This episode is also on Bilibili too.
Why does Zhang Wuji love Zhao Min most? The most one-track explanation in history.
Not long ago, I reread Jin Yong’s The Heaven Sword and Dragon Saber, and made two interesting discoveries. Today’s episode is about those two discoveries.
The Hardcore Heaven Sword and Dragon Saber
My first discovery was that I have no idea what Jin Yong was going through when he wrote The Heaven Sword and Dragon Saber. Every love story in it seems a little hardcore, and some of them even come with a strong whiff of blood.
Whenever the characters in the book fall in love, someone is either losing a hand or a foot, or covered in blood.
If you pulled out the keywords from every love story in The Heaven Sword and Dragon Saber and put them together, you’d have nothing less than a project list for an S&M torture-love game.
Hardcore? I like it. How did I never notice when I was a kid?
Why does Zhang Wuji love Zhao Min most?
My second discovery was that, looking at this S&M game-project list, I suddenly seemed to understand a question I’d never quite figured out: why does Zhang Wuji love Zhao Min most?
As everyone knows, Zhang Wuji has always been regarded as the most unprincipled, promiscuous, and falls-for-every-woman-he-sees male lead in Jin Yong’s novels.
Of the four girls—Zhao Min, Zhou Zhiruo, Xiao Zhao, and Yin Li—if any one of them showed him the slightest initiative, he would gladly accept it.
Once, Zhang Wuji was on a boat with all four girls and shamelessly had a wet dream in which all four of them married him.
And yet Zhang Wuji has also said very clearly: although I love all four, Zhao Min is still the one I love most.
A mother fixation?
Many people think it’s because Zhao Min resembles Zhang Wuji’s mother, Yin Susu—both are clever, ruthless femme fatales. So Zhang Wuji is actually suffering from a mother fixation.
The Ma Jingtao and Jet Li versions of The Heaven Sword and Dragon Saber both handle it this way: Yin Susu and Zhao Min are played by the same actress.
But on closer inspection, that doesn’t really work, because the young Yin Susu and the Yin Susu who raised Zhang Wuji on Ice and Fire Island are practically two different people.
The former really was clever and ruthless, very much like the later Zhao Min—but that Yin Susu never existed in Zhang Wuji’s memories.
On Ice and Fire Island, Zhang Wuji’s family lived apart from the world. Yin Susu’s femme-fatale side would rarely have shown itself; she was more likely to appear as a virtuous wife and loving mother.
So if it’s not a mother fixation, what exactly makes Zhao Min so attractive to Zhang Wuji?
Zhang Wuji choosing Zhao Min is a setup Jin Yong gives us directly. He could have set it up so Zhang Wuji fell in love with Abbess Miejue, and that would have worked too.
So what follows isn’t really a direct answer. It’s a thought experiment built on the question: starting from Zhang Wuji’s obsession with Zhao Min, let’s reverse-engineer his little kinks when it comes to men and women.
The Bloody Love Stories of The Heaven Sword and Dragon Saber
All right, we’ll save exactly what Zhang Wuji likes for the end. First, let’s enjoy a bloody showcase of the S&M love stories in The Heaven Sword and Dragon Saber.
1. Yin Susu’s Self-Harm
The protagonists of the first love story in The Heaven Sword and Dragon Saber are Zhang Wuji’s parents, Zhang Cuishan and Yin Susu.
After being hit in the arm by a Shaolin plum-blossom dart, Yin Susu made some rude remarks about killing all the monks, and Zhang Cuishan teased her about it.
So, when words failed, she harmed herself, slapping the plum-blossom dart deeper into her own body. Zhang Cuishan rushed to save her and got a slap for his trouble.
Self-harm plus a slap: that’s where the romance between Zhang Wuji’s parents began.
The keyword for this love story is “self-harm.”
This self-harm routine later played out once more with the Valley Doctor Hu Qingniu and his wife: Mrs. Hu poisoned herself just to pick a fight with her husband, and nearly poisoned herself to death for real.
2. Yang Xiao’s Captive-Training
The protagonists of the second love story are Yang Xiao and Ji Xiaofu.
Ji Xiaofu was kidnapped and imprisoned by the enormous creep Yang Xiao. Yet instead of hating him, she had a daughter with him and named her Yang Buhui—“no regrets.”
A hostage falling for her kidnapper: this is the textbook “Stockholm syndrome.”
