Duplicity App

[fanoperator]

Name: Nie Huaisang
Door: Right - Sorrow is greater than pain.
Canon: The Untamed
Canon Point: End of Series

Age: Mid-30s (appears mid-20s)
Appearance: link

History: link
Personality: At his core, Huaisang is a dandy. He’s an indulgent aesthetic who loves the finer things in life, especially art, fashion, and pornography. He would rather pursue his hobbies and enjoy himself than put in any kind of effort or endure inconvenience. Especially in his youth, before he gains his vengeance motivation, we see Huaisang constantly driven by the pursuit of pleasure.

Huaisang puts low value on his own pride and constantly forgets to take into account the reputation of his family and Sect. It doesn’t bother him personally that he’s a poor student and a weak cultivator, and he doesn’t seem to mind too much that everyone thinks he’s useless. He doesn’t even show embarrassment when Wei Wuxian is repeatedly scolded in his vicinity for the social faux pas of not carrying his sword while Huaisang’s standing in the background with no sword, just a fan—at that point, it’s just taken for granted that Huaisang’s a useless embarrassment as a cultivator. These things only bother him when it comes to his brother’s disappointment and anger with him. Huaisang loves his brother more than anyone and desperately wants to please him, but his own nature is directly antithetical to everything that his brother wants him to be, so he can only ever fail at trying to meet his brother’s expectations. Over the course of the series, Huaisang learns increasingly how to use his own weakness to protect himself. Because he’s so helpless, people overlook him and don’t consider him a threat. When he’s younger and more innocent, he’s quick to discard his own pride in order to get others to like him, such as offering to do Wei Wuxian’s homework or making jokes about how bad he is as a cultivator. When he becomes more canny, he just flings all personal pride out the window to make himself seem as incompetent as possible.

Huaisang is weak and cowardly, lazy about anything that doesn’t catch his interest, and often will whine and pout in order to get others to protect him or take care of things for him, but he’s so unself-conscious about being a useless embarrassment that people don’t really mind it and even like him more because of it. This does mean that often he’s tolerated rather than liked, and Huaisang gets left out of a lot of invitations within his peer group (he’s left behind for the Caiyi water spirit adventure and the Xuanwu Cave adventure and sent away for the Sunshot Campaign), but because he has a lot of charismatic qualities, people are forgiving of his weaknesses and even tend to be protective towards him. Even at the end when Huaisang is brought into the Guanyin temple, Jin Guangyao insists that he will be handled gently and released, because he’s fond and protective toward Huaisang up until he realizes that it’s Huaisang who has orchestrated his downfall.

When it comes to his goals, Huaisang is extremely manipulative and casual about collateral damage. Though he never directly harms anyone, his schemes create a lot of very hazardous situations in which innocent people die or almost die. We aren’t given any idea of whether or not Huaisang hesitates before sending a group of juniors to Yi City, knowing that they will probably be killed by Xue Yang. He’s responsible for Mo Xuanyu’s death, though it’s left open to interpretation whether Mo Xuanyu was really mentally ill (and manipulated by Huaisang), or just an emotionally vulnerable teenager in an awful situation (and encouraged toward suicide by Huaisang), or whether they were conspirators and Mo Xuanyu chose to sacrifice himself (intentionally in order to set Huaisang’s plans into motion). It isn’t known whether Huaisang hesitates or feels guilt over these things, but he certainly makes these choices knowing that people might die.

Merciless though Huaisang can be, he is driven to it because he must have vengeance and justice for his murdered brother, and he wants to stop Jin Guangyao from killing anyone else. Necessity and vengeance harden him significantly, but there is a genuine sweetness to Huaisang which remains. He wants at the end the same thing he wanted in his youth: to simply enjoy his pleasures and his hobbies and to share them with his friends. When Wei Wuxian asks him at the end about his ambitions, as a way of gauging whether Huaisang remains a threat, he responds with this philosophy: “It was once said that we can never get tired of these scenes of earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, mountains and the sea. As for me, I am a sensible man. The things I need to do, I won’t shirk. But for the things that aren’t my business, I won’t meddle.”

He prefers his pleasures to be shared, and he’s very generous with his money and resources because of this. No matter what he’s doing, he’s always eager to drop it in order to go off on antics with friends. He shares some of his beloved pornography with his friend Wei Wuxian, and when the book gets destroyed he isn’t even upset—he has plenty more he can share! He only becomes upset by such losses when it means that there is no more for him. He’s upset when his lantern is destroyed not because of the loss of money but because now he either cannot participate in the lantern-launching or he must be satisfied with making a lesser lantern with less-attractive materials. His own taste is a priority even if others don’t give him validation for it—he receives more teasing than praise over his fan, but he still takes such pleasure in the beauty and quality of his possession that he doesn’t mind. Still, he very much wants validation, and when his friend Wei Wuxian later praises the quality of his fan (reminding them both of the time that he had been dismissive of the fan), it means a lot to Huaisang.


Powers and Abilities:
Huaisang is one of the weakest cultivators in canon. He carries a fan instead of a sword, and it is unclear in the show whether he pursues an alternate path of cultivation using the fan or whether it’s just a fan, but there are some promo images that show him using the fan in combat situations, implying that he could at the very least use a fan to deflect an attack, and it is probable that he knows how to use a war fan.

He can do a very few of the magical skills that the other cultivators use, but he does have a golden core and so he is capable of speeding his own healing and aiding the healing of others, performing rites to calm and seal restless spirits, and manipulating spiritual energy.

The one area in which he excels is stealth. There are multiple scenes where we see a black clad figure running away through the bushes, and this is implied to be Huaisang. Though he is pursued more than once at this, he’s stealthy and swift enough that he’s never caught. The one exception is that Fairy (Jin Ling’s dog) once manages to catch the hem of his robes and tears a piece off of it, but aside from that Huaisang is agile enough to move under the noses of or escape the pursuit of all the other cultivators. Since he almost definitely uses cultivation abilities to aid this, he probably has extremely high agility enhanced by magic in a canon-typical style (beautiful wirework stunts), so he could probably backflip out of a window on the third floor of a building and land unharmed.

Inventory:
One painted paper fan with a scene of mountains and birds
Qiankun Pouch: A pocket-sized cloth bag that has an interior holding capacity of about two square yards.
Calligraphy and painting set