i have accumulated an ungodly amount of nieyao hot takes/speculation/etc over the past six months as a side effect of writing fic & while i'm waiting for this video to finish exporting i'm going to try and condense them here. this is your warning to mute me now.

what compels me here is the dynamic of two people who are fundamentally incompatible for a variety of factors—innate character traits plus acquired life experiences/worldviews—who nonetheless are entangled beyond sense and live rent free in each other’s heads (ha ha) ‘til death.

i wonder a lot about whether there are any canon divergences, however broad, where things could’ve worked out better (or at least not so bombastically awfully), or whether it’s just doomed in every timeline.

(as opposed to xiyao, where i can imagine timelines wherein the relationship is stable and never blows up. they just had the misfortune to be born+meet in this one.)

both nmj and jgy are characters whose fundamental personality traits are inextricable from the circumstances of their upbringings; it’s pretty difficult to point to any one point of divergence where things could be salvaged without having to go wildly AU about their backgrounds.

the inherent power dynamic and differences in life experience/mentalities/etc were poison in the well that had the potential to turn things sour over time even in a best case scenario, and in canon it’s NOT a best case scenario to start with—war and massive upheaval etc etc.

(though otoh both of these characters are in some ways at their prime in a war scenario, for very different and once again incompatible reasons; war as a comforting arena compared to political conniving vs social upheaval as a springboard, etc. anyway.)

on first brush i saw nmj basically as a boring asshole who was only interesting as an accessory to jgy and nhs’ arcs, but i saw the light and now find him really engaging. relatedly, i disagree with a lot of fanon wrt what nmj’s actual fuckups in his relationship with MY were.

like, when i think about their dynamic assuming they were involved when MY was nmj's deputy, it’s more interesting to me to assume that nmj didn’t mistreat MY besides the baked-in consent issues inherent to the power differential--

b/c the differential alone was enough to get to jgy in the long run (which is valid of him imo!), let alone the significant Ideological Conflicts at play. issues would've developed even IF nmj hadn't witnessed the captain's murder.

so nmj's flaws in the relationship don’t read to me as hardass daddy dom behaviour or whatever. rather, his position as a rescuer and “good guy” in meng yao’s life blinded him to ways their vastly different life experiences put their relationship on uneasy footing inherently. (on

top of the general combination of privilege and distorted ethical thinking patterns nmj has going on already, which i'll get to.) like, for all meng yao was playing a role, there was a fantasy scenario at work which i think they both had investment in—

nmj got to live out "being the Only One who REALLY saw the potential of this poor unfortunate yet talented waif, & making everything better with the power of his commitment to JUSTICE." it validates his worldview and allows himself to be ideal version of his self-concept.

nmj has much more investment than the average cultivator in seeing himself as someone fundamentally honourable and acting very consciously to make that true, because he’s terrified of losing control and becoming destructive.

i think there was probably also an element of nmj willfully believing a newly promoted MY who was living righteously would overall get along fine, because nmj had spoken out about it before and wanted it to be true.

he wants to believe the best in the men under his command, but he also wants to believe that the code by which he lives his life is accurate, and i think there’s an element of insecurity there, too, which i doubt he's consciously aware of—

if things don’t actually work like "behave in an upright way->receive upright treatment", nmj has to reckon with the fact that it’s privilege that lets him maintain his honourable naivete. (i think nmj is more self-aware overall than jgy, but that's neither here nor there rn.)

it would’ve been easier for jgy, in many ways, if nmj WAS just a lana del rey-core shitty boyfriend instead of a human being who was admirable in many ways, who had the capacity to surprise him and challenge him. he certainly would've had less personal investment at stake and

probably could've made some decisions more rationally. the thing is that MY’s position within QHN would've always have been really precarious and reliant on nmj's presence and favour. trying to maintain some kind of balanced relationship under those circumstances is a nightmare!

it doesn't require nmj to actually Do shitty things to MY for MY to get increasingly bitter and vindictive about the state of affairs, esp since i doubt nmj was fully cognizant of just how serious that precarity could be for someone like MY, because he lacks the perspective.

it's also very plausible to me that sexual harassment ESCALATED after MY got promoted rather than subsided, b/c of the optics, whether or not nmj and MY were in fact sleeping together at all.

so if we have nmj uplifting meng yao way above his station as proof that he's a noble and just person who does the right thing, i think MY, who is perceptive about these things, is very aware from early on that nmj needs to prove to himself he’s not just a doomed rage monster.

