#specifically being rude to lan wangji

[lurkinginnernarrator]

I think Lan Jingyi is important. Specifically in what he represents: In the Cloud Recesses Study Arc we see how stolid the Lan Sect is, and with Lan Wangji's whipping we see how blinded the Lan Sect can be by its own ideals that it forsakes the morality those ideals represent.

When we see Lan Wangji in WWX'S second life we see the change Lan Wangji has initiated in his own clan.

That change is embodied in the one Lan Jingyi.

He's loud, brash, emotive, unfiltered and sometimes rude, all of which are anathema to the Lan Clan's sacred ideals of comportment and image. While Lan Jingyi does get punished for infractions it should be noted that he's never dissuaded from his own nature. There is no alienation of Lan Jingyi from his clan. Lan Jingyi is fully Lan, we don't ever see him excluded and we don't see his relationship to his clan in any interpretable as estranged.

What does that tell us?

It tells us that the Lan Sect is changing. If we went purely on the Lan Sect we see in years prior it would not be surprising to see a character such as Lan Jingyi continually disparaged for his anathemic nature, looked down upon and excluded for his differences and punished for his 'undesirable traits'.

We do not see Lan Jingyi's passion being trained or beaten out of him. Instead, we see that the Lan Sect, especially through Lan Wangji's teachings and reforms, are doing their best to model Morality and Righteousness.

The flourishing existence of Lan Jingyi is a testament to the emendation of Lan Sect values; true righteousness being valued over the appearance of it, benevolence in action instead of in name. Mercy. Grace.

Lan Jingyi is the product of Lan Wangji's reforms and trials.

We see Lan Wangji suffer for his innate passion, punished for it by the hands of his own sect. But we also know Lan Jingyi never will.

Lan Jingyi is a sign of growth.

[qiu-yan]

Do you have any feelings opinions or analysis of the golden core reveal or just how the scene in the ancestral hall went down?? Because I have a lot of feelings about it but I can't quite put them together into words and I love your analysis of the story and jiang cheng

thank you for the ask!!!! and thank you for your kind comments!!

god i have so many opinions about the golden core reveal, and the ancestral hall scene that precedes it. i don't quite have all my thoughts in proper essay order right now, but i will probably write another long-ass post about my Hot Takes some day soon.

unorganized thoughts as of right now:

for the ancestral hall scene, i am almost purely on jiang cheng's side. jiang cheng was rude as hell and he did verbally escalate instead of peacefully allowing wangxian to leave, yes. however, they are in his house. they are in front of his ancestors. they are in his ancestral hall, which they entered without permission. to me, it seems like wei wuxian wants to have his cake and eat it too: he wants to avoid jiang cheng and all the anger the jiang cheng of the present has at his (very real and rather devastating) mistakes, but he also wants to freely come and go in jiang cheng's own goddamn house, like he used to be able to when he still had a positive relationship with jiang cheng. if wei wuxian is going to act like jiang cheng and yunmeng jiang are nothing to him anymore, then he should properly commit to being a full outsider.

it's also interesting how wei wuxian focuses his retorts in his argument with jiang cheng on "how dare you be cruel to lan zhan!!! i'm protecting lan zhan!!!!" when in my view the vast majority of jiang cheng's verbal abuse was directed towards wei wuxian himself. jiang cheng calls lan wangji "riffraff" and "an outsider," but that...is incredibly mild language to me. jiang cheng is ruder to wen ning (by calling him a "wen dog") for heaven's sake. instead, jiang cheng is much nastier towards wei wuxian himself: wei wuxian is shameless, wei wuxian's idiotic hero complex got all his family members killed, wei wuxian is why jin ling is an orphan, wei wuxian is a heartless ingrate, etc etc.

wei wuxian, defend YOURSELF! jiang cheng is barely being nasty at all to lan wangji, but he IS being nasty to YOU! compared to all the horrid shit he yells at you, he barely even brings up lan wangji at all! at the very least, tell jiang cheng not to call wen ning a "wen dog"!

