"So-n-so didn't do anything wrong!"

     Okay, so...this is sort of a fandom rant, but more about how fans sometimes relate to the characters than it is about any specific fandom.  (Though after the read more tag, I will be going heavy into MDZS spoilers, just to further drive home my point.)

    This is something that's been bothering me for a few weeks now, so it's been building up, and I wanted to let it out before it festers any more than it already has.

    So, I was introduced to the "didn't do anything wrong" subset of fan reactions indirectly; my brother was sharing a story that...I don't remember where it came from, as this was quite a few years ago now.  Main point of the story, though, was some female fan in all seriousness said, regarding the anime/manga Berserk, that "Griffith really didn't do anything wrong."  Griffith is the extremely pretty villain of Berserk, who started his villainy by literally sacrificing the hero's girlfriend in order to turn himself into a demon.  That is automatically doing something wrong, period, and I seem to recall my brother going on at great length about the other ghastly things Griffith did, but I don't recall any details, and that's not really the point:  just the human sacrifice is already something deeply wrong, especially if he had no mitigating factors to lessen the evil of the action.  (Case in point:  in the second season of a popular isekai anime, the hero sacrifices thousands to become a demon lord, but this act is somewhat mitigated because his reason to do so is that becoming a demon lord is the only way to restore the lives of his friends and subjects who were killed in a treacherous attack by an invading army, said invading army being of course the lives he sacrifices for the transformation.  Even with that mitigating factor, though, it still leaves the audience unsettled, because it's such a horrible thing he's just done, despite his good reasons for doing it.)  The overall sense I got of the "they didn't do anything wrong" fan reaction thus was that it really means "I am attracted to this character and therefore refuse to acknowledge their crimes."  Which is, in a word, not cool.

    So, fast-forward to sometime earlier this year (or maybe late last year?), when I saw someone on Etsy selling a mug that read "WWX didn't do anything wrong" and I honestly got kinda offended by it for two reasons.  First, "he didn't do anything wrong" is a line spoken by fans about villains, not heroes.  And second, it actively negates a large chunk of his character arc, because a large part of his growth as a person was when he realized that all his bad choices and wrong decisions had gotten people killed, including some people very close to him.  Now, in Wei Wuxian's case, it's certainly true that he tried to never do anything truly wrong:  he has a personal code of ethics that he doesn't violate, but that code of ethics does not conform to his society's code of ethics in all places (most of his peers view necromancy as pure evil) nor does it completely conform to the basic code of ethics most modern societies adhere to (we're not typically big on "you killed my family so I am going to kill you" logic, plus the whole necromancy thing), but he does attempt to do what he views as the right thing at all times.  (Unlike some villains about whom "he didn't do anything wrong" is said, who don't even care about right or wrong, and others have the policy "I want to do it, therefore it is right.")  However, when you're an angry teenager (or angry twenty year old) it's not always easy to tell which course is right even by your own personal code of ethics, and sometimes he made decisions that he later realized were wrong, despite that he hadn't thought so at the time.  Him coming to realize that was a major turning point for him as a character, so denying that it was ever wrong in the first place is trying to deny him that growth.

    Moving forward through time again to a few weeks ago, when I was looking at the wiki pages for a few of the Mo Dao Zu Shi characters, as I mentioned in another post.  In among the comments on one of the pages was someone stating, several times, that "JGY did nothing wrong."

    Jin Guangyao (initials JGY) is the villain of the novel.

    Claiming that he did nothing wrong is mind-numbing.  And, honestly, it cheapens both the fan and the character.  JGY is a complex character, and the motivations that led him into his increasingly evil activities are not initially wrong, per se.  What makes him a compelling villain is that his situation is actually deeply sympathetic, and it's hard to say precisely at what time he crosses the line that separates "justified" and "going way too far" in his pursuit of vengeance for all the wrongs that have been committed against him.  (This is also why the leads seem like they might not go all out on actually punishing him once he's fully lost, because they can see just how far he had been pushed, and how it had caused him to lash out in ways that he himself knew were wrong and could never be justified.)

    I think what really bothers me, though, is the entire "he didn't do anything wrong" mindset.  A well-written character is typically not going to be all good or all bad; a well-written character is typically going to be nuanced, and their actions will include both good and bad.  There are authors who have defied that who are lauded as among the greatest writers in their respective languages (specifically, Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo, who are both known for their characters typically being either pure good or pure evil (though even in their works there are exceptions)), but most writers, particularly in the modern era, tend towards having characters that are nuanced with shades of gray, meaning that very few of them can truly be said to have never done anything wrong.  That being the case, trying to deny their wrong-doing is actually discarding part of the character (in some cases, a very large part of the character!) thus doing an injustice to both the character and the fan.

    In short, every time I see someone say that, I just want to say to them "You know, there's nothing wrong with saying 'This character did some really awful things, but I can't help loving them anyway.'  The beauty of fiction is that, in the end, it's not real, so if you like a character despite their wicked ways, it's not harming anyone, but if you don't acknowledge that what they did was wrong then you're suggesting that you, yourself, have a questionable sense of morality."

