big stretch

omg francesca thank u for the nice tags under the sangchengsu set, especially the garden bit had me !!!! im very interested in hearing your thoughts if you'd like to share at some point 👀📝 also im sorry to disappoint perhaps but the shot of nhs is not from that episode even so i had to look around but what else is new with this show... anyways again thank u for the support of my new agenda 🤍

oh you got me good with that nie huaisang shot! the look he gives in that gif is just so pointed and sharp, i really thought it was him at the banquet. and of course, i'm always ready to gush about your work, you know (or at least i hope you do!) that i love everything you do. you always choose such good moments and your coloring makes my eyes go all sparkly_heart_emoji

i don't really have many coherent thoughts about them but your set definitely sparked some interest in the idea of how powerful these three working together might have been. if nie huaisang had let himself trust someone then i can see him trusting these two? jiang cheng because [gestures vaguely] and then qin su because well, i think that to tell her the truth in that way he must have known her well enough to predict that she wouldn't have tried to help jin guangyao. that she would have immediately wanted nothing to do with him. and i wish she had survived. i wish she'd could have seen her son get justice/revenge (depending on how you see it lmao)

the reason why these three could work so well is because they all seem to be so ruthless. qin su's actress does so much with her expressions despite only having a handful of scenes. the looks she sends jin guangyao after she knows the truth & in the treasure room speak of that sharpness i spoke of in the tags of your post, that's just the kind of person she comes off as. kind but not a pushover. slightly like jiang yanli in that sense, where i can see her being perfectly at ease making polite conversation and even willing to bite her tongue here and there for propriety’s sake, but able and willing to speak up when needed. and i realize this is all conjecture but i still believe that the acting choices from the actress that played her have given us a lot to work with given the limited amount of time she had to show us this character.

anyway i’m rambling but uh!! i don’t know, i feel like you’re really onto something here. and it’s so funny to me that, if they had been plotting together from the start, jiang cheng might have been the one with the least amount of shit against jin guangyao (given that everything he has against him came to light after?) i think he’d obviously want justice for jin rusong and nie mingjue but these things are at least once removed from him, if that makes sense? it’s much, much more personal for nie huaisang and qin su and, again, that’s just so amusing to me to consider. he’s just along for the ride, a good way to burn off some of his anger issues or something lmao

but also jumping off of that, another thing that i find interesting is that these are also three people that never really looked down on jin guangyao?? qin su pursued him when his standing in the jin sect/the cultivation world was shaky at best; nie huaisang genuinely cared for/trusted him; and jiang cheng, while probably more neutral or indifferent about him, never really had an issue with his background? he uses it as ammo during the guanyin temple scenes but that’s only after the guy’s crimes have been exposed and he threatened jiang cheng’s family (i’m not condoning it but also, i’ll be honest, to me at that point it felt more like a ‘your mama’ joke/diss than, like, an actual insult to his mother? again, he could have said something else but jiang cheng will go for the low blow he’s not above that. we know he’s an asshole <3)

idk there’s just something to be said about how in the end those he ends up hurting the most are those who had no issues with him. just thinking about the people at the gunayin temple confrontation.... like not a single one of them had anything against jin guangyao before he made them turn against him, one way or another. and it ranges from people simply being indifferent/not giving a shit/do whatever the fuck you want jin guangyao (jiang cheng, lan wangji, wei wuxian) to people who genuinely cared for him (nie huaisang, lan xichen - and of course qin su, but unfortunately she was tied up and didn’t get to participate to the guanyin temple family reunion). and so there is this layer to his downfall as well, where you wonder if he realized that. you wonder if he had a moment looking around, beyond lan xichen, or before they even got at that point, where he thought “did i have to go this far?”

but we’re not here for that. we’re here for qin su, nie huaisang, and jiang cheng. powerful triumvirate. peak head/heart/hands dynamic.

(wait, shit!! didn’t even mention the whole garden thing in all of this but aaaaah, okay really, it was more of a comment on the general color palette of the gifset and the way the character’s own aesthetic seem to form a very beautiful and cohesive mix. the green/purple/pink/gold/grey idk it was very pleasing to look at)