Yeah...this was...I mean, he's the obvious choice because X-names are kind of few and far between in European languages (unless I want to dedicate a post to one of Achilles' horses) and there's not actually a lot to say about Xiao Xingchen (other than that he deserved the happy ending that was denied him) so...I guess we're goin' yandere today! (Because yes, Xue Yang is absolutely a yandere. I am intractable on this point.)
Xue Yang is a very popular character with Mo Dao Zu Shi fans, which I suspect is largely due to the fact that the actor playing him in the drama is extremely hot:
He gets a surprisingly large amount of time devoted to him in volume one of the novel, but despite his tragic backstory there's not much depth to him as a character, in my opinion. Where he has depth is his role in the story: he actually is all the things that Wei Wuxian's enemies think Wei Wuxian is. Thus, Xue Yang's fingerprints are all over an assortment of terrible past events, especially things related to demonic cultivation, so despite that he dies in volume one, he keeps coming up as a concept (and is present in a certain flashback) throughout the rest of the novel. (He also features in a bonus side story that's centered on Jin Guangyao, but that's another matter.)
I know I've expressed this basic idea somewhere in text before (not sure if it was on this blog or in an author's note on one of my fanfics on AO3), but I'll try to go into more detail here to justify the repetition. 😅 There's a fantastic line in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Belloq tells Indy that "I am a shadowy reflection of you. It would take only a nudge to make you like me. To push you out of the light." And that's what Xue Yang is: he's the shadowy reflection of the already shadowy Wei Wuxian. They're both skilled at cultivation and swordplay, they're both capable of showing great ingenuity, and can think quickly on their feet, coming up with new plans and schemes as the need arises.
Their past histories have remarkable similarities, but also major differences. They were both homeless orphans whose life was changed after an encounter with a cultivator at similar ages (8 in Wei Wuxian's case, 7 in Xue Yang's) but the actual change wrought was significantly different: Wei Wuxian was taken home and raised in luxury by the cultivator he encountered, while Xue Yang was tricked, beaten and had his hand crushed, resulting in the loss of one of his pinky fingers. They both single-handedly commit a horrific mass slaughter through the use of demonic cultivation, but in Wei Wuxian's case, the slaughter is of Wen Clan soldiers who had taken part in the massacre at Lotus Pier, whereas Xue Yang slaughtered not only the cultivator who had maimed him as a child but also his entire household, from his family to the servants to their dogs. (Okay, technically, Wei Wuxian was definitely single-handedly responsible for more mass slaughters than that. But the massacre of the Chang Clan by Xue Yang is very deliberately an echo of the slaughter of Wen Chao's men by Wei Wuxian (despite that the reader/watcher encounters the death of the Chang Clan first) so I still feel the comparison works.) And they both become obsessed with a white-clad, pure cultivator, but Wei Wuxian's obsession is expressed first as teasing then as friendship and finally as love, whereas Xue Yang's obsession is variously expressed by seeking vengeance against, tormenting, controlling and then attempting to revive in order to further torment and control Xiao Xingchen. (And yes, I am of course aware of the romantic/sexual component of Xue Yang's obsession with Xiao Xingchen, but as I'm not sure Xue Yang is consciously aware of it...)
Anyway, moving from "describe the character" to "talk about how I've written about the character" (since my April A-to-Z theme is "characters I've written about," after all). While I get his purpose in the original story very well, Xue Yang's character is a hard one for me to work with, so I have a tendency to try not to have any of his scenes be too long or too filled with dialog. Not so much a "less is more" situation as a "fewer opportunities to get him wrong" kind of thing. 😅
So, I'll be starting with "To Walk This Earth With You Again," my strange fic where I said "so how awful would the novel's present become if Wei Wuxian wasn't revived to fix everything?" And while things could definitely have gotten even worse, events in the fic did get pretty grim. Then, in modern times, the reincarnated Wei Wuxian (now going by his former birth name, Wei Ying) encounters the deified Lan Wangji, whose tale of why the world had--by the time of his ascension--come to the mistaken conclusion that he had been the one to kill Wei Wuxian is such a long tale that it needed its own chapter, in Lan Wangji's point of view. And, given the whole "shadowy reflection" thing, it should be no surprise that a central part of the tale is Lan Wangji (accompanied by Jiang Cheng) going up against Xue Yang, who had raised an army of fierce corpses that were slaughtering villagers by the hundreds to grow his undead army.
