To be cool, in my opinion, is to act with a high degree of confidence and almost no embarrassment about anything. This rules out Shen Qingqiu and Lan Wangji immediately. Though on first impression they may seem the epitome of cool, we are unfortunately privy to Shen Qingqiu's thoughts, and Lan Wangji is unfortunately privy to Wei Wuxian, making them anything but.
One may, by this definition, conclude that Hua Cheng is the coolest of any MXTX character, considering his levels of confidence, but in my opinion there are additional considerations in the definition of coolness that bring others into significant contention.
The first consideration relates to embracing vulnerability as a display of confidence. To love someone, one must accept a willingness not only to be hurt, but also to be made a fool; one must admit the possibility of failure. Therefore to love someone openly, without reservation, without any attempts to hide or disguise said love, displays a confidence that Hua Cheng--who cannot bear to even face his love when the depths of his feelings are revealed--utterly lacks. This excludes him from the running totally and completely, in my opinion.
In a shocking turn of events, it also puts Luo Binghe right near the top of the competition. Though many--if not most!--would disqualify Luo Binghe immediately due to his propensity to embarrass himself, my personal definition of cool is far more closely related not to what embarrasses others, but to what embarrasses one’s self—and Luo Binghe is never embarrassed.
He is a person wholly unconcerned with the judgment of others. His self-image is meaningless to him. He will go to any lengths to fully realize the deepest desires of his heart, without care for what a fool that makes him, how weak or vulnerable he may seem in others’ eyes. Few people are cool to the extent that Luo Binghe achieves—they are too worried about being cool.
However, the second consideration that I would argue be admitted into the definition of cool is that of goodness and all that goodness entails—compassion, generosity, kindness, honesty et al. Goodness is not considered cool by the general population, but it is that very exclusion from the definition of cool that in fact elevates to the absolute heights of coolness.
Defiance of convention is often considered cool. To break norms and flout popularity, to exist on the edge of the socially acceptable—such things are considered the height of cool. I argue that kindness defies convention; compassion flies in the face of social norms. To be gentle in a world the encourages us to be harsh requires such confidence and self-assurance that only the coolest are able to pull it off regularly.
In a similar vein, danger is often supposed cool. What could be more dangerous than an act of kindness? Compassion makes us more vulnerable, in some ways, than love. Through compassion, our sympathies are dictated not by someone who is precious to us, but sometimes by complete strangers. To threaten is simple; to be gentle, a feat.
Xie Lian, by being in general a nicer person than Luo Binghe--by being, in fact, the epitome of a mensch--is among the very coolest of them all. While I do not think that anyone would call Wei Wuxian kind by any stretch of the imagination, he is in fact the only competitor left against Xie Lian in terms of an absolute willingness to care about strangers more than his own well-being and reputation. While he’s fundamentally quite rude, I don’t think anyone can dispute his generosity of spirit.
Therefore, in judging between these final contestants, I think we can only return to our original criteria, that of confidence and embarrassment. I think it safe to say that while Xie Lian is possessed a remarkable and quiet self-assurance, he still experiences self-doubt and becomes embarrassed on a number of occasions. Meanwhile, Wei Wuxian’s frankly worrying capacity for remembering even significant events means that he cannot hold even his own failures in his head to doubt for long, and that which would embarrass any man not named Luo Binghe seems par for the course for the Yiling Laozu.
Therefore, by my personal definitions, there is a clear winner to this poll, one that should, in my opinion, be obvious to anyone with even a passing familiarity with these canons.
But okay. My definition of “cool” is not the standard definition. To wit, most people (for reasons unknown to me, considering my above arguments, which are by any measurement, completely airtight) do not consider kindness the epitome of cool. In fact, the definition of cool, to most people, seems directly proportional to possession of another quality, which I will call swagger.
I think it obvious that Xie Lian is by far the loser in the contest of swagger, his sad dad jokes alone capable of pinning him directly to the bottom of the list. Luo Binghe, while actually possessed of a great deal of swagger when not in love, is similarly disqualified given his propensity to dissolve into abject sobbing at the slightest suggestion that his shizun might not like him.
Both Shen Qingqiu and Lan Wangji may appear to the outward observer to have moderate swagger, but I would argue that they are both too poised and self-composed to put any real swag into genuine swagger. Furthermore as previously discussed, one gay word or a single pull of a ribbon to each of them, respectively, has such an ability to annihilate both of them that they cannot reasonably be said to possess true swagger.
This leaves Hua Cheng and Wei Wuxian in contention. Indeed, the results of this poll so far indicate that this definition of “cool” is by far preferred among the general population. However, still, I would argue that Crimson Rain Sought Flower is not at all a contender in the face of the Yiling Laozu.
Yes, the Ghost King Hua Cheng is a Supreme who defies death thrice, who digs out his own eye bare-handed and forges a sword from it, who can summon a cloud of butterflies that are actually blades that will cut you to death; the Ghost King Hua Cheng challenges gods to duels and wins; he is a god-slaying lord of ghosts, a ruler of the dead, richer than gods of the underworld and happy to gamble on souls of immortals, demons, and gods alike. These qualities amount to an almost incomparable level of swagger. Fine.
But please consider, for your evaluation, that this man pretty much trembles like a leaf when his love interest so much as touches him; he thinks he’s ugly trash; he spends all of his spare time carving statues of his beloved and writing their names together in notebooks with hearts around them; he is a very sad boy who is so unloved he actually can’t function in society like a normal person, and while pining might be considered “cool” under my personal definition, you have already excluded Luo Binghe, who literally pines so hard he makes a dead body food and talks to it. Hua Cheng pines so hard he is, in fact, pathetic—a quality antithetical and in fact fatal to swagger.
The Yiling Laozu doesn’t pine. The Yiling Laozu gets interested in a guy and non-cons him into hot sadistic sex that very night, then confesses his love very loudly during what should have been the villain’s monologue in the final act of an intense climax. The Yiling Laozu does regret the non-con but probably forgets about it like one day later because he is literally swaggering so hard regret spills out of his head like catfood from a broken automatic feeder. The Yiling Laozu cannot function in normal society either but it is literally because he is so cool that everyone is fed up with him; his own brother has a complex about it; the mastermind of the plot uses it as a plot device; Wei Wuxian dies and comes back to life because of it; he is literally too cool to live and too cool to die; no one can get rid of the Yiling Laozu because he really is just that cool; even when he stops being arrogant, everyone is arrogant about him; his brother has a breakdown over it; it's literally the plot of the whole thing.
And need I remind you, the icing on the cake, Wei Wuxian gets kicked out of the Lan Sect lectures for inventing an entirely new cultivation method that is so powerful even the common people can use it to protect themselves when powerful sects ignore them; Wei Wuxian mentions this method and gets expelled. He is literally too cool for school, case closed.
stormborns
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amandla
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