    All that being said, I now feel compelled to actually outline just how few characters in Mo Dao Zu Shi can truly be said to have "done nothing wrong" as well as outlining all the things the other characters did that were wrong.  (Omitting really minor characters who only show up once or twice, people who we don't really know enough about.  Like Sisi and Bicao, for example.  Heck, I'm even leaving out Qin Su, because there are just too many gaps in what we know.)

    [EDIT: I've gone back in and added in a character I forgot earlier, also decided to add a mention of the numbers of the characters who lived and died off each list.]

    Since I can't do tables, I'm going to have to do this as a couple of bulleted lists.  (This is all based on the novel's continuity, ofc.  Other versions might have slightly modified lists.  Particularly CQL's version of Wei Wuxian would be way different...)  First, the "truly did nothing wrong" characters:

• Jiang Yanli
• Wen Qing
• Technically, she could be said to have done something wrong when she helped Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng following the fall of Lotus Pier, since that was going against her clan.  However, as helping them was the morally right thing to do on a larger scale, I don't think it counts here.
• Luo "Mianmian" Qingyang
• Wen Yuan/Lan Sizhui
• Lan Jingyi
• Also a lot of the other juniors that we don't know as much about, but since we don't know much about them, it's hard to feel sure they properly belong on this list, unlike the two young Lans.
• Fairy
• Good dog is good. 😁
• Wen Ning
• At least, his conscious self counts here, unless you discount him for helping Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng, enemies of his clan.  If you count things his body did as a fierce corpse when it was not under his mind's control, then...yeah, no longer on this list.  Lots of dead guys, and while some of them (eg the guards who had killed him, Jin Zixun and his ambush party) deserved what they got, some of them (Jin Zixuan, the Lans who were helping to handle his surrender) did not.  But he didn't have any control over his body, so I personally don't feel like that counts.  (I won't argue with anyone who feels it does, though.)
• Song Lan
• Probably.  Or rather, we don't know what all Xue Yang made him do as a fierce corpse, but since he was literally being controlled and had zero power to resist that control, I don't feel like that counts against him.
• Xiao Xingchen
• Kind of.  Xue Yang tricked him into committing an unknown number of murders, including Song Lan's, but he had no idea what was really happening, and as soon as he found out, he took his own life rather than...uh...whatever Xue Yang actually expected to have happen. 😰 (I kinda wonder if  maybe he was hoping XXC's mind would break and he would devolve into being the same kind of heartless killer Xue Yang was...)
• And the survivors are...
• Luo "Mianmian" Qingyang, Wen Yuan/Lan Sizhui, Lan Jingyi, Fairy, Wen Ning (as an intelligent fierce corpse) and Song Lan (also only as an intelligent fierce corpse)
• Kinda telling that only one of the ones from the older generation on this list fully survived...and she's the one who turned her back on the cultivation world rather than meekly submit to the skewed judgment of those around her.  (In fact, looking back on it, the younger generation doesn't lose any named characters.)

    Then we have a list of characters who are hard to put on a "truly did nothing wrong" list or on a "yeah, they did things wrong" list.

• Jin Zixuan
• He is arrogant as all get-out, and treats Jiang Yanli quite badly prior to falling madly in love with her, but he was raised as the heir to the absurdly wealthy and pompous Jin Clan, lavished with praise by all those around him, so it's almost impossible for him to have turned out any other way.  Plus he has the skills and the charm (when he chooses to use it) to back up his arrogance.  We're certainly never told of anything he ever did that was intended to harm those who didn't deserve harm, so...as I said, hard to put him on either list.  (Plus he did defend Mianmian in the cave under Mount Muxi.)
• Jin Ling
• Like Wei Wuxian, Jin Ling certainly never intends to do anything deeply wrong (a little minor disobedience to his uncle definitely does not count as truly wrong) but he's been raised to be arrogant and selfish, plus he's been taught for his whole life that Wei Wuxian is the evil monster who murdered his parents, so he does various things that he thinks are right (verbally abusing anyone who even mentions Wei Wuxian in his presence, stabbing Wei Wuxian after he finds out who he is, etc.) even though they aren't actually.
• Jiang Fengmian
• He almost falls on the previous list, in that we don't really get told of anything he did wrong, and yet it feels like it would be a gross injustice to put him there.  We know he's not a very good husband, and yet he's not an adulterous husband, which is pretty impressive given the setting and the way certain other men in the novel behave.  We do know that he's much too hard on his own son and much too forgiving of his not-quite-adopted-son, though, which to my mind does indicate he doesn't belong on the "did nothing wrong" list, especially since--allegedly--the only reason he's so fond of Wei Wuxian is because he had been in love with Wei Wuxian's mother before she ran off with his friend/servant.  (That "allegedly" is not denying the love he had for Cangse-sanren, just saying that I don't know if we can be sure that's the only reason he's so fond of WWX.)
• Mo Xuanyu
• We just don't know enough about this poor soul.  I mean, we're told he sexually harassed Jin Guangyao, his own half-brother, but did he really?  Or rather, if he did, then why didn't Jin Guangyao kill him later on?  Wei Wuxian assumes he spared Mo Xuanyu because he was mentally ill, but...we don't really know what happened or why he was spared, so...ultimately, we don't actually know enough about Mo Xuanyu to put him on either list.  (Though if we were making a list of people who had been victimized, he would have to be very high on that list! 😭)
• Nie Mingjue
• He's too hard-headed to be willing to see that not everyone is either pure good or pure evil, which is mostly not a problem, except that after Wei Wuxian revives Wen Ning and has him kill the guards who murdered him, Nie Mingjue can't quite wrap his head around the idea that a Wen could be anything other than evil, and thus comes out much too harshly against Wen Ning and Wen Qing, despite that they never did any harm to anyone (prior to Wen Ning becoming a fierce corpse) which in turn encourages Jiang Cheng not to say anything to defend them or Wei Wuxian, because he doesn't want to make an enemy out of Nie Mingjue.  (Not that he would necessarily have otherwise said much to defend the Wen siblings, but hopefully he would have said a bit more than he did, considering he knows full well they saved his life.)  I'm not sure if being hard-headed is truly doing something wrong, though...
• And the survivor is...
• Jin Ling