Yi City was an isolated spot, hardly ideal for coordinating an efficient military effort. Whatever Xue Yang wanted, Lan Wangji doubted it was ordinary conquest. As many corpses wandered inside the town as outside it, which made progress through the foggy streets slow, but ensured that they would attract the attention of the one controlling the corpses.
As they fought their way deeper into the city, Lan Wangji was disturbed to realize that he could sense the energy of the Yin Tiger Tally within the city.
“What?! That's impossible! I destroyed it before I died!”
“Only partially.”
“Well, yeah, but it only worked when both halves were put together! That was why I separated the pieces in the first place.” Even Wei Wuxian had been afraid of the power of the Yin Tiger Tally…
“Mn.”
Jiang Wanyin could sense it as well, and he was gloating about it as they advanced towards the center of the city and the origin of that energy. He seemed to feel no doubt that they would find Wei Ying there, despite that they had not heard even one note played on a dizi. When a single, very clearly living man walked towards them through the fog, dressed all in black, at first his gloating became even more pronounced, until the man came close enough for them to see his face. Though it was a pretty face, it was certainly not Wei Ying’s face. Not as pretty as Wei Ying’s face, either.
Wei Ying’s face, just at the moment, was so hot that it felt as though it might catch fire.
“Who are you?” Jiang Wanyin demanded. “Where is Wei Wuxian?!”
“That’s what I want to know,” the other man replied, a sultry, sulky tone to his voice. “He can’t still be dead after all this time! I was sure this would lure him out!”
“You are Xue Yang?” Lan Wangji asked.
“Oh, you’ve heard of me? I’m flattered!” He laughed almost coquettishly, but with a malice and cruelty to his tone that was deeply disturbing.
“You killed countless people in the hopes of luring out a dead man?” Lan Wangji asked, appalled. He had heard rumors of just how cruel Xue Yang was, but this exceeded them all.
“If he’s truly dead,” Xue Yang said.
“He is dead.” And Lan Wangji had been unable to prevent his death.
Jiang Wanyin glared at Xue Yang for a moment, then suddenly lashed at him with Zidian. The other man deflected the blow with his sword, but Zidian’s electric energy could not be blocked so easily, and he was soon screaming in a combination of rage and pain. Jiang Wanyin watched him expectantly, clearly hoping for some sign that the younger man was possessed by Wei Ying.
“Who do you think you are to do that to me?!” Xue Yang shrieked. “I’ll cut every sinew in your body for that! I’ll slaughter your whole family!”
“Too late for that!” Jiang Wanyin shouted back. “Wei Wuxian already killed them all!”
“You could have skipped that one,” Wei Ying said, shivering.
“I’m sorry.” Lan Zhan frowned. “I will omit the rest of the conversation.”
“Thanks.” Wei Ying didn’t think he could handle another outburst like that one.
Jiang Wanyin’s words made Xue Yang laugh hilariously, as if he had told the most fantastic joke. Xue Yang continued attempting to menace them until Lan Wangji asked how he had raised and controlled so many corpses. Xue Yang gleefully exhibited the object he had been using for that purpose. It was the remaining half of the Yin Tiger Tally, which had been supplemented with a false half reconstructed from inferior materials. Plainly, it was the incomplete nature of the Yin Tiger Tally that had made the dead legions so easy to defeat, but it still contained enough power to be unfathomably dangerous. In the hands of someone more ambitious and less unstable than Xue Yang, it could have brought down empires.
“And yet that wasn’t the reason they all ganged up on me and killed me.” It took the murder of one rich boy to cause that. Not even a murder he had meant to commit.
“They needed an excuse first.”
After Xue Yang exposed that he had the Yin Tiger Tally, the battle began in earnest. The sight of that item had unleashed so much of Jiang Wanyin’s fury that Lan Wangji feared he might die of rage on the spot. The fight pushed through the center of the town into a decrepit mortuary containing only one coffin that was not fallen and shattered.
Every time the fight began to shift in the direction of that coffin, Xue Yang redoubled his efforts to turn them back, moving the fight anywhere but towards the coffin. Exploiting the man’s obvious weakness, Lan Wangji aimed his sword glare at the coffin, knocking it over.
