for the reverse unpopular opinions, I wanna ask JGY, but also Wen Ning in case someone asks JGY as well (or you wanna do both :P)
!!!!! a-Yao!!! wherever could I even begin to explain all the things I love about a-Yao!
(Wen Ning I will write up an answer for in another post, so this doesn’t become excessively long...er)
but oh, ok, ok, Jin Guangyao is just. full of so many good qualities!! on a character level, the way he’s written as a foil to the protagonist both socially and in an emotional sense; the way he has this line running through his life/plot arc/the way people perceive him as being a figure upturning the natural and social order of things (even while in so many ways doing his very best to be impeccable by the very standards of that order!) - he is... a figure of so many contrasts and contradictions and different faces, all folded into one body and forced to exist in the world.
and in that sense - not to be possessed by the spirit of an unhinged undergraduate humanities lecture or anything, but - just the ways in which he is such a liminal figure!! moving both comfortably and very much uncomfortably through the spaces and knowledge of cultivation gentry and commoners alike; becoming a beloved public figure both for being more-than but also bringing very real material help to people in a way other leaders never had? I really enjoy the motifs for him of... secrecy, of private experiences hidden away, of being viewed, always, through reputation and others’ eyes.
(I loooooove his relationship with Lan Xichen <333 the way they were such a team for so long - planning events, planning policies, the easy rapport! the humor! Lan Xichen barely ever providing a way for others to obtain his paintings but Jin Guangyao has a whole set of four in his study! - I’m getting away from myself lmao.)
I really love... I mean, okay, I have eternally upset and unhappy feelings about his coming to an awful, ignominious end, and there’s, well, a reason why my two longer fics about him and LXC so far have shades of fix-it-ness to them. but I do honestly think that the tragic nature of his character in canon is part of the fundamental appeal, for me? I think to a certain extent, it is... difficult for me to latch onto a character to the extent that I have with JGY (and other favourites), if their original narrative doesn’t give them an unhappy ending. and so I will be sad, and cranky, and full of salt forever and ever about that ending, because god fucking dammit I want better for him!! - but at the same time, that grief at wanting better because everything he strove for ended in ruin, is kind of... part of the point, for me.
I love that Jin Guangyao is someone who thinks himself into cold, horrifying, tangled loops of violent self-justification for the things he felt he had to do, cutting off bits of his own humanity and stuffing them away in a little box to survive without being further eaten away by his own guilt and self-loathing... and that at the same time, so much of what he says in this vein is actually true. he doesn’t have much of a choice, he doesn’t have the kinds of options that others in a better position wish he could simply take; he is in danger and so often anything he could do one way or another would be a miserable choice. it’s very... true to the way that power structures operate, one one hand; and also, from an experiential point of view, it’s something I appreciate as a depiction of how much it sucks when the evidence in your actual reality meshes so seamlessly with the dysfunctional disaster spirals your brain is feeding you, that it becomes even harder to see where there could be a true point to crack yourself out of the prison you’ve landed in.
anyway, even with all that, I think this is only a surface dusting of things I could gush about regarding dearest Jin Guangyao, but - *gestures at blog* if I tried to get more comprehensive and into very specific details, we’d be here all week :’D so I think I will wrap it up for now~ thank you!
