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me watching 'gratuitous' sex and violence and ''problematic representation'' in my shows and movies made for adults

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Are you normal or do you cry about how A-yuan was almost the same age when Wei Wuxian died as Wei Wuxian was when his own parents left him?

Both of them were taken in by major Sects because of who their parents were ( or guardian in the case of A-yuan), one loved because that was all that was left of their guardian but the other hated for the same reason.

One wasn't allowed to learn about their origins to keep them safe and protected in a world where every last member of their Clan was hunted down and killed. Still, the other was simply forbidden from learning anything about their parents because of a baseless rumor, jealousy, and insecurity.

One was truly accepted and the other was called a slave in their whole life.

Their backgrounds were so similar yet their childhoods were vastly different. They both went through so much.

The one with a good memory forgot the pain due to a fever.

The one with a horrible memory remembered every bit.

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i know wwx couldn't have watched over him in canon pre-resurrection but i wanted to illustrate it (i'm so soft for lil sizhui)

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Lan Wangji: Why are there little handprints all over the walls?

Wei Wuxian, whispering: Why are there little handprints all over the walls?

A-Yuan, whispering: Because I have little hands.

Wei Wuxian to Lan Wangji: Because he has little hands.

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I'm rereading MDZS and it just hit me that Wei Wuxian's first impression upon meeting Lan Yuan post-resurrection was that he was a "good sprout"

You guys... you guys... that's his little radish... that's his good little sprout....

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Lan Sect's known rules !

▷MDZS Home Page

We are all aware of the famous wall of rules at the Gusu Lan Sect, which Wei Wuxian has a hard time following.

Well, according to the MDZS novel, there were 3,000 rules when they were students, and 4,000 rules 13 years later after Wei Wuxian was resurrected.

I managed to compile 180 rules and divided them into categories.

Sources:

The official printed novel The drama (Youtube) The anime/donghua (Youtube)

Interpretation:

There might be translation mishaps from Chinese to English. One thing could be interpreted in various ways depending on context. (note: neither Chinese nor English are not my native languages.)

THE RULES:

▷ Rules on appropriate behavior: (39 rules)

Lan clan disciples must follow the principles of the Lan

Do not work after 9 pm

Do not rise after 5 am / Do not wake up at 8 am

Do not go out at night

Those who come at night should not be allowed in until 7 AM

Do not be late

Do not enter Cloud Recesses without permission

No one is permitted to attend the lectures without an invitation

Do not enter the back hills without permission

Do not fight without permission (alternate: fighting without permission is prohibited)

Do not create damages

Do not take life within Cloud Recesses (alternate: do not kill within the premises)

Do not stand incorrectly (have a proper posture)

Do not sit improperly (sitting improperly is prohibited)

Do not make noise (causing noise is prohibited)

Do not hurry rashly (do not act impulsively; running is prohibited)

Do not move arbitrarily

Do not smile for no reason (do not smile foolishly, do not laugh for no reason)

Sneering for no reason is prohibited

Do not drink alcohol (alcohol is prohibited)

Do not consume meat

Killing livestock within the area is prohibited

Do not be difficult with food (do not be picky about food)

Do not eat more than three bowls

Do not talk during mealtimes

Pets are not permitted

Change clothes after a shower

Wear a headband to discipline yourself

Do not touch others’ headbands without permission

A headband is not to be used for any other purpose

Only a spouse or child may touch the headband

Do not bribe a law enforcer

Do not use a concealed weapon

Do not hide an edged tool

Do not wear any jangling objects like beads

Do not wear more than three accessories around your waist

Do not alter clothes secretly

Never hurt insects or plants

Do not borrow money

▷ Rules related to personal virtues: (63 rules)

Love and respect yourself

Behave yourself

Be respectful (be courteous)

Be modest Arrogance is prohibited

Hide your wisdom

Do not show off your skills

Be humble

Do not be supercilious

Be amicable and united

Be strict with yourself

Have a strong will and anything can be achieved

Diligence is the root

Morality is the priority

Harmony is the value

Be ethical

Uphold the value of justice

Be just

Shoulder the weight of morality

Perform acts of chivalry

Have courage and knowledge

Have courtesy and integrity

Do not be ill-mannered

Have affection and gratefulness

Be compassionate

Be generous

Frugality is a moral

Give more, take less

Do not expect rewards after giving

Do not be miserly

Do not regret offering

Accumulate virtue and merits

Make sure to act virtuously

Be grateful

Be grateful when praised

Stop bad habits

Destroy the five poisons (desire, anger, ignorance, pride, & jealousy)

Do not indulge in pleasure

Do not be promiscuous

Do not indulge in debauchery

Do not wallow in luxury and pleasure (do not live extravagantly/in luxury)

