And yet again I am using The Untamed to kickstart everything.
I mentioned that public perception plays a huge role in the show... and actually, it's a bit more complicated than that. The main character, Wei Wuxian, starts using powers that are disturbing to pretty much everyone else. Corpses, resentful energy, etc. It makes it very easy for people to believe nasty rumors about what he's using those powers for, with little to no relation to reality. His first life cumulates in a tragedy through a combination of rumor-mongering, his own arrogance, bad luck... and yes, some deliberate manipulation by some pretty shady characters. The degree to which each of these elements plays a role is something we could debate for hours, but that's not what this post is about. Or rather, that's only a small part of what this post is about.
See, there's a character (Jin Guangshan, though it's hard to say how much was done by him and how much was done by the bastard son he reluctantly recognized and used to do his dirty work - Jin Guangyao) who saw Wei Wuxian's abilities (able to fight thousands! On his own! And he created a powerful spritual tool - the Stygian Tiger Amulet - that helped him do so) and considered him a threat. This character also coveted the Stygian Tiger Amulet Wei Wuxian created. The story isn't quite clear on just how much he was responsible for it, but there definitely seems to have been a smear campaign in place.
They put everything Wei Wuxian did in the worst light, exaggerated his arrogance, spun outright lies implying that Wei Wuxian didn't respect his adopted brother (and now sect leader), etc. There's a really interesting scene where we see the cultivators discussing what to do about Wei Wuxian, and you see a few people try to stand up for him and defend him - and get shouted down or dismissed.
When a pompous and arrogant Jin noble got cursed, he assumed Wei Wuxian had done it - with no proof - and gathered a couple hundred cultivators to ambush him. That ambush turned tragic when someone important died during the fight, and Wei Wuxian was blamed. Eventually it led to all the cultivators gathering together and talking about attacking Wei Wuxian, who at that point (grief-ridden, angry, and maybe a bit unhinged) invited himself to the meeting. Wei Wuxian didn't start the fight - the other side shot him first, and then attacked - but he definitely threw down. It's fiction, so it's hard to feel as upset about this as we would for real life characters, but thousands died in that fight. Really, all of our characters survived a rather nasty war... so even though the story doesn't show it they've all got blood on their hands.
Which brings me to the point, I suppose. Thousands die in what some people translate to the 'Massacre at Nightless City'.
Is Wei Wuxian the one responsible? He was their main opponent. But... he didn't start the fight. Was it the responsibility of Jin Guangshan and Jin Guangyao, for manipulating events and painting Wei Wuxian a villain? All in their lust for power? Was it the cultivators themselves, who believed the lies and spread the gossip? Who wholeheartedly believed they were right, that they were the ones on the side of justice?
You could go round and round assigning blame, or trying to divide it up and say that 45% was one and 20% another... but part of the beauty of this story is that it shows how pointless most of that is. There's plenty of blame to go around, and a lot of crappy things happened - now what?
The manipulators did wrong, but can you put all the blame on them? There will always be immoral people willing to justify whatever in the pursuit of power, surely they wouldn't have succeeded if others had asked the right questions, or insisted on proof. (This happened rather consistently ever since the end of the war, but stands out most significantly in the incident that first set Wei Wuxian at odds with the rest of society. They had won the war against the Wen, and the survivors were hunted down and put in work camps. For various reasons had a debt to a couple of Wen, and wound up visiting one of those camps in order to try and pay off that debt. What he found was that his own side was treating the prisoners badly... just as bad as the Wen they'd just fought a bloody war against. So even though he hated the Wen - who had destroyed his home, hurt his brother, thrown him into a rather horrible place to die, etc - he also had this debt to two of them, and could see that they weren't all bad. The people in the camps were NOT a threat. Old, civilians, even a toddler. He ends up killing some of the guards, breaking them free and taking them to live somewhere under his protection. The discussion conference about him shows that the cultivators all believe it was an unprovoked attack, the surviving guards claimed that the death of one detainee in particular was because he fell of a cliff - rather than being murdered as we'd learned earlier - and so of course to them Wei Wuxian seems out of control and a threat to all. We're not even sure whether that's a deliberate lie on Jin Guangshan and Jin Guangyao's part, or the guards coming up with a lie to protect themselves. Regardless, the Jin family didn't have any interest in finding out the truth and the rest of the cultivation world accepted their story without question.)
Should we be angry, then, at the general public? Is it their fault for believing and spreading gossip? For believing the manipulators when they outright lied? But if they were at fault - wasn't the death of thousands a bit extreme for punishment?
That brings me to the point of all this - because there are real world parallels here. There are people who deliberately spread lies and try to manipulate the situation to their own favor. And there are people who believe those lies and take action based on those lies.
The pandemic brings this home rather viscerally, to me at least. I had posted some months back that we could predict and prevent much of the death. We're now almost at 200,000 dead Americans and the vast majority of it did not have to happen.
Hundreds of thousands dead. In the real world, not some fictional fantasy. It's almost too terrible to comprehend.
There's a definite urge to blame - to blame the people who minimized the threat and did everything they could to prevent people from taking sensible precautions. To blame the ones who turned this political, so that some people proudly act as though refusing to wear a mask is some great show of freedom and patriotism. To wonder how many of them believe their own BS, and are honestly just fools... and how many are knowingly and deliberately saying things they are fully aware are false.
To blame people - for being gullible and credulous and believing the BS.
There's plenty of blame to go around. You can even try tracing things back to earlier stages and blame China, though that's a bit like saying Wei Wuxian was responsible for the death of thousands because he rescued a few civilians from a work camp. (i.e. in the broader sense it can be true, but it misses a lot of the steps along the way where different choices would have effected the outcome.)
I have more to write on this, but it's long enough that I'll probably do a separate post.
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