i haven't fully thought this out yet so i'm not sure how fully i stand by it, but the fact that wei wuxian gets that heated "defending lan wangji" when jiang cheng barely even insulted lan wangji that much, is very interesting. it implies to me that, while wei wuxian thinks he does not have the right to properly rebut jiang cheng's criticisms of himself, that he truly is guilty and therefore should just take jiang cheng's verbal abuse of him lying down - deep down, he is still upset about jiang cheng blaming him specifically. when jiang cheng calls wei wuxian an ingrate who got all of jiang cheng's family members killed, wei wuxian is in fact upset and does in fact want to protest. however, he is unable to openly do so because he also feels incredibly guilty himself about the role he played in jin zixuan and jiang yanli's deaths, and therefore thinks he does not have the right to defend himself against jiang cheng's rage on the same issue.

but wei wuxian is still upset and still wishes to rebut jiang cheng's fury. therefore, "defending lan wangji" becomes an excuse for wei wuxian, a pretext to find issue with jiang cheng's arguments and therefore fight back. it's somewhat similar to when someone writes an incredibly effective counterargument to your post, so you hyperfocus on mocking them for a spelling error instead: you can't think of a way to properly rebut their rebuttal, so you jump on the first thing that gives you an excuse to disagree with them and poke holes in their argument. wei wuxian believes (accurately or not) that he does not have the right to defend himself against jiang cheng; however, he is fully justified in defending lan wangji from jiang cheng, which gives him an excuse to argue back when jiang cheng insults wei wuxian.

this is evidenced by the fact that, in the ancestral hall scene, wei wuxian does not defend wen ning from jiang cheng at all. jiang cheng also gives wei wuxian shit for "let[ting] the Wen dog wander around in front of our gates," but wei wuxian just fully lets that comment slide in favor of defending only lan wangji. while this could be because lan wangji is present to hear jiang cheng say this while wen ning is not, for me, another reason comes to mind as well: in wei wuxian's mind, wen ning is also involved, however tangentially, in the deaths of jin zixuan and jiang yanli. wei wuxian's guilt extends to encompass wei ning as well. therefore, wei wuxian feels that he also does not have the right to defend wen ning from jiang cheng. it is only lan wangji out of the three people jiang cheng insults that wei wuxian has the right to defend, because lan wangji alone was not involved in the jiang family tragedy of wei wuxian's first life.

also, it was wei wuxian who first escalated a verbal confrontation into a physical one.

regarding the golden core transfer scene.....first, i find it absolutely hilarious that wen ning of all people spilled the beans to jiang cheng, and got so mad about it to boot. king, you helped operate on him. king, you helped lie to him about it. king, there is no shortage of things you have the full right to be angry with sect leader jiang about, but him believing the lies you actively chose to tell him and not figuring out that you were lying is not one of them. as someone else put it, one person between wen ning and jiang cheng had a free and active hand in removing wei wuxian's core and putting it into jiang cheng, and that person was not jiang cheng. wen ning helping violate jiang cheng's bodily autonomy and then weaponizing said nonconsensual surgery later in an argument against the same jiang cheng is kind of crazy to me, honestly.

imo (and i'm stealing from an analysis i read somewhere), wen ning was this harsh about the golden core reveal despite being one of the surgeons who nonconsensually operated on jiang cheng and then lied to him about it for similar reasons as i described for wei wuxian above. wen ning is also deeply angry with jiang cheng for a lot of things: jiang cheng repeatedly calls him a "thing" and kicks him around like he isn't a human being; jiang cheng also led the first siege of the burial mounds, which killed all save one of wen ning's family members. that is a completely reasonable thing to be mad about. but wen ning, having seen firsthand the wrongdoings of qishan wen, probably has a guilt complex of sorts about being a wen; more importantly, he feels incredibly guilty about his "role" in killing jin ling's father. therefore, wen ning probably does not feel he has the right to defend himself from jiang cheng.