Be peaceful when insulted

Do not succumb to rage

Speak meagrely, for too many words only bring harm

Do not be haughty and complacent

Do not be of two minds

Do not exult in excess (do not be excessively/too happy)

Do not grieve in excess (do not be excessively/too sad)

Do not covet the property of others

Do not steal

Do not be greedy

Be careful with your words

Do not use coarse language

Do not tell lies

Do not take your own words lightly

Do not sow discord

Do not use flowery writing (do not write about love and sex; do not use frivolous language; or do not spread empty lines)

Do not say one thing and mean another (do not break promises; do not go back on your word)

Do not boast about your own strengths

Believe sincerely

Do not be suspicious

Do not be wasteful

Do not break faith and abandon the right

Do not be unreasonable

▷ Rules for training, studying, and learning: (8 rules)

Learning comes first

Train your body and your mind

Maintain your own discipline

Organise work properly

Do not neglect your studies

Do not give up on learning

Do not lose your life goal

Nurture aspirations

▷ Rules for interacting with others: (48 rules)

Love all beings

Embrace the entirety of the world

Honor good people

Appreciate the good people

Good people will be esteemed, blessed by nature, and followed by good fortune

Respect the filial ones

Be fair, and they will follow you

Be trustworthy, and they will believe you

Be mighty, and they will die for you

Be loyal

Earn trust

Win friendships with kindness

See friends as neighbors

Steer away from bad men

Correct others by correcting yourself

Do not fear the strong

Do not ignore others and be undisciplined 

Help the lonely

Take pity on the desolate

Do not despise poverty

Do not bully the weak (bullying is prohibited)

Do not mix public and private interests

Help the underprivileged

Care for the weak

Lend a hand to those in need

Rescue those in danger

Do not take advantage of your position or connections to oppress others

Do not build wealth by using others, for this wealth won’t last

Do not curry favor (flatter)

Do not go tuft-hunting

Do not be a social climber

Do not form a clique and exclude others

Do not insult people

Do not use bad words to hurt others

Do not tease others

Do not praise yourself and slander others

Do not jump to an unfounded conclusion (do not make assumptions about others; do not judge others quickly)

Do not judge people behind their backs (do not speak ill of others; speaking behind other people’s backs is prohibited)

Speak not about other people’s weaknesses

Be easy on others

Be sad for other people’s sufferings

Rejoice in other people’s blessings

Regard other people’s gains and losses as your own

Do not hold grudges

Have wins and losses

If others win over you, do not envy

If others lose to you, do not look down

Do not take apprentices excessively, nor pass ordinary people

▷ Rules for respecting those in authority: (11 rules)

Respect the elderly

Do not disrespect the elder

Do not disregard the younger

Do not forget the grace of the forefathers

Be loyal, filial, friendly, and dutiful

Be a filial child

Do not argue with your family, for it doesn’t matter who wins

Honor the teachers and respect the elders

If your senior is standing, you may not sit until they have done so

Teachers have extensive knowledge and are examples of moral integrity

Disturbing female cultivators is prohibited

▷ Rules on cultivation, good and evil: (11 rules)

Concentrate on cultivating

To suppress and eliminate ghosts and monsters, liberate them

Stay on the righteous path

Take the straight path (follow the righteous way)

Reject the crooked road (do not take the crooked ways)

Eliminate evil and establish a just law

Do not associate with evil

Do not befriend the evil

Do not fall to evil

Resist evil

Promote good

▷ Bonus rule:

Wei Wuxian isn't allowed. (Do not get near Wei Ying)

▷MDZS Home Page

[completed ; 10/07/2024]

★ ⁺. ໒꒰ྀི｡- ˕ -｡꒱ྀི১ ૮꒰˶ᵔ ᗜ ᵔ˶꒱ა ˖⁺‧₊˚

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And again! Bwahaha I can’t be stopped!

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Secret Lovers.

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Thinking a lot about how, in a series filled with liars and deceivers, when it comes to keeping big secrets, Wei Wuxian and Nie Huaisang lie in the exact same way.

In terms of truly big secrets that they have to keep for a long time, Nie Huaisang has one and Wei Wuxian has two. Huaisang's is the collective secret of his grand plot to destroy Jin Guangyao and avenge his brother, and Wwx's are the loss of his golden core and his post-resurrection true identity. And how do both of them go about covering the parts of themselves that they most want to hide? They play up their own existing traits and lean as hard as they can into their more negative public perceptions.

When Wei Wuxian wants to hide the fact that he's lost his golden core, he does it by putting on a show of arrogance, and this can only work as long as it does because ego is already such a big part of his personality. Young Wwx was already known as a willful, trouble-making rule breaker, so nobody's going to question it when he starts showing up to events without his sword. They might ask "what the hell is that kid doing?" but they can always answer their own question with, "Well he's Wei Wuxian. He's always been a disrespectful and done as he pleased."

