I've already made a post about this particular topic that was more even-tempered than the screed about to exit my fingertips, but I really do not get why this fandom is so utterly obsessed with the prostitutes JGY kills after using them to rape his father to death.
Once again I remind us all that this is a story in which our protagonist takes his revenge on an enemy by forcing his lover to bite off his penis and then driving him to autocannibalise his own fingers. While haunting him with the manipulated and desecrated body of a dead woman and child, I might add, along with subsequently using the tormented bodies of the Wen to rise up and murder their own families. After the war, WWX does indeed protect the Wenmants due to the debt he owes WN and WQ, but I don't think we're expected to believe that somehow, conveniently, the only Wen survivors are the nice and deserving ones. There are plenty of innocent casualties on both sides of the war, however you choose to define the term. WWX commits atrocities. He uses the bodies of those weaker than himself to visit vengeance on his enemies, regardless of whether the people whose bodies he uses as tools are 'deserving' in any moral sense of such treatment.
I keep bringing this up in the vain hope that by highlighting some of WWX's most vile acts, I can highlight the fact that it is not only intellectually lazy but also utterly, utterly tedious to apply real world moral standards to any of these characters. If you are engaging with the text and honest to goodness applying your actual real world moral framework to the cast, I can only presume you condemn every single one of them. None is righteous, no, not one.
Since we are expected to be cool with WWX's atrocities (and LWJ's atrocities, etc. etc. you get my point) on the grounds of understanding piddling little things like context and the difference between fiction and reality, let us return to the prostitutes.
Clearly I'm the weird one, but I don't think it's necessary to start up some kind of bizarre ranking system where I grade the reprehensibility of each character's actions down to the finest particle, particularly when said system is not applied evenly. All that matters to me is that JGY is a narrative foil for WWX, our protagonist, the one we're supposed to root for even when he's not perfect. Even within the world of MDZS, it is considered shocking and awful that JGY uses those women to rape his father to death and then has them killed to cover his tracks (barring Sisi of course). Although the characters themselves are more focused on the awfulness of the death for JGS—yes, even LXC, the closest thing we have to a decent human being in this nightmare world. But what's actually interesting is that this act is inconsistent with JGY's other acts, insofar as the chosen method is cruelty for the sake of cruelty. JGY is thinking only of what would make the most cruelly ironic death for the author of all his endless miseries—just as WWX and JC are thinking only of inflicting maximum suffering on WC (and WLJ) for the massacre at Lotus Pier and are using the unconsenting bodies of uninvolved parties to achieve that goal.
If at this point you start to argue that WC and WLJ are somehow more 'deserving' of their fate, I refer you back to the beginning of this post. If we are using real world morality, no one deserves either of those fates. If we are using some other moral framework, I raise an eyebrow at anyone who thinks you can split hairs about the amount and type of terrible acts you have to commit before you deserve to die tortured and afraid. JGS is ultimately responsible for the Jin holding back in the war and the increased casualties thereby, for massacres like that of the Chang Clan and the Tingshan He, not to mention the needless suffering and death of MS, a woman whose only crime was having no reason to doubt a false promise she was given. Would it make a difference if he'd died because his wife had been compelled to bite off his penis? Jin-furen is abusive too, after all.
The point is, passing moral judgement is a dead end if done correctly i.e. consistently across the entire cast. What is interesting is therefore context and motivation. From WWX's perspective, he has reason to seek vengeance on WC and WLJ, and no reason to consider the rest of the Wen as anything other than fodder for his army of resentful dead. Men, women, children; cultivators, civilians: they all go into the meat grinder, their bodies desecrated and used as weapons to murder their families and loved ones. When WWX reflects in later years, his main emotion is one of embarrassment, as though his wartime atrocities and his arrogant attitude are something he can put behind him rather than reckon with. And the text allows this, while still expecting us to root for him.
JGY's lack of shame at using prostitutes to kill his own father is not, therefore, dramatically different to WWX's own past actions or his later reaction to them. When WWX is no longer in a position where he needs or wants to commit atrocities, he is able to move on without a reckoning. There's an argument to be made that WWX feels more of a twinge of guilt about his actions than JGY does, but since he doesn't do anything about said guilt, there's no difference in practice. (JGY is also the only one who works to make systemic changes that improve the lives of the population, so we also can't say the lives of strangers mean nothing to him, but this isn't a post about the watchtowers.) So yes, it's not unreasonable to conclude that JGY does not see those women as anything other than disposable tools. How horrible. Except, again, throwing moral judgement when it lands on JGY alone is a thought-terminating cliche. What's interesting is not that he murdered the loose ends. It's that he spared one of them.
From JGY's perspective, he owes no class of person any allegiance. He has been abused his entire life by cultivators and commoners and prostitutes alike. To read this act as a particular disregard for the lives of prostitutes is to ignore the context. He owes no one anything, so if it is expedient to his goals then yes, he will do what it takes. It's the people who treat him with the bare modicum of respect due from one human being to another who are safe from death, even when their continued survival is an existential threat to him.
If fandom really were applying any kind of consistent moral standard to the text (or reading the text at all) they wouldn't just be stuck condemning WWX and the rest of the cast as heartily as they condemn JGY. But no. According to fandom, the murder of those particular prostitutes is the Worst Thing Anyone Did In MDZS Ever Because It Was Done By JGY. Strange. You'd think people would also bring up that JGY also has XY burn down the brothel he grew up in with everyone inside. But that would require actually reading the text to form opinions, rather than parroting the stale banalities that have been circulating for years.
But maybe I'm wrong. I suppose the lives of the prostitutes burned alive at the brothel just aren't as important as the lives of the prostitutes JGY uses to kill his father. I really wish someone would send me the ranking chart everyone else apparently has access to. How many dead children whose corpses are being puppeted around to murder their own families do you think are equivalent to the murder of a prostitute? What's the exchange rate on that?