The keywords for this love story are “kidnapping + imprisonment.”
3. Yang Buhui and the Creepy Old Uncle with Severed Limbs
The third love story begins when the grown-up Yang Buhui meets Yin Liting, her mother’s former fiancé.
Someone had broken both of Yin Liting’s arms and legs. Yang Buhui took tender care of him, and a strange romance blossomed beside his sickbed.
The keywords are “creepy old uncle + severed limbs.”
4. The Purple-Robed Dragon King and Underwater Asphyxia
Next, let’s look at Daiqisi, the Purple-Robed Dragon King, and Mr. Silver Leaf.
Daiqisi is the greatest beauty in The Heaven Sword and Dragon Saber. She starts out as an ice queen who seems completely uninterested in men—until she and Mr. Silver Leaf hold their breath and battle for three hundred rounds underwater in the Cold Green Pool at Bright Summit. Then her heart finally begins to stir.
This is how the book puts it—the two of them—
Skin touched skin underwater, and they could not help themselves … until at last they became a tragic entanglement.
The keyword for this love story is “underwater asphyxia.”
Well? Isn’t the S&M atmosphere in The Heaven Sword and Dragon Saber pretty intense?
The Four Goddesses
Now we get to the main event: the love stories between Zhang Wuji and the four women he loves.
And around Zhang Wuji, that S&M flavor remains undiminished.
1. Yin Li, the Bite Addict
First up is Zhang Wuji’s cousin, Yin Li.
When Yin Li first began to fall in love as a child, Zhang Wuji bit her once. Her hand was left bloody, and somehow she never forgot it for the rest of her life, searching high and low for her beloved.
In the end she became almost delirious. Even when facing the real adult Zhang Wuji, the person on her mind was still the boy who had bitten her when they were children.
Yin Li’s keyword is: “Bite me. If you bite me, I’ll chase you for the rest of my life.”
2. Xiao Zhao, the Handcuffed Maid
Next, Xiao Zhao.
What kind of image did Xiao Zhao present when she met Zhang Wuji?
In appearance, she was a beautiful mixed-race girl of Persian and Chinese heritage;
in status, Xiao Zhao was Yang Buhui’s servant, and later attended to Zhang Wuji’s daily needs, so she was a maid;
and because Yang Xiao suspected her when she first appeared, she wore a pair of hand and ankle cuffs the whole time.
A mixed-race beauty, a maid, bracelets, ankle cuffs—gentlemen, don’t these words alone make it a little hard to keep yourselves under control?
To sum up, Xiao Zhao’s keyword is: the handcuffed maid.
3. Zhou Zhiruo: “Stab You with a Sword”
Then come the most important of the important: Zhou Zhiruo and Zhao Min.
Let’s start with Zhou Zhiruo.
What was the key moment when feelings began to grow between Zhou Zhiruo and Zhang Wuji?
It was the sword thrust Zhou Zhiruo planted in Zhang Wuji at the battle on Bright Summit.
At Bright Summit, the best fighters from the six major schools had all been defeated by Zhang Wuji. In a fit of rage, Abbess Miejue ordered Zhou Zhiruo to cut Zhang Wuji down with the Heaven Sword. Zhou Zhiruo had obeyed her teacher’s orders since childhood, so in a daze she reflexively thrust the sword.
Zhang Wuji never imagined Zhou Zhiruo would attack him. He didn’t even try to dodge, and took the stab straight on.
The best summary of what followed came from the jealous Song Qingshu, who was standing nearby.
Song Qingshu said to himself:
After that sword pierced him, whether the boy lived or died, she could never wipe him from her heart again.
But for Zhang Wuji, wasn’t it exactly the same?
Before this, Zhang Wuji and Zhou Zhiruo had shared only a few bashful little moments, the sort that pass between young men and women. After that sword thrust, they had secured a permanent place in each other’s hearts.
So Zhou Zhiruo’s keyword is: “Come on, come on—let me stab you once.”
4. Zhao Min and the “Endless Shadow”
If the feelings between Zhang Wuji and Zhou Zhiruo began with a lethal physical injury, then Zhang Wuji falling for Zhao Min was entirely the result of a series of mental attacks.
Lord Zhang, I broke the hands and feet of your Sixth Uncle. Aren’t you angry?
Lord Zhang, all the experts in your Ming Cult have been poisoned by me. Aren’t you scared?
