-zun, the war hero who killed WRH, his own sworn brother, JGS' beloved son, etc etc etc. It would not have gone well for him. Part of the point is that—in a corrupt system, acting as though the system isn't corrupt will itself lead to injustice. Making NMJ himself knowingly complicit in the corruption of that system rather defeats that point.

I am also, I admit, /extremely/ annoyed that /he/ is offered the understanding that he had no choice because of his position, while JGY's difficulties are ignored, and when a) although from what we see in MDZS it would certainly have been quite difficult, he did actually have a choice b) the movie strongly suggests (with the ready willingness of the Nie men to follow him when he rejects the ancestral method of balancing, their respect for sabre-weak NHS, and the lack of opposition from any other area) that it would not, actually, have been that difficult, socially speaking.

I think in terms of the effects this has on people's interpretations of JGY, probably this makes them think that NMJ at the stairs rejects the specifics of JGY's argument, and contributes to a general lack of engagement with the substance of what JGY is actually saying (and the lack of substance of NMJ's reply). People mostly ignore NMJ's similar stance towards WQ, so I suspect this doesn't have much effect there; I have on occasion seen the claim that he was right to condemn her as well, but I mostly don't think it was coming from an FJ-inspired place.

When it comes to NHS…mmm. As I said, CQL makes him less amoral at the beginning, although it doesn't prevent his total—I'm not even sure you can say 'carelessness towards collateral damage' in the current timeline when from his perspective collateral damage would be a good thing, since it would be blamed on JGY. Not to mention the way he treats QS, what he's implied to do with MS' body... I suspect that FJ!NHS is where you get man-of-the-people NHS, who would /totally/ have built those watchtowers instead of that awful JGY if that awful JGY hadn't cruelly murdered his brother because a) he's Evil and/or b) he's ambitious (and also evil), and what other considerations could there possibly be?

To which I can only say: fucking spare me. I suspect the characterization here of NHS and of the Nie men contributes generally to fandom's idea of a much more gentle and progressive cultivation world than either MDZS or CQL supports.

In summation: FJ is, considered as providing any kind of interpretive light on CQL and/or MDZS characters, a terrible movie. If you are not fully familiar with the relevant portions of MDZS, I don't see how you could come away from this without absorbing significant falsehoods. Although I certainly can't and indeed don't wish to tell anyone what they should or should not consider canon, I do think it's important to know that incorporating FJ into your personal canon is going to result in an extremely different characters than not doing so, and if you want to argue with CQL or MDZS fans about characters' characterizations based on FJ, it's not going to be a very productive discussion for anyone involved.

A few miscellaneous notes:

-The change in the narrative of NMJ's violence extends beyond the replacement of his primary target. In fact, there are three things in particular I want to pull out.

First, and despite his near assault of NHS, FJ!NMJ is portrayed as much less...well, scary, than MDZS NMJ, and even to some extent CQL NMJ. NMJ habitually takes out his anger in undirected violence towards objects—the boulder when he hears his men talking about MY, the boulder(/pillar in CQL) after MY kills WRH, the door he kicks open to kill JGY before he qi-deviates, the table he cracks in his anger around NHS delighting in fans rather than knowing where he sabre is; even, though here at least it is a clear deliberate choice, his burning of NHS' things. In FJ—well, I don't want to say there's none of that, he does at least break NHS' paintbrush and I could be misremembering other things, but it certainly seems a lot less prevalent. And more than that, people simply don't react to him as terrifying! In FJ, NHS after NMJ /nearly hits him/ is still a lot less scared of NMJ's anger than NHS is in this parallel scene in MDZS, where he does not (ch 49):

One day, the moment he returned to the main hall of the Unclean Realm, he saw about a dozen folding fans, all lined in gold, flattened out one next to the other in front of Nie HuaiSang, who was touching them tenderly, mumbling as he compared the inscriptions written on each one. Immediately, veins protruded from Nie MingJue’s forehead, “Nie HuaiSang!”

Nie HuaiSang fell at once.

He really did fall to his knees from the terror. He only staggered up after he finished kneeling, “B-b-b-brother.”

Nie MingJue, “Where is your saber?”

Nie HuaiSang cowered, “In… in my room. No, in the school grounds. No, let me… think…”

Wei WuXian could feel that Nie MingJue almost wanted to hack him dead right there, “You bring a dozen fans with you wherever you go, yet you don’t even know where your own saber is?!”

Nie HuaiSang hurried, “I’ll go find it right now!”

Nie MingJue, “There’s no need! Even if you find it you won’t get anything out of it. Go burn all of these!”

All of the color drained out of Nie HuaiSang’s face. He rushed to pull all of the fans into his arms, pleading, “No, Brother! All of these were given to me!”

Nie MingJue slammed his palm onto a table, causing it to crack, “Who did? Tell them to scurry out here right now!”

Even though he nearly hits NHS, even though he actually kills many of his own men, he is simply not presented as nearly as scary.

