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As a fandom, I wish we still had coms and their attendant discussions. There are a lot of canon moments where I’d like to not so much thrash out a definite consensus as to what exactly happened as simply to articulate the range of possible interpretations, and why we think given readings are likely or compelling. One such problem spot is CQL’s rendering of Wei Wuxian’s death. The adaptation team was tasked with rendering the book’s somewhat confusing and drawn-out timeline screen-legible and emotionally cogent in a new medium, while also integrating the drama’s new focus on the Wen refugee crisis (at the expense of MDZS’s focus on demonic cultivation and hubris). More prosaically, you can’t have zombies rip your protagonist to shreds on live television. Accordingly CQL stages a very different death scene, and more depends on exactly how you read what Jiang Wanyin does on the cliff than fandom typically addresses.
My partner believes Jiang Wanyin stabs the rock, and thus chooses not to stab Wei Wuxian. I also believe Jiang Wanyin chooses not to stab Wei Wuxian, but that he simultaneously chooses to splinter the rock. This decision has consequences. Lan Wangji is balanced on that rock, and is holding onto Wei Wuxian's hand. Because Jiang Wanyin stabs the rock, the part of the cliff they’re on starts speedily splintering and crumbling away. The fissure is visible, audible, and must be palpable. Thus either
1. both Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji will fall, because Lan Wangji is not letting Wei Wuxian go. Wei Wuxian will die, and will also be responsible for killing Lan Wangji. Or,
2. Wei Wuxian will be forced to actively choose, once more, to kill himself. In order to protect Lan Wangji, he will have to let go of him, rejecting his effort to save him.
For me, choosing to strike the rock face and thus forcing Wei Wuxian to enact option two himself fits perfectly into Jiang Wanyin's ambivalence at important moments and regular deferral of responsibility (often specifically onto Wei Wuxian). Rather than an act of mercy (though it could be intended as one), this is a tiny sliver of possibly-accidental extra cruelty on Jiang Wanyin's part. His inability to kill Wei Wuxian forces Wei Wuxian to do this to himself and to Lan Wangji, and further forces Lan Wangji to watch.
Lan Wangji’s unwilling involvement is additionally painful because Wei Wuxian walked into Jin Zixun’s ambush due to an invitation Lan Wangji wrote, starting the whole chain of events that led them here. I would further argue that Jiang Wanyin finds Wei Wuxian on the battlefield at this point because Lan Wangji is perched on the lip of the cliff in a conspicuously shiny robe and guan. Wei Wuxian has been hanging over the cliff side, not visible, for a few minutes. Thus Jiang Wanyin must have found him by tracking Lan Wangji.
I don't think Jiang Wanyin considered and elected this additionally-painful course any more than he actually thought, while choking his severely injured brother half to death in a field after the Wen raid on Jiang Sect, ‘I want a fellow victim who is also one of the two remaining members of my family to die, here and now.’ I’m just not sure that lack of consideration helps anything.
Yes, Jiang Wanyin was very upset at the time. It’s a genocide, everyone’s upset. It is, however, ridiculous to blame Wei Wuxian’s Attitude for Wen imperialism after they set up an indoctrination prison camp and attacked Cloud Recesses as proof of concept. I believe, at least in the donghua, there are mentions of the Wen having amalgamated many smaller sects over the course of the last decade, and beginning to style themselves in Imperial fashion; if so, the major sects have Neville Chamberlain’d about during the annexation of Czechoslovakia, hoping that the leopards eating faces party would not eventually eat their faces. In the drama, the Wen are setting up a system of supervisory offices. Wei Wuxian is, very obviously, just a label they’ve put on a massive and already in progress plan.
While ‘this is all your fault, Wei Wuxian’ makes sense as a thing for Madam Yu to say in her rage, per Richard III, and/or in an attempt to emotionally manipulate her foster son into protecting her biological children with his life, I find it bizarre that fandom takes this claim at all seriously as a contention. Not even a slightly-calm Jiang Wanyin, when not actively trying to pick a fight, could believe something so self-evidently stupid. And if it had been true, somehow (though even holding this hypothetical twists my fucking brain), the Wen’s disproportionate response would still not be Wei Wuxian’s fault, because it is, in fact, the fault of the people who did the murders.