    And, finally, the "yeah, they did things wrong" list.  This is the big one...and unlike the other lists, I'm going to try to order this in ascending order of wrongness (thus starting with the least wrong, and ending with the most); not so much by the number of wrong deeds but the amount those deeds stain the character.  Though that's somewhat entirely subjective (plus the last six of them are actually a dead tie, really), so others might disagree on where some people fit on this list.  In this case, I'm going to itemize the things done wrong as further bullet points, rather than paragraphs.  (Also, fair warning, I've probably missed some points for everyone involved.)  I'm leaving off smaller characters like Mo Xuanyu's family because there's just not much to say there.  (Also because we pretty much only know the things they did wrong, if that makes any sense?)

• Lan Wangji
• On seeing that the Wen remnants were harmless and should not be persecuted, he did nothing to try to convince the other clans--or even his own clan--to let them be.
• He only decided to save Wei Wuxian at Nightless City after he had slain some 3000 people, instead of fully intervening before the Yin Tiger Tally was used.
• Yeah, he shouts orders at WWX, telling him to stop the attacking corpses and stuff, but he could have physically dragged WWX away earlier and he didn't even try.
• He wounded 33 senior members of his own clan in the process of trying to protect Wei Wuxian following the Nightless City Massacre.
• Yes, this is something that we, as fans, love him for, but it's still wrong, despite that he did it for love.
• Wei Wuxian
• Assorted minor mischiefs and general gremlin antics
• Including breaking a whole lot of rules at Cloud Recesses
• Also often failing/refusing to properly honor his place in society and pay the correct amount of respect to those who are deemed "better" than him for reasons of birth/wealth/etc.
• Resorting to fist fights when people (esp. Jin Zixuan) tick him off too badly
• Torturing Wen Chao and Wen Zhuliu to death
• Using the Wen Clan dead (including long-dead civilians) against the Wen Clan army in the Sunshot Campaign
• After raising Wen Ning from the dead, ordering him to avenge himself then and there
• Not recognizing how much his own emotions impact on Wen Ning as a fierce corpse, leading to Wen Ning's out of control behavior at Qiongqi Path causing him to kill Jin Zixuan
• Using the Yin Tiger Tally at Nightless City in the wake of Jiang Yanli's death
• ...actually, that may be it?
• Despite the number of bullet points here, since we're privy to his thoughts the whole time, we see his reasons for doing everything, and honestly the torturing Wen Chao and Wen Zhuliu to death part is the only one that makes the reader step back and say "whoa, stop, that's going too far!"  Uh, okay, maybe some of the necromancy also does that...
• a-Qing
• Habitually steals
• Though she stops once she attaches herself to Xiao Xingchen's side, because at heart she's a good kid, and she wants to love and be loved, and she hopes to find all of that with the sweet, kind, actually-blind daozhang.  (OMG, I am driving myself to tears just thinking about this poor child...)
• Feigns blindness
• Given that she's already homeless and fending for herself at the start of her story, when she's like twelve or something, stealing and playing blind barely even feels like she's doing anything wrong, since she needs to do those things to survive.
• Lan Xichen
• Does not stand up for the Wen siblings enough in the wake of Wen Ning's revival, even though he knows Wen Qing is blameless, and a gifted doctor
• Does not try to de-escalate the situation at any time after Wei Wuxian and the Wen remnants have retreated into the Burial Mounds, despite knowing how important Wei Wuxian is to his brother
• He's like their biggest shipper, so why doesn't he help?!
• On seeing his brother save Wei Wuxian at Nightless City, he sends thirty-three of the disciples who are most fond of him to bring Lan Wangji back to Cloud Recesses and hush up the incident so no one else will know what he did and cause his reputation to suffer
• Either agrees to or orders thirty-three lashes of the Discipline Whip against his brother for having (temporarily) saved the man he loves
• There might be a few other points against him if we had full details on the thirteen years Wei Wuxian spent dead, as he surely had to have noticed some signs that his best friend/sworn brother/man-he-maybe-loves has been doing truly horrible things, and yet he refused to acknowledge any of those signs, but since we don't know, we can't really put those things on the list
• Except for the part about shipping Wangxian, all these points apply equally to Lan Qiren, so there's no point in even giving him a separate entry...though for Lan Qiren there would be an added "general unreasoning hard-headedness" bullet point...
• Jiang Cheng
• Torturing Wen Chao and Wen Zhuliu to death
• General lack of patience with Wei Wuxian following the Sunshot Campaign, not realizing that there's actually a very good reason that Wei Wuxian can't keep his promise to help him run the Jiang Clan
• Failure to stand up for Wei Wuxian in the wake of Wen Ning's revival