but deep down wen ning is still angry. he is still incredibly angry with jiang cheng for the things jiang cheng did to wen ning. and, while wen ning may not feel like he has the right to defend himself from jiang cheng, defending wei wuxian from jiang cheng is a different matter. in wen ning's eyes, wei wuxian did no major wrong and always had good intentions. therefore, jiang cheng has no right to be angry with wei wuxian. therefore, if wen ning absolutely wrecks jiang cheng's shit defending wei wuxian (and not wen ning himself), then wen ning would be entirely justified.

second - and my thoughts on this haven't fully baked yet - there's this undercurrent in both the golden core transfer scene and the guanyin temple scene that, because wei wuxian gave jiang cheng his core, jiang cheng does not have the right to be angry with wei wuxian for the pain wei wuxian's actions caused jiang cheng. that jiang cheng is now permanently indebted to wei wuxian, which therefore voids all of jiang cheng's right to say that wei wuxian hurt him.

i don't like this undercurrent. i don't like this idea at all. if someone - even accidentally - caused you a lot of pain, the fact that they also once sacrificed themself for you does not negate the pain they caused you. you should be grateful for what they did for you, but that doesn't mean you no longer have a right to your pain.

to flip the script, jiang cheng in reality also sacrificed himself for wei wuxian: he only lost his golden core to begin with because he drew that wen patrol away from wei wuxian. it is factually correct to say that, were it not for jiang cheng, wei wuxian would very likely be dead. but if anyone were to say: "jiang cheng once sacrificed himself for wei wuxian, meaning that wei wuxian owes his life to jiang cheng; therefore, wei wuxian does not have the right to be angry with jiang cheng for the first siege of the burial mounds," that would be fucking stupid. because that's not how it works.

i hold this to be true even though there is a cause-and-effect relationship between each person's sacrifice and their later actions. wei wuxian not having a golden core explains a lot of his later lying and other behavior, and jiang cheng having been tortured because he saved wei wuxian in turn explains a lot of his later resentment and other behavior as well. but neither of their fates were set in stone. both of them still had free will and still could have made different decisions afterwards.

the above is all a lot of blaming, refutation of blaming, and morality wank, so here are some assorted non-morality opinions:

the gift of the magi esque dual-sacrifice wei wuxian and jiang cheng pulled for each other is my favorite part of the story. like holy shit.

wen ning did phrase the golden core reveal to be as hurtful as possible. i find the idea of a sacrifice performed out of love and care for the recipient later being weaponized against that same recipient to be a very interesting idea.

wei wuxian absolutely did not give up his golden core out of only a sense of duty. there was quite a lot of duty, obligation, and guilt (spurred on by jiang fengmian and yu ziyuan's last words to him) mixed into his reasons, but i think wei wuxian gave his golden core to jiang cheng because he loved jiang cheng and didn't want to watch jiang cheng suffer.

jiang cheng, meanwhile, led the wen patrol away and thus got captured in place of wei wuxian purely because he loved wei wuxian. in doing so, he specifically failed his duty to his dead parents, his ancestors, and his sect.

wei wuxian's internal narration about how he later conceptualized the golden core transfer as "his duty to the jiang" is interesting because it is written to be a post-hoc justification. as in, he came up with those reasons and that line of thinking after he already gave up his golden core, and was trying to make the outcome acceptable to himself.

jiang cheng postcanon is in a position to start healing. this take is also stolen from an analysis i read somewhere else, but the one question that's been cooking jiang cheng for the past 13 years is Why. why did wei wuxian do all that? did wei wuxian ever truly care about him, about his family, or was wei wuxian lying from the start? wei wuxian consistently accomplishes the impossible, so how could wei wuxian allow this to happen? but now that jiang cheng knows wei wuxian gave his golden core to him, suddenly all these questions have answers. the cause and effect relationship between A and B makes sense now. and now that jiang cheng has answers, he can let the questions stop cooking his brain and begin to heal and move on.

thank you again for the ask and the kind comments!

