it's interesting how quickly & relatively easily? qin su doubts jgy & believes the contents of bicao's letter without needing any evidence against her husband - who, at least by outward appearances, treats her well & "lovingly".

qin su seems to be a fairly loyal person, given that she takes bicao's identity as the person behind the letter to the grave, so it's especially damning that she turns on jgy without much convincing.

IMO, it speaks to the possibility that she'd been having uneasy feelings about

their marriage for some time now - and their son's death especially, which was incredibly suspicious given that he was their first-born & a son to boot, so he should've been basically the most well-guarded baby in the cultivational world, yet some nobody from a small sect was

able to murder him? but i digress.

her reaction to the letter & to jgy makes me wonder how strained their relationship was, what sort of tension existed between them behind closed doors. i'm sure jgy manipulated her as he did lxc, but maybe she felt it more than lxc did,

simply by virtue of the fact that she and jgy were together far more regularly & intimately. so when he tries to bullshit her again, tries to tell her that the letter is lying, that he's her perfect husband, and she's his perfect wife, she hears that tiny whisper of doubt in her

heart, and she's so fucking DONE being lied to & told that her gut feelings are wrong that she snaps.

it makes me wonder if lxc ever hears that whisper too, but he dismisses it out of guilt* & a little bit of a selfish, partially subconscious desire to hold on to the only friend/confidante he had left in the world.

*the guilt would've come from so many places.

guilt that he's

doubting jgy's character unfairly, without proof, just like everyone else who never gave his sworn brother a chance.

guilt that his doubt will echo nmj's & retraumatize jgy (who i am convinced would've weaponized the whole "our eldest sworn brother who you swore didn't hate my

guts kicked me down the stairs, insulted me in the worst way, and then tried to kill me in his final moments" situation against lxc if & when his other methods of quieting lxc's doubts weren't enough).

guilt that he's being a bad sworn brother.

just, all the guilt.

... but the whisper would've still been there, right? and i think we can see that it exists in how lxc responds to lwj & wwx approaching him about the possibility that jgy is the one behind nmj's fierce corpse. yes, at first, he is adamant that it was not jgy. but he eventually

agrees to help wangxian investigate, doesn't he? and that's partially because he trusts lwj & partially because he is the type who's willing/wants to hear all sides of a story before passing judgment. but there's something about how relatively easily he's willing to stick his

neck out for them, especially for wwx. lxc KNOWS that there's going to be a scene if wwx shows up in mxy's body to a banquet at koi tower. yet he brings him along anyways (i mean, that's def in part because he knows that lwj's liable to be a stubborn baby about it if he refuses).

ANYWAYS this thread got longer than expected lmao but basically,

jgy's a manipulative bitch & the people around him, even lxc, the one who gave him the benefit of the doubt again & again, were catching onto his bullshit, bit by bit, because they always do, eventually.