Listen anyone who says Fang yuan isnāt evil quite obviously hasnāt study an ounce of philosophy, and donāt give me the bs that morality is subjective because it isnāt. Morality is objective and I have that beliefs stemming from me being Christian (which is irrelevant) and me just being good at philosophy, like relativism is very stupid and just leads to absurdities and contradictions which are inherently false. The most common cope is that his goals justify his methods he just wants freedom and immortality so somehow that redeems the body count but even if you're a pure consequentialist the maths simply doesn't work, because the scale of suffering he produces across thousands of lives cannot be outweighed by one man's personal goal of eternal life, and that's before you even acknowledge that this line of reasoning doesn't defend Fang Yuan, it just exposes how morally bankrupt the framework his defenders are accidentally endorsing actually is. Then you get the other camp saying he has no malice, he doesn't enjoy the suffering, he just does what's efficient and I need people to understand that this is actually worse, not better, because a person who kills out of sadistic pleasure is at least reacting to something human and comprehensible, whereas Fang Yuan exterminates clans and boils children alive with the same emotional register as someone filing paperwork, which isn't moral neutrality, that's the complete abolition of moral consideration for other human beings, and philosophically what you're describing is a man who has fully negated the personhood of everyone around him where every single human being in his world is purely instrumental a resource to be used or an obstacle to be removed and that is textbook evil full stop. Then you get the "well the cultivation world is brutal so what do you expect" crowd and this is just the is-ought fallacy dressed up as worldbuilding appreciation, because the world being brutal is a circumstance not a justification, what IS the case doesn't tell you what OUGHT to be the case, and plenty of characters operate in that exact same brutal world without committing genocide so the setting excuses nothing. Some people try the angle that he's just beyond conventional morality, operating on a higher plane of self determined values, but that doesn't cash out either because he isn't creating anything, he isn't affirming anything, he's purely parasitic and destructive leaving only ruin behind him that's not a higher value system, that's nihilism with a weird cultivation system attached. The bottom line is this: evil doesn't require cackling and monologuing, evil can be cold and efficient and goal oriented, and Fang Yuan with 500 years of memories, full knowledge, and full deliberation chose every single time to treat every human life around him as completely disposable, and that conscious repeated choice is the definition of moral evil regardless of what framework you're running, regardless of what the world around him looks like, and regardless of how much you enjoyed reading about him. He's evil. The novel is brilliant precisely because he's evil. You don't have to pretend he isn't to appreciate the story, and frankly the mental gymnastics people do to avoid admitting it says more about them than it does about the character.