Lord Zhang, I wiped out Shaolin Temple and framed your Ming Cult for it. Doesn’t that make you furious?
Lord Zhang, I seriously injured your grandteacher. Doesn’t that break your heart?
Lord Zhang, I captured all the experts from the six major schools. That includes your senior and junior uncles, and the woman you love, Miss Zhou. Aren’t you worried?
The mental attacks kept coming, one after another. I call them “Zhao Min’s Fifty Shades.”
And yet, amid this chain of devastating blows, every shadow Zhao Min unleashed made Zhang Wuji admire her a little more.
To sum up, Zhao Min’s keyword is: relentless mental torment.
Zhang Wuji’s Little Kink
All right, now we can analyze Zhang Wuji’s little kink.
Let’s draw a coordinate plane:
The horizontal axis shows whether something belongs to the physical or mental category;
the vertical axis shows whether, within the S&M framework, it belongs to S (the sadist, or master) or M (the masochist, or submissive).
From the analysis above, we find that the four women in Zhang Wuji’s life occupy one quadrant each.
Bite-addict Yin Li is a physical M, maid Xiao Zhao is a mental M, Zhou Zhiruo is a physical S, and Zhao Min is a mental S.
Once we make this map, Zhang Wuji’s tastes become obvious.
First, two of the four girls are M and two are S. Their importance in Zhang Wuji’s heart can be distinguished along exactly this dimension.
Yin Li and Xiao Zhao, the two Ms, are minor characters with very little screen time. Zhang Wuji’s feelings for them are clearly much weaker than for the other two, the Ss.
His main emotional entanglements are with the two Ss.
So, Zhang Wuji is unquestionably a male M. He really enjoys being tormented by queens.
What kind of queen does he specifically like?
That depends on whether Zhang Wuji is a physical M like Yin Li or a mental M like Xiao Zhao.
Physical M:
A physical M can experience sexual pleasure directly from bodily pain. In medicine, this is called “algolagnia.”
Research suggests that this kink may be related to a variant of a gene called SCN9A.
This genetic variant may cause the brain to misinterpret pain signals, so sometimes pain becomes directly linked to pleasure.
So many physical Ms may simply be born that way. If it’s in your genes, it’s in your genes; if it isn’t, it isn’t.
Apparently Zhang Wuji doesn’t have this variant. Otherwise, when Zhou Zhiruo stabbed him, he shouldn’t have suffered so much. He should have said, “That feels so good, Queen—one more sword thrust!”
Mental M:
So Zhang Wuji should be a mental male M.
A mental M may not care much about physical pain, but enjoys mentally submitting to a powerful S—being controlled, teased, tormented, and humiliated by the S …
Seen this way, Zhao Min, a mental female S who can play at “control” and “teasing” with consummate skill, isn’t she simply Zhang Wuji’s perfect match, made by heaven?
The queen may torment me a thousand times, and I will still love her like my first crush.
That’s the fundamental reason Zhang Wuji is obsessed with Zhao Min.
A Mental Male M? Why?
So why would Zhang Wuji be a mental M like this?
When it comes to S&M torture love, many people have a certain idea: anyone who likes S&M must have been abused as a child, and so, when they grew up, they either took revenge on society or turned 180 degrees into an abuser—
A lot of films and literature set it up this way.
Take the domineering CEO hero from Fifty Shades of Grey, which took the world by storm a few years ago: his foster mother made him play S&M as a child, forcing him into the role of an M. Then, once he grew up, he did a complete 180, took revenge on women, and became an S.
Or maybe they rationalize the abuse they suffered as children, fall in love with that experience, and then keep enjoying being abused as adults, becoming an M.
Zhang Wuji seems to fit the bill pretty well:
As a child, he had to watch his parents being forced to their deaths, then got beaten by villains using the Dark Heavens Divine Palm, and was set upon by dogs released by Zhu Jiuzhen… Alone and helpless, he was bullied every which way.
But he took it all in stride, treating suffering as pleasure, and eventually grew into an M.
Sounds pretty reasonable, right?
Completely wrong!
The idea that people who like S&M were abused as children has absolutely no scientific basis.
In 2008, a group of Australian scholars surveyed nearly 20,000 respondents—one of the largest-sample studies of S&M I’ve ever seen, and relatively reliable.