Wwx never pretends to be anyone or anything but himself in his first life, but he dials up certain facets of "himself" to make the public think what he wants them to. Pretending to be the person that the outside world expects him to be makes a very good disguise, because it's against others' nature to question it.

And we can argue about how effective it is, but Wei Wuxian tries to do a version of the exact same thing when he gets brought back as Mo Xuanyu. He hears that Mxy was gay and a "lunatic" and says "well if you want insane, then you'll get insane." He leans as hard as he can into that public expectation, because if Mo Xuanyu is behaving like exactly the annoying, openly queer freak that everyone expects him to be, no one's going to wonder who else he might be.

Meanwhile, Huaisang uses more or less the exact same defense mechanism when he starts racking up things to hide. Based on his repeating school as a teen and late formation of his golden core, he presumably has a reputation from a young age as not the sharpest tool in the shed. People know him as the Nie brother who cares little for cultivation and developed far too slow to make use of his saber. To be unkind about it, he's a useless little dandy unfit to ever inherit his clan.

So when Huaisang wants to be sure that no one will suspect he's making moves behind the scenes, he leans into that and leans into it hard. He makes everyone think they're right—he is an idiot unfit to run his clan. But nobody's going to look twice at a fool, and nobody will suspect subterfuge of the head shaker.

Once again, though, Huaisang's act only works because people expect him to turn into a leader like the head shaker. The same act wouldn't have worked so well for someone like Wei Wuxian, because even though they disliked him, people knew he was talented and dangerous. Only Nie Huaisang can get away with playing useless for a decade, because he's playing as hard as he can into the worst of his established public persona. Others mistaking him for a fool lets him trick them into thinking that he is one.

Nobody wants to question you when you're confirming their expectations, and Wei Wuxian and Nie Huaisang both know how to use that to their advantage. It's easy to keep a secret when your cover story is something the public is already primed to hear.

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I am contemplating on Nie Huaisang, who possesses an indifferent attitude.

Nie Huaisang, who genuinely cannot determine whether Wei Wuxian is truly evil and if he has succumbed to demonic cultivation. Nie Huaisang, who willingly took a risk, fully aware that Wei Wuxian could return as a twisted and malevolent being, wreaking havoc on Jianghu, and deemed it acceptable.

Many thoughts revolve around the notion that NHS is entirely convinced that WWX is not evil, that he has not completely lost his soul and his kindness to demonic cultivation.

Huaisang, who has spent the past decade living in constant fear of being killed for not being obedient enough, terrified of being discovered, and haunted by the inability to locate his brother's remains. He has been pushed to the edge by this fear, anger, heartbreak, and agony.

And he has decided that he no longer cares about how Wei Wuxian returns. If he is still the Wei Wuxian that Nie Huaisang remembers, then that is fantastic! Wonderful! His plan will likely succeed flawlessly.

However, if he is not the same, if he is a tormented and shattered soul consumed by resentment and nothing else, if he truly is the mass murderer everyone claims him to be and returns with that same murderous instinct, then Nie Huaisang will ignite the flames right in front of him, guiding the destruction Koi Tower, and accept his fate of being burned alongside the rest of the world. Because he is exhausted, he is terrified, and he is so incredibly angry.

In one way or another, he will bring down the world that Jin Guangyao constructed and will reduce it to ashes.

He has nothing left to lose.

Nie Huaisang is alone and has nothing left. He is determined to bring down Jin Guangyao, who has caused him so much pain, and make sure he loses everything too.

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Nie Huaisang: Wei Wuxian, don’t pretend you’re not the type of guy to keep a list of all the people you’ve slept with

Wei Wuxian: you’re right, it’s called a marriage license

Wangxian: *high five*

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since i’m on my third mdzs brainrot of the year, let me just say: it’s enlightening how this story, spread over multiple volumes, goes over the simple but undeniably true reality that even while doing almost everything “right” you can still be horribly “wrong” in the eyes of society. how wei wuxian would bend over backwards to follow his morals (which have been narratively shown to be somewhat the standard) but still be condemned at large because he didn’t go about it the way that was perfectly compliant with what his social superiors and other authority figures expected of him. how “good” deeds in the mdzs world (and ours) will only be accepted and praised, coming from someone of lower social standing, if they are packaged in an unobstrusive manner–and sometimes, not even then. and it’s funny how some people miss that, how they wonder what would have happened if wei wuxian had been just a bit more tempered, a bit more subservient, a bit more polite. how the expectation of delivering his kindnesses in the most unhindering manner possible is somehow an acceptable train of thought–how the burden to do better is not unequivocally placed on people like JGS, Jiang Cheng, Nie Mingjue, the Lans, etc.

