huaisang thread:

i find litigating around which characters in cql/mdzs have done bad things that are excusable vs. which haven't pretty tiring, because i don't think trying to quantify fictional characters' ethical responsibility a particularly interesting way to engage with narrative.

i say this because i think a lot about Ethics when i think about nhs but don't want to come across like i think The Point of all this rambling is to reach a fixed verdict on which individual actions are justified vs. which aren't. one of the major Themes in the story in general—

or at least one i think is particularlyl compelling—is the relationship between trauma and agency, in the sense of exploring what "fault" actually means when characters are faced with situations in which there are no "good choices",

or where the "good" option is either not clearly visible or would involve significant personal loss/risk, especially when characters are entangled in cycles of violence/abuse which make the possibility of taking alternate routes appear even more foreclosed.

this is what i find particularly tiring about character discussion/etc that revolves around "well if [x] had simply NOT DONE [y]—" because outside of a handful of specific choices,

there are few circumstances in the story where a sympathetic character makes a choice that was obviously wrong or where there was nothing to be lost by taking the other option,

and idg the impulse to flatten the stakes by making circumstances more straightforward than they actually are, both b/c it's boring and makes characters seem unnecessarily stupid. but this also works in the other direction in that "did nothing wrong" readings are a snooze 2 me.

so i guess the position i arrive at re: most of these characters is, "they did a lot of things wrong but it would've been borderline impossible for them to have done everything right and if they had there wouldn't have been a story so why bother getting mad at them for it."

the top 3 cql chars i'm the most obsessed with are nhs+jgy+jc, because i'm interested in the way they justify their actions to themselves in relation to all of the above;

to varying degrees, i think each of them thinks some form of "i had to do things this way and there was no alternate option for me" to be true re: various things they've done, & i'm interested in the conditions+personality traits that had to be in place for them to believe that.

related to this is the theme that all actions have widely-reverberating consequences that even best laid plans can't predict, and that choices made in your personal/family/etc life have ripple effects that go beyond those relationships into the lives of others.

which once again ties back to the significance of intergenerational trauma and cycles of abuse/violence/loss. this is all a preamble (and sorry if i'm incoherent rn i am SO caffeinated) to my actual points, but imo nhs(+jgy)'s character is largely about these themes.

this thread isn't very organized because i'm paraphrasing and attempting to synthesize a bunch of rants i've gone on at different points in time, so i may jump around a lot, but i want to speculate for a min about nhs+MY's relationship back in the day at the unclean realms...

a lot of people have talked about the visual similarity btwn nhs and MY in cql's costuming; both on an at-first-glance level, plus things like the infamous headpiece as seen in meng yao’s nie-furen days and huaisang's fatal journey childhood flashbacks.

they’re styled and framed together as to clue the viewer in to the fact there are connections between them that go beyond just "the only two fems on qinghe grindr". (MY isn't the only one who get this treatment, though, because it happens w/ nhs+all of 3zun @ various times.)

thinking about nhs' relationship to MY obsesses me because it doesn't seem to have any one relationship model it falls into above all others... it's this weird familial relationship/mentorship/friendship. i can't imagine huaisang had many friends his age prior to the lectures,

so there's that element to it, but practically it's also a master/servant dynamic where and MY has to verbally defer to nhs—except in practice nhs seems to defer to MY in situations like the arrival at the chang mansion. the way MY responds when nhs tells him to keep an eye on XY

is really fascinating to me because it has the energy of taking an order from someone you're babysitting with a mixture of indulgence and irritation, lol. so MY has this ostensible (and literal) role as nhs' inferior within the hierarchy,

but he's also nhs' caretaker (he says as much explicitly when nmj banishes him) who's positioned as having a much higher level of maturity and life experience despite not actually being that much older than nhs, as far as i can tell.

(also, not to go off the deep end this early in the thread but there's a universe in which their relationship at this point in time could have across as brotherly but it isn't this one. the stepmom/governess energies are so real. anyway.)

i imagine nhs was at times jealous of MY for being valuable to nmj for his skills+personality traits, while—love aside, and i think pre-sunshot nhs probably at times had that teenage mentality of “[nmj] doesn’t even LIKE me!!” due to lack of maturity/perspective on love and Life

(though it hits different than when jiang cheng says it, because i tend to think nhs never truly believed deep down nmj didn’t love him; overbearing/short-sighted pseudo-parenting strats=/=consistent patterns of emotional neglect and abuse)—

nhs was valuable to him just for being his heir, which has nothing to do with nhs as a person and is also something he actively doesn’t want for himself. the skills and interests nhs sees as important are where he and nmj run into conflict with e/o,

so to have someone enter their family dynamic (what else are the braids supposed to tell us. hello 911.) who’s on the surface more of a kindred spirit to nhs than anyone else around, who’s a couple years older than him at most, and who enters nmj’s high regard

