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sunderwight · 5 months

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disciple luo binghe, running errands for his shizun one day, somehow manages to be in the exact wrong (right) place at the exact wrong (right) time and catches shang qinghua meeting with mobei jun

in order to keep luo binghe from tattling right away, shang qinghua dissembles in a panic and claims that his clandestine meetings with mobei jun are happening because they're lovers and definitely not because shang qinghua is betraying the sect and handing their secrets over to demons in order to save his own hide. when that almost doesn't work, he also tells luo binghe that he knows he's part demon, and that if luo binghe rats him out then shang qinghua will take him down with him. mutually assured destruction

it works, and even though luo binghe threatens him quite a bit (jeez kid calm down, you might be the almighty protagonist but also you're like sixteen) he agrees to keep shang qinghua's fraternizing a secret. but if ANYTHING BAD should happen to the sect or especially to luo binghe's shizun because of this, luo binghe will take shang qinghua down even if it does ruin his life too

shang qinghua, now sweating even more bullets about the impending immortal alliance conference: cool! cool cool cool sounds great cool yeah

so shang qinghua can add "being blackmailed by the punk ass brat I sort of created" to his list of stress-inducing woes. which gets even worse when luo binghe keeps somehow sensing if mobei jun is around for more than a couple hours and showing up, and picking fights with him?? kind of??

wtf has the protagonist been taking tips from liu qingge or something...?

shang qinghua feels like he's gonna have a heart attack when mobei jun just snorts and tosses luo binghe by the scruff like he's an annoying yappy dog

mobei jun actually knows what's up though. teenage half-demon who has never been around his own kind has become spoiled by the lack of competition on this front, and now his hackles are all up because he wants to claim the whole mountain range as his territory, and his instincts are screaming at him to challenge mobei jun about it so that they can decide who is actually top dog. since mobei jun could easily kill him, especially with his blood sealed, and has been clawing rocks and pissing on trees along the borders of an ding peak since before luo binghe was born, he's clearly got seniority here

and since qinghua doesn't want mobei jun to just kill the little shit (fair enough -- that sealed bloodline does look kind of interesting) that means it's up to mobei jun to teach him how to do things like interact with other demons without making a complete fool of himself. lesson one: what to do when you challenge someone out of your league and they win, assuming they don't just kill you

so luo binghe reluctantly gains another demon tutor

meng mo actually approves. he's been out of the loop on demon high society for a long time, and has lacked a body for long enough too that he's forgotten a lot of the particulars of socializing. it'll be good for luo binghe to pick up some manners that aren't just silly human tea ceremonies and things. maybe he'll start addressing meng mo more respectfully for a change!

(lol no)

luo binghe is partly like "I don't need to learn demon social skills since I'm spending the rest of my life as a disciple of qing jing peak" but partly like, well, if shizun knew about this and didn't freak out about it, he'd probably say that knowledge is power and learning how to handle politics and diplomacy of all kinds is important. and despite himself luo binghe is also interested, because this is a whole perspective on his own nature that he's never really gotten advice about

also, mobei jun is the lover of shang qinghua? mobei jun is a demon who successfully seduced a cang qiong peak lord? does he have any advice about that?

(he does -- all of it very bad)

anyway all of this sort of fucks up the immortal alliance conference developments really good, so the system kind of gives up and settles on some other big transformative achievements that luo binghe has to complete in order to be suitably heroic

but shen qingqiu has no idea and so the reprieve just seems to come out of nowhere until several years later, when he walks in on luo binghe with his claws out and huadian gleaming in the company the demon king of the northern desert, the two of them playing weiqi or something while they wait for shang qinghua to get back from some random logistics crisis he had to rush off to

shen qingqiu: ...?!?

luo binghe, panicking: wait shizun I can explain it's not what it looks like SHIZUN I SWEAR I WAS GOING TO TELL YOU PLEASE DON'T BE MAD--!

shen qingqiu: all this time I thought you were sneaking out to meet a girl, and this was what you were doing instead?!

luo binghe: WHAT?? shizun no I'd never do that I swear I don't even like girls!

shen qingqiu: that's not -- wait what do you mean you don't even like girls?!

mobei jun, unperturbed and still focused on the weiqi board: he's gay

#svsss #scum villain's self saving system #bingqiu #moshang #most anticlimactic reveal of all time #luo binghe had several plans for how to do it but he kept chickening out at the last minute #so now he's gonna get all his secrets randomly outed by a bored mobei jun who is mad at losing a board game #while sqq's brain keeps stopping and restarting trying to figure out what to freak out about first #lbh: it's the demon thing oh no he's upset about the demon thing #sqq: already knew the demon thing and is circling the drain around 'gay' and 'mobei jun is here' instead #sqq: wait is the girl he's been meeting MOBEI JUN???

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wutheringskies · 7 months

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Lan-Furen's Case and Lan Zhan

A couple of days ago I came across an excellent meta on Lan Xichen over how by not "wanting to know" who is in the right and who is in the wrong, he is able to maintain a schrodinger's cat syndrome and assume the best of everyone. I thought more about what that then meant for Lan Wangji who visited his mother publicly every month.

Lan Wangji is an extremely righteous character. He has a temper against those that he deems as unrighteous. He can absolutely not take it if someone is using their privilege to oppress others; or if, someone is killing innocents for baseless, useless reasons.

Someone like Lan Wangji would not continue loving a person even if they act for their own gains, petty revenge or selfishly. Simply stating, he can't continue loving a person who has left the road of righteousness.

In his mother's case, it doesn't seem as if bigger forces (such as sect politics) were involved; but it was something personal. We do not know what that something was, thus we cannot judge. Thus, he cannot judge.

I believe his coming over to the Gentian House every month shows perhaps the most important characteristic of his:

Lan WangJi slowly shook his head, “One should not comment without understanding the whole picture.”

I find Lan Wangji and Nie Mingjue's insistence upon their sense of justice similar. Even in dire situations, where it seems stupid to act upon your sense of justice, when everyone around you is acting unjustly, they will insist - Lan Wangji stuck in a cave, injured, protecting someone who is being harassed by those who hold power, hunted down by enemies who are much higher on the social ladder, own much more money, and are many in numbers, despite knowing, inevitably it may cause his own demise and fall. Yet, he doesn't care about that. This happens twice. That's his sense of righteousness and justice. Similarly, Nie Mingjue is ready to kill himself as punishment for killing someone who saved him, yet he must kill Guangyao for killing his clansmen and stuff (so much killing with this guy.)

But Lan Wangji is better, as his justice is embedded with empathy, patience and true efforts to understand the entire story before placing his judgement. He's not free from making false judgements, and societal judgement does affect him.

But, he's not holding to any particular judgement to the ends of his life. He is willing to accept new facts and reform his opinion, reframe his thoughts. He's like that guy on twitter who tweeted something tone-deaf in 2012, but is completely against that in 2023, as now he has new information.

So, Lan Wangji doesn't incriminate people. He doesn't hold personal grudges. He is prone to hatred, jealousy and the stuff - that is what makes him human. But he rarely acts upon it, preferring to remove himself from the situation.

He is such a person.

So, it cannot be known whether the glass was filled and then emptied, or whether it was empty and then it was filled; what I mean is we can't judge from just a half-full/half-empty glass of what the context was; similarly, we can't judge from just the other's actions and situations alone of what the intention, purpose, reasoning, etc was. We can't judge evil or bad that easily, and with all those who were involved in Madam Lan's case - all their souls dispersed, and Lan Qiren being Lan Qiren, Lan Wangji can only judge on what he knows.

What he knows is that his mother was a lovely woman and he was happy to see her; so he visits her still. He is not accepting her actions, or incriminating them, as she is not there to defend herself or to accuse others. He doesn't know if the clan was wrong or if his mother was. I believe, with Lan Wangji's character, that he's strong enough to face the actions of those who he loves.

It’d be inconvenient for him to be more specific, such as Lan XiChen or Lan QiRen.

Lan WangJi answered assuredly, “No.”

Wei WuXian was quite confident in Lan WangJi’s answer. To him, Lan WangJi wasn’t the kind of person who’d hide or run away from the truth. If he denied it, that meant it must have been wrong. He didn’t like to lie, either. In Wei WuXian’s opinion, if someone asked Lan WangJi to lie, he’d rather silence himself and not talk at all. Thus, Wei WuXian immediately excluded the possibility of the gravedigger being these two.

So, this. If Lan Wangji felt any of Wei Wuxian's actions were uncalled for, or unrighteous and cruel, he wouldn't have loved him. But, even by the logic of Great Grudges, Wei Wuxian had every right to kill the Wens (the SSC ones).

But that's beyond the point. The point is that Lan Wangji is stuck in a situation where he can't cast judgment, but still, his actions reflect what he knows and has gathered first-hand; what his actions show is pure love, patience, a strong, but sensitive heart waiting for another chance to understand the truth, yet knowing and accepting that it will never come, and being at peace with that.

#Lan Zhan meta #Lan Wangji meta #Lan Wangji #Lan Zhan #My meta #My essays #Mdzs #Mo dao Zu Shi #The Untamed #mdzs meta #Lan Xichen #Nie Mingjue #Wei Wuxian

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veliseraptor · 1 year

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Remembering my first introduction to Xue Yang and thinking about how methodical he seemed to me vs fanon version that is basically evil Wei Wuxian on speed.

No really you're so right he's normally calm and methodical. Just sometimes the universe tells him he fucked up and he's like "would you say that if I did this? *makes an utterly insane choice*"

ohhh this is something I have Thoughts on for sure. don't get me wrong! I think xue yang does have manic periods and will get into a mode where he's not sleeping for three days because he has a project to work on and sleep is boring, a-yao, leave me alone. but I think the degree to which xue yang is - prior to xiao xingchen's death - actually as unhinged as he's sometimes painted is...it's not pretending but it is playing up an aspect of his personality to make people uncomfortable or nervous or scared, both because it's how he makes damn sure he's not going to be forgotten or ignored (have talked about that elsewhere) and because it's what people expect from him, so why not.

(it also means people underestimate him and while I think xue yang has a kind of complicated relationship with that it is useful sometimes.)

I do think a solid 30% of xue yang's behavior is looking at what people expect from him, going "oh you are like a little baby. watch this" and doing worse. i.e. if people are going to assume he's basically a wild animal then he's going to be the meanest wild animal they've ever seen. I think the fact that he settles relatively easily into playing a role where that's very much not the case, where nobody is looking at him like that (or at least nobody who is in a position to look down on him, qingqing is too short), is somewhat indicative.

he has more control over himself and his behavior than most people realize; I think the perception (both in universe and in fandom) is that he's sort of a creature of id, driven purely by impulse and almost instinctual reaction, and I don't think that's actually accurate to what we see of him most of the time. he's certainly very clever, and good enough at what he does to attract the attention of powerful people. jin guangshan finds him valuable enough to alienate and anger another sect leader about it. give Xue Yang a puzzle and if he's interested he'll sit down and pick at it until he figures it out, unless it's too easy, then it's just boring.

it's also notable to me that when xue yang is angry at someone, he doesn't actually act immediately. he's very willing to wait and plan to figure out how to really twist the knife in someone. the choice to go after song lan's temple, and song lan himself, rather than directly targeting xiao xingchen, might be a practical one, but it's also a very deliberate and targeted attack that's aimed right at xiao xingchen's stated purpose: "you say you're here to protect people? look, you can't even protect your friend and his temple, and now they've suffered because of you." that's not, like, an immediate and explosive reaction, it's a very purposeful act that has thought and planning behind it.

now, does xue yang make impulsive snap decisions, frequently involving violence? sure. but the most notable of those is, I would argue, at the two absolute nadir moments of xue yang's life. the first one being when xiao xingchen finds out who he is and vehemently rejects him - xue yang's reaction there feels like much more of an instinctive lashing out, and it's happening because for the first time in his life since he was very young, someone who actually has the ability to hurt his feelings has hurt his feelings and it feels real bad! doesn't like that! so he reacts to make it stop, and then keeps going and pushing until xiao xingchen breaks, and then after that it's pretty clear to me that he sort of shocks back to reality and spends the next eight years going "no, wait, I take it back." or, well, trying.

and then also when he dies. when wei wuxian goads him about what he did to chang ping and the implications thereof regarding xue yang's own feelings of (unnacknowledged, unrecognized) guilt, xue yang absolutely loses it, gets reckless and careless and ultimately it's that, with a-qing's help, which gets him killed.

oh, wait, one other place I think xue yang loses control of himself and acts without really thinking it through, and that's killing a-qing. I have less textual evidence for this (though I don't think it's completely absent), but it's definitely my headcanon.

outside of those moments, though - aka the ones that get really bad - I don't think xue yang is as off the chain as he sort of...gives off the air of being. I don't know that I'd call him calm, but I would say that he has the ability, most of the time, to exercise at least a modicum of self control.

at least, before xiao xingchen's death. frankly, after that I think he does very much lose his mind a little, but, you know. I think that's understandable, under the circumstances.

