Honestly, as much as I have no doubt that Sandu Shengshou was greatly influenced by Wei Wuxian, by the memory of the time when Jiang Cheng had to choose between protecting his brother and protecting his people and everything went straight to hell and his resulting determination to never be in a position where he’d have to make such a choice ever again, I think that when Jiang Cheng was building up Sandu Shengshou he looked at Wei Wuxian’s Yiling Patriarch as more of an example of what not to do.
The thing is, WWX’s “I can kill anyone I want and who can stop me” might sound really impressive but that attitude is kinda one of the major reasons everything blew up in his face. Because one of WWX’s chief strengths is also one of his greatest weaknesses:
He doesn’t know when to stop.
And that’s great when you need improvisations and innovations or last minute skin of your teeth victories snatched from the jaws of defeat because he doesn’t care that whatever he’s come up with hasn’t been done or that it’s unconventional, he just does it and he’s good enough that, nine times out of ten, he can make it work. But it backfires pretty terribly on him here. It feeds into the Jin’s rumor mongering in a pretty cataclysmic way that he could have easily avoided by just taking a step back and not coming at the issue like a bludgeon. JC is far, far from perfect but I think what he took from WWX, and that incident, is how to toe the line between being dangerous and being a threat.
Because that, I think, is one of the ways where WWX went wrong. Sandu Shengshou is the man you do not cross, the one you dare not offend. He’s known for his power and his rage and for a handful of hot button issues that will absolutely set him off but he doesn’t go out of his way. If you do not cross him, if you do not offend him, if you do not trigger one of those issues…you’re good.
He is incredibly and undeniably dangerous, enough that everyone’s too scared to fuck with him…but not so scared that they decide to band together to remove him.
Because he is not a threat to anyone who does not first threaten him or what is his.
The Yiling Patriarch is equally as dangerous. But he is also actively threatening to everyone around him. He publicly disregards the man he’s supposedly sworn loyalty to, he blatantly disrespects their allies and repeatedly flouts basic social niceties, throwing out comments that he can do what he wants and kill who he wants without reprisal because he’s too powerful to be stopped while bleeding resentful energy everywhere…
…a lot like the genocidal megalomaniac they all just fought a war to get rid of.
Mob mentality is a thing that the Jin’s absolutely took advantage of but WWX’s behavior did him no favors in preventing that disaster. We the audience know that world domination is the absolute last thing WWX is interested in, but he’s making a damn good show of heading in that direction.
Because he doesn’t know when to stop, when to take a step back, when to look at a situation and ask himself “this is a way but is it the only way? is it the best way?” That he figures out in his second life, as well as how to ask the people around him if maybe they have some input that might be helpful.
JC always took that step back. In fact, he did it a little too much is some ways, hesitating to act when he needed to because he was spiraling while weighing potential consequences. [sidenote: if WWX and JC had managed to sort their shit out, individually and collectively, and find a balance between themselves, they could have been fucking unstoppable. WWX could have dragged JC out of his own head and into action while JC could have gotten WWX to slow down and think long enough to stop from crashing headlong into disaster].
This has gotten more than a little away from me and I think I might have lost the thread so I’m gonna end it here.
