fannish-karmiya:

Who Knew the Truth About the Wen Remnants?

(finally cross-posting from Ao3)

In the story of Modao Zushi, we see a group of people being rounded up and placed in a restricted settlement, then shuffled to a prison labour camp, and eventually be massacred and thrown in a mass grave. The treatment of the Wen remnants by the sects and their eventual fate bear similarities to real ethnic cleansing/genocide attempts, and I find the way that fandom tries to mitigate and even ignore it deeply disturbing.

I think that part of it is because people like these characters. They don’t want to take a long hard look at them and admit that they were either complicit or active participants in such an atrocity. How could people who are supposed to be righteous, like Lan Xichen, Nie Mingjue and Lan Qiren, do such a monstrous thing?

People want to believe that they didn’t know. That the Jins were engaging in a massive smear campaign against Wei Wuxian and that the sects were deceived into thinking that the people in the Burial Mounds settlement were an army. But I don’t think the text backs that up, and am going to be going over it very closely to try to build a clear picture of what was known about the Wen remnants by the cultivation world, and who was involved in their massacre.

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