#conversating #anonymous #holy shit i wrote a lot for this whoops #been a while since xy feelings essay...?#not that long. again whoops #anyway i just have a lot of feelings #she said to no one's surprise #xue yang #lise does meta #...ish #the sad queer cultivators show

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leatherbookmark · 1 year

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Thinking, and like. all previous nie sect leaders qi deviated to death, because that's how the saber cultivation worked: it gradually fucked up their qi and tempers on top of that. and jgy playing the song of turmoil didn't cause nmj's death, it just sped it up. so... what if that's what happened with wrh and nmj's father?

the facts we have (from chapter 49):

wrh called nmj's father, said his saber was quite cool indeed, patted it a couple of times and that was it.

after nmj's father went back, he Was Not Pleased, rather annoyed that wrh called him just for a second then sent him back.

however, nothing was "out of the ordinary".

during a night hunt, his saber suddenly shattered, and in result, he couldn't defend himself against the beast who then injured him heavily.

after nmj took him back to the unclean realm, he couldn't accept this/couldn't get over it/怎么也咽不下这口气/腹に据えかね、悔しさに満ちていた (he was full of anger and frustration)

and his wounds didn't heal.

half a year later, he passed away. "it wasn't clear whether the cause was rage or illness".

later, when wrh and nmj fight, there's this neat little sentence:

愤怒使他陡然之间力大无穷, or, 湧き上げる憤怒が一瞬にして彼に限りなき力を与えた (rage welled up in his chest and immediately gave him a surge of unlimited boundless power)

i don't know much about how powers work in xianxia novels, let alone xianxia-based webnovels, but this sounds to me a bit like the qinghe nie cultivation method kind of uh, fucking sucked.

saber cultivation requires resentful energy of beasts and monsters.

the blade requires more strength and an aggressive fighting style than a regular "honest" sword.

unfortunately, in the process, the sabers start demanding more sacrifice, more anger and more blood -- this is why after their owners' deaths, they still need to be contained.

the more one uses such a saber, the more their qi and temper gets out of control.

it's like an ouroboros. the saber needs 😡 to work. but using saber makes one 😡 as well. both the saber and the user get more powerful thanks to 😡, but by getting more 😡, they get more 😡 (<-- this is not good).

idk, again, i don't know shit, but this looks like demonic cultivation... with one's own self... while alive? 😬

another two things, from chapters 49 and 50: one, nmj doesn't seem to notice that anything is out of order with his behaviour; when lxc points out his mind is in turmoil, he says "no it's not, i know what i'm doing". two: nmj still "hasn't told nhs about the saber spirit". it could mean "about the fact that sabers fuck you up, yknow, that it's a thing", or "that baxia's saber spirit in particular is being rowdy", but if nhs knew about the saber spirits being a thing, he would've done the math, i think. so, i think it's safe to assume that nhs did not know about the saber illness.

i'm talking about this because... they just don't know, huh. nmj's father must have been at least thirtysomething when he died, which means that a, even without a war going on, he's practiced rageloop turbo 3000 for more than half of his life and that probably shows, and b, his sons haven't seen his calmer, non-saberbrained self, because he must have been like 20 when he had them. the nie are just fiery-tempered! the sabers like a fiery-tempered warrior. which, okay, but could nmj tell that his father was, over the years, steadily getting quicker to anger? he has more duties, and besides, having wrh for a neighbour is stressing... no, he couldn't.

and wrh is power-thirsty and unstable, but also clever. he did work it out that the nie cultivators are strictly bonded with their sabers, so like a cat pushing something off the table, he couldn't help himself. he literally patted the blade a couple of times -- i'm assuming it wasn't just that, and that he infused his touch with something -- but it was enough to send this bond spiralling, enough for the saber to shatter. was the beast nmj's father was fighting so strong that its horn stopped his body's regeneration abilities? or was it the damage done to the saber that fucked up his qi and his body's regeneration abilities? LOTS TO THINK ABOUT.

again, my problem is that i don't really know how it all works -- but iirc, while jc doesn't have his sword, he's able to use zidian just fine, meaning that a proper, righteous cultivator's qi isn't tied to their sword. the nie cultivation seems to me like one big clan of people with targets carefully painted on their backs, of time bombs about to explode. there's no way out of this one!

and also like. something something, jgy trying to rise from his place as a sex worker's son -- he can't do it like a normal, high-born cultivator, so he has to use means other deem undignified, cheating, unfair. something something the nie sect founder trying to rise from his place as a butcher... i'm not saying they're the same, jgy honorary nie etc, but -- if you have no resources, then even if you somehow get them... jgy is paranoid, he feels he can't fully trust even the man he considers his closest friend, he's trapped in the way he's perceived by the society. meanwhile, the nie clan is trapped in their own way of cultivation that they can't abandon because you don't just abandon the way of your ancestors, even if you're literally cultivating yourself to death.

cool!!!

anyway

nmj 🤝 nhs : losing yourself in rage and revenge on the person that murdered your family member, except that family member would have died either way, except you realized way way wayyyyy too late, and by the time the murderer is dead you don;t really have anything to be happy about

#shrimp thoughts #i sitted down and thinked with my brian but i don't know if it makes even a square decibel of sense. eh

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fandomside · 4 months

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NiF Rewatch Introduction and Episode One

I am making notes as I rewatch Nirvana in Fire and I thought I would share them with the internet. This is going to be focused on what I find interesting and useful and is not intended to be a comprehensive review. It is also not going to be helpful for people watching NiF for the first time, because I will assume you know who the characters are.

Episode One

Events:

Word gets out that Northern Yan has a new taizu (Crown Prince), who was previously a nobody, and he achieved this after receiving advice from Langya Hall.

Prince Yu is finishing up a tour of Jiangzuo; when he returns he will be promoted.

After surviving an assassination attempt from the Crown Prince (henceforth CP), Prince Yu makes a visit to Langya Hall himself; he and the CP are both told to seek the Qilin Talent Mei Changsu.

MCS is introduced defending a group of people who are fleeing across the borders of his territory; they are the plaintiffs in a legal case involving Duke Qing.

Lin Chen visits MCS's headquarters in Langzhou to see him off.

MCS travels to Jinling with Jingrui and Yujin; when they arrive they meet Nihuang.

Nihuang discusses her marriage tournament with the Emperor.

Names and titles: (I am particularly interested in learning how people are addressed; I have no knowledge of or cultural background with the Chinese language. I am happy to be corrected on anything I get wrong.)

Lin Chen’s title is 'shao ge zhu' (junior hall master)

Prince Yu is addressed as ‘xiangsheng’ at Langya and it’s hilarious. This says a lot about a) the power of Langya Hall and b) the powerlessness of the Imperial authorities with respect to the jianghu. Note that the way NiF uses xiansheng is somewhere in between its historical usage of 'respected teacher' and its modern usage as plain 'Mr'.

MCS is referred to as Jiangzuo Mei-lang, ‘lang’ being a title I don't know much about. His subordinates call him Mei-zongzhu.

Nihuang’s title is ‘junzhu’ (either duchess or princess depending on the translation).

Xia Dong is called ‘daren’.

Costumes and weapons: (this will only be about things that particularly catch my eye)

Ordinary Langya disciples wear brown with black trim.

No one at Langya wears silk except Lin Chen, and his is quite plain.

In the jianghu MCS wears cloth around his topknot with a green/white jade ornament in front. In JInling, of course, he always wears the same pale jade ornament and his hair is up.

Scabbard are attached to saddles while mounted.

Lin Chen carries a fan while at Langzhou.

I had completely forgotten about Lin Chen's ear cuff!

Lin Chen's hair ornament is a sort of round metal thing on the back of his head.

Characters:

The first thing we see Fei Liu do is put a cloak round MCS. The second thing we see him do is kill a guy.

Nihuang gets an awesome introduction.

I have a distinct memory of Prince Yu being made to wait and watch while Lin Chen does his sword practice; clearly that was wrong. The sword practice is just gratuitous wirework for Lin Chen.

Times:

The CP has been CP for 6 years.

It's late autumn; Prince Yu has missed the Mid-Autumn Festival.

Places:

Jiangzuo is a province of Da Liang. There are 14 states or districts within it.

Langya cannot be far from Jiangzuo – Prince Yu goes there as a side trip.

MCS’s rooms at Langzhou are painfully bare.

Jinling has better weather than Langzhou, or close enough to use it as an excuse.

Misc:

The sect next to MCS's Jiangzuo territory has large expensive looking ships on the river. Are they his or are they hired?

#nif #nirvana in fire #langya bang #lyb

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vf-thompson · 7 months

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Book Review: Dionysus in Exile: On the Repression of the Body and Emotion is an Antidote for the Aftermath, Antimatter for the Master Plan, Louder than God's Revolver and Twice as Shiny

"What do you know of Bacchus?"

The question came to me in the dark, when i spent a week in the psych ward at the beginning of 2020, at the dawn of the pandemic. It was time for morning meds, and i was half asleep, and the orderly whispered it into my ear.

That question, once full of mystery, has become something almost threateningly mundane in my own life over the last few years. The knowledge that i am afflicted with Dionysiac madness as described here in Pedraza's text has been an everyday fact of my life for most of my adult life. Dionysiac imagery first began to call me early in my formal higher education, and has slowly colonized my life and mind like his sprawling, crawling vines. It's an odd thing, to slowly discover that not only are you not, as you had assumed for a long time, more or less an atheist, but believe in gods and monsters that are, culturally speaking, long dead.

... Or perhaps, as Pedraza posits, not dead at all, but merely, like Euripides, like Bacchus himself, in exile. Here, he conjures the ghosts of dancing women and satyric ravings, weaves them seamlessly into the struggles that plague our everyday modern lives. Though your tolerance for his arguments will likely be dependent on your views on Jungian psychotherapy as a whole, if you're willing to play along, he makes a strong case that our current mode of understanding madness and mental health, a system of temporary fixes that treat symptoms rather than help people process their underlying emotions, is limiting at best and actively harmful at worst.

If you are interested in working with Dionysus as patron in today's world, this book is required reading. Pedraza contextualizes Dionysiac practice and imagery organically within the fabric of contemporary life, and illustrates well both the benefits and the risks of a Dionysiac way of being. If you are not a true believer yourself, the stories here are nevertheless powerful parables that offer a wealth of opportunities for personal reflection. For myself, Pedraza's explanations of various aspects of Dionysiac worship echoed powerfully. Denial of faith, i have discovered, leads to disaster. Here, in his work, i found someone willing to sit me down, to speak to me frankly about what i have experienced and am experiencing as a madwoman from a long line of madwoman. Though little of the content in this book was entirely new to me, the writer was able to contextualize psychic phenomenon that i have experienced firsthand, such as Dionysiac possession, in ways that have provided clear affirmations in the face of doubt. His descriptions of Hellenistic practice as a system of collaborative rather than competitive modes of worship between sects rings particularly powerful in a highly combative world. Dionysus offers truth in multiplicity.

It is written in an extremely accessible and engaging way, the essay itself possessing an extremely vibrant poetic rhythm. The supporting quoted selections throughout the the book are consistently well-chosen and integrated into the text. If you have little pre-existing knowledge of the subjects, the basics of who Dionysus is and what he represents are well-presented. Where the text falters, it is in its limited perspective on queerness and a few suppositions about the gendered aspects of Dionysiac worship that are, while not offensive, perhaps reductive or not explained in enough detail to support the suppositions made.

