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Trauma gave us deeply sad, deeply fucked ideas about how to love: an essay by Jin Guangyao and Lan Xichen
All! Afternoon! I’ve been thinking of the list of things that JGY says after LXC stabs him — in some ways, it’s a super weird list, not what you expect from people who have been mutually and deeply in love for decades. It’s all about how
he never tried to take credit from the Lan sect, helped LXC rebuild Cloud Recesses. It’s feels downright cold in some ways, but then you think about it in the context of this cold, hard society that wants people to place loyalty to their own family and sect above all else
And as an acknowledged son of JGS and later Jin sect leader, it would have been standard and even expected in many ways for JGY to try and take credit from the Lan, not to exert himself to help the rebuilding of Cloud Recesses as much as he did
Being sworn brothers is a reason to help, but does the Untamed universe consider it enough to act against your family? So yeah, JGY legit believes that this is what love looks like. Helping someone achieve their goals, helping them achieve prestige
Even maybe sometimes refraining physically harming them, even when it would be more useful to let them be hurt. JGY legitimately believes that this is how you treat someone when you love them — and i think you can even draw
A line between the love he experienced from mother and what he tries to give LXC later — Meng Shi teaches her kid about what gentry cultivstors do, has him wear a hat because that’s what gentlemen do, and it functions as a way of protecting him from the ugly
reality that he is a child born out of wedlock to a sex worker. Meng Shi lies by implication about the universe and the real state of the society to her son, and there is a throughline to JGY lying to LXC for years about what he actually is. There is an absolute element of
Selfishness and self-protection in JGY’s lies to LXC, but it follows a pattern — he lies to Qin Su about them being half-siblings, for example. Truth and honesty are fundamentally not a part of what JGY has learned love to be.
And you can see a similar pattern for LXC. His mother is generally held to be a murderer — and not just a common murderer, but someone who murdered a teacher and therefore a moral superior in Confucian contexts. His father used his personal position to
Shield said murderer from so-called justice — a further breach of what a righteous man does in a Confucian society. His uncle is the one who raised the brothers and made them the exemplars of cultivation they are, but is a harsh
disciplinarian, capable of personal cruelty in the name of preserving social order and what he sees as justice, as seen in him presiding over LWJ’s beating and lecturing him on the rules while men take turns beating LWJ at his feet and LWJ shouts defiance.
And then there’s LWJ himself In the books, I think LWJ actually kills fellow Lan sect members protecting WWX? The show softens this, but does show LWJ fighting fellow sect members that night. So pretty much every person LXC has to love is — flawed. Difficult. Problematic under
Social norms that have been drilled into him since birth. So what can he do? What is he supposed to do? In a normal, healthy world, he’d have examples and experience of how to love flawed people — how to recognize the good, how to call out the bad
How to draw boundaries. But the only family warmth that we ever see the boys get (and we arguably only see LWJ get it, LXC is an observer when relating the story to WWX) is from their mother, the teacher-murderer, who is kind to her boys
one day a month by looking at them kindly, by not making them bear her rage and grief and frustration at imprisonment, by not demanding they excel in their studies, which you know was the measure of their worth not only to Uncle but to
all the other Lan elders. There is an argument that maybe talking about studies and praising them for progress have been hard for the mom if she viewed herself as being jmprisoned by the system her boys were being raised to embody — but I think
The point stands. Similarly, when Uncle orders LXC out as the designated survivor — that’s family love, too, of the oldest school, but it is tangled up in pain and sacrifice and staggering blindly forward because you cannot think about what might be true, what might be happening
behind you. For LXC, love has always meant a certain kind of blindness. To the extent that he has doubts, to the extent he cannot be wholly blind, he only voices it at midnight to someone who will not be hurt, like he does with WWX at Gentian House.
So that’s LXC and JGY, and you can imagine from everything LXC days and does in the temple that he is left really doubting whether JGY ever loved him. Whether he was just one-sidedly in love with a monster for decades of his life. And then JGY says
those words to him, describing all the ways that things he has done out of love for LXC. And the goddamn moment when LXC realized that JGY did — how they have had two different ways of loving each other that led here, but JGY asks him to stay and die with him, and this is
something they both understand, that appears in both of their ways of loving another person. So he does. And then JGY shows that he does, at the end, really mean it when he says that he won’t physically harm LXC.
Fuck me up, show. FUCK. ME. UP.
The end, off to cry into my sweatshirt, sorry for the untagged spam, I was not expecting this to be so long, but I should have expected to be betrayed, just like LXC.