[canary3d-obsessed]

Restless Rewatch: The Untamed, Episode 40 part two

(Masterpost) (Pinboard)  (whole thing on AO3)

Warning! Spoilers for All 50 Episodes!

What a Relief

After spending a few weeks in Gusu doing...stuff, our trio comes to Jinlintai for the discussion conference. Unusually for a CQL stair-climbing scene, nobody is planning to murder anyone once they get to the top.

Our crew walks up the stairs past 3 massive sculpted reliefs featuring Jin Guangyao.

First and most important, I have to point out that the sculpture version of Lan Xichen [edit: Nie Mingjue actually, whoops] is wearing a sash that looks like this:

*cough*

Meanwhile, for the picture with the sword and flames, qhanzi.com tells me that the written characters are 伏殺, fú shā; Google translate tells me this means "ambush." Specifically Fu=conceal, Sha=kill. Ballsy to have a monumental artwork on your front steps announcing that you're a backstabbing turncoat, Jin Guangyao.

Speaking of balls, Jiang Cheng jumps at the opportunity to bust some when the Lan bros arrive with Wei Wuxian in tow. He pretends not to know who Wei Wuxian is, but obviously does know something, given how bitchily he asks to be introduced. Lan Wangji continues his 13-year-long silent treatment of JC while Lan Xichen tries to figure out which bland smile he's meant to be deploying in this situation.

(more after the cut!)

They're all rescued by the appearance of Jin Guangyao 3.0, who has discarded his Nie braids and his Wen hotness in favor of Jin ostentatiousness.

He's no longer wearing the v-neck robe and topknot crown that we associate with the cultivation sects. Instead he's wearing a hat and a round-necked robe with a big embroidered design on the chest, that resembles the clothing style of a court official.

Some people see JGY's bureaucratic wardrobe as signaling that he's an unassuming administrator, someone who is not threatening to the power structure or is not ambitious. I see it more as conveying that his ambition reaches beyond the cultivation sects into the realm of dynastic/imperial politics.

Anyway, Jiang Cheng turns his ire towards his nephew, and Lan Xichen relaxes again. Possibly he is a little too relaxed, judging by how he's ogling Jiang Cheng.

I'm high as a kite, I just might stop to check you out

Party Monster

Fanfics are often accused of giving us an out-of-character (OOC) Wei Wuxian, but no fanfic Wei Wuxian is as OOC as the Wei Wuxian who attends this banquet. Normally Wei Wuxian is a mildly annoying flirt, but as soon as soon as he arrives in Koi tower he is (presumably) possessed by the spirit of Jin Guangshan, and becomes a gross sex pest.

He goes out of his way to hit on the wife of the clan leader and make googly eyes at all of the maids, whose social status doesn't allow them to be rude to him. And he does it in front of his date! What the hell, possessed Wei Wuxian.

While oblivious to Lan Wangji's jealousy, Wei Wuxian does check in with him to make sure it's ok to put on his "crazy Mo Xuanyu" act. LWJ replies with a certain amount of salt, but once Wei Wuxian makes it clear he's thinking about Lan Wangji's public face, LWJ chills out and answers him normally.

Side note: in no universe would this cute lil maid be making eyes at heavily-masked Mo Xuanyu when unmasked, radiant, filthy-rich Lan Wangji is right there to be smiled at.

Jin Guangyao greets everyone and some dancers start doing their thing; mercifully, possessed Wei Wuxian refrains from hitting on the dancers. As soon as Jin Guangyao starts to circulate through the room, Nie Huaisang has an epic nervous breakdown all over him, which is even better entertainment than the dancers.

This gives Wei Wuxian the cover he needs to slip out of the hall unnoticed. Well, as long as nobody notices Lan Wangji's obvious pining.

Fight Club

The prophecy foretells that into each generation of Jins will be born one douchebag cousin. Jin Chan is the douchebag cousin of his generation.