which means that when things go bad, jgy already knows what nmj's worst nightmare is. he knows the single worst thing he could do to nie mingjue is turn himself into someone he would've hated, and the kind of person he's lived his life terrified of becoming.

that jgy was able to identify "what's the most personally devastating thing i could do to nie mingjue" shows how close they were. he could have killed him other ways, but he responds to frustration over nmj's claim of moral high ground by making nmj the worst version of himself.

to detour into what-ifs, it's hard to imagine how jgy's life would've gone if nmj hadn't caught him killing the captain. on the one hand he has proximity to power in QHN he's not guaranteed to reach elsewhere, and to gamble on his ability to improve his standing would be risky.

but on the other, he's basically already hit the ceiling of how high he can be promoted there as an outsider w/o strong cultivation, and his status is reliant on being in nmj's good graces--OH GOD DO I HAVE THINGS TO SAY ABOUT JGY AND NHS HERE but it's off topic for now.

there's an entire genre of canon divergence scenarios in my brain where sunshot never happens and jgy still eventually kills off nmj with the intention of ruling QHN through nhs but that's a thread for another day.

@ the end of the day, however many opportunities nmj gave him within QHN, jgy would always be perceived at best as a nobody who owes everything to nmj and at worst as a conniving social climber who manipulated his way to anything he got. some people could've been okay with that,

but jgy is prideful and an internal narrative of self-reliance is important to him. it’s hard for me to imagine him being able to deal with being the subordinate party in their relationship long-term without lashing out at nmj in some way, covert or not.

...now, you may say, "okay but if nmj cares about honour so much why would he screw his sexy secretary". i think the power discrepancy plays out on nmj's end in a couple ways, notably that nmj sees his position as giving him the ability to redress wrongs/enact justice,

but i also think there's an element of simply not being super inclined to look a gift horse in the mouth. especially in the context of having the opportunity to indulge within the frame of this, like, erotically flavoured and vaguely paternalistic saviour complex thing.

someone said s/t along these lines a few weeks ago but i can't remember who--sorry!--but i also see pre-betrayal nieyao as nmj allowing himself to do something for pleasure for the first time in a very long time, which is a powerful enough emotional rush to overlook some things.

nmj has very little room for joy in his life; he's held a leadership position since he was very young... surely that gets hellishly lonely, though i doubt he'd articulate it like that to himself.

he's close with xichen, but i don't imagine they get to see each other more than a few times a year; he's been huaisang's de facto parent for years, which is a barrier to relating to each other straightforwardly as siblings, on top of the age difference.

he doesn’t want to get married or have kids because of living under the sword of damocles of qi deviation, etc. nmj is dour and intimidating but he’s also in his twenties, has almost no peers on his level who could take social liberties with him, and had to grow up way too fast.

meng yao being an outsider to the martial culture of QHN facilitated how close they became and the role he could play in nmj's life, because he filled an emotional niche completely different from familial obligation or camaraderie between warriors. taken together with their

complimentary skillsets, etc, the math starts to really check out as to how this sort of domestic fantasy LARP could come into being, on nmj's end regardless of its long-term sustainability.

(also, any amount of cursory research into the history of sexuality in china will tell you that back-in-the-day nieyao fit the most conventional possible mould for m/m relationships. obviously cql=/=histfic but it would've been extremely culturally normal wrt Real World Logic.)

jin guangyao as we know him is hard to separate from the experiences he had at qinghe, incl. the skillsets nurtured by nmj. he's clearly a different person when he leaves qinghe from how we see him in nmj's flashback meetcute. (now i have to go do dishes but i will be back >>>>)

nmj and lxc are upright + noble men whose their attention/regard gives jgy a particular kind of validation, but also, in another life, this could’ve been him; he could’ve had the level of security and goodwill to let you believe in straightforward concepts of honour and justice.

that tension is so interesting to me in his relationship with each of them, that he's drawn to qualities that set him apart from them, even as those qualities cause him frustration and reinforce the divide.

i'm going to bed now so the other half of this thread has to wait, but it always strikes me when i rewatch the ep 10 breakup scene that MY doesn't do his little putting-himself-together brushing-off of his clothes and hair to make himself look presentable out of spite

(& an assertion of agency), like he often does in similar circumstances. he walks out of the hall sisheveled and SO SLOWLY because on some level he still thinks that at any second nmj is going to change his mind and call him back.