The coffin fell from its pedestal and opened, spilling out the corpse of a man in the white robes of a Daoist priest, with a thin white band tied around his eyes. Like Song Zichen, he had died young, probably about the same age Wei Ying had been when he died. Talismans were fixed to both the body and the interior of the coffin.
Seeing the body disturbed, Xue Yang let out a shriek of rage, and leapt towards Lan Wangji with a bloodlust that he had never seen before, less like a man than an animal maddened by pain. Jiang Wanyin took advantage of his distraction and sliced with his sword. One of Xue Yang’s arms was severed just above the elbow, and the impact sent him falling far off the course of his leap. Though he had skidded to the ground roughly and was rapidly bleeding out, Xue Yang still got to his feet with an unnatural energy, and began railing at them in venomous words that defiled their names, their honor, and those of the dead man who had been in the coffin.
The longer he snarled at them in his futile attempt to continue fighting despite that he was plainly dying, the more Xue Yang’s intentions towards the deceased Xiao Xingchen became less and less clear. The only thing that was apparent was that he was morbidly, fanatically obsessed, and he was all the more determined to destroy them both for having disrupted the coffin containing Xiao Xingchen’s remains.
After some time, Jiang Wanyin evidently couldn’t take any more of Xue Yang’s mouth. “Which is it?” he demanded. “Do you hate him or are you in love with him?!”[snipping digression already quoted in the Jiang Cheng post]Jiang Wanyin’s question had left Xue Yang even more unhinged than he already was, and his attacks became increasingly sloppy. Finishing him off was no longer difficult.
That's obviously pretty much all that fic has about Xue Yang, needless to say. So we may as well move on to "A Hidden Road." It's a more straight-forward canon divergence fic, where I'm doing my usual thing of trying to prevent the tragedies from happening.
My original plan for it was for Xue Yang to hold pretty much the position he did in the original novel, as more or less the right-hand henchman of the main villain (uh, prior to their falling out in the novel). Only then something happened around the main villain in one scene that made me go "wait, wouldn't hearing that make him reconsider and go down a better path before becoming totally twisted up inside?" And, since the answer to that was "yes," that meant I needed a new head villain! And who else could fit the bill other than Xue Yang? (Well, okay, actually, the novel is rife with villain and villain-adjacent characters, but most of them were out of the question for other reasons...)
So, suddenly Xue Yang got promoted to Big Bad, but thankfully the way the story was structured, I still didn't need to have him present all that often. 😅 He doesn't get a really big scene until the start of the third and final arc of the fic. And actually, it's still not even that big a scene. This is the entire scene:
For a man currently being reprimanded in the strongest possible language, Xue Yang seemed remarkably unconcerned. He was just standing there, smirking, his hands casually folded behind his head. And as soon as Jin Zixuan paused to take a breath, he languidly tilted his head to the side. “If you’re done, can I go? I’ve got things to do.”
“I’ve barely gotten started!” Jin Zixuan shouted back at him. “Do you honestly expect me to look the other way as you butcher people?!”
“Oh, you must be mistaken, gongzi. I haven’t butchered any people.”
Jin Zixuan scowled. That remark led him to suspect that Xue Yang’s view of the world was so warped that he didn’t even acknowledge that his victims were human. That being the case, was there even any point in attempting to force him to see it any other way? In the years since Xue Yang first arrived at Golden Carp Tower, Jin Zixuan had not once seen him even acknowledge his own errors, let alone amend them. No, there was no point trying to convince him of the humanity of his victims. Better to just overwhelm him with the proof of his own actions. “Chang Ping of Yueyang has reported seeing you prowling around his house multiple times over the last year—and every time someone disappeared. Additionally, you’ve been outright bragging about how many members of the Su sect you’ve murdered!”
“But your own father wanted them killed. You can’t blame me for following orders, gongzi.”
“Those orders were rescinded,” Jin Zixuan reminded him, clenching both fists. “This is Lanling, not Qishan. We do not perform wholesale slaughter!”
Xue Yang actually laughed. “You need to relax more, gongzi. Isn’t your pretty little wife doing it for you anymore?”
“Don’t you dare let her name cross your filthy lips!”