Jin Chan accuses "Mo Xuanyu" of being a sex pest, and Wei Wuxian suddenly understands why the plot made him act so OOC at the party. Mo Xuanyu wasn't really a sex pest; he was a regular pest, trying to get information out of Qin Su, not trying to seduce her. But he doesn't know that yet. In other adaptations Mo Xuanyu is gay, but CQL exists in a strange censorship-created realm in which gayness is pervasive but never mentioned, and therefore there is no homophobia. So nobody would care if Mo Xuanyu was gay.

When Wei Wuxian realizes what Mo Xuanyu did, he thinks "Mo Xuanyu, do you want to die?"

Nice choice of idiom, Wei Wuxian. I believe we have firmly established that yes, Mo Xuanyu absolutely did want to die.

The show is kind of vague, verbally, about whether Wei Wuxian 2.0 has a golden core. But there are a lot of moments that strongly suggest he does, at this point, have a functioning core.

This rock attack is, I hope, one of those moments, or else Jin Chan is a total pussy, getting knocked back by landscape gravel.

Next, Wei Wuxian shows Jin Ling the super-secret move known as "arm twisting," which Jin Ling, as an only child, has never encountered before.

Anyone with siblings is very familiar with this move.

Because this is The Untamed, this move should be executed with extra spinning whenever possible.

Jin Ling learns the move right away, and uses it to win the scuffle.

Avuncular

After the fight, Wei Wuxian sits with Jin Ling for a chat, and gives him the classic uncle advice "have as many fights as possible while you're young, because when you're older you'll have to be mature and get along with people."

I love Wei Wuxian so much.

For contrast, Jin Ling says that Jin Guangyao tells him not to get in fights. This makes Wei Wuxian seem like the cooler elder, but it also has a more sinister element, of Jin Guangyao holding Jin Ling back. Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian grew up constantly fighting with each other--sparring as well as informal fights, presumably. And their cultivation was super strong, partly as a result of that.

Wei Wuxian takes the opportunity to tell Jin Ling that he's not in love with Qin Su any more, because he's transferred his affections to someone else. Obviously Hanguang-Jun is the someone else, given that they've been inseparable for weeks. To keep Jin Ling from yelling while he explains, he clamps his hand over Jin Ling's mouth.

The thing is, in order to effectively clamp your hand over someone's mouth, there has to be something behind them--a wall, the mattress, your own torso, or something else solid. Otherwise they can just jerk their head backwards to get away from your hand. Or they can stand up and walk away, even.

Jin Ling, hilariously, does not realize this, and spends a ridiculously long time sitting still and making angry faces while Wei Wuxian rests his hand on his face.

Spy Game

Later that night, Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji get ready for some shenanigans.

Not the sexy kind, alas, just some paperman snooping.

Wei Wuxian, because he's facing serious danger, is feeling extra playful and cute, and he takes time to goof around with Lan Wangji before getting down to business.

In paperman form, he's able to do some things that the censors overlook, including tugging on Lan Wangji's headband and apparently blowing him a kiss. In the book and the donghua, he catches onto Lan Wangji's lip on his way down his face, too.

One thing that's kind of muted in the live action as compared to the novel is how much Lan Wangji enjoys Wei Wuxian's childish and playful behavior. Lan Wangji never got to be playful as a child, but with Wei Wuxian he can cut loose--which he does mostly in the sack or when they're drinking together. But even when he stays in control of himself, he likes Wei Wuxian's silliness.

He tells Paper-Xian, tenderly, to be very careful, before he sends him on his way.

The Adventures of Paperman

The CGI department outdoes itself with paperman, making an animated character so adorable I'd be happy to watch a whole episode of him.

Paper-Xian sneaks into JGY's study and pokes around, finding an empty envelope. Then he listens and watches while Qin Su stumbles in, retching.

She's followed closely by Jin Guangyao; they proceed to have an absolutely fucking endless argument in which the words "sister," "brother," "incest" "rapist dad" are never said, instead using vagueburger phrasing like "this matter."

Jin Guangyao does freely admit to killing their kid, though, and wants to know who told Qin Su about it so he can kill them, too. She won't tell him, shockingly.