Offering Dionysiac practice as a balm against our accelerated future-driven lives, offering a way to reconnect with death and ego death, Pedraza has given those interested in dancing the path of the Maenad an indispensable gift.

#dionysus #dionysian #hellenistic pagan #hellenic pagan #jungian psychology #psychotherapy #bacchus #greek mythology #the bacchae #pentheus wept #book review #books #bookblr #reviews

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spacemancharisma · 2 years

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Hi, this is about the 'risen demons' post, although I'm not the guy who tagged it with the 'lukewarm' take thing. I'm not a biblical scholar or anything, but from what I think the idea of a risen demon being an impossibility has more to do with the nature of demons rather than the nature of God. The sin of the most famous demon, Satan, is that of pride. Satan would not ask to be forgiven nor would he humble himself before God. If we assume angels have free will, and Satan chose to rebel of their own free will, he remains 'in sin' out of his own free will. Personally, I would find a story about a demon finding redemption and being forgiven interesting and powerful. As to the 'sin is inescapable and nothing you can do can make up for it', I'd first like to say that of course sin is inevitable. People are flawed, they will do bad things. Everyone has done bad things. But God isn't an accountant who tallies good/bad deeds and sorts people into the 'naughty' or 'nice' list. He is concerned with the condition of the spirit inside each person, and genuine, spiritual goodness requires the realisation that you are a small part of the world, and that you are only what you are. Humility, in other words.

Sorry if this is incoherent. I hope you have a good day.

so in the sect of christianity I grew up in and was speaking towards, no one can ever be good enough for god, it’s the whole fundamental principle. it’s why “salvation” is necessary, and why everyone goes to hell by default. you have to “accept jesus” (which I’m not going into details on cause I’m not gonna put evangelical rhetoric on my blog) if you want to not be tortured for eternity for the fact that sin is inherent and inescapable. that said, I was raised with a specific belief set in regards to satan and demons as well, and I found some christian article that explains what I was raised to believe pretty well-

so yeah, it’s very much taught in the version of christianity I was raised in that all demons will be cast into the lake of fire along with satan in the end times because of their original sins, with no chance for redemption, and to even suggest that they could be “saved” would be hugely heretical

#ask #anon #risen demon post #long post #christianity tw

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robininthelabyrinth · 2 years

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Light on the Door

- chapter 6 -

aka the WWX gets adopted by the Nie sect for everyone who’s forgotten about this one

“I’m not angry,” Nie Mingjue said when they sheepishly explained the demonic cultivation they’d been doing while on the Burial Mounds. “You were in a tight spot, and you did what you needed to do to survive.”

Wei Wuxian and Nie Huaisang both nodded furiously.

“I am, however, disappointed.”

Their shoulders slumped.

Not that it was going to stop them from proceeding, of course.

Nie Mingjue wasn’t going to delude himself here. He’d met his younger brothers.

“But da-ge, it can be so helpful,” Nie Huaisang said, almost on cue. “The way we’ve worked it out – well, mostly Wei Wuxian, he did most of the work –”

“Well, I am your shixiong, of course I did. Also, you like being lazy and useless.”

“Shut up, that’s not relevant here. The thing is, though, it’s really not that hard to make it work, and it’s really, really useful. The amount of power we can generate is exponentially greater –”

“I’m aware,” Nie Mingjue said, suppressing his temper through force of will. “That’s why demonic cultivation is considered to be so dangerous, and that’s why our Nie sect cultivation method, which is only barely orthodox, gives us strength that outstrips the other sects’. We all know it’s powerful, but equally so, we know that it’s bad for you. Did everything I said on the subject go in one ear and out the other?”

“No, we listened, really!” Wei Wuxian chirped, looking especially earnest. “But like you said, da-ge, we were in a tight spot…”

“And now you’re out of the tight spot and you can stop. And go through every single one of our rituals for cleansing resentful energy, too!”

“I see what you’re saying, da-ge,” Wei Wuxian said in a way that meant he disagreed. “But the Sunshot Campaign is also in a tight spot. You get what I’m saying?”

“No,” Nie Mingjue said, even though he did. “Absolutely not.”

“But da-ge –”

“Do you really think that I want to win this war at the cost of your lives?” Nie Mingjue demanded.

That made them both look abashed.

Abashed, but unfortunately not deterred.

“The way we’ve come up with is based in part on our Nie sect techniques and in part on the Jiang sect techniques I learned when I was at the Lotus Pier,” Wei Wuxian said. “I even relied a bit on what I learned at the Cloud Recesses. I’ve made it as safe as I possibly can – and it is safe, at least in the short term. You may not be willing to win the war at the cost of our lives, no, but would you really be willing to lose the war and potentially all our lives just to avoid a small increase in short-term risk?”

“Fuck,” Nie Mingjue said, with feeling. “Remind me what piece of trash taught you to debate again?”

Nie Huaisang happily pointed to himself.

“…that didn’t need an answer, Huaisang.”

“But you got one anyway, da-ge!” He beamed. “Does that mean you agree with us using it?”

“No, I don’t.”

“…but you’ll allow it?” Wei Wuxian asked, fishing for the answer he wanted.

“I’m not sold,” Nie Mingjue announced, even though he was, mostly. “Your point about risk and reward is a good one, but we don’t know enough to be sure if you have the balance between the two right. If you overestimate your capability on something like this, arrogantly assuming that you have it under control when you don’t, the consequences would be unthinkable. I think we need to take this in front of an expert.”

They both blinked at him.

“An expert?” Wei Wuxian asked. “In – demonic cultivation?”

“I didn’t know we had someone like that,” Nie Huaisang said.

“Me either,” Wei Wuxian said. “Who is it?”

Nie Mingjue smiled at both of them, and they blanched at the expression.

The first smart move they’d made all day, really.

“I’m sorry!” Wei Wuxian yelped. “I didn’t mean to!”

Baxia was incredibly unimpressed with him.

(Suibian was laughing at him.)

Like Suibian, she could not speak in words, but her feelings were startlingly clear and vivid – a demonstration, Wei Wuxian supposed, of Nie Mingjue’s exceptional cultivation. She was able to convey her thoughts on a given subject quite well.

Evil is as evil becomes was the feeling she conveyed right now. You are starting down a dangerous path.

“For good reasons!”

Each step forward you take will be infinitely harder to return from.

“You believe in revenge yourself! You told Suibian to break the Wen sect’s swords!”

I did. And I will allow you to proceed here.

Wei Wuxian blinked. “Wait,” he said. “You will?”

He hadn’t expected that, given the way she was radiating vicious cold rage at him.

I will, she said. And if you go too far, I will cut off your head.

“That seems fair,” Wei Wuxian said, and then yelped again when Suibian bit him.

Think about what you’re saying, moronic meat-man, his saber snapped at him. If Baxia kills you, that means her master will have to be the one who kills you. Don’t you meatsticks care about things like that?

Wei Wuxian grimaced, his enthusiasm for demonic cultivation and all its interesting challenges and mysteries abruptly diminished exponentially. He’d known Nie Mingjue for a long time – he’d known him back when he’d been an anxious teenager putting on a façade of knowing what he was doing, and he’d known him all the way through his development into the man he now was. How could he not know what being forced to execute Wei Wuxian, who he’d adopted as his own little brother, would do to him?

“I’ll be careful,” he said, much more solemn than before. “I won’t let it come to that. I promise.”

Good, Baxia said. Now: send Huaisang in here.

Wei Wuxian scarpered away at once, betraying his shidi without the slightest hint of guilt.

“So we’re allowed to use demonic cultivation to fight the Wen under very limited conditions,” Nie Huaisang explained to Jiang Cheng. “Very limited. Extremely limited. And we have to do a whole bunch of purifying and cleansing stuff after we do it, too. It’s going to be a pain.”

“I’m surprised they’re going to let you do it,” Jiang Cheng remarked, and ignored the way Nie Huaisang glared at him. “Seriously! At least Wei Wuxian has a proper golden core and a solid foundation in orthodox cultivation – you don’t.”

“I have a golden core!” Nie Huaisang argued back, but it wasn’t like Jiang Cheng wasn’t right. “Anyway, my situation is a bit…complicated. It’ll be fine.”

Ironically enough, according to Baxia and Suibian and Aituan – their local experts in demonic cultivation, and it was a little weird that they were actually opining on stuff rather than just reacting to things but whatever – Nie Huaisang was actually more suitable for demonic cultivation than Wei Wuxian was on account of how weak and piddly his golden core was. Without too much spiritual energy flowing through him, he would be able to channel more resentful energy through his already strengthened meridians – in fact, the ideal situation would probably be someone exceptionally powerful who had lost all of his cultivation somehow, as they would’ve had the strongest meridian pathways possible but no interference from purifying spiritual energy, but also that sounded awful so it was probably for the best that nothing like that had happened.

Anyway, they’d all put their heads together (sabers and humans alike) and determined that Nie Huaisang had enough of bond with Aituan that they could mitigate the effects of the demonic cultivation by doing, essentially, the reverse of the Nie sect cultivation approach: instead of Aituan cultivating with resentful energy and Nie Huaisang filtering it clean with spiritual energy, Nie Huaisang would be the one cultivating with resentful energy and Aituan would be filtering it out.

As a result, while Wei Wuxian was unquestionably the inventor and founder of this new type of demonic cultivation – they hadn’t come up with a name for it yet, since Wei Wuxian was enamored of calling it ‘The Path of Evil’ and that was just amazingly dumb – it was probably going to end up being Nie Huaisang who was going to be using more of it.

Perhaps predictably, the second they’d decided that, Wei Wuxian had lost the vast majority of his enthusiasm for the project. Self-sacrificing idiot!

“At least there’s that,” Jiang Cheng mused, and Nie Huaisang looked at him in question. “You’re not like Wei Wuxian; you don’t have a death wish and you’re not reckless, either. You like being comfortable and safe. If you say it’s fine and safe and not likely to kill you, then it probably is.”

Nie Huaisang spontaneously hugged him.

“What are you doing?!” Jiang Cheng howled. “Get your paws off of me! Do we look like Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji? No touching!”

Nie Huaisang hung on to his neck anyway and cackled.

The Wen sect, he thought happily, weren’t going to know what hit them.

“Brother has a spy among the Wen sect,” Lan Wangji told Wei Wuxian. “He does not wish to share any information regarding his identity, but he trusts him.”

“Well, that’s dumb,” Wei Wuxian said. “So what if he trusts him? We need to trust him! Even if the spy’s sincere, the information he receives could have been fed to him, and even putting aside reliability, how are we supposed to work with this person if we don’t know who he is? If we besiege the Nightless City and some random man or woman runs up to us claiming to be our spy, are we just supposed to believe them? What if we stab them just to be on the safe side? Wouldn’t your brother feel bad about that, if it happened?”

Lan Wangji shrugged.

“Let me talk to your brother about it,” Wei Wuxian decided. “I’ll talk some sense into him, even if da-ge won’t because he’s too honorable to press hard on his best friend – I’m not suggesting we tell everyone about it, but surely the important people need to be in the know…you agree with me, right Lan Zhan?”

“Mm,” Lan Wangji said.

“I thought so! You’re the best boyfriend ever.”

Lan Wangji hummed and pressed a kiss to Wei Wuxian’s temple.

“Careful,” Wei Wuxian said, snickering. “People might think I’m seducing you to the side of evil.”

There had been all sorts of rumors recently. The vast majority were nonsense, of course, and easily dispelled – but the one about Wei Wuxian being corrupted by his demonic cultivation seemed to be irrepressible in a way that suggested to Lan Wangji that someone might be pushing it deliberately.

Once, he had not cared for such things as rumor, and even less about the politics of who said what and why, but that had been before he had decided to unite his fate with Wei Wuxian’s for the rest of his life.

After the cave with the Xuanwu, where armed by Nie Huaisang’s timely revelations, they had declared their affections for each other and even kissed, Lan Wangji had wasted no time in informing his uncle of his decision. His uncle had taken it about as well as could be expected – a lot of sighing and suggestions that literally anyone else in the entire cultivation world might be better had been involved – but he’d also started teaching him more seriously about the challenges he might expect to face in such a situation.