“I could always help you out,” Xue Yang added, lowering his eyelids as if he wanted to seem alluring, making Jin Zixuan back away from him in disgust. That only made the cur laugh, of course. “Or I could find you a nice new friend, like your father’s got,” Xue Yang added, gesturing with his head towards the hallway behind Jin Zixuan’s back.
Glancing over his shoulder, Jin Zixuan saw [a sight that does not mean much out of context, provoking a POV digression that is irrelevant to this passage]
His thoughts were cut off as Xue Yang tried to slip away. Jin Zixuan grabbed his shoulder and held him firmly in place. “I am not done with you,” Jin Zixuan said.
“Such a forceful gongzi!” Xue Yang chortled. “I hope you’ll be gentle with me.”
Jin Zixuan’s hand released him instinctively. “A thug like you deserves no gentleness—and I’ll see to it that you don’t receive any!”
“Oh, you like it rough, gongzi?”
“One more word,” Jin Zixuan said coldly. “Just one more word, and I’ll allow Chifeng-zun to come here and cut your head right off your shoulders, as he’s been demanding for more than a year!”
Xue Yang shook his head, a disappointed expression on his face. “That would be quite the mistake, gongzi. You’ll see. Once your father’s gone and you’re in charge, then you’ll see how valuable I really am.”
“My father is the only thing keeping you alive!”
“Well, then you shouldn’t be threatening me, should you, gongzi?” Xue Yang replied with a smirk, before slipping off down a side hall while Jin Zixuan was too outraged to react.
Admittedly, in canon Xue Yang doesn't exactly flirt with the people who are threatening him, but--I know I say this to excuse my writing a lot, but what's the case is the case--I did watch the drama before reading the novel, and not only did Xue Yang's actor really sexually charge his performance, there's also an added exchange between him and Wei Wuxian (in a sequence that didn't exist in the novel) that very much had this kind of "flirt to disgust my enemy into leaving me alone" energy to it. (Perhaps they put that in there to make up for being forced to lose the scene early in the novel where Wei Wuxian is actively and openly flirting with two men in the hopes of disgusting them enough to give him an opportunity to escape...)
Anyway, despite being the final villain of the piece, there's not a lot in "A Hidden Road" I can quote out of context for Xue Yang, not if there's to be any hope of it making sense. That being said, though, I wanted to quote two brief bits from the conversations before the final battle commences. This first bit, I just really love the mental image conjured up in the second paragraph. (I've deleted the various details that would distract and/or make no sense out of context. The hostage, btw, is being held in place by two fierce corpses that are holding his arms.)
“Jiang Wanyin and I hunted down [your accomplice],” Wei Wuxian shouted up at [Xue Yang's hostage]. “Before we dealt with her, she admitted [a lot of things, actually, but mostly that Xue Yang and his hostage had been working together]. But now you two don’t like each other anymore?”
“Who said we don’t like each other?” Xue Yang laughed, again leaning forward over [the hostage's] shoulder, draping his arms around him, rather like a child with his favorite pet.
...and then this bit with a demand that just felt very genuinely Xue Yang to me. (Though it loses something of its punch along with losing its f-bombs... 😅)
“Let him go, Xue Yang!” Jin Zixuan shouted, a rage in his voice far beyond anything Wei Wuxian had ever managed to cause.
“
[expletive]off and die!” Xue Yang shouted back at him.No one was quite sure how to respond to that.
Wei Wuxian felt like he ought to say or do something at this point, considering that [he had accidentally made everything worse in his attempts to expose what seemed to be deception]
“You haven’t[expletive]ed off or died,” Xue Yang observed, glaring down at them. “I suppose I’ll have to make you, then.”
And, lastly, this bit (of people talking about Xue Yang) from the epilogue that I actually sort of wanted to put in Wei Wuxian's post, but figured maybe that one was already too long, so...
Jin Zixuan cleared his throat uncomfortably. “The question we need to address, as a group, is whether there was any way we could have prevented this tragedy.”
Wei Wuxian was so disgusted by that statement that he couldn’t quite figure out where to start answering that it had been entirely Jin Guangshan’s fault for having built a small-time thug like Xue Yang into a serious threat by giving him access to countless tools and notes far too dangerous for the likes of him to handle.
It was probably best that he didn’t say anything, because it seemed half the room was glaring at him as though it was somehow his fault, just because he was the one who had invented those tools and written those notes.