(nhs is the one to tell wwx+jc how much nmj respects/admires MY, after all) because of skills which aren’t to do with how well he can swing a sabre around or direct troop movements, but are soft skills that nhs could theoretically acquire as well:

this could be a blueprint for nhs to grow into his role, except it never happens b/c by the time nhs really needs those skills MY has been banished, and the ways nhs ends up adopting jgy’s blueprint are exclusively in ways that wouldn’t have resulted in nmj respecting him. lmao.

the difference is that MY learned how to think and act this way to survive much more challenging life experiences than nhs has ever had at this point; their relationship is between MY, whose childhood innocence was never protected, vs. nhs enjoying perpetual extended adolescence.

which leads to contemplation of the other side of this relationship, where i assume MY must have felt a Lot of contempt over the way nhs, in his eyes, is essentially pissing away all the opportunities life gave him. which is a completely understandable way to feel, considering

nhs was born into conditions which MY has been desperately crawling his way towards his entire life and has none of the drive or desire to make himself someone who Matters in the way that's deep in jgy's bones (as a response to his circumstances, obviously, but imo he's also just

one of those people who wants to be a mover and a shaker, to be valued and appreciated for his skills, and that's not inherently bad; ambition isn't inherently bad. if MY was born into nhs' position in life i think things would have been very, very different. this isn't to say

that jgy is just a poor woobie who didn't have a choice to do bad thingsss (there's always a choice, it's just not always a good one; themes, innit), but just on the most basic level, a lot of jgy's negative or harmful qualities are pretty obviously learned behaviours he picked

up in response to things that have happened to him. This Guy Is Just A Guy Who Sucks is not interesting and misses the point on like, 15 levels. anywayyys). but at the end of the day MY and nhs are very different people with different priorities;

“not like nmj” doesn’t mean they actually have that much in common re: their goals/desires/personalities, etc., & nhs doesn’t want the things MY wants except in the broadest senses (personal security and comfort), which he already has and has no reason to believe are in jeopardy.

to go on a tangent for a minute, i've been rereading asoiaf w/ bookclub & it has me thinking a lot about the way that dynastic models of wealth/power are inherently traumatizing, which is something i don't see folks talk about very often, probably because of not wanting to seem

like they're playing tiny violins for rich people, to which i can sympathize, but i think it is something worth dwelling on. familial relationships are warped when high-stakes inheritance, succession, etc. baggage is thrown into the mix;

it's not that gentry have it "harder" than commoners (fucking obviously), but relating to your primarily through a frame of property inheritance and dynastic maintenance and only secondly as actual family members is inherently harmful to the ability to have healthy relationships.

not to mention that it's harmful to one's sense of self to have one's choices and personal development be so scrutinized and hyper-determined, in a way that's concentrated in a particular way when one is part of a succession hierarchy.

again, i don't mention this to be like "poor little rich boys are the REAL victims in society", it's just a thing that i don't think paying attention to the trauma of poverty and exclusion from the social hierarchy means we need to ignore completely.

being poor means not having agency; being born into an institution of extreme generational wealth/power means having a lot of agency on paper that's nonetheless very predetermined based on social+familial expectations. (jotting it down for my nonexistent sa/ngcheng manifesto.)

on that note, the extent to which MY seems to have invested in building a solid relationship with huaisang attests to his awareness of how nmj's likely early mortality could put him in an intensely precarious position if he was still with the nie sect at that time.

the old clan leader’s up-jumped right hand from outside the clan, w/ poor cultivation, an unsavoury background, and an inflated sense of importance, who everyone probably assumes slept his way to what he got, i mean, look who his mother was—? w/o the favour of the new clan leader

(whom, being nhs, MY could sensibly assume would be in need of advisors), forget about it. so, by extension, nhs had to have factored into jgy's much later decision to k!ll nmj; jgy knows nmj has no heir but nhs

(and has more context than most as to why that is, based on his understanding of the sabre spirits as well as nmj’s personality and fears re: children), and clearly believed nhs would completely as a clan leader (and had every reason to believe this.)