some people think that wei wuxian using demonic cultivation in the eyes of the cultivation world is his downfall. nevermind the fact that he literally isn’t practicing mo dao–this whole issue is NOT about what he’s doing, but about who he is. mxtx has made that clear at multiple points in the novels but the most glaring example is, ofcourse, how the nie sect is allowed to mess with resentful energy all they like and since they are a powerful enough sect, they face no social or political backlash for it–not in the way that wei wuxian does. even then, during the war, those people had no qualms against weaponising wei wuxian’s powers for their benefit. if it truly was about the dubious morality of using mo dao for them then wei wuxian should have been condemned from the get-go. but it’s not. it’s about the son of a servant wielding enough power to change the tides of a war and then surviving to tell the tale and continue to live with the kind of power that shouldn’t be held by someone of his station. it’s about people quaking in their boots because wei wuxian has shown himself as someone who won’t conform, who won’t become a dancing monkey for their tunes.

yes, wei wuxian is not some perfect angel saint but then, why the fuck should he be??? this expectation from some readers and the members of his world alike, that wei wuxian should have been the one to give it his all and more to avoid conflict is blasphemous. in the end, wei wuxian chose his path, stuck to his ideals, and went down throwing a big fuck you at the larger cultivation world’s back, while the rest failed to break the cycle of power abuse. the fact that it took them more than a year to see him to death is just a testament to how well wei wuxian handled things than some grace given by the cultivation world. the whole “wei wuxian’s first death was inevitable” is, for me, not about wei wuxian slowly spiralling and things getting out of hand. his death was inevitable because corrupt people with power will always choose to exploit and silence, will always choose to exert their will, will always choose to hurt those lower in the chain. and that is exactly what happened with the ambush and everything that led upto it.

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House Jiang’s Lost Founder - Jiang Chi - Lost canon detail from the novel - Wen and Jiang, how their names foreshadow their fates

Did you know the man who founded House Jiang is named Jiang Chi 江迟? 

This name is not included in any materials from the official novel, the Donghua and its character data sheets, or even the live-action drama Chenqingling. 

The name Jiang Chi was mentioned only once in chapter 56, Sandu 12, The Three Poisons - 12, of the original web novel version of Modaozushi before it underwent rewriting and editing in 2016. Here  is the full passage in which it was mentioned: 

Keep reading

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Ok hear me out. This is for the people who keep saying that Jiang Cheng can't help the remnants cause he's still rebuilding his sect and is in a politically weak position.

Because I argue if he had actually played his cards right he should have actually been the one with the most to bargain and gain if he helped Wei Ying

Cause yeah, everyone hates the remnants and is terrified of Wei Ying. Imagine if Jiang Cheng had actually used that. If the people saw Wei Ying as some kind of monster on the loose, then make it the JIANG'S monster on a leash instead. When the brothers met at the burial mound, Wei Ying had asked Jiang Cheng for a solution that still safeguards the Remnants. Telling Wei Ying to play along so people think Jiang Cheng has influence on him would be easy. So Jiang Cheng just makes a statement, "Wei Ying said sorry and he's chill but he's keeping the Remnants cause technically yeah, the Jin were mistreating them and the people guarding were simply punished for that mistreatment. Basically, the remnants are under us now"

There WILL be an uproar from almost everyone, but all Jiang Cheng needs to do is play cool, double down and call their bluff. "Yeah, you don't agree? Fine. We're leaving." And no one can do anything cause they're all still licking their wounds from the last war and aren't just gonna start a new one. Even if they wanted to, they know they can't take on Wei Ying, so they won't.

Jiang Cheng is building his clan from the ground up. Doing so whilst making the clan self sustainable would be more than manageable. Plus, we have another secret weapon, and that's Jin Zixuan, who at this point is so in love with YanLi that he would probably go against Jin Guangshan any day now. And we know Yanli isn't gonna go anywhere without her brothers. It's either he defects and brings some of his loyal servants with him to either establish their own sect or join the Jiangs OR Jin Guangshan just relents cause that's his heir.

Coaxing their way back into the Lans good graces is also more than manageable with Lan Xichen. Nie Mingjue can be a brute, but he's not gonna pick a fight where there doesn't need to be one. He just fought a war. He's done. The smaller clans just do whatever the big clans do.

This is what frustrates me the most. If Jiang Cheng had been just a little bit smarter and played the long game he could have had everything. Instead he bent and snapped under the pressure of the other clans and told Wei Ying to just abandon the Wens.

I think mxtx did it on purpose too. I think it was meant to be a character defining moment. Jiang Cheng had the ultimate opportunity to live up to the Jiang Motto and do the impossible.

He didn't. That will always be the biggest tragedy of his character