At the time, Lan Wangji had been very busy with pulling their sect together to fight the Wen sect’s threat and had not listened with as much seriousness as perhaps he ought to have, so his uncle had demonstrated the importance of it to him with an experiment. He’d purposefully leaked a hint of a relationship to one person who had promptly told another, and another, and another, and soon enough Lan Wangji had been besieged with rumors (the vast majority miserably wrong) about who he was supposedly courting. And that had been in the Lan sect, where there were rules against gossip and he could silence anyone who was being disrespectful!

He’d started listening to his uncle’s warnings with a great deal more attention after that.

“There are those that say you are planning on leaving the Nie sect,” he told Wei Wuxian solemnly. “To start your own sect, focused on demonic cultivation.”

“That’s ridiculous. Why would I leave? The only reason I’m acting in such an ostentatious manner is to keep everyone from figuring out that Nie Huaisang is the one actually doing most of the work – I can handle the assassination attempts, he can’t.”

Lan Wangji arched his eyebrows.

“…okay, yes, I also kind of like the ostentation,” Wei Wuxian confessed. “It’s just so much fun go to around wearing creepy robes and calling everything I use evil – the ‘Devilish Hairbrush’, the ‘Compass of Evil’, the ‘Demon Slaughtering Pillow’ –”

“The child-consuming beast.”

“Hey, you leave Xiao Bai out of this! He’s a good dog! He just likes kids, that’s all…”

“Jumping on them, licking them, gnawing on them…”

“A good dog,” Wei Wuxian insisted. “A friendly dog.”

Lan Wangji just kissed him again. It wasn’t that he disagreed – certainly not about Xiao Bai, who was in fact an excellent dog, even if the ‘scary’ collar Wei Wuxian had fashioned for him was little short of ridiculous – but he knew he wasn’t getting his point across. If even as nice a dog as Xiao Bai could be so thoroughly misconstrued, then Wei Wuxian, who was deliberately putting himself out there as a target…

Lan Wangji would keep watch, he decided.

He wouldn’t let anyone get away with hurting Wei Wuxian.

Anyone.

#mdzs #nie mingjue #nie huaisang #wei wuxian #baxia #jiang cheng #lan wangji #lan qiren #my fic #my fics #light on the door #today in things that haven't been updated in a century or more...

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spockandawe · 3 years

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There’s something about Shen Jiu that really sticks with me in a way that not many characters do. And I can’t stop prodding at that and trying to figure out what it is! And today, what I’ve shaken out of the story is that Shen Jiu embodies a lot of pretty visceral fears.

There is... a lot that goes wrong in his life. And given the role he has in the story, there’s no kind of miracle fix that comes in to solve his problems at any point. It’s much more likely that whatever breaking point someone else pushes him to (killing qiu jianluo) or whatever partial resolution he manages to claw out for himself (entering cang qiong, even if it’s much older than usual) will be weaponized against him in some way. Even in the happier timeline, it’s only happier for him in that he doesn’t have to be tortured or learn that yue qingyuan is dead. Instead, he dies, very young, and the few people who would have mourned him don’t do so, because they don’t know that he’s gone (which is another wrenching fear, the idea of disappearing and nobody around you even noticing). His life is a worst-case scenario, and originally it’s something that happens to a deeply unsympathetic character, so hey, whatever, right? Yes, except for everything the rest of the story reveals.

So, I will go ahead and assume that most people reading this book have not been purchased by a young master and mistreated and forcibly engaged to his sister. Probably not not the most common backstory. But a lot of people have Been Through something, whether that was thanks to outside forces, bad luck with brain chemistry, or hell, just the stress of something like living through a long pandemic. It’s not that rare to live through an experience that leaves you wondering if what has happened to you left you.... damaged, or broken. It’s not usually a good idea to linger on, and humans are capable of a lot of recovery, but--

Shen Jiu gets to find out that yes, absolutely, it did damage him, in practical and emotional ways that he failed to recover from, external and internal. When Liu Qingge wants to upset him later, all he has to do is make a dig that ‘even if talent doesn’t guarantee high achievement, it’s still better than starting to learn at age sixteen, lmao.’ And Shen Jiu refuses to admit that he’s going to the brothel just to sleep, because ‘seeing women and saviors and huddling in their arms for comfort’ is shameful. I don’t expect to ever fret about how I started cultivating too late in life, but the idea of receiving that confirmation that something was measurably, observably lost in me, that sinks a nasty hook deep into my stomach.

And I don’t want to get distracted with a whole rant about this, but Qi-ge “abandoning” him at this same time is an absolutely brutal thing to throw into the mix. It tears both of them up so badly that they can’t even begin resolving it before they die, but as far as Shen Jiu knows, someone he adored and trusted just... forgot about him. It was too much trouble to come back for him. Against the odds, Yue Qi found a spot in a cultivation sect, had connections and power, and either forgot to come back for Shen Jiu or decided it wasn’t worth doing. The end of extra thirteen, slightly rephrased, would be ‘it would have hurt shen jiu less to learn that yue qi was dead than to learn he chose not to come back for him.’ Again, confirmation of a fear that you want to believe is irrational. No, the people you care about aren’t just waiting for an excuse to get away from you. Except for Shen Jiu... mm.

But what really, really got to me was the whole Binghe situation. The discourse scene is uhhh spicy right now, so let’s be real explicit that the way he treated Binghe was inexcusable. But what put the nail in my emotional coffin was realizing, again, that it’s about the fear that your experiences have damaged you. Not just the fear that they’ve damaged you, the fear that they’ve poisoned you, that they’ve affected you in more ways than you’ve already noticed, and that no matter how you try to leave your mark on the world, you’re doomed to ruin everything you touch. The last few 79 extras are very hard for me to read, because Shen Jiu’s conversation with Yue Qingyuan is so much about his awareness of how he’s responsible for shaping Luo Binghe, and then his conversation with Luo Binghe is about his realization that simple proximity to him was enough to doom Yue Qingyuan to a terrible death. It’s absolutely suffocating, the idea that you yourself are a poison in other people’s lives, in ways that you’re completely unaware of.

There we go, that’s enough being sad about Shen Jiu for the day. I kid, there are not enough hours in the day for being sad about Shen Jiu. But it’s time to go accomplish other things while being sad, because my mind has been circling around these ideas all day.

#svsss #shen jiu #abuse mention?/#yue qingyuan #did i listen to comfortable doug the whole time i was writing this? yes.#and now i'm comfortable comfortable comfortable doug

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vodkassassin · 3 years

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Inspired by your Jiuplane fic, Everyone loves SQH series and Nighthaunting's work.

Shen Jiu has never actually spared much attention to An Ding. While he doesn't consider them less-his past would never allow himself to look at anyone being derided for doing 'servant duties' less- he also doesn't pay much attention to them. Ever since Shang Qinghua modified the teleportation talismans for transporting large amounts of goods between the Peaks, An Ding disciples have all but disappeared from view. Shen Qingqiu occasionally saw a groundskeeper or a cook return back to An Ding but that was about it. He was pretty sure that people outside the sect saw more of the Logistics Peak than the people in it. And during meetings Shang Qinghua barely makes a sound, just records whatever was he was supposed to and just vanish off to his peak the minute the meeting inevitably ended in chaos. It was like An Ding never existed.......in hindsight, that should have been suspicious. But Shen Qingqiu never even noticed glaring absence and he would forever berate himself for that. It happened quite unexpectedly. Shen Qingqiu was supposed to go on mission with Qi Qingqi, the only Peak Lord he could tolerate beyond a certain period of time but Xuan Shu Peak suddenly had an emergency that she had to take care. Mu Qingfang was busy with preparing the Baying Moon Jade Orchid that he had been given (Really that should've tipped him off! Those flowers were ludicrously expensive because they only grow in the Demon Realm and Mu Qingfang had been given an entire crate of them along with his monthly supplies!), and the only other Peak Lords available were Liu Qingqe and Shang Qinghua. The choice was obvious.

The mission was relatively simple. Wan Jian disciples had been sent as a response to a request for assistance from a cluster of villages deep in a mountain valley. The disciples had found evidence of a large monster but it seemed to be intelligent and the presence of cultivators had run it off to a cave system. By the trails it left and it's actions, the lead disciple had judged it too dangerous for normal disciples, especially in the enclosed spaces of a cave system and had reported to his Peak Lord. The mission thus had been entered into the Peak Lords' roster. It should have been routine, should have been simple. But Shen Qingqiu had the world's worst luck and so everything turned sideways within ten minutes of them entering the cave.

First of all, the monster seemed to have destabilized the cave so they got caved in. Secondly, it wasn't a monster at all but a demonic beast, a Thousand Screams of Ruin Swan, a rabid thing that was created when someone forcibly corrupted a Thousand Screams Swan with too much demonic qi. And finally, the beasts absolutely hated each other. A Thousand Screams Swan had the ability to gauge the truth and a lie in its presence would not only prompt the most ear piercing of all screeches but also destabilizes the qi of the liar in particular and produce unimaginable pain. The southern demon courts use the swan in interrogations, putting the accused and the swan in enclosed spaces and the interrogators questioning from behind a sound muffling seal. However if the swan were overloaded with too much malicious qi, it would grow to enormous sizes and it's screech would actually cause death to anyone in the vicinity. In this state it was called a Thousand Screams of Ruin Swan. So after every interrogation the beast is taken for purification. The question is how a pair of valuable demonic beasts from the Southern Demon courts end up in a remote village far away from the borderlands?

If it was any other situation, Shen Qingqiu would've been fascinated. But as it was he had no time to dawdle. The confined space of the caves meant that the screeches of the swan would be magnified in intensity and their muffling shields were already cracking under the pressure of the sound waves. If they did, they would be dead as their qi system would be destabilized enough to cause a painful death. Shen Qingqiu, with his already unstable qi was extremely vulnerable in this situation. With Shang Qinghua having no combat ability to think of, they were completely under the mercy of two rabid S-rank demonic beasts who hated them and each other.

Then the shields cracked. Shen Qingqiu barely had time to close off his hearing using qi before Shang Qinghua disappeared into one of the caves with a beast after him. On one hand Shen Qingqiu now had to worry about only one Thousand Scream of Ruin Swan. On the other hand, no hearing was a double edged sword in a situation like this and there was no back up, negligible as it would have been. But he marshalled his focus and unsheathed Xiu Ya. If that overgrown bird thought that the Qing Jing Peak Lord was going down without a fight, it was wrong.

Two hours later the fight was still going on. His head was hurting only from being flung into the stone walls of the cave but also from sealing off his hearing for so long. The Beast's rampage had destroyed one of the cave walls and they had both fallen into a lake within the cave system. Shen Qingqiu had somehow managed to pull himself out of the water, not being stupid enough to fight a water fowl in water. He was exhausted, looked like a wet rag and was bleeding. There was no sign of Shang Qinghua and that either meant he was dead or that Shen Qingqiu was so far off from the main caves that he wouldn't be found in time. While the former was more likely, he at least hoped that Shang Qinghua made it to the surface and called for help because as much as he hated to admit it, that brute Liu Qingqe and his brutish sword would be helpful at the moment. He was tiring and his core couldn't hold on any longer while the beast was all but brimming in energy. It lunged and the Peak Lord futilely brought up his sword, knowing it wouldn't do anything, realizing that this was the end of Shen Jiu, dead by a rabid bird in a fucking cave. And then...there was light.

Lightning, there was lightning in the cave, huge arcs of it racing towards the beast and striking it over and over, the lake water acting as a conductor and exacerbating the damage. And on a ledge, was a creature wearing Shang Qinghua. Because that couldn't be Shang Qinghua. Shang Qinghua was a mousy, nervous, skittish mess of a man. Non obtrusive, and a pushover. He was weak and had no combat abilities to speak of. He barely had a core....except that wasn't true was it? None of them had ever seen Shang Qinghua fight. None of them had ever felt the power of his core. Shang Qinghua always ran solo and the occasional company of his head disciple so none of them had been on a mission with him. In fact, none of them knew anything about Shang Qinghua. They just assumed that he was weak...because he was An Ding and acted like a coward. But now it was clear Shen Qingqiu that it was by design. It should have impossible to constantly keep up a facade like that but looking at the imperious creature watching on dispassionately at the Demonic Beast writhing in his lightning, Shen Qingqiu knew that the impossible had been done.

