AND ONE MORE THING.... Oh my god would people stop saying he's a parallel to Wei WuXian? *weeps blood*
Leeeet's compare them, shall we, if they're so similar.
Wei WuXian: Orphaned, has to fight with dogs to eat as a kid. Probably got yelled at/rebuked by plenty of people, who knows? He's not thinking about it. Still a ray of sunshine though. | Xue Yang: Orphaned from an even younger age, possibly. Gets tricked and injured by one huge asshole. Doesn't get picked up by a cultivator before he's 10, which sucks for him, that's true.
2) ENTERING THE CULTIVATION WORLD
Wei WuXian: Let's say Madam Yu's extreme toxicity and Jiang Cheng's fragile self-esteem are leagues better to deal with than being an orphan on the street who isn't a cool cultivator, and pronounce him to be in a pretty good situation. He's a genius, lives in a beautiful place, and gets the biggest crush of all time on the prettiest and goodest Lan to exist. Good stuff. Too bad he's a servant and stuck between a rock and a hard place in the sect's internal play of power but, you know, he's making the best of it. Ray of sunshine boy, still. | Xue Yang: is a little genius, is very smart and gets appreciated for his smarts. As a tool, but heh. Still better than living in the street and he's had plenty of that. But wait! He has some measure of power and protection, now! What will he do? Flourish? Bask? No no no. No. That's not what he does. But let's make this part coincide with what he's compared with Wei WuXian for next.
3) IT GETS DARK AND THERE WILL BE REVENGE NEXT
Wei WuXian: NOW his reasons for revenge begin. Let's see.
Wen Chao basically takes all the sect heirs hostage and makes them do a lot of annoying to dangerous work for him. Mostly dangerous.
The jerk decides being humane is for others, and that stringing up a young person as bait is in. Wei WuXian gets an ugly and painful burn because of him and his asshole concubine/side piece because it is not, in fact, in, and he will not stand for it.
The Wens (Wen Chao and Wang LingJiao) then decide it's time to bully the Jiang a bit more and we know how that ends. The whole sect and clan are brutally massacred except the heir and his sister and the head disciple. The corpses of the heir's parents are going to be disrespected/not given the proper burial rights and the sect definitely annihilated (but Wen Ning saves the day <3).
The awful pair then also get Jiang Cheng's core destroyed, which makes Wei WuXian give up his as a result.
Let me reiterate: all his friends, sect siblings, and mentors, all the people who took care of him and that he grew up with and trained with, his family, or village, basically, got murdered in one night. And to repay the debt he felt he owed the Jiang for saving him from the street, he lost the one thing that made life good and awesome for him, a thing no one would give up, his freaking golden core. It's like losing a limb. It's like going from a god to a mortal. It's like, let's say very randomly and a-propos of nothing, like giving up both of his eyes. Hard-core move, very painful loss, severely disabling.
Wait that's not all. Wen Chao and Wang LingJiao still hunt him down right in the wake of losing a fundamental part of himself in the midst of the grief, and punt him into Hell. Where he probably had to practice cannibalism/necrophagy in order to survive. Where he was assaulted H24 by pure concentrated essence of Resentment and Grief and Pain. While grieving. While having lost his golden core. (While inventing the brand new Ghost Path like the sexy Leonardo Da Vinci he is.)
Xue Yang: Mmmhhh. That's all for Xue Yang's sad backstory, I'm afraid. He doesn't elaborate on the intervening years between the little finger incident and being noticed by the cultivation world, so we have to assume it doesn't matter to him/drive his actions like his lost pinky does. I'm sure it sucked. Fortunately, he's quite brilliant, I'm sure he'll be able to make a good life for himself, right? Right.
4) VERY PROPORTIONAL REVENGE WITH VERY REASONABLE GRIEVANCE
Wei WuXian: There is a war against the Wen, whose rule has been a shadow on the whole cultivation world for generations. His side are the underdog, it's very personnal for him, and he's a traumatised young person with a very cool weapon of mass-destruction. So he wages war, and wages it brutally. They need to win to end the Wen's tyranny and boy will he make them win. Does he go a bit or a lot overboard? Yeah. He says it himself. It's war and war is ugly, no matter which side you're on. The others do the same. Nobody decides to dangle live people as bait, though. Wei WuXian raises some grandmas from the grave to murder his enemy for him, with something of an evil flair, sure. Not live grandmas though, so, heh.
Now where it really gets personal and revenge-y, not just a war, is when he hunts down Wang LingJiao and Wen Chao, and takes his time, especially with the later, to kill them slowly and horrifically. You know, the ones responsible for killing the whole Jiang sect? The selfish, inhumane, uncaring, cold-blooded murderers who acted horribly just because they could and personally wronged him deliberately and in multiple ways? That's the only two he kills cruelly, as far as we know. Killing Wen Chao slowly under Wen ZhuLiu's helpless nose was also a revenge against Core-Melting Hand himself. Two birds, one stone. It's horrifying and bloody, and yet societal expectations are on his side on this. They killed his benefactors, he has to avenge them. Not as much as Jiang Cheng has to avenge his parents, but still, no one bats an eye at what he does. Except Lan WangJi, because Lan WangJi is shocked at seeing him in this state, and he's right to be, Wei WuXian isn't himself then - he's traumatised and hurt. Notice how he didn't go and personally kill their whole respective families to even the score? Yeah. His did maim Wen Chao pretty considerably though. Everyone snaps after a point, I suppose. | Xue Yang: Ah, yes, Xue Yang who lost his pinky when he was a kid. Huuuuh. Yeah he goes and murders an entire clan, servants, kids, beasts and all. Not even the guy who was responsible, I think he was already dead, he just murdered his descendants and also the ones who were standing too close. Hhhuuuhh no after that he doesn't stop, his childhood trauma and wronged feelings assuaged at last. No, he. He conducts inhumane experiments to transform people into living-dead puppets. Yeah, he tries to imitate the Ghost Path with actual Demonic Cultivation and it's ugly and a crime against decency. Like stringing up and cutting someone to make them a living bait but somehow worse, if you catch my drift.
