Super big fan of the way the Nie Mingjue severed head Empathy segment of the book opens with a hard cut to his decapitation of Wen Xu, and the description of how Wen Xu's body was immediately thereafter torn limb from limb and systematically desecrated by Nie Mingjue's allies, and the head put up on a spike.
Because I think it really centers one of the key narrative tensions around the characters' life choices, and the question of the very definition of 'crime.' And how it's a contextualized process, rather than a hardcoded binary of actions that are okay and actions that aren't.
It maybe wasn't good to do that to Wen Xu's corpse, but it was war after all, so it's also not a big deal and the cultivators involved don't carry any lasting culpability, even though it wasn't even useful to the war effort to do that.
There's no need to figure out who it was exactly, and attach a stigma to them for vengeful corpse desecration.
But Jin Guangyao having done the very same thing to Nie Mingjue that Nie Mingjue did and allowed to be done to Wen Xu--well that's bad, right? Because it's not war, now. Because it's politics and personal relationships, and the rules for those are different. It's different.
And Jin Guangyao is like, is it though? No. That's bullshit you all tell yourselves. Lines drawn in water, to make sure you're always in the right and anyone else who resorts to violence is wrong.
The rules aren't ever different. Some of us are always at war.
Which is simultaneously the mindset that makes him a dangerous untrustworthy person who makes everyone around him less safe, and He Has A Point Tho.
All of which juxtaposes really interestingly with Wei Wuxian, who in the two phases of his Terrifying Necromancer era did exactly the same things under what were, to him, about the same circumstances (i.e. people he loved had been killed on a pretext that he'd started it, by people who self-professedly weren't going to stop until they'd taken everything he had left) but when it was war he was a hero (albeit controversial), and when it wasn't war anymore he was a criminal, unforgivable, had to be put down.
Still 'killing people and corpse desecration.' By the same person, using the same methods, with almost the same motives. And all it took to take him across the line from 'basically like when Nie Mingjue did it' to 'basically like when Jin Guangyao will do it' is an alteration in the story being told.
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