• This was actually such a significant wrong that Jin Guangyao called him out for it during the final confrontation, in a very much "see, I'm not the only one responsible--you are, too!" kind of thing.
• Failure to object to the oath to destroy Wei Wuxian in the wake of Jin Zixuan's death
• Turning all his hatred for the death of his sister onto Wei Wuxian (despite knowing that Wei Wuxian has just as big a sister complex as he does and therefore is both just as tormented by her death and that he would have done literally anything to save her)
• If the rumors are true, torturing and maybe even killing people he suspected might be a revived Wei Wuxian
• There could probably be more bullet points here, but these are the big ones.  The major thing here, though, is that the two failures to stand up for Wei Wuxian--which are the biggest ones where he made a real choice regarding what path he could take (rather than acting out of his increasingly uncontrolled rage)--were done out of his fear that the Jiang Clan might suffer if he didn't go along with the prevailing mood.  In other words, his motivation is clearly spelled out at these crucial points of decision, and his motivation is very specifically looking towards the larger whole that he has the responsibility of protecting.
• More succinctly, those turning point decisions were not selfishly motivated, unlike the decisions of villains like JGY, XY, JGS, etc.
• Nie Huaisang
• Somehow convinced/coerced the mentally ill Mo Xuanyu to sacrifice his own soul to revive Wei Wuxian
• Ideally, these bullet points should be in chronological order, but we don't really know the exact chronology on all the things NHS did secretly, so...I've sorta tried to guess at it as best I can
• Knowingly put a number of teenagers in dangerous situations repeatedly
• Though always when he knew Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian would be there to save them (or in some cases the boys were the bait to lure them in), so to me this is mitigated by the fact that he knew those two would never let those children be harmed, especially since the ones he was most determined to involve time and again were Lan Sizhui, Lan Wangji's adopted son (at least, it's implied that he's actually been adopted, what with him being treated as a member of the main family), and Jin Ling, the orphan of Wei Wuxian's precious shijie; thus the two teens that they would go the furthest to protect under absolutely any and all circumstances.
• I also personally like to think that he probably had back-up plans in mind to save them in case the adults failed to show up, since planning and plotting are his big strengths, but I freely admit that there's no proof of any such back-up plans.
• Horribly murdered a number of cats.
• There is no excusing this one.
• Bribed Bicao to betray her late mistress' trust and expose Qin Su's true paternity, which resulted in Qin Su's death by suicide
• This was likely an outcome he neither intended nor expected...I hope... 😰
• Dug up the body of Jin Guangyao's mother and did an unspecified something with it (hopefully not as bad as what JGY did with his brother's body, but as it was in vengeance for that... 🤷🏻‍♀️)
• Worried that his brother's murderer might be spared despite all his crimes, he tricks Lan Xichen into stabbing him, even though he knows how much Lan Xichen cares about Jin Guangyao and how much it would hurt him to have personally played a role in his death.
• Yeah, I know a lot of people would put Nie Huaisang lower than this on the list.  I don't care.  I like him despite what he did.  (Look, I watched the drama first, okay?  And his actor is adorable and activates my maternal instinct, as I just want to cuddle him and protect him from harm.  (Him the character, not him the actor.  That would be creepy.))
• Yu Ziyuan
• Being cruel to Wei Wuxian for something that is not remotely his fault
• Poor kid wasn't responsible for the love triangle (quandrangle?) that happened before he was born, for pity's sake!
• Being cruel to Wei Wuxian for things he actually did himself
• Naughty little boys will not learn to stop being naughty if they're just punished and not taught how to be better
• Being really pretty mean to her husband after she basically forced him to marry her
• Seriously, did she actually expect him to act loving when he didn't want to marry her in the first place?
• ...I feel like there's something else, but I can't think of it now.
• These points all seem pretty minor, and in a way they are, but she still comes off really badly.  Probably because we basically only see her while she's screaming abuse at Wei Wuxian.  (She comes off a little better in the drama, where we see her kicking way more ass than her husband does immediately prior to their deaths.  Also where we get a dream sequence, possibly based on a real memory, in which she is not being mean to baby WWX.)  That being said, being mean to a small child is horrible, period.  Being mean to an irreverent (and mentally resilient) teenager is less so...
• Wen Zhuliu
• Allowing his sense of indebtedness to Wen Ruohan to lead him to commit myriad acts of slaughter
• Melting golden cores all over the place
• Did I mention the myriad acts of slaughter yet?
• Jin Guangyao
• Murdering the Jin Clan officer who was verbally abusing him and taking credit for all his hard work
