I think what kills me about Jiang Cheng antis is that a lot of their talking points reek of anti survivor rhetoric. As someone who is a survivor and has done a lot of advocacy for victims and survivors of power based personal violence, I want to be the first to inform you that the narrative of the “pretty survivor” (which is steeped in cishet normative, white supremacist, and ableist ideas) is an extremely rare case. Trauma survivors are rarely pretty. The Wei Wuxian’s of the world are incredibly uncommon.
Trauma–especially intense, horrific trauma like what Jiang Cheng went through–often leads to intense issues of anger and hatred. It makes you deeply emotional and can often lead to you becoming unstable. Jiang Cheng lost his entire family and community in the span of a few years. He didn’t have access to therapy (something that literally anyone would need to heal from that), he had to rebuild his entire sect, likely had to fight an uphill battle in order to be a significant part of Jin Ling’s life, all while cleaning up the mess that Wei Wuxian left behind.
This is not to hate on Wei Wuxian, he’s my third favorite character (after Jiang Cheng and Lan Wangji) and I love him deeply, but he left behind a legacy that Jiang Cheng had to clean up. Whether or not he realized this would happen, Wei Wuxian created a cultivation path (gui dao/ghost cultivation) that is extremely dangerous and horrific. While I still don’t know if I believe that Jiang Cheng killed every demonic cultivator he came across, I don’t know that it was necessarily a bad thing that he did kill them. We’ve talked a lot in the cxc server about gui dao and demonic cultivation and just how much it harms the mind and body. Wei Wuxian is the exception to the rule in having such control over it and even he eventually succumbed to it. If demonic cultivators are causing great harm, then a cultivators job is to stop that harm and the source of it. That may mean killing the demonic cultivator. I think people get mixed up when (I think it was Jingyi) said that Jiang Cheng kills the wrong person. I believe it was @twilightarc-gm who said that “wrong” doesn’t imply innocent but rather the fact that the person isn’t Wei Wuxian. We know that Jiang Cheng spent thirteen years trying to find Wei Wuxian and when he does find him, he doesn’t kill him despite having literally every reason to.
Like idk y’all, if the guy that got my entire clan wiped out, my sect burned down, and caused the deaths of my sister and her husband died and came back from dead, I wouldn’t just threaten him with a dog and yell at him. I would kill him. But he doesn’t he has every opportunity to in multiple instances after confirming that it’s Wei Wuxian, but he never does. He seems more interested in dragging Wei Wuxian home (literally stating that he’s going to bring Wei Wuxian home to Lotus Pier to kneel before his parents’ graves). Like that doesn’t imply that he’s going to kill Wei Wuxian, but rather make him repent.
I think it’s telling that despite a lot of Jiang Cheng’s hurt and pain, he still chooses to not severely hurt or kill Wei Wuxian, it would be within his right to do so, but in the end after it’s all over, he let’s Wei Wuxian go. He doesn’t tell Wei Wuxian that he sacrificed himself for him, because he knew that Wei Wuxian would feel guilty and obligated to him, just like Wei Wuxian knew Jiang Cheng would feel guilty and obligated. That to me shows a survivor choosing to break the cycle of hurt and pain and I have to question why Jiang Cheng antis so often choose to ignore the side of him that does love Wei Wuxian (it’s up to the viewer whether they see that love as romantic or platonic), enough so to let him go and not burden him with pain.
Jiang Cheng’s story and character arc is at it’s core about trauma, survival, and rising above dire circumstances despite the odds. He attempts the impossible and manages to succeed in it. And to ignore that is a disservice to his character, survivors of trauma, and the effort MXTX put into creating such a complex and interesting character.
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