Antis will be like “Jiang Cheng never viewed Wei Wuxian as family, he was treated like a servant!!! 😠😠😠” but like… if I showed up day-drunk to work, stopped performing my basic duties, kept skipping out when the most support was needed rebuilding, escalated fights during diplomatic events, and refused to tell anyone why I’d started behaving like this, I would definitely get fired. But instead Wei Wuxian has to quiet quit and then actually quit when even that doesn’t work, because as far as we can tell Jiang Cheng would've let him stay as first disciple forever no matter what. So like, if Jiang Cheng thinks of himself as just Wei Wuxian's boss, he does a pretty bad job of treating Wei Wuxian as just an employee.

Are there complicated class dynamics and internal senses of responsibility and debt and duty and obligation fucking both of them up? Absolutely. But Wei Wuxian is definitely not just a servant or a debtor, it’s much, much messier and more complicated than that--which is kind of the problem.