I've been reading through your mdzs meta (hope that's not too weird! I've loved your different takes on a lot of things!) And I was struck by the line "Jyl makes a choice (however coerced, but that can be another convo) to marry into the Jin" in post /690494124992937984. I never really got behind the ~romance~ of jyl/jzxn but I've only seen one other meta saying maybe they werent in love and tbh I find that idea fascinating for all that it implies
XuanLi is such an interesting couple in that we only learn about them through flashback and they’re mostly used by both the story and most of the people in the story to talk about the tragedy of their doomed lives rather than who they were as people. Now, I have no doubt they loved each other in the course of their very short marriage, as Jin Zixuan is said to confide in Jiang Yanli for everything, to the point of it leading to his death in the story. He is also willing to put aside his animosity towards Wei Wuxian to invite him to his son’s one-month celebration (or 100-day celebration? whichever one) because it would make his wife happy. Jiang Yanli also loves him, as she’s excited at the reinstating of her wedding when she comes to show off her wedding dress in that scene lacking self-awareness, and she genuinely mourns jzx’s death and cannot tell wwx in truth that she forgives him for his hand in killing her husband.However, how they got there? 🤷🏽♀️
Jk, I believe it’s in character for jyl to have given jzx another chance to prove himself to her after the debacle of the soup incident during the sunshot campaign that turned her off of him completely. Yet, mxtx does not write jyl softening towards jzx again. Instead, we get these scenes: 1) Madam Jin pressuring a reluctant jyl to spend alone time with jzx during the Phoenix Mountain hunt, who then chooses to leave the scene with wwx despite jzx confessing that actually, it was he who wanted to court her on his own, 2) Jiang Cheng, who before the ssc was moved to violence at any slight jzx visited upon his sister, suddenly deciding that jzx’s past (and current if we count him losing his temper at the hunt) actions towards jyl “don’t matter” because “she likes him, so what can we do 🤷🏻” conveniently as everyone is trying to curry favor from the Jin, and 3) jyl, herself, in every flashback after the soup incident but before the reinstatement of the engagement being shown to be reluctant to be in jzx’s presence or even discuss her feelings about him.
So while I don’t think their marriage was a loveless sham put together purely for politics, and while the couple actually do seem to hold genuine affection for each other in the short time they actually get to be a couple, the lead-up to their marriage after the war is posited as a political move on the part of others around them using their real past (for jyl) and present (for jzx) affections for each other to pretend as if the match was for the couple’s benefit and not for the others. If, theoretically, jyl had decided she didn’t want to marry jzx after all, I think those other characters still would have pressured her into it. On the other hand, if the story had been written that way, I don’t think wwx would have had the hangup of killing his shijie’s “beloved husband,” so we lose a plotpoint there.