The creature that was Shang Qinghua jumped down from the ledge and made his way to Shen Qingqiu. He was clutching a Thousand Screams Swan now back to its original size. He was barefoot. His clothing was ripped in places. A large slit too clean to be from the beast ran up both his legs just shy of his hips revealing long legs adorned in gorgeous ink patterns climbing up them and disappearing up the torso. It was clear Shang Qinghua cut them up to increase mobility. The sleeves were also ripped, also covered with beautiful tattoos and the high collar of the robes were open showing off beautiful collar bones. His hair was left free and falling russet waves down his back to his knees and with each shift Shen Qingqiu could see a silver shine of what seems to be metal strings woven into it. He was... He was a vision.

Shang Qinghua was always covered. He wore high collar robes that never showed an inch of skin on his body. So seeing him with his legs and arms and his collar visible, it was obscene! Shen Qingqiu realized to horror that he was blushing. His entire face was burning! Shang Qinghua must have succubus blood in him! He must have! Shen Qingqiu is not the type to blush at every pretty face! He hoped to the gods that Shang Qinghua just think of his blushing face as a result of exertion.

As Shang Qinghua drew closer, Shen Qingqiu noticed something strange. Gauntlets. Silver gauntlets carved with seals. Two on the ankles, two on the wrists. And one collar on the neck. Hidden underneath high collar robes as they were, this was the first time Shen Qingqiu had ever seen them. At first they looked like enhancers and looking at the lightning still attacking the beast which seemed to be getting smaller and smaller, it seemed most likely. But Shen Qingqiu was done assuming things about Shang Qinghua. And he was right, because closer inspection revealed the seals to be limiters. Shen Qingqiu for the first time since he became a Peak Lord, was truly astonished. Limiter seals active on five points on the body and undoubtedly forming a restructure five point qi circuit and still manages to defeat two S class demonic beasts? Incredible. Shen Qingqiu wanted to know everything about him. He wanted to burrow underneath his skin. He has never wanted anything more.

After the Beast shrunk down somehow, Shang Qinghua retrieved it with a talisman that seemed to be some sort of Binding. He silently clutched the swans together and made his way to one of the caves, silently motioning for Shen Qingqiu to follow. As they made their way up the caves, Shen Qingqiu looked at his mysterious companion and told him what he was adamant about from the moment he saw the other bring down the wrath of the heavens,

"You can't hide from me anymore."

Shang Qinghua was silent. Then, like a whisper of silk on soft skin, he replied,

"I can try."

Shen Qingqiu smirked,

"Yes you can. But you won't succeed."

The Xiu Ya sword looked the two beasts the other was holding, two Thousand Screams Swans.

"Is Shang Lei even a real name? "

The other didn't answer and that was an answer in itself. Shen Qingqiu couldn't wait to have him.

Anon oh my god this is GORGEOUS!!! Thank you for feeding me, it was delicious!! Bamf SQH! Beautiful SQH! Badass, pretty, mysterious SQH!!!! Attractive as hell, an unattainable prospect!!!

@nighthaunting look look, it’s our writing child

#SCREAMING #jiuplane #this is beautiful #thank you anon #anon ask #anon fanfic #anonymous #vodka answers

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antebunny · 3 years

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Lan Wangji: Damsel-in-Distress

If Lan Wangji had known it was this easy to get Wei Ying to do what he wanted, he would’ve put himself in mortal peril a long time ago.

He has this realization when they’re retreating from the Wens. Despite Wei Ying’s new, dangerous powers successfully turning the tide of war in their favor, the Sunshot Campaign still loses battles and takes losses. But Nie Mingjue rarely loses battles, and Wei Ying has never lost a battle he participated in, which makes this battle a special case.

Their intelligence underestimated the number of Wens in this region, so when Lan Wangji and Jiang Wanyin launch an attack shortly after sunrise, leading the Lan and Jiang cultivators into battle, their forces falter under the onslaught of Wens.

The Wen supervisory office is bathed in blood when Wei Ying arrives. He collapsed after the last battle, and Jiang Wanyin elected to head into battle anyway, under the premise that it would allow Wei Ying more time to rest. Lan Wangji very much disapproves of Jiang Wanyin’s decision to let Wei Ying continue demonic cultivation, even if it is winning them the war, but he has to admit that he does care for Wei Ying in other ways. But Jiang Wanyin’s plan backfired, because instead of winning the battle and successfully giving Wei Ying the day to rest, the battle instead dragged on, until the day sunk into night and they were forced to admit they were losing.

Lan Wangji is knee-deep in dead bodies and blood, guarding the retreat of their forces, when he steps into the array. He misses it because of the sheer volumes of blood, running from an endless number of sword wounds. He stands facing the entrance of the supervisory office, back to the retreating Lans and Jiangs. Jiang Wanyin is ten paces behind him, Zidian one violet blur around him.

The shrieking of Chenqing heralds Wei Ying’s arrival, and Lan Wangji is just as displeased as he is pleased. He spares himself one glance back, and sees Wei Ying standing on the roof of a nearby building, corpses already rallying to his song. Lan Wangji and Jiang Wanyin make brief eye contact.

“Go,” Lan Wangji tells him. “Wei Ying and I will cover the retreat.”

If Jiang Wanyin resents being told what to do, he sees the sense in Lan Wangji’s words and nods sharply. The Lans hesitate to abandon their Hanguang-jun, but a sharp gesture from Lan Wangji sends them after Jiang Wanyin and his contingent of cultivators.

At the same time, Wei Ying advances, jumping off the roof and joining his ranks of corpses. Lan Wangji pushes down his usual revulsion upon seeing Wei Ying walking amongst the corpses. He retreats to the top of the steps while the corpses of Wen and Jiang alike line up at the bottom, Wei Ying at their head. The Wen cultivators hesitate to chase after the retreating cultivators, scared by the presence of Wei Ying. Instead, they cluster outside the main door but before the stairs, surrounding Lan Wangji in a loose semi-circle.

Lan Wangji’s fingertips are bloody on the strings of his guqin when he feels the array flare up around him.

Immediately, Lan Wangji tenses, and inspects the array for weaknesses. Wei Ying runs up the stairs, but red light flares up when he tries to break the array, and Wei Ying is pushed back, hissing in pain. A moment later they both realize that the array is a repurposed protective array, meant to keep out demonic energy. This includes, of course, demonic cultivation, and by extension, Wei Ying.

Lan Wangji’s mind is already racing with possible solutions, and clearly Wei Ying’s is doing the same, if the grim smile that settles on his face is any indication. It takes the Wens a further five seconds to recognize the array, at which point they all level their swords and begin to run towards Lan Wangji.

There’s only two meters between the Wens and the array, and about two seconds before the Wens reach the array. During those two seconds, time for Lan Wangji slows to a near standstill.

The array trapping Lan Wangji is perhaps one and a half meters in diameter. Wei Ying can very easily direct his corpses around it and kill all the Wens at the top of the stairs. But the Wens, unlike the corpses, can enter the array. Wei Ying cannot enter the array, and Lan Wangji cannot leave. The only way Lan Wangji can leave is if someone enters the array and takes him out–these arrays are nominally made by cultivators to protect non-cultivators who find themselves in the middle of a night hunt or some such danger.

This means Lan Wangji will be fighting however many Wens can fit inside the array, which by his estimate is up to twenty at a time. Although Lan Wangji is confident that he can defeat twenty Wen cultivators, he knows that he cannot fight the entire army, especially not after having fought for the entire day.

In other words, Lan Wangji is about to die.

This all passes through his mind in less time than it takes the Wens to realize what the array even is, which means that he’s turning back to look at Wei Ying one last time when the Wens actually start running. Wei Ying, having come to the same conclusion perhaps faster than Lan Wangji, has set his corpse army into motion by the time Lan Wangji turns back to look at him. The corpses flood past Lan Wangji, roaring and snarling, but Lan Wangji already knows that they won’t slow the Wens down enough.

So instead of turning around to defend himself, he finds himself staring at Wei Ying’s face, even though Wei Ying’s familiar silver eyes are instead demonic red, and his pretty face is twisted in a dangerous smile.

Wei Ying presses a hand to his chest and then draws it away. Shadows follow, swirling all around his body like Wei Ying’s very presence causes resentment to the world. They hiss and shift like writhing snakes, lashing against Wei Ying’s control until his face twists with effort.

“Here,” Wei Ying says. “Catch.”

And then he hurls the resentful energy like the world’s deadliest toy. The massive cloud of demonic energy quickly seeps into the Wen soldiers, who freeze in place, suddenly battling an invisible energy. Soon, screams split the air, as grown men crumple under a fraction of the power Wei Ying wields.

Used to wield.

Wei Ying looks so much smaller without his deadly aura. His eyes shine a familiar silver as he takes the one step he needs to cross the array. A shiver runs through him as he does, and he staggers on the other side of the array. His fingers wrap around Lan Wangji’s wrist, and his grip is much weaker than Lan Wangji thought it would be.

“Well, don’t take your time, Lan Zhan,” Wei Ying chides with dark humor. “It’s not like we have all day.”

He pulls Lan Wangji out of the array, and collapses nearly the moment he’s out. Lan Wangji doesn’t waste a moment before scooping Wei Ying up in his arms. He steps onto Bichen, guqin on his back, and flies off as fast as his shaking limbs can carry him, leaving the Wens behind to deal with the corpses.

Lan Wangji arrives at camp with spots dancing in his vision, and Wei Ying in his shaking arms. Wei Ying, who is free from demonic cultivation.

Drunk on this victory, Lan Wangji promptly faints.

Lan Wangji curses his body’s limitations when he next wakes up and discovers that during the time he was unconscious, Wei Ying woke up and promptly picked up demonic cultivation again. He witnessed firsthand how weak Wei Ying was in the moments after he removed all the demonic energy from his body, so he has no doubt that Wei Ying was scared. But if only he hadn’t fainted, if only he’d been there when Wei Ying woke up to support him through this temporary weakness and encourage him to pick up Suibian instead of Chenqing–

It’s no use, he tells himself. What’s done is done. What he focuses on instead is the moment he looked back at Wei Ying and saw his face set in grim determination. He knows that Wei Ying realized everything he did, which means he looked at Lan Wangji trapped in the array and made a choice: Lan Wangji or demonic cultivation. Of course, he did it knowing that he could pick it up again, but still, Lan Wangji’s heart does funny little rabbit thumps every time he remembers how Wei Ying’s overwhelming gaze focused on him as he casually drew the resentful energy out of his body and chose Lan Wangji.

It seems that all of Lan Wangji’s lectures and arguments about the danger of demonic cultivation had a much simpler solution. Wei Ying threw it all away because Lan Wangji needed help. Now Lan Wangji finds himself in a strange situation, in which the way to help Wei Ying involves something Lan Wangji has never done, not once in his life: asking for help.

Naturally, he turns to his brother for advice.

“Wangji,” Lan Xichen says, his smile strained to the point of breaking. “No.”

Lan Wangji frowns. It sounds perfectly reasonable to him.

“You are not putting yourself in mortal peril on the off-chance that Young Master Wei will choose to abandon his method of cultivation,” Xichen says flatly.

“It is not an off-chance,” Lan Wangji argues. He’s almost never argued with his brother before, merely choosing to run away from conversations (such as “I see you’ve been staring at the Jiangs’ Head Disciple a lot, Wangji–Wangji, come back–”)

“Assume that he does, then,” Lan Xichen allows. “Did you not say he immediately picked it up again?”

“Giving up demonic cultivation caused him to collapse,” Lan Wangji says. “As I was injured at the time, I was not there to help him through its loss, and Jiang Wanyin–” He allows himself a small scowl, so furious is he at the carelessness of Wei Ying’s brother. “–did not say a word to stop him.”