• Torturing people in Inferno Palace, on the orders of Wen Ruohan
• Recruiting Xue Yang to be a demonic cultivator for the Jin Clan; this would eventually led to Xue Yang having a private workshop called the Corpse Refinery where he committed a vast number of horrifying experiments, murdering hundreds  [EDIT:  actually, I'm not positive the novel specified that he was the one who recruited Xue Yang, but he certainly encouraged and enabled him at all stages even if he wasn't the one who first brought him to Lanling]
• Encouraging Jin Zixun to believe only Wei Wuxian would ever have cursed him
• Sending Jin Zixun and 300 archers to ambush Wei Wuxian on his way to Jin Ling's full month celebration, knowing that no amount of prep was likely to prevent Wei Wuxian from evading the ambush and killing them all (and contrariwise also knowing that Wei Wuxian was innocent of the charges Jin Zixun was leveling against him, and thus that if he did somehow end up dead, it would be an unjust death)
• Tricking Jin Zixuan into going to talk them down, in the full hopes/expectation that Jin Zixuan would end up dead, as indeed he did
• Knowingly married his own half-sister
• Though at least he only slept with her the once, prior to learning that they were related, which is something...I guess?
• Murdering all his other half-brothers except Mo Xuanyu (and possibly any half-sisters, but I don't know if that was specified, and given the cultural setting, most of his half-sisters other than Qin Su were probably the victims of infanticide)
• Murdering Nie Mingjue, chopping up the body and burying each piece in a cursed location where it can't be easily found, and where the body will continue to be more and more contaminated by resentment
• Sending a large number of old and scarred prostitutes to sex his father to death
• I would say that this is the only fitting death for someone like Jin Guangshan, except that it was a really horrible thing to do to all those unfortunate prostitutes.  (He shoulda had Xue Yang raise some dead prostitutes as fierce corpses and used them to sex JGS to death.  If he'd done that, I'd have been all in favor of it.)
• Murdering all but one of those prostitutes so they can't tell anyone what he made them do
• When the leader of the He Clan wouldn't support the Watchtower Plan, Jin Guangyao murdered his own son, framed the leader of the He Clan for the killing, and then promptly had the entire clan executed.  (Well, okay, technically he handed them all over to Xue Yang to do as he pleased with, which is actually a fate far worse than just a simple execution...)
• Burning down the brothel where he was born, with both prostitutes and customers inside at the time
• He and his mother had been verbally (and sometimes physically) abused by both the other prostitutes and the customers while he was growing up there, but by the time he burned the place down, few to none of the people inside would have been the ones who had been abusing them.  If the place had been empty when he burned it down, I wouldn't even put it on this list, but it wasn't.
• On his wife learning the truth of her paternity, he somehow caused her to commit suicide
• We do know that the cursed blade she uses drives people to kill themselves (at least, I think that was said somewhere?) though how he convinced her to take hold of it is unclear...but we do know that when he listed his own victims later on, he included her, so he apparently thought he had been fully responsible for her death.
• On realizing that Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji were going to succeed in exposing all his crimes, he trapped most of the heirs of the major cultivation clans (including his own nephew, Jin Ling!) in the Burial Mounds, then encouraged all the current generation's leaders and best cultivators to storm the Burial Mounds (protecting only himself and Lan Xichen), while Su Minshan played special guqin music to cut off their spiritual powers so they would all be killed by the fierce corpses Jin Guangyao called up with the partially-restored Yin Tiger Tally
• In his attempt to escape the righteous fury of the rest of the cultivation world, he takes numerous hostages, in the process making direct threats against Wei Wuxian's and Jin Ling's lives, even going so far as to draw blood from Wei Wuxian's throat
• After reading this long list, I hope you can see why I was so appalled at someone saying "JGY didn't do anything wrong."  There are way too many murders on this list to be hand-waved away as "nothing wrong."
• And yet, because his childhood was so horrible, and he had been treated so badly and pushed so far by everyone he encountered--including and especially his own father--it's hard to fully hate him for all his crimes.  There were definitely a lot of places where he could have turned along a different path and been a great hero instead of a villain.  That's what makes him so interesting to read about.
• Xue Yang
• General acts of cruelty
• Slaughter of hundreds at the Corpse Refinery, with the Jin Clan's approval
• Slaughter of the Chang Clan of Yueyang, testing out the partially-rebuilt Yin Tiger Tally
• It's true that Chang Cian had abused him horribly as a child, but that's no excuse for killing 49 (or more) other people along with him.
