i think the issue with cql/mdzs fandom (specifically jiang cheng antis) is that it seems to have a very rigid view on a) what being a good person looks like and b) what trauma looks like, or significantly, what it should look like, and c) the meeting point of the two: what being a good person with trauma should look like. e.g. the way wei wuxian is held up as this sort of shining example of how to be traumatised the right way. so much of this fandom consistently frames wei wuxian as Good Traumatised rather than what he actually is, which is quite simply a person with various trauma responses and trauma-learnt behaviours that he did not choose and that have no actual bearing on his goodness. whereas jiang cheng is condemned as Bad Traumatised when actually he is just a person with different trauma responses and trauma-learnt behaviours that he also did not choose and that also have no actual bearing on his goodness. people categorising the way wei wuxian responds to his trauma as Good and the way jiang cheng responds to it as Bad (or even Evil) is a mindset that is deeply rooted in stigma whether you realise it or not.
like, i don't interact with jc antis if i can help it. which, yeah, is because i have no interest in reading endless hate posts. but i also steer clear predominantly because as someone with a heavily stigmatised mental illness a lot of the discussion around jiang cheng and the notion that trauma making you angry and hateful = Bad reads as "i support people with mental illness but only the people with symptoms that i personally find palatable" which is very reminiscent of frankly dehumanising real life debates around whether people who display certain symptoms (people like me) are worthy of help (or whether they even can be helped or whether they are just inherently terrible people etc.). and that is a horrible and damaging thing to read about yourself.
essentially, it all boils down to the wholly problematic idea that there are right and wrong ways to be traumatised—as if (in the absense of therapy and/or medication) you have any choice or control over your own symptoms/trauma responses—and that anything that doesn't fit into the "trauma made me kinder" mold is the wrong way to be traumatised. which is exactly what stigma is and why a lot of people have to fight so hard to get a modicum of help. so much of the language used around jiang cheng's trauma and his emotional responses to that trauma is rooted in real life stigmatising rhetoric that denies people the help they need and deserve because they're not the right type of mentally ill. this mindset that wei wuxian did trauma right and jiang cheng did trauma wrong is based on a made up concept designed to demonise certain mental illnesses.
it's like, there are so many takes which go something like, "well, wei wuxian has trauma too and he didn't do x, y, z." and sure, you're right, he didn't do x, y, z, but he did do a, b, c, if you see what i'm getting at. and arguing that a, b, c, are better responses than x, y, z shows a lack of understanding of the complexity of trauma and the way it can be informed by self-perception or perception other people have of you, i.e. it can become a bit (or a lot) of a self-fulfilling prophecy. because if anything the idea that trauma made wwx kinder oversimplifies the damaging effects it actually had on him. because it also made him reckless and (re)vengeful. it also gave him a messy saviour complex that repeatedly leads to ruin (like, man, when jiang cheng says to wei wuxian in anger, "wei wuxian, do you have a saviour complex?" he reads him very well. he knows him very well. in the same way wei wuxian knows that jiang cheng holds on to too much anger). wei wuxian's trauma is just as messy as jiang cheng's but it manifests in very different ways. different ways, not the right ways. wei wuxian's trauma responses hurt people too and you can acknowledge that. it doesn't make him Bad.
what seems to cause real issue though, is the differences in the way they respond to trauma. what causes real issue is that those differences are indisputably to do with certain symptoms jiang cheng displays being the more stigmatised ones. it's his anger and hatred and volatility. it's his very extreme fear of abandonment and equally extreme efforts to avoid it by furiously protecting what he has left because he cannot bear to lose anything or anyone else. it's his dichotomous thinking that can make him irrational. but those are not evil or wrong trauma responses. they're just trauma responses and they are actually fairly common trauma responses at that. certainly more common than "trauma made me kinder". i don't know who needs to hear this but a person's involuntary emotional responses to trauma are not an indication of whether they are a good person or not. you can struggle with anger and hatred and symptoms considered "less palatable" and still be a good person. trauma does not give "bad" symptoms to bad people and "good" symptoms to good people because there is no such thing as a morally good or a morally bad symptom.
people need to stop letting stigma inform their (mis)understandings of mental health and trauma and try to remember that there are real life people who suffer from the symptoms they are stigmatising and who face barriers every single day because of that stigma.
tangentwithtanner
stormborns
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areudirty
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