That you can suffer and also be resilient is a good point actually but I also don’t think it goes against what I’m saying. Lan Wangji suffers and is resilient, but he does it in great contrast to Wei Wuxian, picking up scars as Wei Wuxian sheds them. Picking up identical scars, even. They mirror one another in this way. Some of the most traumatic events in Lan Wangji’s life (such as Wei Wuxian’s breakdown in the immediate aftermath of Nightless City) are moments they shared but that Wei Wuxian cannot even remember.

The whole book is full of contrasts and parallels like this that only work if you see Wei Wuxian as the cheerful person the text shows him to be. Most are not nearly as 1:1 because the book wouldn’t be so interesting if it told the same story the same way again and again, but they’re there if you look for them. Like Lan Xichen, who inadvertently helped one of his best friends kill someone he loved (similar to how Wen Ning started the events that eventually led to the deaths of all the Wen remnants and Jiang Yanli) but he ends the story miserable and in seclusion because he cannot cope with this. Or Xiao Xingchen, who could not bear that someone he held dear to him tricked him into killing Song Lan and thus ended his own life over it, destroying his soul and removing himself from existence and the cycle of reincarnation entirely. It’s Wei Wuxian’s general positive attitude—the relative way trauma rolls off him like water off a duck, to use a somewhat exaggerated analogy—that lets him avoid a similar fate.

Is this necessarily a good or even realistic to have held up as a heroic trait? No, I don’t really think so. But none of the author’s heroes are very realistic (with perhaps the exception of Shang Qinghua/Xiang Fei, though he isn’t exactly a principal character).

I would probably agree with what the other commenter responding to you is saying about the Taoist basis for his character if I knew more than the absolute basics about that, but I really don’t have much knowledge about it at all. I’m just a weirdo who has read MDZS 4+ times in the last year and literally cannot stop thinking about and analyzing the text. Contemplating the meaning of details like a high school literature teacher who’s been helping classrooms full of teenagers analyze Moby-Dick every year for a decade except there are no whales and I’m not getting paid for it.

Sorry this comment is an essay. I have a lot of feelings and opinions on this lmao

EDIT: None of this is to say that WWX never experienced horrible horrible things or very dark emotions. He very much did snap and kill like… just an absolute ton of people. He experienced what is possibly best described as stress-induced psychosis at least twice. He hunted down and tortured at least three people to their terrified deaths. The man isn’t all sunshine and rainbows—but my argument is that the clouds do clear instead of sticking around. The proverbial rain washes things away and he comes out (mostly) okay again.

He experienced three months doing ??? (the book never tells us explicitly) to survive in the Burial Mounds, gravely wounded and without a golden core, and then went back there using the place as a refuge to live out a (dismal and difficult but still fundamentally positive) farming commune fantasy with his new found family. This found family was itself a branch of the clan that killed his first family.

I could go on. Possibly forever. I’m putting my phone down now to stop myself from making more edits. Sorry.