Anyway, moving on to the massive Jiang Cheng fic that I spent eleven months writing and haven't yet started editing. This one is based on the live-action drama rather than the novel, for reasons I've gone into extensively in other posts, which changes certain things about Xue Yang. Firstly, it makes him the same age as Wei Wuxian instead of about five years younger, and it means that he had been working for Wen Ruohan, and moves up his slaughter of the Chang Clan of Yueyang to before the Sunshot Campaign, the big war to take down the Wen Clan, instead of several years after it. (This honestly kind of breaks the later story point of Xue Yang working for the Jin Clan as a guest cultivator, because why in the world would they allow that after he slaughtered so many people so brutally?) Anyway, the fic is of course canon divergence, so all sorts of events turned out very differently. Including that in the wake of the Sunshot Campaign, a task force is assembled to hunt down Xue Yang, not only to bring him to justice for the murder of the Chang Clan (and a few other clans he had killed on his way to Yueyang) but also because he has a particularly dangerous spiritual tool that Wei Wuxian has sworn to find and destroy. Because the last place anyone saw Xue Yang was in Qinghe at the stronghold of the Nie Clan, the task force is assembling there. And while they're still there, waiting for Chang Ping, the sole survivor of the Chang Clan, to arrive, they have a discussion about the target of their manhunt, specifically about how to recognize him if they see him...
“But I should like a better description of this villain we are pursuing, as I do not wish to mistake him for an ordinary person if I happen across him at some time when our group has split up. If you have all seen him, surely one of you can tell me what he looks like?” Yu-guniang said.
Nie Huaisang hesitated. Describing a person’s physical appearance was not his strong suit, though he doubted he could ever forget Xue Yang’s face.
Thankfully, he didn’t have to try. “Beautiful, but deranged,” Wei-xiong said, summing the man up quite succinctly.
Xiao Xingchen choked on his tea, and for a moment seemed to be fighting to take a breath. As Song Lan began patting him on the back and otherwise worriedly attending to him, it became clear to Nie Huaisang that Xiao Xingchen was actually laughing so hard he was having trouble breathing.
“Not much of a description,” [random OC] commented.
“But accurate,” Lan Wangji said.
Yu-guniang chuckled. “It certainly conjures up a vivid image,” she admitted. “Not, perhaps, the most clear-cut of images, but…vivid none the less.”
“I am not, personally, in the habit of perceiving men as ‘beautiful,’ Yu-guniang,” [random OC] said coldly.
“Really?” She raised a curious eyebrow. “Then what do you see when you look at Hanguang-jun?”
Just at present, what Nie Huaisang saw was slightly flushed ears, and beyond that a mildly jealous look on Wei-xiong’s face. He was having trouble keeping himself from laughing at how obvious the two of them could be about each other.
Xiao Xingchen is laughing so hard because MXTX had made a statement about him being extremely given to laughter, the opposite of his partner, Song Lan, who has no sense of humor whatsoever.
Anyway, moving on, here's a bit of the confrontation when Xue Yang is stirring up trouble at an event being held by the Jin Clan, significantly later in the plot. (The previous scene was a tiny bit past the halfway point of the fic (page 448 of 822), and the following scene is about 3/4 of the way through (page 629 of 822).) So there's a lot of other stuff that has happened, but I think you can glean most of what you really need to know from the dialog.
“People like you make me sick,” Xue Yang snarled, suddenly launching an attack at Wei Wuxian. “Every one of those people was ready to execute you for murders I committed, but you’d risk your life to save them?”
“Not every one them was,” Wei Wuxian countered, even as he parried the blow. “And even if they were, they aren’t now. And unlike you, I’m not a monster.”
Xue Yang laughed as he attacked again. “Just wait,” he chortled. “The day will come when you are. When the whole world condemns you, ready to hunt you down.”
“Never,” Lan Zhan said, pressing an attack while Xue Yang was still swinging his blade towards Wei Wuxian.
Unfortunately, Xue Yang was able to contort his body in time to block the blow, even though that left him open to a strike from Wei Wuxian. With a gutteral growl, Xue Yang withdrew slightly, pressing a hand to the wound in his side. “Isn’t someone missing?” he asked, his eyes darting back and forth between them, then looking around at the otherwise empty clifftop. “Surely that irritatingly persistent daozhang didn’t give up so easily? If I’d known just slaughtering his friend’s whole temple would get rid of him, I’d have done it sooner!”