To be fair, he doubts that Jiang Wanyin discouraging Wei Ying from using demonic cultivation would stop him. Lan Wangji must admit that he’s taken advantage of Wei Ying’s lack of respect for his new sect leader’s orders. Once he understood that Jiang Wanyin would make no move to prevent Wei Ying from using demonic cultivation, he turned his entreaties to Wei Ying instead, knowing that the only way to help Wei Ying would be getting through to Wei Ying himself. And because with the war keeping him exhausted and on the verge of losing his temper, he’s afraid that if he talks to Jiang Wanyin for too long, he’ll snap and beat him bloody, which is not the support that neither Lan Xichen nor Wei Ying need right now.

Lan Wangji eyes his brother expectantly, hoping that Lan Xichen will offer to guide and support Wei Ying on his behalf, after Wei Ying has narrowly recused Lan Wangji from mortal peril once more.

If he’s being completely honest with himself, it would be far easier to engineer a scenario in which Wei Ying must give up demonic cultivation for either of his siblings. But Lan Wangji’s morals won’t allow him to put others in danger in such an underhanded scheme, and Lan Wangji very much likes the thought of Wei Ying running to his rescue. The truth that Lan Wangji does not want to admit to himself is that the second reason is far more compelling to him than the first.

Lan Xichen’s face makes a strange motion that indicates that he would be sighing at Lan Wangji if he was just a slightest bit meaner. “Wangji,” he says patiently, “from what you have told me, Young Master Wei purged himself of resentful energy because you needed his help. Why do you not just ask for his help?”

That, Lan Wangji has to admit, sounds far simpler than orchestrating a scenario in which Wei Ying is the only one who can help him, specifically by setting aside demonic cultivation.

It’s also far less compelling than Wei Ying dashing heroically to his rescue, but Lan Wangji was raised to be straightforward.

He was not, however, raised to need help, so he frowns and asks; “How?”

Lan Xichen still refrains from sighing at him, because he knows why Lan Wangji finds the concept of asking for help so baffling. “Well,” he says, “here’s one thing you can do…”

#mdzs #mo dao zu shi #the untamed #wei wuxian #lan wangji #lan xichen #jiang cheng #my writing #writeblr #greetings tumblr void #featuring: simp!lwj #wangxian #antebunny's ficlets

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drwcn · 3 years

Note

ok but for fem!wwx au does lan zhan believe the rumours? and if so what does that mean for the whole 'i birthed him with my own body!' cause lan zhan did the maths and was like 'no it was just the once and this child is too old' but if he thinks he was just one in a line does he go back to bm after nightless city to rescue a kid he thinks is wei ying's but with another man? does he spend the three years in seclusion cursing every jin whose name he remembers as cowards only to step out, take one look at sizhui, and have an 'oh. i know why wei ying was so determined to save wen qionglin' moment???

Answer: Haha, nah, Lan Wangji was fairly sure Sizhui wasn’t Wei Ying’s, for several reasons. One, Wen Yuan was born before the wen remnants even went to the Burial Mount. Lan Wangji saw the small child amongst the escape party that rainy night at the concentration camp. Also, Wen Ning was several years younger than them, which would make it kind of weird if he were the dad. Before Wen Ning became the Ghost General, everyone just knew him as Wen Qing’s kid brother. Lan Wangji, however, absolutely believed Jiang Yan to be Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian’s child even before Wei Wuxian was resurrected...

《the midnight sun》 —

[original], snippets [x] [x] [x] [x], other posts found under #lanyan or #midnight sun

midnight sun [snippet 7]

When Yan’er turned ten, Jiang Cheng decided it was time for her to accompany him to Cultivation Conferences. Most sect heirs began their training this way; Jiang Cheng still remembered his first time, trailing nervously in Jiang Fengmian’s wake.

Heiresses, in comparison, were few and far between. Even head disciples were rarely girls. Jiang Wanyin had no children. His head disciple was his heiress, and his heiress was Jiang Yueqian (江月千).

长烟一空 - when the smoke clears; 皓月千里 - the moon casts a thousand miles of light 浮光跃金 - which dances upon the water, golden 静影沉壁 - the shadow of the moon itself like jade underwater*

A jade underwater indeed.

“Shifu.”

Speaking of the devil, here she comes, walking measuredly down the long stairs of Jinlintai towards Jiang Cheng, the epitome of an obedient, filial disciple. It had only been a day and Jiang Yan already had the world fooled. Only Jiang Cheng knew how impossibly obstinate and utterly uncontrollable she was when her mind was fixed.

"Ah, Jiang-zongzhu, this is..." Spotting her, Lan Xichen glanced beyond his shoulder, the question dangling in the sentence he did not deem necessary to finish.

Unbeknownst to Lan Xichen, the child that made her way over was his niece by blood. Jiang Cheng was acutely aware that Yan'er actually resembled Lan Wangji a great deal, and despite having weighed the risks and gains against each other repeatedly before deciding to bring Jiang Yan along, now he was no longer so certain in his calculations. Lan Xichen was not a simple peasant; what if he detected a trace or a hint of her heritage between the furrow of her brows or the curve of her eyes? What if...

Jiang Cheng turned, raising an arm towards Jiang Yan, an introduction ready, but whatever words he had prepared in advance died on on his tongue when he laid eyes on the girl. Suddenly, he was no longer worried that others would suspect her to be Lan Wangji's child.

There was a red ribbon in her hair.

Yan'er stopped at a polite distance from the two older men and bowed in perfect form.

Jiang Cheng's heart stuttered violently in his chest at the sight of that red ribbon falling sideway over her small shoulder. If souls could travel, his would have left him in an instant. He stood in disincorporated panic, wrestling with the nauseating sensation of being ripped from his reality and tossed so far into the distant past that he felt whole again.

"Shifu, Lan-zongzhu." Yan'er greeted.

Shifu. Lan-zongzhu. In another world, another life, she would not need to be so formal. She could easily bound up to them, carefree, cooing jiujiu and bobo and ask to be bailed out from whatever trouble she caused.

Instead, he was only her shifu, and Lan Xichen, a stranger in her life. It would be laughable, if fate had not dealt them each such a wretched hand.

Jiang Cheng stepped towards her. “Where did you get this?”

Jiang Yan looked up in surprise, her hand reaching up and making an aborted motion to touch the red ribbon in her hair.

“Qin-shenshen gave it to me. Is it not nice?”

Qin Su. Jiang swallowed down a sigh of relief. Earlier, the Jin servants had sent word that Jin-fu'ren had baked treats for Jin Ling, and the boy had wasted no time dragging his favourite person - his Yan'er jiejie - to his aunt's place with him. Clearly, Qin Su had seized the opportunity to dote on the girl in place of the daughter she never had. Qin Su meant well. She couldn't have known. She's never even met Wei Wuxian.

In this state, Jiang Cheng could barely bring himself to look at his disciple, but he forced himself nonetheless to kneel and tuck an errant strand of baby hair behind her ear. “Very pretty.”

Yan'er smiled.

Jiang Cheng could cry.

They'd been lucky thus far. Yunmeng's Jiang-xiao-guniang was born a taciturn girl who did not like to smile or laugh, not even when she was expected to for polite society. Whether she was happy or sad, one would be hard pressed to tell. Only in front of her master Jiang Cheng or her Jin Ling-didi did she elect to reveal the full expanse of her emotions. Yet, whenever Jiang Cheng bore witness to that smile as warm and incandescent as sunlight, he could not help but shudder somewhere deep. Recalling the radiant days of years gone by, he could still see - every time he closed his eyes - his er-shijie smiling at him in the very same fashion.

Aiyo, Jiang Cheng ~

So...they'd been very lucky thus far, that Yan'er was not so like her mother in that way, not so free and generous with her smiles. Or else this devastating secret —Wei Wuxian's only wish — would not be able to withstand the test of time.

"Very pretty, Yan'er." He reaffirmed. "Did you thank Jin-furen?"

"I did."

Jiang Cheng stood and turned back to face Lan Xichen, and realized they were being joined by two others: Lan Qiren and Lan Wangji. The latter of two stared directly down at Jiang Yan, visibly stricken and unblinking, as though he'd just seen a ghost. After all, he had often been on the receiving end of that signature smile once upon a time. It was probably not a smile he'd ever expected to see again in this life.

In hindsight, perhaps Jiang Cheng should have made Yan'er wear her uniform like all the other disciples instead of her favourite indigo robes.

“Ah, Wangji, shufu -” Lan Xichen was quick to react, sensing animosity brewing in the disquiet that stretched taut between his younger brother and his fellow sect master. "Jiang-zongzhu, perhaps you would introduce us?"

The First Jade smiled kindly down at Yan'er. She returned his kindness with a polite nod.

Lan Wangji finally dragged his gaze up to meet Jiang Cheng's, a rarity since their violent parting at Nevernight. The venerated Hanguang-jun had developed a habit of pretending that Jiang Wanyin of Lotus Pier did not exist at all. He probably preferred, dreamed of it even, if Jiang Cheng had been one to fall of the cliff that day. He probably hated himself for not shoving him into the molten abyss when he could to avenge the love of his life.

Love. What did Lan Wangji know of love? Jiang Cheng sneered inwardly. One did not compromise one's love and abandon her, ill and with child, to bleed out alone in a cave tainted by demonic spirits.

One did not watch idly as one's love and her people are reduced to ashes for the power and greed of men either....

Jiang Cheng buried the offending thought, too familiar with Wen Qing's ghost that still haunted him in his moments of weakness. Without breaking gaze, he laid a hand on the crown of Jiang Yan's head and said, "This is my first disciple, Jiang Yan, Jiang Yueqian."

"Yueqian greets Zewu-jun, Lan-lao-xiansheng, Hanguang-jun."

Jiang Cheng watched as the icy fire within Lan Wangji's eyes flicker, fizzle, and extinguish entirely. Jiang Cheng's vague silence had allowed him the space to make his assumptions, and he had assumed the most insane explanation.

Is it so difficult for you, wondered Jiang Cheng. To believe that she could be yours? So impossible, that you would choose to doubt Wei Wuxian instead?

Fine.

Hanguang-jun. The venerated Second Jade of Gusu. That's all you'll ever be. Yan'er will never call you Father.

Jiang Cheng decided he had spent enough time today making nice. "Zewu-jun, it's getting late. If nothing else, I will be taking my leave. The conference continues tomorrow. I will see you then. Yan'er, come."

Yan'er bowed again to the senior cultivators, perfectly well-mannered. A dash of surprise crossed those bright eyes, however, when Jiang Cheng took her hand to lead her away. She followed wordlessly, trusting him, and did not look back once at the Lans she left behind.

Now that Yan'er was out in society, there would surely be rumours. No matter. Rumours were nothing Jiang Wanyin could not withstand. How ironic, indeed, that this was to be his lot in life.

For the first time, Jiang Cheng felt he could understand his father.

Note:

The poem is from the Song dynasty, by poet 范仲淹 from his work 《岳阳楼记》

Jiang Cheng of course is also working off a lot of assumptions about Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji's relationship. He has his reasons for hating and blaming Lan Wangji, but not all the blame is deserved.

#Anonymous #corie replies #cql #the untamed #lanyan #midnight sun #corie fics #cql ficlet #yes jiang cheng stringed enough brain cells together to come up with a half decent name #ly7

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testudoaubrei-blog · 3 years

Text

Content note for discussions of eternal damnation, and all sorts of other shit that will trigger a lot of folks with religious trauma.

Before I get started I might as well explain where I’m coming from - unlike a lot of She-Ra fans, and a lot of queer people, I don’t have much religious trauma, or any, maybe (okay there were a number of years I was convinced I was going to hell, but that happens to everyone, right?). I was raised a liberal Christian by liberal Christian parents in the Episcopal Church, where most of my memories are overwhelmingly positive. Fuck, growing up in the 90’s, Chuch was probably the only place outside my home I didn’t have homophobia spewed at me. Because it was the 90’s and it was a fucking hellscape of bigotry where 5 year olds knew enough to taunt each other with homophobic slurs and the adults didn’t know enough to realize how fucked up that was. Anyway. This is my experience, but it is an atypical one, and I know it. Quite frankly I know that my experience of Christianity has very little at all to do with what most people experienced, or what people generally mean when they talk about Christianity as a cultural force in America today. So if you were raised Christian and you don’t recognize your theology here, congrats, neither do I, but these ideas and cultural forces are huge and powerful and dominant. And it’s this dominant Christian narrative that I’m referring to in this post. As well as, you know, a children’s cartoon about lesbian rainbow princesses. So here it goes. This is going to get batshit.