Jin Guangyao ends the fight by putting a paralysis spell on his wife and then making her go to sleep with another spell, which is the cultivator equivalent of saying "I've said what I had to say and I need some space."

He takes her into a secret room where he is also keeping a bunch of talisman-protected stuff and a shockingly small number of books.

Seriously, as a person who has way too many books, I am personally offended by the way Jin Guangyao wastes shelf space in his secret room.

As Paper-Xian sneaks around the room, Jin Guangyao helpfully pulls aside the curtain covering the shelf with Nie Mingjue's head on it, so he can grouse at NMJ for (figuratively) haunting him. Seriously? Dude, you keep a guy's head on your bookshelf, he gonna haunt ya.

The episode ends with Paper-Xian bowing (adorably) to Nie Mingjue, and then sitting laying on his face, which would make BOTH Lan brothers jealous if they found out.

Soundtrack: Ring the Alarm, by Beyonce; Blister in the Sun, by the Violent Femmes

[ineedtorantaboutjiangcheng]

Fuck, I'm here again. Goddammit. I've been doing well. I've been keeping Jiang Cheng off my mind (and my computer screen). Things have been peaceful.

And then today happened.

Again, a fic. Again, not naming names, both because that's rude and also because this issue is hardly specific to one fic alone. I've seen it many times.

But I've been pacing for half an hour, too agitated to keep reading, so I'm just gonna get this off my chest, and then skim through the fic 'til it stops talking about it.

I need to talk about the golden core reveal.

Specifically, I need to talk about an attitude I've seen cropping up recently in a lot of fics. (By recently, I don't mean it's only recent fics that do it, just that I've only noticed it recently.)

So it'll be a fic, usually canon divergent, but prior to the golden core reveal. Wen Ning or Wen Qing will often be involved (though I can think of a few times it was Lan Wangji). And the character, who knows the truth about the golden core transfer, will urge Wei Wuxian to tell Jiang Cheng.

They'll say "you have to tell him". They'll say "he'll find out eventually". They'll say "he deserves to know".

And... the fic will support this.

Will frame Wei Wuxian as irrational, paranoid even, to keep it secret.

Will sometimes even punish him, narratively, for his "failure" to disclose such a thing.

And I am... completely baffled.

Where the fuck is this coming from?

I suppose, if I'm being generous, I can kind of see why an individual sympathising with Jiang Cheng might have a knee-jerk reaction to this. If you see them as being essentially family, the idea that a family member that you love deeply, keeping what amounts to both a huge sacrifice and a massive disability from you would be extremely painful. You might feel hurt, that they didn't tell you. Angry, at the implied lack of trust.

I get it, as an emotional response you might have in the moment. I don't find it particularly relatable, but I can follow the thought process.

But like... that's an emotional response. Surely, at some point, logic has to kick in, right?

Because the thing is. Okay, there's two aspects to the secret, right? One, is that a medical procedure was done to Jiang Cheng, sort of like an organ transplant, I suppose, but he wasn't told that the organ was donated by Wei Wuxian. And the other is that Wei Wuxian made this huge sacrifice for Jiang Cheng, and didn't tell him.

But thinking about this for even five minutes should tell you that... neither of those things are actually Wei Wuxian's responsibility to deal with?

The first one is the by far the more common argument I've seen. I've read fics where Wen Ning and Wen Qing are tortured with guilt over having performed the procedure without telling Jiang Cheng all the details. I've even seen people have them blame Wei Wuxian, for demanding they keep it secret, had them secretly resent him for it. He's portrayed as deeply selfish, for keeping the truth of Jiang Cheng's operation from him.

But the thing is... if you're going to apply modern medical ethics to the situation... Wei Wuxian was in the right? They all were?

Under modern medical ethics, you have no right to know the identity of your organ donor. That can feel a little weird (it's probably why people often have a knee-jerk reaction that demands the opposite); after all, it's my body, shouldn't I have a right to know where the organ that goes in it comes from? What if it has cooties?

