Here’s something I don’t see a lot of people talking about:
Nie Huaisang’s revenge scheme absolutely included revenge on Lan Xichen, and to be honest, Nie Huaisang was right to do it.
Everyone always seems to want to paint Lan Xichen as this paragon of righteousness and virtue, and in some ways he is, but when you actually go back and look at his actions, he’s kind of a blind asshole.
Some of the things he did wrong weren’t so obvious, but there are definitely points throughout the story where he blatantly disregards righteousness in favor of maintaining the status quo. The very first instance that comes to mind is when his brother, Lan Wangji, comes to him with the truth of the people living in the Burial Mounds, and Lan Xichen tells him that he’s just letting his emotions mislead him.
Lan Wangji. Hanguang-jun. The strongest cultivator of his generation, with a reputation for NEVER LYING OR BEING EMOTIONAL, and Lan Xichen is like “bro, I think you’re lying because you’re in love :) Also a-Yao told me you're wrong :) So I choose to believe that the evidence you saw with your own eyes is false :)”
Or at the Phoenix Mountain banquet where Wei Wuxian accuses Jin Guangshan of wanting to be the next Wen Ruohan. Lan Xichen comes right out and says that Wei Wuxian ISN’T WRONG, but he shouldn’t say it out loud because it’s rude. Like, my dude, my guy, you can obviously see that the Jin are shady as shit, you even admit it, but you’re choosing to ignore him because he was being impolite?
And we can't forget how he vilified Wei Wuxian at that same hunt for taking a third of the prey, but when Nie Mingjue did the same thing, that was somehow acceptable and expected. Bro, can you BE any more of a hypocrite?
Nie Mingjue told him that Jin Guangyao couldn’t be trusted, and instead of asking why, Lan Xichen was just like “Oh, I’m sure it was all a misunderstanding! He’s harmless! :)” By all accounts, Nie Mingjue was one of Lan Xichen’s oldest friends, and he chose to ignore the man in favor of the sweet-talking twink he met 20 minutes ago.
There’s a lot more than that, but I digress.
Nie Huaisang put all the pieces together after Nie Mingjue’s death and realized that Lan Xichen absolutely had a major part to play in the deaths of not only his beloved Da-ge but also his best friend, Wei Wuxian, and destroyed Lan Wangji, his own brother’s, heart and body (because you cannot tell me that Lan Xichen, as SECT LEADER, didn’t know or have a hand in Lan Wangji’s punishment after his escape from Nightless City).
Nie Huaisang knew that Lan Xichen not only taught Jin Guangyao Lan clan techniques (which they aren't supposed to give to outsiders), but Lan Xichen also gave Jin Guangyao free access to the Cloud Recesses, which is what allowed him to find the Collection of Turmoil and eventually kill Nie Mingjue with it. None of that would have been possible had Lan Xichen not gone against his own clan rules for a man who had already proven himself to be manipulative twice over.
Lan Xichen was flitting around, acting like everything was all fine and dandy, and Nie Huaisang was sitting in the Unclean Realm SEETHING with anger because, had Lan Xichen listened to literally anyone other than Jin Guangyao at ANY POINT, he could have very easily stopped A LOT of the shit that ended up happening. The entire reason Jin Guangyao was able to get away with everything he did was because Lan Xichen was standing right behind him and offering up his full support, so no one ever bothered to look twice. After all, if the righteous Zewu-jun has his back, then he can’t be doing anything wrong!
Don’t get me wrong; Huaisang absolutely has his own faults too. He’s 100% not a good person, and he did some incredibly heinous shit, but given the way his character was written, I’m pretty sure he didn’t become the mastermind until he was forced to after Nie Mingjue’s death, so it’s not like he could have stopped anything on his own beforehand. He just simply wasn’t paying attention at the time. And after Mingjue’s death, Huaisang would have felt like he didn’t have anything to lose or anyone else to rely on. After all, his Da-ge was dead, his Er-ge and San-ge were complicit in a ton of murders (including Nie Mingjue’s), the Jin were the direct cause of everyone’s problems, the Jiang were a bunch of crazed murderers, and the Lan were more than willing to cripple a righteous man and kill innocents if it meant they could keep their reputation intact.
Is it any wonder he went rogue and used any means or people at his disposal to drag the truth into the light regardless of who it would hurt?
Mo Xuanyu? He was a Jin and easy to manipulate. Who cares if he was horrifically abused and driven insane? That just meant he’d be willing to sacrifice himself to bring back the dreaded Yiling Patriarch, the one person Huaisang knew would fix any problem as long as he was thrown into the middle of it.
The junior disciples? Convenient bait to make sure Wei Wuxian stayed on the correct course. Cannon fodder. Wei Wuxian will protect them anyway, and if any of them die or get severely hurt, that’ll just make him more determined to solve the mystery!
Qin Su? You mean to tell him that she married into that viper’s nest and never once noticed any of the shady shit going on around her at all times? She lived there for YEARS and didn’t see a single thing wrong with the place and try to say something? Too bad, she deserved it.
As far as Huaisang was concerned, the only people he could trust were Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji, and Lan Wangji was on thin fucking ice. Everyone else fell into the categories of “acceptable sacrifice” or “actual villain.” And unfortunately for Lan Xichen, Huaisang put him on the villain side. Lan Xichen may have been an unwilling villain, but as Alucard said in Symphony of the Night, “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”
So yeah, at the end of it all, forcing Lan Xichen to stab Jin Guangyao was Huaisang’s way of saying “I know what you allowed to happen and now I’m going to make sure you feel the same way I do.”