(sidenote: this is the real tragedy of nmj; not just is he murdered, but he fails to accomplish many, many things: preventing the sword spirits from hurting people, preparing huaisang to lead the sect, or being able to overcome the effects of his cultivation on his personality,

until he’s become someone he would’ve once been appalled by. what good is being the general of a successful campaign if you can't even leave your clan in good order when you die or protect your only living family from dealing with the same burden,

and your oldest friend clearly favours your ex who unbeknownst to you is k!lling you, so you're alone at the end of the day, except for the little brother who never wanted the power he's going to be given in your absence. that sucks buddy! watch out for that resentful energy!)

so we have nhs as clan leader; obviously this position isn't something he wanted, but i think a lot about how the interactions we see on screen/page paint a pretty inaccurate picture of his day to day life at this point in time wrt where he stands in relation to other people.

his cultivation is weak, he presents himself as ineffectual, & his primary living peers are 2/3 of the venerated triad+hanguang-jun+jiang cheng, but he's actually had a massive amount of social power for the last decade+, whether or not we get to see him use it.

everything about this relationship is pure speculation, but this gets into fridge horror territory when one contemplates the role nhs had in what happened with mo xuanyu, for example.

the power dynamic is clearly HEAVILY slanted in nhs' direction based on age and social status, on top of the other factors at work. it's. um. terrible! and something i wonder about a lot is the degree to which nhs is high on his own supply—he obviously is presenting a front

consciously for specific tactical reasons, but i wonder a lot about the degree to which he believes the narrative about his own incompetence and powerlessness even in the face of evidence to the contrary re: the latter. the only area in which his power is actually constricted is

wrt the jgy/nmj situation; no one is stepping in and controlling him actively or telling him what he can and can't do. one of the big differences between nhs and jgy imo is that i think nhs' self-esteem issues are very genuine while jgy has a high opinion of himself he's shored

up as a self-defense mechanism against a world that's constantly telling himself he ain't shit. i don't think nhs is An Actor like jgy who has entire fake personalities; the raw material of nhs’ persona is there.

the nhs we see at cloud recesses is as much the “real” him as at guanyin temple. why create an elaborate web of lies when he could just amplify and intentionally demonstrate certain existing qualities in order to give people a convenient idea of who he is?

the part in fatal journey where nhs is lost in the qinghe nie crypts and he's hallucinating his ancestors' disapproval tells me a lot. jgy is willing to grovel and prostrate himself as a last resort, but i think fundamentally jgy's motivated by getting to a place where he never

has to stoop that low again. he'll do it as many times as he needs to preserve himself! but he hates it, and he longs for dignity and respect. nhs is able to performatively debase himself for a decade and a half because his ego is already pretty shit.

but the flipside of all this is that i think it functions as a rationalization/excuse wrt whatever unsavoury methods he might employ. it's a disavowal of choice/agency/responsibility, as i was talking about at the beginning of the thread.

if you’re a 38 year old who has snorted ketamine in a carp tower bathroom and are the ruler of a major cultivation sect, it seems that you are not, in fact, “baby."

i have no doubt that jgy thinks of his weaponization of other people's perceptions of him as exactly that, and for the most part i think he thinks of what others think of him as fundamentally incorrect. with nhs, the degree of separation is a bit less clear to me.

(aside: jgy's approach is informed by literally not having had the opportunity to become a strong cultivator and exert power in a more traditional way. i doubt that a meng yao raised in the nie sect would abstain from pursuing cultivation the way nhs does,

even if he knew the cost, because his mentality is to use any and all resources available to him. the tradeoff would be worth it in his eyes, imo anyway. thinking about a MY who practices full-blown sabre cultivation... hahaha wow. what a nightmare!)

it’s crucial for me to be able to enjoy the conclusion of the story that nhs is the one who Gets jgy in the end, and by methods that largely aren't related to cultivation. the thing that does jgy in isn't his social climbing, his “unsavoury” background, or his weak cultivation—

though these get mobilized against him after the fact—but his vindictiveness, his obsession over past slights, and the other character traits that led to his killing nmj. i doubt huaisang would ever have lifted a finger against jgy were he not his brother’s killer.

it’s a personal vendetta undertaken in response to another personal vendetta, & rather than being punished for his ambition* by a righteous man who's done all the "right" things his undoing comes from underestimating someone who has socially "failed" as a cultivator and a leader.

(also, just on an optics level, personally speaking the fact that nhs is notably effeminate helps lessen the sting of “queercoded villain getting put down like a mad dog.” ymmv.)

*again ymmv & debatable on a metatexual level, but purely speaking to in-universe causation logic.

i'm pretty haunted by the way that jgy realizes what huaisang's done surely being the most jgy's ever respected him, while the question of what nmj would have thought of it hangs over nhs for the rest of his life.

out of 3zun the one who would’ve been the most sympathetic in the abstract to nhs doing Alla That to get jgy is.......... jgy.

the betrayal of realizing jgy is the reason nmj died is as traumatic for nhs as nmj's death itself, b/c the situation becomes, "not only is my only living family member prematurely dead in horrific circumstances but the one responsible is someone i thought of as my protector."

rightly or wrongly, he believes there's no human being left in the world he can trust or who actually cares about him, and this is how you get to the point of... That. it's grief over nmj but it's also grief over... feeling connected to the broader human race?