But according to medical ethics, the donor's right to medical privacy is more protected that the recipient's right to that information. Right to medical privacy is pretty highly valued; it kind of ties into body autonomy, which is kind of the keystone of... most modern ethics. You have a right to control what happens to your body, and that includes controlling whether or not people know about any medical conditions/procedures. So you might have an emotional response, thinking Jiang Cheng is valid for being upset that his golden core came from Wei Wuxian without him knowing, but... ethically, Wei Wuxian has the right to withhold that information.

But! some scarecrow says, If a person has the right to control what procedures happen to their body, surely that means Jiang Cheng has a right to control what happens to his own body! Therefore, the procedure was still unethical, because he didn't know everything!

And I say, well... not really. The reality is, we don't actually know how much Jiang Cheng was told. He was told to walk up a mountain, lie to the person he encountered about his identity, and ask for a golden core. And he left that mountain with said golden core... but we don't know how much Wen Qing told him when he reached the top. We know he believed Wen Qing was the Baoshan Sanren. We know he received a fully developed core, not just the ability to form a new one. Was he told that the core was from someone else? Were there signs of the transfer? Did he know the chance of success/failure? Did he not find any of the situation dubious?

(Did he really spend two and a half years fighting a war alongside, and then running a sect for a year with, someone and not realise they didn't use orthodox cultivation even once?)

The truth is, a doctor is required to inform a patient of risks, and answer any questions they ask. Wen Qing may well have disclosed the risk (if there was any to Jiang Cheng, other than potentially the transfer failing) prior to the surgery, we just don't know. We don't have any evidence that Jiang Cheng asked any questions, and from what we see in the novel, it seems likely that he simply didn't want to know. He got a core, his life was somewhat back on track; we never see any evidence of curiosity or confusion in him as to the specifics of how that happened.

The only lie we are sure that he was told was the identity of the person who he met on the mountain, who "gave" him the core. I could be petty and point out that as he was also lying about his identity, it kind of cancels out, but that would be a bit ridiculous, and unnecessary besides. The truth is, ethically, Wen Qing could have knocked him out and performed the surgery from the comfort of her own office. Because one of, if not the main reason you can ethically violate someone's body autonomy... is to save a life. And Jiang Cheng, after losing first his family and sect, and then his golden core, displayed clear suicidal ideation. He indicated, repeatedly, that he wanted to die. He refused food. Wei Wuxian even doubled checked, before giving him hope of getting a new core, that he was serious! (Rereading that scene is horrible; Wei Wuxian's dread, and eventual resignation/resolve becomes very apparent once you know what's happening).

The characters around him, including a trained doctor, believed that if he didn't get a new core, he would give up and die. Under those circumstances, a doctor has authority to make medical decisions, without a patients consent, if they believe it is a medical emergency. Wen Qing was an unquestionably brilliant doctor; if she believed doing the surgery was the right/necessary decision, who the hell are we to dispute her?

So, to be clear, under modern medical ethics (which seems to be what is being applied in these claims), Wen Qing has the right to do whatever surgery she feels necessary to save the life of her patient, no consent needed, and Wei Wuxian has the right to keep his identity as the donor a secret, since that's his own private medical history. Modern medical ethics (a bit ridiculous, when talking about magic powers, but I've seen the argument) supports our protagonist.

Now, onto the other thing. This is a lot less... ethics discussion and a lot more feels-bad-so-wrong type thing. Wei Wuxian kept the loss of his golden core a secret.

Jiang Cheng being upset by this is understandable. Like I said, I can follow the emotion/logic. Someone keeping a big secret from you can be hurtful.

But just because it's hurtful to you, doesn't mean they're in the wrong to do it!