• As vengeance against Xiao Xingchen, he slaughters everyone at the temple where Song Lan was trained and blinds Song Lan
• Discovering that Xiao Xingchen's sword can strike down evil without Xiao Xingchen needing to see, he starts poisoning people with corpse toxin and cutting out their tongues so the sword will mistake them for fierce corpses, causing Xiao Xingchen to unwittingly kill living people, including Song Lan
• Turns those people into fierce corpses, including turning Song Lan into an intelligent fierce corpse
• Turns the few people of Yi City who he didn't kill into living corpses
• Tries to revive the dead Xiao Xingchen as a fierce corpse but fails
• Okay, that doesn't technically sound like a bad thing (Wei Wuxian raising Wen Ning as a fierce corpse was a good thing, after all), but considering Xue Yang's stated goal was to continue to force Xiao Xingchen to commit terrible crimes, it still counts as one, I think.
• And yes, I do fully understand that Xue Yang's feelings for Xiao Xingchen were far more complex (and romantic/sexual) than he was willing to admit, but that would not have stopped him from using a fierce corpse version of Xiao Xingchen to commit myriad atrocities.
• Uses Xiao Xingchen's sword to brutally murder Chang Ping, thus framing the dead Xiao Xingchen for the killing
• Blinds a-Qing, cuts out her tongue, and then murders her
• (Probably also murders anyone else who happens across Yi City, but this is not fully specified, as I recall)
• On the arrival of Wei Wuxian, Lan Wangji and the juniors, he tries to kill all of them except Wei Wuxian, who he tries to force to repair Xiao Xingchen's soul so his preserved corpse can be revived as a fierce corpse (because yandere)
• Honestly, I am constantly astonished that people make excuses for this guy.  Xue Yang delights in his own evil.  He would be offended if anyone tried to claim he's never done anything wrong.  (And would then promptly murder them.  Probably horrifically painfully.)  It's true that he has a tragic backstory, and his actor in the drama is smokin' hot, but...yikes.  Psychotic villain territory here.  But also really entertaining; his enthusiasm for his own villainy makes him fun to read about/watch.
• Jin Zixun
• Massive arrogance despite having very little skill, charm or wit to back it up; he generally throws his weight around as if being the nephew of the leader of the Jin Clan makes him superior to everyone else in the world
• On being humiliated in a Night Hunt, he lashes out against Wen Ning and the others with him, taking them to the Qiongqi Path work camp to be worked to death (or, in Wen Ning's case, beaten to death)
• Thinks he's so well loved that no one other than Wei Wuxian could have a grudge against him big enough to kill over
• Refuses to listen to any kind of reason on confronting Wei Wuxian about the curse
• Knowingly shatters the present Wei Wuxian spent a month making for Jin Ling, delighting in how upset that makes Wei Wuxian
• Jin Zixun is one of several villians who come off as cartoonish in the drama...and aren't much better in the novel.  He's just a bundle of obnoxious arrogance who exists purely to enrage Wei Wuxian at every step until his inevitable death at Wei Wuxian's hands.  (Well, technically it was at Wen Ning's undead hands, but close enough...)
• Su Minshan
• Unable to cope with being treated badly by an arrogant ass, he places an especially vicious curse on Jin Zixun; this leads directly to the deaths of over 3,300 people, including Wei Wuxian, Jiang Yanli and Jin Zixuan.  (Also, slightly less directly, the deaths of Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan as well, along with a-Qing, the entire Chang Clan, and the population of Yi City.)
• Acts as Jin Guangyao's loyal henchman, performing an unknown number of heinous tasks for him, including...
• ...recovering Xue Yang's corpse to get the partially restored Yin Tiger Tally off his body
• ...disabling the cultivation of hundreds of other cultivators, including his own disciples, so that they'll die at the Burial Mounds
• ....everything necessary to help Jin Guangyao escape to Dongying (Japan) when it becomes obvious that the situation cannot be salvaged; this includes killing anyone and everyone who might get in the way of his boss's escape (though he lacks the skill to succeed at this one...)
• The perfect counterpart to Jin Zixun, as he is also moderately cartoonish, and utterly lacking in anything to back up his inflated sense of self-importance.
• Much of the ill will aimed at him is more just due to his nasty personality rather than his specific acts of wrongdoing (other than the curse); as a former member of the Lan Clan, the clan he started after striking out on his own copies the Lan Clan in its every technique, but he gets furious whenever he's accused of copying them (even though he is) and he especially hates Lan Wangji, feeling that he is perpetually and arrogantly looking down on Su Minshan when really Lan Wangji doesn't even notice Su Minshan exists most of the time.  (Meaning that one of the most memorable of Lan Wangji's lines in the drama--"You are not qualified to speak to me."--is actually a bit out of character, because that line proves that Su Minshan is not wrong to say that Lan Wangji looks down on him.)
