I’ve gotten to the point where I first fell in love with CWN on my initial read of 2ha - the moment he throws the fee into the merchant patriarch’s face and beats the awful man up.
The thing is, on reread, I love this moment even more because it, and its outcome, encapsulates everything that is amazing about CWN. The way he never looks away from injustice even if the customs and laws encourage him to - Chen family is right they broke no law but they are morally wrong and that is all that counts for CWN. It is easier to look away, it is encouraged but he won’t - this is the same person who fed starving child Mo Ran when he was a child himself and despite the rest of the world looking away, despite his “father” encouraging him to (I will forever love that meeting each other changed BOTH their lives, that is what made CWN leave the monastery and to actually eventually live, live as a human being of flesh and blood; he saved Mo Ran from bodily starvation but MR saved him from emotional starvation.)
He cares about propriety and rules and face but only if they do not contradict justness - the latter trumps everything for him and it’s vanishingly rare.
But what I love even more and what is even more telling is when he comes back to the sect, wounded to hell, and INSISTS on being whipped for beating the horrible man because that violates the sect rules. This is basically everything because not only is CWN unique in the novel in not just claiming the rules apply equally to everyone, himself included but living it, however the cost, but also because it encapsulates his accepting that everything has a cost, that “because this is right” may justify the action but it does not justify escaping paying the price for that action.
I am watching him being whipped in public at his insistence for doing a just deed that is against the rules and it’s a direct line from there to a man who near the end does his level best to kill Taxian Jun - even though this is the only part remaining of his lover, even though Hua Binan tries to stop it by saying he only needs TXJ to complete the bridge (and surely, most of the people in the bridge are dead already so he only needs a few more corpses so that’s OK, right, stopping bridge won’t bring back all those gazillion dead) and CWN can have him, even though Hua Binan explains that this remnant of Mo Ran has actually resisted full control because of his love for CWN, that this is basically encapsulation and personification of Mo Ran 0.5′s love for him. And CWN thinks of the real Mo Ran and what real, non-zombified, non-controlled Mo Ran would have wanted and also about the world and does his TXJ-destroying spell harder! Because he will always do what is right but it’s not easy or smugly perfect, it’s wrecking and harrowing but CWN is always willing to do what is right whatever the horrific price he pays (and this price is horrible - CWN never cared about himself much, but he loves Mo Ran more than anything.) Honestly, Meatbun is so good at portraying pure goodness as not cloying or saintly or wholesomely easy, but as so human and fascinating and hard fought and I love that. It’s easier to make anti-heroes interesting than pure unwavering good.
CWN is someone who is not only willing to do what he thinks is right but is always willing to do it in full knowledge that there is a price for that and in full expectation of paying that price, however heavy, and I love that.
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