"All events whatsoever are governed by the secret counsel of God." - John Calvin

“We’re all just a bunch of wooly guys” - Noelle Stevenson

This is a post triggered by a single scene, and a single line. It’s one of the most fucked-up scenes in She-Ra, toward the end of Save the Cat. Catra, turned into a puppet by Prime, struggles with her chip, desperately trying to gain control of herself, so lost and scared and vulnerable that she flings aside her own death wish and her pride and tearfully begs Adora to rescue her. Adora reaches out , about to grab her, and then Prime takes control back, pronounces ‘disappointing’ and activates the kill switch that pitches Catra off the platform and to her death (and seriously, she dies here, guys - also Adora breaks both her legs in the fall). But before he does, he dismisses Catra with one of his most chilling lines. “Some creatures are meant only for destruction.”

And that’s when everyone watching probably had their heart broken a little bit, but some of the viewers raised in or around Christianity watching the same scene probably whispered ‘holy shit’ to themselves. Because Prime’s line - which works as a chilling and callous dismissal of Catra - is also an allusion to a passage from the Bible. In fact, it’s from one of the most fucked up passages in a book with more than its share of fucked up passages. It’s from Romans 9:22, and I’m going to quote several previous verses to give the context of the passage (if not the entire Epistle, which is more about who needs to abide by Jewish dietary restrictions but was used to construct a systematic theology in the centuries afterwards because people decided it was Eternal Truth).

19 Thou wilt say then unto me, Why doth he yet find fault? For who hath resisted his will?

20 Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus?

21 Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?

22 What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction:

The context of the allusion supports the context in the show. Prime is dismissing Catra - serial betrayer, liar, failed conqueror, former bloody-handed warlord - as worthless, as having always been worthless and fit only to be destroyed. He is speaking from a divine and authoritative perspective (because he really does think he’s God, more of this in my TL/DR Horde Prime thing). Prime is echoing not only his own haughty dismissal of Catra, and Shadow Weaver’s view of her, but also perhaps the viewer’s harshest assessment of her, and her own worst fears about herself. Catra was bad from the start, doomed to destroy and to be destroyed. A malformed pot, cracked in firing, destined to be shattered against a wall and have her shards classified by some future archaeologist 2,000 years later. And all that’s bad enough.

But the full historical and theological context of this passage shows the real depth of Noelle Stevenson’s passion and thought and care when writing this show. Noelle was raised in Evangelical or Fundamentalist Christianity. To my knowledge, he has never specified what sect or denomination, but in interviews and her memoir Noelle has shown a particular concern for questions that this passage raises, and a particular loathing for the strains of Protestant theology that take this passage and run with it - that is to say, Calvinism. So while I’m not sure if Noelle was raised as a conservative, Calvinist Presbyterian, his preoccupation with these questions mean that it’s time to talk about Calvinism.

It would be unfair, perhaps, to say that Calvinism is a systematic theology built entirely upon the Epistles of Romans and Galatians, but only -just- (and here my Catholic readers in particular will chuckle to themselves and lovingly stroke their favorite passage of the Epistle of James). The core of Calvinist Doctrine is often expressed by the very Dutch acronym TULIP:

Total Depravity - people are wholly evil, and incapable of good action or even willing good thoughts or deeds

Unconditional Election - God chooses some people to save because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, not because they did anything to deserve, trigger or accept it

Limited Atonement - Jesus died only to save the people God chose to save, not the rest of us bastards

Irresistible Grace - God chooses some people to be saved - if you didn’t want to be saved, too bad, God said so.

Perseverance of the Saints - People often forget this one and assume it’s ‘predestination’ but it’s actually this - basically, once saved by God, always saved, and if it looks like someone falls out of grace, they were never saved to begin with. Well that’s all sealed up tight I guess.

Reading through these, predestination isn’t a single doctrine in Calvinism but the entire theological underpinnings of it together with humanity’s utter powerlessness before sin. Basically God has all agency, humanity has none. Calvinism (and a lot of early modern Protestantism) is obsessed with questions of how God saves people (grace alone, AKA Sola Fides) and who God saves (the people god elects and only the people God elects, and fuck everyone else).

It’s apparent that Noelle was really taken by these questions, and repelled by the answers he heard. He’s alluded to having a tattoo refuting the Gospel passage about Sheep and Goats being sorted at the end times, affirming instead that ‘we’re all just a bunch of wooly guys’ (you can see this goat tattoo in some of his self-portraits in comics, etc). He’s also mentioned that rejecting and subverting destiny is a huge part of everything he writes as a particular rejection of the idea that some individual people are 'chosen' by God or that God has a plan for any of us. You can see that -so clearly- in Adora’s arc, where Adora embraces and then rejects destiny time and again and finally learns to live life for herself.

But for Catra, we’re much more concerned about the most negative aspect of this - the idea that some people are vessels meant for destruction. And that’s something else that Noelle is preoccupied with. In her memoir in the section about leaving the church and becoming a humanistic atheist, there is a drawing of a pot and the question ‘Am I a vessel prepared for destruction?’ Obviously this was on Noelle’s mind (And this is before he came out to himself as queer!).

To look at how this question plays out in Catra’s entire arc, let’s first talk about how ideas of damnation and salvation actually play out in society. And for that I’m going to plug one of my favorite books, Gin Lun’s Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction (if you can tell by now, I am a fucking blast at parties). Lun tells the long and very interesting story about, how ideas of hell and who went there changed during the Early American Republic. One of the interesting developments that she talks about is how while at first people who were repelled by Calvinism started moving toward a doctrine of universal salvation (no on goes to hell, at least not forever*), eventually they decided that hell was fine as long as only the right kind of people went there. Mostly The Other - non-Christian foreigners, Catholics, Atheists, people who were sinners in ways that were not just bad but weird and violated Victorian ideas of respectability. Really, Hell became a way of othering people, and arguably that’s how it survives today, especially as a way to other queer people (but expanding this is slated for my Montero rant). Now while a lot of people were consciously rejecting Calvinist predestination, they were still drawing the distinction between the Elect (good, saved, worthwhile) and the everyone else (bad, damned, worthless). I would argue that secularized ideas of this survive to this day even among non-Christian spaces in our society - we like to draw lines between those who Elect, and those who aren’t.

And that’s what brings us back to Catra. Because Catra’s entire arc is a refutation of the idea that some people are worthless and irredeemable, either by nature, nurture or their own actions. Catra’s actions strain the conventions of who is sympathetic in a Kid’s cartoon - I’ve half joked that she’s Walter White as a cat girl, and it’s only half a joke. She’s cruel, self-deluded, she spends 4 seasons refusing to take responsibility for anything she does and until Season 5 she just about always chooses the thing that does the most damage to herself and others. As I mentioned in my Catra rant, the show goes out of its way to demonstrate that Catra is morally culpable in every step of her descent into evil (except maybe her break with reality just before she pulls the lever). The way that Catra personally betrays everyone around her, the way she strips herself of all of her better qualities and most of what makes her human, hell even her costume changes would signal in any other show that she’s irredeemable.

It’s tempting to see this as Noelle’s version of being edgy - pushing the boundaries of what a sympathetic character is, throwing out antiheroics in favor of just making the villain a protagonist. Noelle isn’t quite Alex ‘I am in the business of traumatizing children’ Hirsch, who seems to have viewed his job as pushing the bounds of what you could show on the Disney Channel (I saw Gravity Falls as an adult and a bunch of that shit lives rent free in my nightmares forever), but Noelle has his own dark side, mostly thematically. The show’s willingness to deal with abuse, and messed up religious themes, and volatile, passionate, not particularly healthy relationships feels pretty daring. I’m not joking when I gleefully recommend this show to friends as ‘a couple from a Mountain Goats Song fights for four seasons in a cartoon intended for 9 year olds’. Noelle is in his own way pushing the boundaries of what a kids show can do. If you read Noelle’s other works like Nimona, you see an argument for Noelle being at least a bit edgy. Nimona is also angry, gleefully destructive, violent and spiteful - not unlike Catra. Given that it was a 2010s webcomic and not a kids show, Nimona is a good deal worse than Catra in some ways - Catra doesn’t kill people on screen, while Nimona laughs about it (that was just like, a webcomic thing - one of the fan favorite characters in my personal favorite, Narbonic, was a fucking sociopath, and the heroes were all amoral mad scientists, except for the superintelligent gerbil**). But unlike Nimona, whose fate is left open ended, Catra is redeemed.

And that is weird. We’ve had redemption arcs, but generally not of characters with -so- much vile stuff in their history. Going back to the comparison between her and Azula, many other shows, like Avatar, would have made Catra a semi-sympathetic villain who has a sob-story in their origin but who is beyond redemption, and in so doing would articulate a kind of psychologized Calvinism where some people are too traumatized to ever be fully and truly human. I’d argue this is the problem with Azula as a character - she’s a fun villain, but she doesn’t have moral agency, and the ultimate message of her arc - that she’s a broken person destined only to hurt people - is actually pretty fucked up. And that’s the origin story of so many serial killers and psycopaths that populate so many TV shows and movies. Beyond ‘hurt people hurt people’ they have nothing to teach us except perhaps that trauma makes you a monster and that the only possible response to people doing bad things is to cut them out of your life and out of our society (and that’s why we have prisons, right?)

And so Catra’s redemption and the depths from which she claws herself back goes back to Noelle’s desire to prove that no person is a vessel ‘fitted for destruction.’ Catra goes about as far down the path of evil as we’ve ever seen a protagonist in a kids show go, and she still has the capacity for good. Importantly, she is not subject to total depravity - she is capable of a good act, if only one at first. Catra is the one who begins her own redemption (unlike in Calvinism, where grace is unearned and even unwelcomed) - because she wants something better than what she has, even if its too late, because she realizes that she never wanted any of this anyway, because she wants to do one good thing once in her life even if it kills her.

The very extremity of Catra’s descent into villainy serves to underline the point that Noelle is trying to make - that no one can be written off completely, that everyone is capable of change, and that no human being is garbage, no matter how twisted they’ve become. Meanwhile her ability to set her own redemption in motion is a powerful statement of human agency, and healing, and a refutation of Calvinism’s idea that we are powerless before sin or pop cultural tropes about us being powerful before the traumas of our upbringing. Catra’s arc, then, is a kind of anti-Calvinist theological statement - about the nature of people and the nature of goodness.

Now, there is a darker side to this that Noelle has only hinted at, but which is suggested by other characters on the show. Because while Catra’s redemption shows that people are capable of change, even when they’ve done horrible things, been fucked up and fucked themselves up, it also illustrates the things people do to themselves that make change hard. As I mentioned in my Catra rant, two of the most sinister parts of her descent into villainy are her self-dehumanization (crushing her own compassion and desire to do good) and her rewriting of her own history in her speech and memory to make her own actions seem justified (which we see with her insistence that Adora left her, eliding Adora’s offers to have Catra join her, or her even more clearly false insistence that Entrapta had betrayed them). In Catra, these processes keep her going down the path of evil, and allow her to nearly destroy herself and everyone else. But we can see the same processes at work in two much darker figures - Shadow Weaver and Horde Prime. These are both rants for another day, but the completeness of Shadow Weaver’s narcissistic self-justification and cultivated callousness and the even more complete narcissism of Prime’s god complex cut both characters off from everyone around them. Perhaps, in a theoretical sense, they are still redeemable, but for narrative purposes they might as well be damned.

This willingness to show a case where someone -isn’t- redeemed actually serves to make Catra’s redemption more believable, especially since Noelle and the writers draw the distinction between how Catra and SW/Prime can relate to reality and other people, not how broken they are by their trauma (unlike Zuko and Azula, who are differentiated by How Fucked Uolp They Are). Redemption is there, it’s an option, we can always do what is right, but someone people will choose not to, in part because doing the right thing involves opening ourselves to the world and others, and thus being vulnerable. Noelle mentions this offhandedly in an interview after Season 1 with the She-Ra Progressive of Power podcast - “I sometimes think that shades of grey, sympathetic villains are part of the escapist fantasy of shows like this.” Because in the real world, some people are just bastards, a point that was particularly clear in 2017. Prime and Shadow Weaver admit this reality, while Catra makes a philosophical point that even the bastards can change their ways (at least in theory).

