(no subject)

[fairandfatalasfair]

I’m having a lot of feelings about Wei Wuxian and that flute and his initial hostility any time anyone criticizes it.

Because here’s the thing: in general, one of the things I’ve observed about people is that we get very fucking irrational about things that have kept us alive.

Any trauma survivor, anyone who has been in a dangerous situation, is likely to cling desperately to the skills, patterns, and institutions that allowed them to survive whatever it was that happened to them. It’s not about love or enjoyment or pride. It’s about the lingering certainty that the things that tried to kill them before are always always just around the corner, and if you lose the things that saved you before, then next time you won’t survive.

Wei Wuxian was captured by the enemies of his family, people who he knew had murdered the majority of his clan. He was threatened, and tortured, and then thrown out of the sky and left for dead in a place that everyone knew was unsurvivable.

And he survived.

He survived, and he learned, and he gave himself the power to leave this place that no one had walked out of since it was created, and to avenge himself and his family. And it was this flute, these disciplines, this unsettling new ability that made that possible.

And then the war is over, and everyone is telling him that the skills that kept him alive are wrong, that he needs to put them down and just choose to forget them. That he needs to turn his back on this thing that is the only reason he’s alive, maybe the only reason his family are alive.

And yes there are times when he’s visibly losing control and it is at least heavily implied that his current practices are making that worse. And he does hurt people as a result.

But just telling him to walk away from it was never going to work. Because people are very rarely rational about the things that have kept us alive.