Who is the real villain in The Untamed?

Chinese canon1584 words

Who do you hate?

It is an easier question than who is the villain, which is why so many readers answer the first one and think they answered the second. Most people land on Jin Guangyao. He is the one with six bodies on his ledger, the thin smile, and the run from disowned bastard to Chief Cultivator. Some land on Nie Huaisang, once they realise he arranged the whole thing and walked away. A smaller, louder group lands on Jiang Cheng, whose dao heart is the one thing in the book that visibly cracks, who did nothing that could be called villainy and failed at the 1 thing that mattered.

All 3 answers are defensible. None of them is the answer.

The thing that killed Wei Wuxian does not have a face in this show, and it does not need one. It has a mouth, and it is the mouth of everybody who was in that room, and everybody who heard about it secondhand, and everybody who repeated it for 13 years.

Jin Guangyao, read as a wound

Start with the man and the reason he is impossible to dismiss.

Jin Guangyao's mother was a courtesan. His father Jin Guangshan would not let him into Lanling Jin as a son, only as a servant who happened to share the name. When he showed up at the sect as a child, the door was open, in the technical sense, and shut in the only sense that counts. He was smart. He was useful. He was the 1 servant everyone in Lanling Jin relied on and 0 people called brother. Nobody saved him, because nobody needed to. He was doing fine.

Then he did the killing, and the killing is not ambiguous. His wife was his sister and he knew. His son was a liability and he removed him. Nie Mingjue, the 1 sworn brother who would have fought for him, died of a qi deviation engineered with music. You cannot argue the man into being a good person. What the text wants is for you to feel exactly what he felt, right up to the moment the blade went in, and then to feel it again after, in the 1 scene where his own father calls him by the servant's name one last time.

Here is the sentence I keep coming back to. It is not the confession. It is the way he explains himself at the Guanyin Temple, almost patient, as if to a child who has asked why the fire is hot. He was told his whole life that he was the wrong kind of son. So he made himself the kind that could not be turned away, by being more useful than anyone else, and by removing anyone who could testify otherwise.

So he killed his father, his brother, his wife, his son, his teacher and a friend. 6 people, and 1 of them was a child. That logic is a machine. Give a clever person a wound at the door, a system that rewards usefulness and a family that never says the word son, and one day he will murder a child to keep the arithmetic working. The story's point is that the machine was built before he arrived.

The second candidate, and why his immunity is the real scandal

Nie Huaisang did worse in a purely moral sense, if you weigh intentions rather than bodies. He spent 13 years as a performance. He used a grieving boy as fuel. He put Lan Xichen in a position where the only exit was to kill a man he loved.

Then he went home and raised birds.

Nobody arrests him. There is no trial, no exile, no sentence. The show ends and he is still there, an acknowledged sect leader, and the reason he is untouchable is the same reason he could operate for 13 years: everything he did happened through other people's hands. The system has no category for that. A world that judges by the sword cannot see a crime committed entirely by suggestion.

I find this more unsettling than Jin Guangyao, and I think it is supposed to be. A villain the world can name and execute is a world that works. Nie Huaisang is proof that the world does not work, it only appears to.

The third thing

Now take both of them out of the room and the story still happens.

Wei Wuxian did not die because 1 man hated him. He died at the Nightless City, surrounded by the 5 great clans and everyone who had attached themselves to them, after the flute he used to command the dead killed a great many of his enemies. The siege was not the act of a villain. It was the act of a committee, and committees do not feel like committees from the inside.

Each faction had a reason. The Jin wanted him punished. The Jiang wanted him contained. The Lan wanted the war to end. The Nie had a grudge they could not name, and the minor sects had lost relatives to the corpses and wanted somebody to be held responsible. Nobody there woke up that morning planning to murder a young man who had just won their war for them. They each made a small decision in a large room, and the small decisions added up.

That is what the genre calls public opinion, and the Chinese phrase for it is closer to the truth than the English: 众口铄金, when enough mouths speak, metal melts. Slander is not a misunderstanding in this story. It is a weapon with a specific property: it cannot be defeated, because the person doing the believing always thinks they are thinking for themselves.

Look at how the worst lie about Wei Wuxian spreads — the 1 that he was raising an army of corpses to wipe out the clans. Nobody ever produces evidence. Nobody asks for any. It arrives as something everyone has heard, from someone who heard it from someone, and by the time it gets to a clan leader it has the texture of fact.

The detail that gives it away

There is a version of this show where Wei Wuxian is simply misunderstood, and in that version the misunderstanding is cleared up and everyone is sorry.

That is not what happens. When he comes back, 13 years later, the people who condemned him are mostly still there. Some are contrite. Some are not. The most chilling thing about the epilogue is how many of them go on believing whatever is currently convenient, and how little it costs them. The story does not spend its ending punishing the crowd. The crowd is still doing what it does, to somebody else, in another arc of another novel.

Wei Wuxian himself is aware of this. His most famous speech at the Guanyin Temple is not about Jin Guangyao. It is about the people who will always find the truth useless when a good story is available. He grew up in the jianghu; see our note on why the wuxia world runs on reputation at Is it wuxia or xianxia?. He knows the rules better than anyone. What he never learned was how to stop caring what the rules said about him.

Jin Guangyao is a product of that mechanism, born on the wrong side of a door. Nie Huaisang is a person who understood the mechanism well enough to run it. And the crowd is the mechanism itself, running on its own, all the way to the end of the story, and after.

You can pity the first. You can almost admire the second, if you are the kind of reader who admires competence. You cannot pity the crowd, because it is five shapes in a row and no face between them.

The awkward questions, answered straight

Is Jin Guangyao a villain or a victim? Both, and the show never lets you pick. He was the bastard son his father would not acknowledge, raised at the door of a house he could never enter. Then he killed his way in, and by the end he was the man who murdered his own son to keep a lie tidy. Understanding the first half does not excuse the second. It only explains why the second was possible.

Did the sects know Wei Wuxian was innocent? Not everyone, and not entirely, but enough of them were willing to act without checking. The siege was not a trial. It was a solution. The clan leaders lined up behind a story because the story was convenient, and stopping to verify would have cost them the convenient part.

Why does the story make you pity the villains? Because otherwise the ending has nothing to say. If Jin Guangyao were simply evil, the story would be a hunt. Because he is legible, because you can see the exact moment his life was decided for him, the ending has to work on a harder question: whether the man he became was always going to happen, or whether someone at the door could have opened it.

The novel ran on Jinjiang from October 2015 to March 2016; the drama aired in 50 episodes from 27 June 2019. Between them sits a revision, and the revision is where the crowd gets its sharpest scene — a hall of cultivators voting on a death they have all agreed to call justice. Watch who raises a hand. Count them. Almost everyone.