something i love about jin guangyao is that pretty much everything he did From a Certain Point of View is just... take out the assholes. Nie Mingjue was qi deviating. Maybe he was just trying to help?

Maybe *someone didn't teach him correctly* (i'm desperate to write that au)

Jin Guangshan was a shitty dad, a shitty husband, a shitty person. REALLY shitty. From a certain point of view, Wei Wuxian was an unstable demonic cultivator with the blood of *a LOT* on his hands, someone who had broken with his own sect, and now hiding in fantasy land chernobyl

maybe those sects didn't like those towers. maybe they thought it was a threat to their own sovereignty. maybe they had to be wiped out for murdering his son.

maybe nie mingjue died with so much resentful energy because of Baxia that he had to be bound to keep his ghost from hurting anyone. and jin guangyao just wanted to help nie huaisang save face for how far mingjue had fallen, by dealing with it himself

after all, nie huaisang had never shown himself to know anything. but he did show himself to be uninterested in the saber. and perhaps as sect leader, he could start saving his own people. find a way to keep them from dying.

mingjue wouldn't. maybe nie huaisang could.

maybe a boy was so desperate for acknowledgment that he started doing small tasks that slowly got worse. agreed to work for wen ruohan to help stay close to the enemy and wait for a moment to strike. until he found himself helping xue yang get corpses and it was too late.

maybe he had to let xue yang go or wen chao would kill everyone. maybe he thought wen chao WOULD kill everyone and he was desperate to just get the fighting to stop. maybe he thought killing the commander was a small price to pay to protect them.

maybe he realized the best way to know if the yiling laozu ever came back was to hold onto wen ning, his fierce corpse, and watch him. just in case.

maybe he fell in love as a young idealistic boy desperate for love and a father figure and family and knew he could never have what he wanted, but maybe he could protect what he loved. so he agreed and agreed and agreed to stain his hands red.

as long as what he loved didn't have to dip his hands in the gore, as long as he did it himself, everything was fine. right? everything was good. he was used to rolling in filth to protect someone he loved. used to putting on his mother's robes when she was too sick.

everyone always said they had the same eyes.

and maybe, some mornings when he gets ready for the day, considers what he needs to say to jin zixun, and wonders if he should send another cultivator to find xue yang, and decides what words to add to his letter to lan xichen, he looks in his mirror and thinks they are right.

anyway. i just feel like you could spend about a million words trying to analyse Jin Guangyao and still 100% come out unsure of what the truth is, and i love that. sometimes i resent a little that i'm apparently a JGY apologist because THREE HOURS of breakup monologue??? but yeah