When Jiang Yanli sets out to avenge her husband’s murder, she’s told she doesn’t stand a chance against the Kuizhou Kid. They’ll learn the hard way not to underestimate a Jiang.
MDZS translation by dragongirlG: ch 100 - wangxian in Guanyin Temple
Happy almost-Valentine's Day and almost-Lantern Festival 2022! I'm super excited to share my fan translation of MDZS chapter 100, featuring Wei Wuxian's famous love confession to Lan Wangji. As with chapter 1, I included footnotes with my notes and references, and a preface with my translation goals.
Reblogs and positive feedback are always appreciated!
Links below:
GDocs
PDF
ePub
Crossposted to Twitter
And a preview with alt text: Wei Wuxian's confession!
One underrated aspect of MDZS is that usually when you have a love story where one of the lovers die, the lover who is alive is responsible for the dead person to come back to life. Think of princesses whose tears are life-giving, or princes who deliver the true love's kiss, or quests to the underworld seeking one's beloved. MDZS, though? LWJ is all but irrelevant when it comes to WWX's resurrection. So much so that even CQL, which plays up all romance tropes they possibly can, keeps that irrelevance
Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, broadly speaking, MDZS is full of people whose "I love you" to someone is answered by the world and fate with "So what?" Love doesn't conquer all in this story, in fact love usually fixes nothing at best and hurts you at worst, no matter what kind of love it is. I don't have any conclusions I can immediately draw from this but I'll be Thinking about it in the foreseeable future and hopefully come to some conclusion because I feel like I'm missing something major here but I don't really know what
I can see this got a lot of notes and I'm really looking forward to reading the discussions but I'm trying not to right now because I feel like I have a thought juuuuust out of reach inside my brain and I want to get to it without external influences. But thanks for playing the overthinking game with me, you're all awesome!
Got it. The thought that was just out of my reach, I mean, not the only possible conclusion, of course. (Do check the notes, there are some awesome thoughts in there!)
In a well-written love story, of course love has to play an important role. It has to do something, it can't be just an afterthought. And I can point to many ways in which love is either useless or destructive in MDZS, but it felt like an oversimplification to stop there. Yes, love, like everything else, is tangled up in the worst aspects of the world the characters live in. But to say there's nothing uniquely good about love in this world feels disingenuous? I never get that sense, I do get the sense that people are right in loving, even if the results of that love can be disastrous sometimes. And then it hit me.
Love remembers.
That's basically it. In a story where truth and lies are so central, love is about remembering. Grievances lead to grudges, thankfulness leads to debts - I'm sorry and thank you, right? Love leads to memories. You remember because you care, because you're paying attention enough to notice things in the first place. It's really that simple.
The sheer amount of mementos in this story should've clued me in tbh, but if it hadn't - I only had to think of how the story begins and ends. The antidote to narratives being spun about you is to have even a single person who will look at you, and see you, and remember you.
LWJ might be powerless to stop WWX's downward spiral, or to bring him back to life, but. He remembers his favorite wine and his sense of humor. He remembers him throwing flowers and playing with a child. On his body, LWJ has scars so he will never forget him. Oh, and he recognizes WWX because even in a new life, he still remembers their song.
hello fellow lqr fan!! do you mind sharing more about why you like lqr? he needs more love :)
Hello fellow fan! LQR does indeed need more love, and he deserves it, too!!!
Like every single character in this story, LQR is a hot mess in need of heavy duty therapy. Which, given I love would-make-a-therapist-quit 3zun, is obviously something I appreciate about him. I don't think he's processed the whole QHJ situation anymore than JC has processed the WWX situation, and oh boy does that influence how he raises the Jades. He's doing his best to be a good parental figure but there are so many unaddressed issues getting in the way of him being as good as this as he clearly wants to be. I say this because I often see people conflate his mistakes in raising the Jades with his entire being, which strikes me as a bit unfair since that's not generally how we treat anyone in the Sunshot generation.
But anyway, none of this is why I love him so much, I just wanted to get that out of the way.
The reason why I think he's profoundly underappreciated is mainly because he's so, so, so moral. You can't possibly accuse him of not doing his best to be as good a person as he knows how to be. It's fair game to disagree with his worldview, but very, very few characters are as earnest about their beliefs as LQR is. He sincerely believes with all his heart that the way he's living life is the most virtuous way and he does that not because he has any sort of agenda, it really is as simple as wanting to be a good person because being a good person is the most honorable of goals. He's not particularly after power or prestige or ego trips or an easy life. He knows being righteous is a narrow road and the work is never finished, but he tries as best as he can to stick to it with a sincerity that I find very touching. Compared to other people of his generation, there's something disarmingly pure about LQR. When he gets things wrong, you can be sure it's still coming from a place of good intentions. The only person I can think of who is as heartfelt and unwavering in their convictions is XXC, though of course, LQR is basically a Confucian scholar, while XXC is a follower of Daoism, and these two can be at odds.
Anyway, whenever I think of LQR, I'm reminded of the Analects 12.14-15, which one translation renders as
Fulfill your office untiringly, perform your duties with loyalty. . . . Once a junzi (1) has studied broadly in patterns and constrained them with li (2), indeed he will never turn his back on them.
(1) Junzi 君子 – often used to denote an ideally ethical and capable person; some-times simply meaning a power holder, which is its original sense.
(2) Li 禮 – the ritual institutions of the Zhou, of which Confucius was master; the range of behavior subject to the broad category denoted by this term rang-es from political protocol to court ceremony, religious rite to village festival, daily etiquette to disciplines of personal conduct when alone.
This is an extremely Confucian way of seeing the world and LQR is very intense about it. Once you have learned the way it is proper to act, it's unethical to turn aside from it. And after a lifetime of studies and reflections (which are different skills, both of which LQR is shown to regularly attend to), LQR is fairly sure he knows a fair amount about how it is proper to act, and he doesn't allow anything, be it external pressures or internal turmoil, to deviate him from these things. I don't think that's a particularly healthy or even wise way to live, but I can respect the hell out of him for his commitment to his understanding of his duty as a man, a scholar and a teacher. I just... Look, he's doing his best and he's genuinely trying to be a good person, and I don't know how to not find that admirable, whatever his flaws might be.
Oh hold on, these tags by @lansplaining made me realize I have a little sidenote
I think LQR is a Lawful Good antagonist, which people often simplify into Lawful Neutral or Lawful Evil villain, because it's somewhat hard to reconciliate someone who causes so many problems for the main characters being committed to being a good person. And because this fandom in general already sees rules as evil for some reason, LQR ends up being vilified way past what a reasonable reading of canon would suggest. Which is fine, I mean, not everybody has the inclination to do deep dives into minor antagonists! But I find that LQR is often treated more as a symbol for the kind of things the fandom dislikes than as an actual full-fledged character. Since I'm more invested in him than I am in wangxian, this tends to frustrate me, but at the same time, I totally get why it happens, it's a natural reaction to the role he plays in the story
“The strongest stars have hearts of kyber.”
↳ Chirrut Îmwe, Rogue One, a Star Wars story.
For the Baze to my Chirrut,
The Jiang Cheng to my Wei Wuxian,@flyppa.
in average
are photos
are videos
are texts
are gifs
are audio