One conclusion of the study was that whether someone likes S&M has absolutely no correlation with being sexually abused in childhood or being drawn into non-consensual sexual activity.
In fact, other evidence suggests the opposite: the happier someone’s childhood, the more likely they may be to play S&M as an adult.
Li Yinhe says in The Subculture of Sadomasochism (Nuelian Yawenhua):
Among lower-class children who suffered domestic violence from an early age, sadomasochistic tendencies are relatively rare. Sadomasochism, however, flourishes among people raised in happy middle-class families.
Why would that be? I think it’s easy to explain.
People who have actually lived through war tend to be pacifists. It’s the keyboard warriors who’ve been pampered in peaceful surroundings who spend all day yelling about flattening Tokyo and entertaining romantic fantasies about war.
The same logic applies here: if you really suffered violence as a child, you know how terrifying it is, and you can’t romanticize it.
Only people who never truly experienced the pain of violence and power as children can become absorbed in S&M games that turn violence and power into something sexy.
So Zhang Wuji became an M not because he was bullied relentlessly as a child—quite the opposite. It’s because, when he was even younger, he grew up on Ice and Fire Island, a paradise far removed from violence and the threat of power.
He was surrounded by a father’s tenderness and a mother’s love; even his murderous adoptive father, Xie Xun, had reined in his bloodlust by then.
Zhang Wuji’s childhood was practically blissful beyond belief!
Maybe only children who grow up with that much love can come to long for a wilder, more violent kind of love as adults.
For Zhang Wuji, the sunlight of childhood was simply too dazzling. What left him dazzled and bewitched, instead, was Zhao Min’s fifty shades of shadow.
(The End)
Books and references mentioned in this article:
1. Jin Yong, The Heaven Sword and Dragon Saber (Sanlian edition)
In an interview, Jin Yong once said that among the characters in his novels, he was most like Zhang Wuji.
2. Algolagnia
For the causes of algolagnia, see the Wikipedia entry Algolagnia.
3. A Large-Scale Study of the Relationship Between Childhood Abuse and S&M
Richters, J., De Visser, R. O., Rissel, C. E., Grulich, A. E., & Smith, A. (2008). Demographic and psychosocial features of participants in bondage and discipline,「sadomasochism」 or dominance and submission (BDSM): Data from a national survey. The journal of sexual medicine, 5(7), 1660-1668.
4. Li Yinhe, The Subculture of Sadomasochism (Nuelian Yawenhua)
On the tenth anniversary of Wang Xiaobo’s death, I went to Shanghai’s Xintiandi to hear Li Yinhe reminisce about Mr. Xiaobo. In that lecture, she repeatedly emphasized that the heavily S&M-flavored sex scenes in Wang Xiaobo’s books came only from the writer’s imagination.
Is that really all there is to it?
Included in
A revised version of this article was included in my book The 24-Frame Psychology Code: Psychology in Film.
Version history
This article was the inaugural episode of a brand called “Psychological Punk” that I built in the early days of my entrepreneurial career. The video was made from this written version.
Here is the “inaugural issue” I wrote at the time:
Who Is “Psychological Punk”? | Inaugural Issue
As you can see from the avatar, “Psychological Punk” is a masked superhero.
Their neural circuitry is a little unusual, and their glasses are a little dazzling.
Their superpower is earth-shattering:
They can “generate an illusion that makes them believe psychology has helped them understand the entire world!”
Actually, they often forget that the two characters “psychology” are in their name. Sometimes, when they get carried away, they leave psychology at home and go straight out to look at the world.
“Psychological Punk” is unfortunately a DID patient, currently with three personalities.
Personality No. 1
Emilia♀ A female delinquent pretending to be respectable
Specialties: supervising, breathing down people’s necks, squeezing out every penny, and playing the all-purpose big sister who knows exactly how you feel.
Personality No. 2
Wu Zhenyu♂ A goofy young man who is always adding dramatic flourishes to his own life
Specialty: winning over naive young women with a voice fifty times more mature than his face.
Personality No. 3
Zhichao Wei ♂ A nutcase who loves overinterpreting everything
Specialties: opening up all kinds of bizarre flights of fancy and somehow making all sorts of unreliable stories sound coherent.
“Psychological Punk”’s superpower goes off twice a week: Monday and Thursday, 15 minutes each time.
Please head over to Ximalaya FM and search for Zhichao Wei’s Chat Shack to check it out.
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