#with a disclaimer that whether or not someone experiences empathy is NOT correlated to their morality

[aphel1on]

not sure how to phrase this but something i have been ruminating on recently is that xue yang is strangely fragile. obviously he is also incredibly resilient. he survived, and continues to survive, impossible things. he has a million barriers between himself and the world, but none of this actually matters when it comes to what he feels. everything is personal to him. everything pierces straight through all that armor and goes right to his battered heart, the heart that no one else believes he has. that even he is not fully cognizant of. the world strikes and strikes and strikes and so he strikes and strikes and strikes back, even (especially) when the wound is something other people would not think worthy of retribution.

xue yang would never realize this- would be outraged at the concept of it- but the way everything, everything is something to rally a defense against is in itself a form of fragility. he does not know how to let go of things, or let them pass him by. passivity is death. so he is ruthlessly cruel and violent. he projects himself as a lunatic untouchable by anything you might possibly do to him, and on some level he even believes this. but in actuality he is one raw emotional wound. he never learned to separate himself from his emotions, much less process them. the volatility is not so much insanity as it is the constant lashing out of an animal in a trap, and the trap is the world, and the trap is himself, and he is never going to get out. and like so much else, this pain is just part of the background radiation of his life. it hardly registers. to be able to register the hurt, you would have to be able to register a time in which you were not hurt.

i feel like it is a fragility that could blossom into such tenderness, given exactly the right set of circumstances. how at the very first touch of softness in his life he fell into a domesticity from which he never recovered. how much was there, still, to be salvaged from the cruelty. on some level i am always thinking about the little apple bunnies. about the meal for daozhang and the straw in a-qing's bed.

it was too little, too late. it shattered like glass when the world intruded back in. but the tenderness was there. no one, least of all xue yang, knows what might have happened had it been unearthed in him any sooner.

#he is easy to hurt. this is a fact. it is also anathema to his own self conception as well as the model of him in anyone elses minds. #xue yang #yi city #mdzs #aphelion.txt #xy #Contact is crisis; every touch is a modified blow #<- xycore anne carson quote. if you even care #meta #i guess? idk #it is always character analysis hour in my head #with a disclaimer that whether or not someone experiences empathy is NOT correlated to their morality #i dont think its necessarily that xy is incapable of empathy it's that any empathy that might exist in him is deeply deeply repressed #bc he views it as a death warrant. he (at every moment in his head and really quite often in reality) is on trial for his life #and it would be suicidal to give a shit about anyone who is not him. #especially since he knows- down to his bones- that no one is ever going to give a shit about him EXCEPT FOR him #the one chance he ever got to escape this cycle of brutality came with an expiration date built in by consequence of his past atrocities #and he only first started to comprehend anything about his own emotions after it was all already irrevocably fucked #in canon he is doomed. in fandom i am always picking him up and putting him somewhere kinder #shakes you by the shoulders do you understand what he does to me. do you. do you #if you tell me im excusing his crimes i will kill you w my lazer beam. #this isnt ABOUT THAT. this is ME BEING UNHINGED ABT HIS PSYCHOLOGY in a moral vaccuum. #i'm not saying 'hes sensitive uwu' but like i kind of am. unfortunately it mostly just motivates him to murder people #OH and when i connect the fragility to the tenderness i dont mean that i believe hes like. secretly soft #i mean that being as he is so deeply impacted by people's slights against him. he is just as deeply impacted by people's kindnesses #and he's not incapable of reciprocating it. he is INCREDIBLY fucking bad at it. but not incapable #ok i have to post this before i feel compelled to ramble any longer in the tags. jesus #got consumed by my a-yang feelings on a sunday morning sorry #not sure why i worded it as 'continues to survive' other than a constant subconscious denial that xue yang is dead