*An idea first proposed in the second century by Origen, who’s a trip and a fucking half by himself, and an idea that becomes the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, which protestants vehemently denied!

**Speaking of favorite Noelle tropes

#she ra horde prime #she ra #she ra catra #she ra spoilers #redemption arcs #toxic religion

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leatherbookmark · 1 year

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more bitching about one and the same thing aka Everyone Is Wrong About A-Yao (but me, of course)

there’s this fanon idea of jgy as someone who’d flaunt his luxurious possessions (either dressing in flashy, visibly expensive clothes in modern aus or parading his boyfriend around), who’d feel possessive and territorial, and it rubs me the wrong way (like honestly everything about fanon jgy). not only because this isn’t a behaviour he’s ever shown in the novel -- if anything, he spoils people dear to him, but that’s a different thing -- but also because he simply doesn’t do that in general. sure, he’s had nothing both financially and security-wise for the first ~20 years of his life, but he’s Never did the thing where you suddenly have money and go crazy with it.

like he isn’t just poor and naive, he knows that even if you Do get something, others can easily take it away from you. when nmj defends and promotes him on the spot, is he happy? proud? flaunting his sect leader’s support? no, if anything he only gets more anxious, because he clearly sees that nmj’s clueless way of defending him will only get the other disciples to hate him more. if he spends money later on, it’s to spoil the people he loves (jl and his 400 fancy hunting nets, fairy) or builds the watchtowers.

another thing is that even if he was possessive and prone to bragging, considering he used to be poor, it shouldn’t be anything like... shocking or out of the ordinary. if you had nothing to call truly yours, and all your clothes were flimsy and low quality, wouldn’t you splurge on some proper, sturdy stuff as soon as you had the means to? wouldn’t you be attached to the first thing you bought with your new money, as a symbol of your new life and possibilities? but for some reason, the way fanon!jgy’s possessive tendencies are framed is more focused on the way it makes him twisted, greedy. a petty bitch flaunting her tall, handsome and rich boyfriend.

and it’s just so not what’s happening, or what could possibly happen, that sometimes i understand those jc haters who do nothing but bitch about how people are wrong and stupid, because when i think about how ooc the fanon!jgy is, Boy do i see red. i don’t think any other character gets this treatment, because even jc is considered a monster because people simply refuse to see the motivations behind the thing he does and says. for jgy, it’s like the majority of the fandom sat down with a picture of smirking zzj!jgy and made an OC based on that. insane.

anyway -- bragging and hissy possessiveness simply Wouldn’t Happen here, but man, i would actually like to see fanworks exploring jgy’s relationship with owning things that are just his and being confident in his relationships. because a jgy that can confidently say “this is mine” is a jgy who’s secure, safe, stable. possibly has been for years. and this would be Something, because even lxc isn’t considered “safe” enough. even as the most powerful person in the jianghu jgy still thinks like a poor abused teenager* -- he can’t expect anyone to fully accept and support him no matter what. what he can expect is for the world to immediately turn against him, forgetting everything he’s ever done for them, because in the end, he is always just a son of a prostitute.

*and he’s right. it’s important to me that he’s RIGHT, and scenarios where “if only jgy just talked to his two boyfriends, he’d realize that he’s totally secure and has nothing to fear!” are just *growls hisses bites*

this is the kind of person we’re dealing with here. so it would be really interesting to explore that -- at what point does jgy, assuming either a modern au or a canon divergence where things don’t go the way they did in canon, feel secure in his life? at what point does he allow himself not to dress like a glorified servant, perhaps even -- gasp! -- flaunt his riches a bit in a tasteful way, just because he feels like looking fancy? at what point he stops caring about what people might say about him, because he knows there are people who would never abandon him? does that ever happen? does he ever stop showing people, even his loved ones, only the sides of him that are good, lovable, agreeable, not because he’s obsessed with his pristine image but because he fears that anything less than that would make them leave? once they see his “true self” which is, god do i reiterate, not “oh boo hoo i’m such a horrible murderer who doesn’t deserve pure er-ge’s love, i wish i could turn back time and not commit all those unnecessary crimes :(((” but “someone who’s dirty, evil and below everyone no matter what he does, simply because of his birth”? like man That Is Interesting but if i want to read it i’m gonna have to write it myself huh

#this man is so fucking tired and so am i #shrimp thoughts

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no--envies · 3 years

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The destruction of the Tiger Seal and Wei Wuxian’s death

A really popular theory in the fandom is that WWX died destroying the Tiger Seal, either because of an explosion of all the energy it had accumulated or because trying to destroy it affected him to the point that he couldn’t control the resentful energies anymore. This theory often implies the destruction of the Tiger Seal was a relatively fast process and that WWX started to destroy it when the sects besieged the Burial Mounds, because he didn’t want it to fall into the wrong hands.

However, the novel explicitly contradicts this theory:

It wasn’t as though Wei Wuxian, after forging such calamity, had refused to destroy it. However, creating the thing had been difficult enough; destroying it was every bit as difficult, and demanded an incredible amount of his time and energy. Moreover, by then, he already vaguely sensed that his own situation was precarious, and sooner or later, everyone would turn on him. The immense power of the Yin Tiger Tally meant that no one dared touch him while he was wielding it—thus, Wei Wuxian kept it, for the time being. He only split the tally into two, so that anyone attempting to use it would first have to put both pieces together. Furthermore, he decided never to use it without thinking carefully through the consequences.

In all, he only ever used it two times, and both times, it shed rivers of blood. The first was during the Sunshot Campaign, and after the second time, he finally found the determination to destroy it. One half, he completely obliterated. But before he was able to finish disposing of the other, the Siege of the Burial Mounds descended upon him. He had no control over the events that followed.

(Chapter 30, Fan Yiyi translation)

This passage is very clear: WWX had completely destroyed the first half of the Tiger Seal before the siege happened. At the time, he was in the process of destroying the second half, but then he died and couldn’t do anything about it anymore. It’s also stated that destroying the Tiger Seal required an incredible amount of time and energy, which was one of the reasons he hadn’t decided to destroy it earlier.

Given the amount of resentful energy the Tiger Seal contained, it’s not surprising that both creating it and destroying it were such difficult processes. Even a much less powerful object like the bell WWX had made for JL took a long time to create:

Wen Ning, “Young Master, is this what you’ve been making for the past month or so, when you were shutting yourself in the Cave on days upon end?”

Wei WuXian, “That’s right. As long as that nephew of mine carries this bell around, not a single creature whose level is just a bit too low can even think about getting close to him. You can’t touch it. It’ll probably leave you affected for some time as well if you do.”

(Chapter 76, ExR translation)

If a bell that could only protect a person from the weakest creatures took a whole month to create (I assume because a lot of energy needed to be stored in it), how much longer would it take to destroy an immensely powerful artifact like the Tiger Seal, which could even surpass the power of its creator and didn’t recognize a master? We’re talking about something that was forged from a piece of metal that had accumulated resentful energies for centuries and WWX himself admits making it into a usable tool was a long and difficult process. Even destroying just a half probably required a lot of time to gradually dissipate all the resentful energy that was stored in it. Since we know the siege happened three months after the bloodbath of Nightless City - and considering WWX probably had other things to do in the meantime, like strengthening the defenses of the Burial Mounds for the attack he knew would come sooner or later - he had enough time to successfully obliterate one half of the Seal and start destroying the other one. Before he could completely destroy the second half, the sects arrived to besiege him and he had to focus on protecting himself and the Wen remnants.

Moreover, the process of destroying the Tiger Seal didn’t only require a lot of time, but an incredible amount of energy as well. By the time the siege happened, he was probably already exhausted. This would explain why he received a backlash and lost control of his army of corpses, since we know demonic cultivation is affected by the mental state of the one practicing it. Besides, seeing JC - the person who was once like a brother to him - lead the siege meant to kill him and destroy everything he was fighting for didn’t help his mental state at all. All of WWX’s guilt and grief at the time were already a lot to bear, but knowing that his former shidi hated him so much that he took part in the siege as the leader must have shaken him quite a bit. We don't see him sad often, but one of the few times we do is when he gets reminded of JC's role in his death while he's watching a group of kids impersonating them in a game based on the Sunshot Campaign (chapter 32).

I think WWX did what he could to protect the Wen remnants, but his exhaustion combined with his unstable mental state made him lose control of his demonic cultivation and receive a backlash, which led to him being torn to pieces by his own ghost army and dying in a really gruesome way.

The fact that he died because his cultivation method backfired and he was torn to pieces by the corpses he could no longer control is stated in the novel multiple times:

“Rejoice, rejoice! Say, which hero dealt the finishing blow to the Yiling Laozu?”

“Who else could it be? His disciple-brother, Chief Jiang Cheng of the Yunmeng Jiang Sect! [...] Sect Chief Jiang killed his own disciple-brother and destroyed his lair for the good of us all. The Burial Mounds are gone!”

[...]

“But that’s not what I heard. I thought one of his evil tricks backfired and he was shredded to pieces by those ghosts of his. Some say that they bit and tore at him so viciously that by the end of it, his body was no more than a slurry of flesh and bone dust.”

(Chapter 1, Fan Yiyi translation)

After a moment of silence, Wei Wuxian said, “What else have you heard?”

“Jiang Cheng, Clan Chief Jiang, brought people to encircle and besiege the Burial Mounds. He killed you, sir.”

“I have to clarify this. He didn’t kill me. I died because one of my techniques backfired.”

Wen Ning finally lifted his eyes and looked at him directly. “But, Clan Chief Jiang, he clearly—“

“It’s impossible for someone to walk on a lonely, single-log bridge safely and soundly for an entire lifetime. It couldn’t be helped.”

(Chapter 43, Fan Yiyi translation)

Jin GuangYao, “It is true that body sacrifice cannot be proven, but whether or not he is the YiLing Patriarch can. Ever since the YiLing Patriarch had received the cultivation backlash and been torn to dust by his ghouls on the top of the Burial Mounds, his sword was collected by the LanlingJin Sect. But, not long afterwards, the sword sealed itself.”

(Chapter 50, ExR translation)

Some of the things that were said about the first siege - like that JC had dealt the fatal blow to WWX - were untrue, but since the backlash is something WWX himself confirms we can safely take it as a fact. Also, a lot of people were present during WWX’s death and witnessed it with their own eyes, so they knew how he died. JGY, who described WWX’s death as him being “torn to dust by his ghouls”, was probably one of them since the Jin Sect was on the frontline as one of the main forces.

In my opinion, WWX started destroying the Tiger Seal not long after returning to the Burial Mounds. What finally made him decide to eliminate such a dangerous artifact from the world was the bloodbath it had caused at Nightless City. He had originally resolved not to use it unless it was really necessary, but he ended up activating it when he wasn’t clear-headed at all, in a moment of extreme desperation and grief after his whole world had crumbled, his beloved shijie had died and everyone condemned him and blamed him for everything that had happened. He wasn’t proud of all the people he had killed and didn’t want something like that to happen ever again, so he finally resolved to destroy the most powerful weapon he had, which until then he had kept as a deterrent to discourage others from attacking him, since he sensed that sooner or later the cultivation world would turn against him.

He knew perfectly well that destroying the Tiger Seal would leave him in a more vulnerable position (though he still had his demonic cultivation to protect himself and the Wen remnants), but he chose to do it anyway because he knew it was the right thing to do. Such a terrible artifact couldn’t be allowed to fall into the wrong hands under any circumstances, and he knew his own fate was sealed since the sects had already labeled him as the scourge of the cultivation world and sooner or later they would come to besiege him. Instead of perpetuating the cycle of violence, WWX chose to willingly put himself in a more precarious position, but it wasn’t the destruction of the Tiger Seal itself that killed him. It was a series of circumstances that his decision partially contributed to.

#mdzs #mdzs meta #wwx #wei wuxian #wei ying #yin tiger seal

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