my favorite part of the jin guangyao & nie huaisang dynamic that seemingly every fic ignores is that jin guangyao genuinely thought of nie huaisang as incompetent and annoyingly whiny. he didn't realize at ALL until the very end that he was being intentionally played.
he might’ve recognized that huaisang has potential when he actually puts his mind to things. but jin guangyao honestly believed across two decades that huaisang at most was rich, pampered, and pathetically ill-prepared.
it came as a nasty, hysterical shock to jin guangyao that the little brother of the man he killed had actually 1) figured out at any point what he did 2) kept his bitter vicious rage inside and secretly wished him dead 3) brought that to fruition with a skillful mix of planning, improv, and making others do the dirty work of publicly exposing everything for him.
@each-uisge-and-glashtyn say it louder for the people in the back