5) AND THEN THE DARK YILLING LAOZU WITH RED EYES AND HIS ARMY OF CREEPY CORPSES TERRORISES THE WORLD FROM HIS DARK LAIR, AND THAT SOUNDS EVIL ENOUGH TO BE LIKE XUE YANG? I GUESS?
Wei WuXian: Funny how people associate his darkest area with the time people start calling him the Yilling Laozu. I'd argue the time when he was the least himself was from the time he was thrown into the Burial Mound to when he finds Wen Qing again. He still can't catch a break, and in fact, he can catch exponentially LESS of a break starting from when he saves the Wen remnants, because everyone is riding his ass about the Tiger Seal, but I think he's a little more like himself while in the Burial Mounds than before. A big indicator is how his meeting with Lan WangJi goes in Yunmeng versus in Yilling. In Yunmeng he's trying so hard to recreate the flirt and levity of before the war, and the failure hurts deeply. In Yilling they do actually manage to have a good time and enjoy each other's company. Lan WangJi has stopped trying to give him a help he doesn't want, sure, but Wei WuXian has also stopped being so moody and full of posturing. He has a measure of his sunshine self back. Despite everything, time still heals him a little. So yeah the fearsome Yilling Laozu. He's literally just chilling on his cursed mound, trying to grow potatoes radishes and raising a 3 years old, AND bringing back someone's consciousness from death (wow??), while doing his level-best to keep the resentful energy at bay to make the place liveable for the war refugees he saved from inhumane treatment. | Xue Yang: Yep, he's trying to recreate the Tiger Seal and still doing Demonic Cultivation on actual live people. It's a bit the equivalent of taking someone who is not dead yet and then making them lose their consciousness to turn them into puppets as if they were dead, you see? Kind of like the opposite of what Wei WuXian did with Wen Ning, what a coincidence! Funny how the hero and a villain don't actually act in the same way, mmmhhh...
6) AND THEN THE FEARSOME YILLING LAOZU REALLY TERRORISES THE CULTIVATION WORLD BY LEAVING HIS CREEPY MOUND, AND XUE YANG TERRORISES THE CULTIVATION WORLD TOO! WOW! SO SIMILAR!
Wei WuXian: Well I don't feel like joking about this part. He gets a ray of hope in this whole terrible situation then gets ambushed, and accidentally kills one of the last person he would have wanted to kill. His friends sacrifice themselves to save him and try to fix the whole mess but everyone still gets together to decide to kill him. Him, alone, trying to survive and save innocents. Him, against all the other cultivators. Grief, again, and this time he's truly alone, not only because no one can help him, but because no one is even on his side. He's so powerful he could have indeed terrorised everyone long before. Easily. He chose not to. They saw he wouldn't and those hungry for power (the Jins) stirred the others with their blind misguided hunger for justice (Nie MingJue), or their selfish insecure hunger for superiority (Jiang Cheng), etc. Anyway. He didn't lay down and let himself die, he fought back. His dear Shijie got killed to save him. More grief. More horror.
His last act? To destroy the powerful weapon that everyone was so hungry for, so that no one could tower over others like the Wen did.
Xue Yang: After one commits an atrocity for no good reason, it stands to reason that some people would want to keep order and restore justice. Xiao XingChen brings Xue Yang to the Jin for punishment, which, crucially, Xue Yang does not receive, because he's a precious tool and they won't hurt him. Still, better massacre this one guy's best friend's entire clan and blind the best friend for good measure, you know? It's only reasonable.
At some point he outlines his usefulness or becomes too much of problem and gets tossed aside, almost killed. Killed indeed, for all the world knows. But he'll come back, just like Wei WuXian. Or not quite like him, as you've probably guessed I'll demonstrate by now.
Wei WuXian: Oooh I love that he comes back to life and immediately fools around, saves people, and runs into Lan WangJi's iron chest ahah <3
So yeah, the second chance. The second chance to have a good life. He has deserved it after all this. He's finally free! Blank slate! He can do whatever he wants! Like huuuh *checks notes* steal a reluctant donkey because it reminds him of his parents, and then, solve a dangerous mystery/save people with his childhood crush while parenting his neglected nephew and a very good boy and also a bunch of other teens. Lovely! Let's look at Xue Yang. | Xue Yang: What I said above. He has a blank slate, a second chance, and he immediately uses it to be the most cruel he could be, to the man whose only crime against him was to try and bring him before justice for a crime he very much did commit. Lovely few years of freedom night-hunting, fixing the roof, going to the market and playing with a little girl, right? Yeah.
7)THE PAST COMES FOR US ALL IN THE END
Wei WuXian: So he gets recognised. So people gather to kill him once more. He saves everyone, again, people are still mad at him, and he says listen man, I already lost everything and died, and I'm haunted by what I did, I don't know what to tell you, or what more you could possibly want from me. And he's right. Lan WangJi is past giving a shit and they've actually had time to communicate and understand each other, so he's ride or die this time. Wei WuXian is not alone. Thus things are kind of good, this time around, even in the middle of ugliness. Miraculously, things resolve themselves and he fucks off into the sunset to do more good with the love of his life, and they have a bunch of sex and laugh a lot together, the end. | Xue Yang: He gets recognised, it comes to light that he had been extremely naughty all the while, he kills everyone about it with extreme prejudice and is very very sad he broke his favourite toy. Years later, Wei WuXian and Lan WangJi end his reign of terror. The end.