• Wen Ruohan
• Caused the death by rage (or qi deviation?) of the former head of the Nie Clan by damaging his saber such that it broke the next time he went on a Night Hunt (the implication in the telling of this tale is that he absolutely intended to break the saber, possibly knowing that it would lead to the other man's death)
• General unspecified acts of tyranny
• Ordered that no clans other than the Wen Clan could go on Night Hunts (which doesn't sound too terrible, but is basically hamstringing their cultivation while simultaneously putting the common people at a lot more risk of being horribly slaughtered by various supernatural threats)
• May or may not have instigated/authorized the various tyrannical acts performed by his sons, including
• Forcing the Lan Clan to burn its own home and beating anyone who refused to cooperate, including breaking Lan Wangji's leg and inflicting mortal injuries on his father (this is the sole thing we know of his elder son, Wen Xu, doing)
• Taking dozens of disciples from all the other clans--including at least one clan heir per clan--hostage at a camp to "educate" them on the glories of the Wen Clan
• Turning Lotus Pier into a Wen Clan Supervisory Office if the Jiang Clan cooperates, and slaughtering everyone when Yu-furen refuses to cooperate
• General "evil emperor" vibes and actions, including killing his own people
• There's actually probably a lot more he did, but he's not so much a character as an ominous and mostly off-screen (off-page?) presence during the flashbacks, so it's hard to nail down what all he did and didn't do.  Even in the drama he doesn't have much in the way of a personality, he's basically just an evil object.
• Wang Lingjiao
• While still a maid in service to Wen Chao's wife, she supplants her mistress in bed and proceeds to run rampant based on the borrowed power she gets from being the bedmate of the second son of the leader of the Wen Clan
• Jealous that Wen Chao was hitting on Mianmian, she starts targeting Mianmian, first trying to have her bled to be the bait for a massive yao beast, and then trying to use a branding iron on her face during the chaos as everyone else is fighting said beast.  (And keep in mind here that Mianmian did not want or respond positively to Wen Chao's attention.  So Wang Lingjiao's brutal jealousy was doubly uncalled for.)
• A lot of other nasty stuff that can mostly be summed up with "See Wen Chao."
• Honestly the only thing she ever does that isn't just cartoonishly evil is when she comes to the decision that her prized position in Wen Chao's bed isn't worth the terror Wei Wuxian is putting her through, and tries to take her valuables and run away.
• Wen Chao
• Lecherous and adulterous, despite that he's only about 18 or so by the time he's already got both a wife and a mistress!
• Runs the "education camp" with a barbed iron fist, tormenting the heirs and disciples of the other clans at the slightest provocation.  Also uses this to particularly punish Wei Wuxian, Lan Wangji and Jin Zixuan, all of of whom are guilty of the "crime" of doing better than Wen Chao in the archery tournament at the Qishan Grand Symposium about a year earlier
• Uses the disciples of other clans to do all the hard work on Night Hunts only to swoop in for the final blow in order to get the glory of the kills himself.  It should be noted here that none of the disciples have swords, as they were forced to hand those in when the "education" process began, so they're all freakin' unarmed as they're going up against the monsters and such.
• Forces said disciples to march to Mt. Muxi (location unknown, but possibly located in the general Moling area, while the education camp location, also unknown, is probably more central, so said march might be a hundred miles or more) in search of a particularly deadly yao beast said to live there.  This leads to...
• ...forcing the disciples to climb down into the cave on vines before he and his men fly down on their swords.
• ...attempting to bleed one of the disciples to lure out the beast (which would undoubtedly end with the death of the disciple in question), and giving in to Wang Lingjiao's jealousy to make Mianmian the unlucky one chosen to be bait, even though he's interested in her
• ...ordering his men to kill Lan Wangji and Jin Zixuan when they refuse to step aside after Mianmian hides behind them, as they would rather die themselves than watch an innocent girl killed
• Sending Wang Lingjiao to Lotus Pier to get revenge on Wei Wuxian for having dared to take Wen Chao hostage to stop his men from killing Lan Wangji, Jin Zixuan and Mianmian.
• When Yu-furen refused to cooperate with Wang Lingjiao's increasingly horrible demands and behavior, Wen Chao and his men attack Lotus Pier and kill everyone inside, including the clan leader himself.
• Upon capturing the weakened (and newly golden core-less) Wei Wuxian, he has his men beat him horribly, then drops him into the Burial Mounds in terror that Wei Wuxian is capable of making good on his threat to become a vengeful spirit that will haunt Wen Chao
• Again, a cartoonish villain in the novel as well as the drama, if not quite as much so.  (In the drama, of course, we get much more of him, since he's a major figure in the "Yin Iron" arc that adds a good eight or nine episodes to the flashback half of the show.)