Second, and not unrelatedly, in FJ the narrative focus of the consequence of NMJ's violence is on his own pain at his men's death, and NHS' pain at seeing him kill them. In MDZS, this is more complicated. We see, of course, his violence to JGY, and the consequences to JGY of that violence; at the stairs, for example, kicking JGY down the stairs he gives him another head wound to add to the one Madam Jin gave him. Moreover, his increasing rage actually /damages/ his relationship with NHS. We see this notably in NHS' reaction to NMJ burning his things (ch 49):

Nie HuaiSang’s eyes brimmed red. He didn’t even make a sound. Jin GuangYao added, “It’s alright even if the things are gone. Next time I can find you more…”

Nie MingJue interrupted, his words like ice, “I’ll burn them each time he brings them back into this sect.”

Anger and hatred suddenly flashed across Nie HuaiSang’s face. He threw his saber onto the ground and yelled, “Then burn them!!!”

Jin GuangYao quickly stopped him, “HuaiSang! Your brother is still angry. Don’t…”

Nie HuaiSang roared at Nie MingJue, “Saber, saber, saber! Who the fuck wants to practice the damn thing?! So what if I want to be a good-for-nothing?! Whoever that wants to can be the sect leader! I can’t learn it means I can’t learn it and I don’t like it means I don’t like it! What’s the use of forcing me?!”

He then runs off the field and locks himself in his rooms, not even letting anyone in to bring him medicine. The next we hear about NHS is in the next scene, not two months later, when LXC describes NMJ's recent troubles (ch 50): "These past few days, he has been deeply troubled by the saber spirit, and HuaiSang has argued with him again." Now, they clearly continue to love each other, and NHS is clearly devastated by NMJ's death; but in the months leading up to NMJ's death, their relationship was unusually strained, not closer than ever.

Thirdly, I think the narrative ends up distorting the way NMJ's sabre rages work. Not completely—the example where he almost punches NHS is actually a pretty good example—but consider his final violence to his men. He kills them, /not/ because in his rage he feels that killing them would be righteous punishment for whatever they have done, but because he hallucinates that they are WRH's puppets. But I don't believe we see NMJ hallucinate anything until he actually qi-deviates—at which point he hallucinates that they are /JGY/, and while in CQL at least JGY has confessed to the corrupted music before he starts hallucinating JGYs, in MDZS his anger is, again, about how JGY was talking about him to LXC. When NMJ is violent to people under the effects of the sabre curse, it is because he is angry, and in his anger that violence feels reasonable. There is not as far as I can tell anything that suggests that his sabre-affected rages feel differently from the inside than his more regular rages—nor do we ever see him apologize for the harm he does in his rages, precisely because, to him, his rage and hence his subsequent violence feel like entirely appropriate responses to the situation. I think this goes to point two, above; it would be harder to induce sympathy for NMJ if, say, he killed his men because they were challenging him, and at no point acknowledged he has been wrong to do so.

-You could probably do something interesting here with considering this movie as splitting JGY's character between NMJ (the man who makes difficult decisions due to his political position), NHS (the weak but skilled cultivator), and NZH (the loyal and extremely competent subordinate), even as it ignores the much greater difficulty of JGY's position, that his weakness is because he lacked NHS' opportunities and his skill obtained despite lacking them, that unlike FJ NMJ he actually does need to make those difficult decisions to achieve his goals and does indeed achieve them, etc. This is left as an exercise to the reader.

-I greatly resent the clear and extensive visual parallels between NHS' bow to JGY, at the end of the film, and MY's bow to JGS after JGS kicks him down the Jinlintai stairs, and the way the similarity is taken as indicating parallels beyond the visual. This is, first, because their positions are not at all the same. I am certainly not saying NHS' position was in any way comfortable or good; nevertheless, he is at that moment a clan leader who is surrounded by men who, from the film, would not hesitate to die at his command. There is not really anything about the presentation of the Nie men in FJ that suggests that if NHS went outside that room with JGY and announced to them that JGY had killed NMJ and they should attack him now, his men would do anything other than try to kill JGY immediately at his command. This was, needless to say, very much not the position of the young teenager MY, far from home, injured, humiliated, and made a public joke; perhaps more subtle is that NHS' position at NMJ's death, though he is politically weak and though he has just suffered a devastating loss, is still more secure than /JGY's/ at the same, as JGY—far from being a clan leader with the absolute obedience of his men—is not even JGS' acknowledged heir. Indeed, in many ways the focus of NHS' enmity on /JGY/, rather than JGS who commands him, is an extension of NMJ's focus on JGY rather than JGS when it comes to achieving XY's execution, and in both cases extremely advantageous to JGS. Certainly NMJ would not have been able to get away with harassing Zixuan as he does JGY on the matter of XY; likewise, JGS would never have risked Zixuan in an attempt to kill NMJ as he does JGY. The advantage of JGY as assassin is that if he kills NMJ, JGS wins; if NMJ kills him, JGS also wins (an incalculable political advantage); and if he is caught, his background makes him both easily severable and an ideal scapegoat. Also returning to framing of the bow—and while this is much more trivial it is a recurring petty imitation—I have seen matched gifsets suggesting that JGY was also swearing revenge on JGS at this moment.

-The last words JGY says to NHS are "Restrain your grief;" in English of course this comes across as extremely insensitive, but see drwcn's post for some cultural context; it's actually a common expression of condolences.

-I believe this is whence the idea that MY's headpiece in CQL used to be NHS', because we see kid NHS wearing it in the flashbacks; let us say, if you don't feel the need to accept FJ as canon, I don't think you need to accept that, either.

#fj negativity #long meta #more than one tag could contain #anger burned in his heart #we can't change places

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