and in fairness, nhs has reason to be paranoid. nmj is dead for crossing jgy; wwx is dead for going against the status quo; lwj was punished severely for supporting wwx and has receded from society completely (and they were never really friends anyway);

jc has become completely irascible; lxc is devoted to jgy. he doesn’t have much of a reason to believe that trying to seek justice in a straightforward way by reaching out to others will work out in any way but getting himself killed.

it’s also how you arrive at a place of not only seeing everyone around you as a potential tool but also of denigrating yourself and rejecting the possibility of anyone around you knowing you in a genuine way or being able to support you.

i mentioned earlier that nhs gets styled, at various times, after each member of 3zun; his robes here are a clear match with the pattern and style of xichen’s robes in a much earlier episode. this is my segue into talking xisang for a bit.

i want to know at what point he decided lxc was a lost cause. immediately? or did he try and feel it out cautiously before deciding jgy had his claws in him too bad already? did he ever give lxc an opportunity to prove him wrong?

i doubt jgy would've died at guanyin if nhs hadn't intervened via lxc, and there’s a way in which jgy’s final decision to spare lxc at the last moment, which imo comes both out of love and out of a desire to leave something behind—

someone who will remember him as he wanted to be seen, despite everything else—plays off of nhs using lxc in this way. they both choose to let lxc live in his grief and guilt for the rest of his life, for one reason or another.

i think the cruelty and apathy nhs has towards lxc’s emotional well-being as shown by The It comes from deep sadness and jealousy for what he represents to jgy: specifically that despite all he’s done, jgy still has someone who loves him that much.

nhs doesn’t and probably believes he never will, that he’ll be alone with this forever. the through-line of all of this is a certain degree of social isolation and low self esteem and (familial, inherited) fatalism.

there’s also something to be said for his understanding of justice, & being motivated by justice, in a way i assume he connects to nmj—i think the clothes nhs wears from bicao and sisi’s testimonies through guanyin point in this direction.

nhs has never applied himself more than he does to avenging nmj, and i can’t help but think it comes from guilt, from wondering whether he could’ve done something sooner to protect nmj had he been less carefree and naive.

(it’s guilt both towards nmj on a personal level as well as his generalized guilt towards his ancestors and the clan, imo.)

of course, everything about nhs’ approach is antithetical to nmj’s mentality, but rather than the subterfuge in and of itself, it’s nhs’ willingness to use others that nmj would’ve recoiled from.

because this is what nmj can’t forgive jgy for—why are the lives of others more important than his own?—, and nhs+jgy both sacrifice others in their pursuit of what they believe is a justified higher goal,

with the inherent implication that, rightly or wrongly, they each need to live because they are individually too valuable to the cause; in their own minds, they aren’t expendable, while others are.

BUT, on the flipside, i think nhs’ attitude towards lxc re: culpability in the jgy affair bears some resemblances to nmj’s attitude towards jgy’s responsibility for his killings at the fire palace;

nhs measures lxc against a standard of what nhs believes he would’ve done in that situation and refuses to entertain the possibility that lxc could exist in a position between guilt and innocence.

nhs is justified in holding lxc accountable, but, like, that’s the problem; he doesn’t ACTUALLY hold lxc accountable, because that would require nhs confronting him & being upfront with lxc in the form of a conflict in which lxc could defend himself and possibly achieve closure.

i think nhs looks at lxc and thinks, "this was all happening in front of you and you let it happen, which makes you complicit.” is he right? maybe, but lxc is emotionally and financially indebted to jgy and was saved by him in the worst circumstances of his life!

& more to the point, “if i were a member of the venerated triad i wouldve stopped it”/“rip to lan xichen but i’m different” is very funny considering nhs also did not realize anything was happening until it was too late, + was also on warm terms with jgy just before nmj’s death.

(fwiw, lxc absolutely engaged in willful blindness for years, particularly in the face of nmj’s clear concerns about jgy that lxc did not want to believe, and consistently pushed at nmj’s boundaries re: jgy, and i think ought to SHOULDER some blame.

this thread makes good points about it: https://twitter.com/YeetWei/status/1316454395169714181 but, again, nhs himself was on good terms with jgy prior to nmj's death, so selectively assigning lxc guilt by proxy is, um, questionable.)

but i come back to the difference between jgy’s last conversation with lxc, while he’s actively dying, where i think he’s being as honest as he’s capable of being—and, to be honest, i wonder whether jgy really even knew how much he loved lxc until he was dying at his hands—

as well as to the last conversations nhs has, with lxc and wwx, respectively. how even after it’s over, he won’t give a straight answer about his culpability or intentions, and won’t give lxc the most basic level of closure by telling him the truth.

it’s very, “here we are, the last two living people who loved them both, and if i have to live this way you do too." it’s crueller, to me, than making lxc stab jgy in the first place, because it’s unnecessary. it’s emotional cowardice, as well as profoundly sadistic.