• His cartoonishness--the pure "I'm better than you and thus can make you suffer" attitude he displays as a result of his upbringing--is the large part of why he comes off so horribly when he's actually a pretty minor character in the long run, dying in the early months of the Sunshot Campaign.
• Jin Guangshan
• Serial adulterer, widely said to have dozens of illegitimate children.  We know of the identities only of a few of his illegitimate children--Jin Guangyao, Mo Xuanyu, Qin Su--but dialog from Jin Guangyao confirms that there were many, many more (and that he killed them all)
• Fathering Qin Su was a particularly horrible crime on his part, as he did so by raping her mother, the wife of one of his subordinates.
• He has a known habit of giving pearl buttons to his mistresses as love tokens that he leads them to believe will serve as a token to signify that their children are his, but the presentation of such a token leads only to mockery, and in Jin Guangyao's case got him kicked down the stairs of Golden Carp Tower (and they're very long stairs!)
• Smarmy politician who will be polite to your face and then stick a knife in your back as soon as it's turned
• Desperate to become the new leader of the cultivation world after the Sunshot Campaign ends
• Constantly rejects and ridicules Jin Guangyao, even after Jin Guangyao personally killed Wen Ruohan and won the Sunshot Campaign
• He also ridicules Jin Guangyao's late mother, Meng Shi, and one of his biggest complaints about her (other than her general expectations that her son would be accepted even though she's a prostitute) is that she's a woman who has actually read a book
• Accepted the very young Xue Yang as a guest cultivator because he cultivated the demonic path, as Jin Guangshan hoped that Xue Yang would be able to emulate the abilities that Wei Wuxian had used during the Sunshot Campaign to such great effect
• Was ultimately responsible--as clan leader, if nothing else--for the Qiongqi Path work camp being a place that Wen Clan survivors were horribly worked to death; also responsible for all the Wen Clan survivors being forced into ghetto-like refugee villages, forcibly separating families in some cases (as in the case of Wen Ning and Wen Qing)
• Coveted the Yin Tiger Tally and tried several times to force Wei Wuxian to hand it over, claiming he would never use it (and yet you know for a fact that he so would have)
• Despite Jin Zixuan giving his word that his wife's shidi would be welcomed to Golden Carp Tower for Jin Ling's full-month celebration, Jin Guangshan could not bear the idea of Wei Wuxian being allowed into Lanling, and ordered Jin Guangyao to find an excuse to kill him
• Following the death of Jin Zixuan, he brings Mo Xuanyu to Golden Carp Tower to be his new heir, in order to cut off Jin Guangyao
• Rejects Mo Xuanyu as a potential heir and sends him away in disgrace, without a hint of fatherly care or affection for the mentally fragile young man
• His reasons may have been Mo Xuanyu's homosexuality, his alleged sexual harassment of his half-brother Jin Guangyao, or his generally weak ability to cultivate; a combination of all of the above is likely.  (It's also possible that Mo Xuanyu started losing his mind before being sent away from Golden Carp Tower; he might have seen the half-brother he so idolized murder one of their other half-brothers and thus lost his mind in fear and disappointment, and that was why he was sent away.)
• Protected Xue Yang even after he slaughtered the entire Chang Clan of Yueyang, and hounded Chang Ping to withdraw his testimony against Xue Yang
• One could theorize several more points here, mostly related to seeing the horrible crimes Jin Guangyao is committing in a vain attempt to win his favor and just ignoring them (both in terms of letting him get away with them and not giving any favor in exchange for getting the results he wants), but they're only theories, not known facts
• As far as I know, no one ever tries to defend this guy.  Thankfully.  (In fact, there is apparently seriously a tag on AO3 that is just "Warning:  Jin Guangshan".  That is kinda epic.)
• Even though his list seems small and mostly boils down to "a lecherous creep who won't treat his illegitimate children well" he's actually responsible for pretty much every one of the post-Sunshot Campaign tragedies, since his fathering and then brutal rejection of Jin Guangyao led to almost all of them.  (The Qiongqi Path work camp would have happened regardless of Jin Guangyao's existence and/or acceptance, but Jin Guangshan was responsible for that one, too.)  Thus he has the blood of many thousands of deaths on his hands.
• And the survivors are...
• Lan Wangji, Wei Wuxian (second time around), Lan Xichen (and Lan Qiren), Jiang Cheng, Nie Huaisang

    So....looking at this list, I'm kind of struck with "omg, why do I love this so much when almost everyone seems to die horribly?"

    ...though maybe that's why I'm kinda obsessed with writing AU fanfic where they don't all die horribly...

    On a related note, I'm hopeful the fanfic I've been working on most of the year won't go above 500k words.  😰