#ballcon

[venhediss]

jgy is like no-face from spirited away. being in that bathhouse (cultivator society) made him lose it. if you took him out of the bathhouse and put him in a hut in the woods (regional management office) with a kindly old witch (local bureaucrat) where he could do crafts (balance budgets) all day, he would be perfectly benign. he would be the most efficient worker you'd ever seen. he would be instituting multi-level policy reforms while somehow never leaving his desk or getting promoted and it would be completely fine.

[kamil-a]

greetings from scenic clown car. with love to the ball convention <33

[venhediss]

i've also been thinking, on this go round of mdzs fixation, about memory as a character trait and how it's used.

it is a funny exaggerated thing about jgy that he has a photographic memory, it's in the same category of fake over the top information as when like 4000 people are killed all at once in some battle or some cultivator throws 50 talismans all at once out of thin air. but it's pertinent insofar as it's sort of like an externalized piece of information about his character - he's someone who is Literally Incapable of forgetting any slight that's ever been leveled at him. his emotional inability to let things go is somaticized as a mental or biological inability to forget. and while this helps him excel and make a name for himself, it also necessarily underpins the bottomless resentment and fear inside him that are ultimately turned back against him. (side note: the root of xue yang's evil is Also refusing to ever let go of any insult, see: that time he murdered an entire clan because two of its members severed his pinkie finger.)

by contrast wwx is naturally flippant and forgetful. he doesn't pay attention to things or people that don't interest him, and he has to be reminded of people and events frequently. he's not unintelligent at all, he's easily one of the smartest characters in mdzs, but in the present arc in particular, he doesn't brood or self-flagellate or nurse his pain - he learned from his first life that it's not productive to stay hung up on what's already done. the conclusion to the lifelong tension between him and jc is just to say "look, that was all a long time ago and i literally died for it. do you think we can just let it go?" the characters who survive the final confrontation all reach their emotional conclusions in a similar way: the hurts of the past don't need to determine how we move forward. everybody was fucked over and it was all terrible and we have Got to let it go. the only other option is being literally trapped forever with your undead worstie in a coffin full of unsublimated rage.

[venhediss]

lxc's only ever one-on-one conversation with wwx going

"i'm not quite at the point where i'm going to say it For him but my brother is in love with you for reasons i don't really get"

"here's a rundown of the family generational trauma, to help you figure out (gestures vaguely) all of that"

"so, anyways, you strike me as something of a narrative foil for my own unconsummated romantic life-bond partner - that being the case, What Should I. Do."

"(thinks about who he's talking to) never mind. forget i asked actually."

is honestly peak and one of my favorite conversations in all of mdzs gkhfgdhfkg

[venhediss]

jgy being a symptom of systemic issues rather than their cause is also why killing him is not framed as like. cool, or worthwhile, or anything other than bewildering and vaguely pitiable. killing him solves nothing - it doesn't change the system, it doesn't heal those who were hurt, it doesn't bring back the dead, it may or may not even really bring any satisfaction to the person who orchestrated it. it's not exactly portrayed as a great tragedy either - it's just this sad, embarrassing thing where you watch a messed up person who mostly only wants to get out of this alive get whittled down, emotionally and literally in a physical bodily sense, until there's nothing left and the overwhelming emotion is just like. well that was uncomfortable for everyone, and deeply unnecessary.

and you get the sense that for most regular people it's just going to be a blip, something that comes up in gossip or stories for a few years and then fades into obscurity as more salacious news becomes the hot topic. ironically only wwx ever really ended up "knowing" him, and he's completely uninterested in thinking about him beyond the events of guanyin temple, just kind of put out that he had to be involved in something so ugly and pointless at all. only lxc will ever care to try and grapple with what happened - and no matter what he learns from that, he's not going to get a second chance like his brother did.

[venhediss]

ok like yes the untamed is the source of 90% of any 3zun fan's food and the donghua does jgy absolutely dirty in ways i will never forgive, for plot simplification reasons but still, but never forget, too, that the donghua is the Only version of the story, INCLUDING THE ORIGINAL NOVEL, that provides any details At All of the formative months that lxc spent on the run with meng yao. in an adaptation that prized breakneck pacing and otherwise butchered jgy's personality and role in the story, the producers thought it worthwhile to invent scenes that had only ever been gently alluded to before. And I Think That's Beautiful.

[venhediss]

3zun had to be nerfed with interpersonal callout drama because otherwise all the other teams would’ve wiped instantly in the face of their perfectly balanced tank-support-DPS party comp

[venhediss]