Wei Wuxian shook his head. “If you wanted Xiao Xingchen to come finish you off, you should have alerted us you were going to be here.”
“He’s not here?” Xue Yang sounded like he truly couldn’t believe it.
“Why would he be?” Wei Wuxian asked. “He’s got better things to do than listen to Jin Guangshan make speeches.”
Xue Yang scowled, even as he blocked another blow from Lan Zhan. “Then I’m just wasting my time here,” he muttered. Without another word, he leapt far away from them and pulled out a talisman. Before they could pursue, he activated the talisman and disappeared in a puff of black smoke.
Wei Wuxian swore as he put his sword away. “Why do they keep doing that?!” he shouted. “No, how do they keep doing that?! Teleportation talismans take huge amounts of energy to activate! And after he just used so much to—ah,[expletive]. He found a way to use the Yin Iron to power the teleportation talisman, didn’t he?”
Finally, I wanted to share this scene, again one of people talking about Xue Yang, because I think it really highlights my take on the character. This scene is a meeting taking place after the conflict above, discussing what just happened and why and what to do about it. Just before this quote, Wei Wuxian put forward the notion that Xue Yang was now aligned with the Jin Clan, and had been acting on its behalf when he attacked their event. (Which does actually make sense in context, trust me.)
“Even as idle speculation such an idea is quite implausible,” [someone] said. “If this Xue Yang is so powerful, then why would he submit to another’s authority?”
“That’s the main hole in my theory, I admit,” Wei Wuxian said, shrugging his shoulders. “Maybe he lacks ambition and had no idea what to do with his abilities. Or maybe he thought the Jin Clan could get him something he wanted and hadn’t been able to get any other way so far. Revenge against Xiao Xingchen, perhaps, or Chang Ping served up to him on a platter to slaughter as he pleases.” Wei Wuxian shook his head. “Not knowing Xue Yang as a person, it’s hard for me to guess what he might be thinking. I have spoken about him to a few people who had met him while he was working for Wen Ruohan, but they hadn’t really known him, so they couldn’t shed any light on what made him go to work for the Wen Clan, either.”
When was Wei Wuxian talking to Wen Qing about Xue Yang? Was that all they were talking about, or…? Jiang Cheng scowled, trying to put that line of thought out of his head. Wei Wuxian was (for some reason) head over heels for Lan Wangji. Of course he wasn’t flirting (or worse!) with Wen Qing…
“Knowing what it’s like to be a homeless child, I can imagine how bad it would be to spend your whole childhood like that, never gaining a family who loves and takes care of you,” Wei Wuxian went on. Something stung inside Jiang Cheng’s chest at the thought of Wei Wuxian never having come to Lotus Pier at all. Even though his parents might still be alive if events had played out that way, the idea was somehow crushing his lungs. “Considering that, it’s possible Xue Yang’s real goal isn’t so much thought as felt: he may have been serving the Wen Clan because he wanted a place to belong, and he wanted to make those rich and powerful people see him as important and necessary. If that’s the case, he would likely go to the Jin Clan for the same reasons.” He shrugged again. “This is all conjecture, though. Maybe he just enjoys killing people and ran out of his own enemies so now he’s happily killing other people’s enemies.”
As is likely unsurprising, I let Wei Wuxian just sort of describe my own understanding of Xue Yang's character there. As someone who had never belonged, never had a home, he does want a place to belong and people to value him. But as someone who had become twisted and warped inside, he doesn't really know what do with that when he gets it, and instead of seeking warmth and comfort, he seeks to punish and abuse others as if that would erase the punishments and abuse he himself had received while he was still young and helpless.
Should you be interested in reading the rest of any of these fics (though the last one isn't posted yet, obviously, and won't be for quite some time, as it'll take me a very long time to edit it), my fics are on AO3, though Xue Yang is only really in the ones mentioned above at the moment (though he's mentioned in "Two Fujoshi Get Isekaied to Lanling") but that link will take you to all my AO3 fics in the fandom regardless of when they're posted, so if you happen to be reading this post a year from now... 😅
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