If someone I cared about kept a massive secret from me, and I found out, I'd be upset! But my first thought would be 'Why did they feel they couldn't tell me?' And the answer here is obvious; Wei Wuxian didn't think he could tell Jiang Cheng because he knew he'd be horrible about it! Wei Wuxian admits, after the reveal, that the process of losing his core was distressing, and that he wasn't as okay with it as he pretended to be. If something like that happens to you (not... that it can, but, you know, equivalent), and you're struggling to hold it together, the last thing you want is someone you care about yelling at you about it, insulting you, making you feel bad for what happened!

Wei Wuxian didn't tell Jiang Cheng because he knew Jiang Cheng would be awful to him because of it. Jiang Cheng's jealousy when they were young was something Wei Wuxian felt he had to manage*, and he knew Jiang Cheng would feel inadequate if he realised his accomplishments were made with Wei Wuxian's core. And he would then lash out at Wei Wuxian for it, at a time when Wei Wuxian was already feeling emotionally fragile. Hell, nearly twenty years later, Jiang Cheng getting up in his face was enough to cause a Qi deviation; I can't imagine it would have been better any sooner!

No one wants to think of the people they love keeping secrets from them. And sometimes, people who keep secrets are doing it for their own sake, because they're scared, or unsure, or guilty, or whatever. But sometimes, when a person keeps a secret, the reason is not internal. If someone acts horribly to you when you tell them things, you're going to stop telling them things. And the person responsible for that gap in communication is them; all you're doing is protecting yourself.

And before anyone thinks that I'm assigning reasoning to Wei Wuxian that he doesn't have; he essentially admits it. After the reveal, Wei Wuxian states that he knew Jiang Cheng would react badly (though he didn't expect it to be quite so bad). Wei Wuxian is shown to have been managing Jiang Cheng's moods since they were young**, it's probably not the first secret he's kept. But that's kind of just... how that works; if a king kills every person who brings him bad news, eventually, all his advisors will only ever bring him good news. And he has no one to blame when his kingdom falls but himself.

SO. tl;dr. Modern medical ethics supports Wen Qing performing the golden core transfer, and Wei Wuxian keeping his identity as the donor a secret. Jiang Cheng can be upset at Wei Wuxian for not telling him that he no longer has a core, but it's not unethical, or selfish, and the nature of their relationship, with Jiang Cheng lashing out with impunity and Wei Wuxian trying to manage his moods, meant that secrets like that were pretty much inevitable. Unhealthy relationships are unhealthy. Truly, newsworthy take.

And one final note, on Wei Wuxian keeping secrets from Jiang Cheng and being portrayed as selfish for doing so; I have yet to see a. single. fic. that says Wei Wuxian keeping his sacrifice secret is wrong, but then goes on hold Jiang Cheng equally accountable for keeping his sacrifice secret. Not. One. Jiang Cheng often tells Wei Wuxian afterwards, that he deliberately got the Wens attention, but he's never framed as selfish for keeping that secret. Not. Once.

* see post-Xuanwu argument, when Wei Wuxian drags himself out of his sick bed, having just woken up from a coma, to reassure Jiang Cheng that he's no threat to his birthright. Because Jiang Cheng was jealous that his father acknowledged Wei Wuxian's skill in surviving, under horrendous circumstances. -_-

** childhood flashback; after arriving in a new place, having a massive change in lifestyle and meeting many new people (and, it seems, trying to make a good impression), Wei Wuxian took the blame for his broken leg, despite it being because Jiang Cheng locked him out of his room and threatened to sic dogs on him. Entirely because he knew one of them would get blamed, and he wanted to keep Jiang Cheng happy. People who grow up with aggressive/abusive family/people around often end up learning to juggle mood changes.

[spriteofmushrooms]

'for being rude in his own home!' your tags there, LMAO. but truly WHAT A MOMENT for everyone involved. It's amusing how other adaptations made jc's more aggressive when he is not the one raising hands

MXTX: ...He implies they're flirting in the ancestral hall, so then wx attack him together in front of his dead parents.

CQL writers: Umm...

MXTX: Because they're the heroes.

Donghua writers, barely sensible due to lust: Outhfh what if he cries and falls to his knees and Lan Wangji tears off his guan and also he has dainty little legs like a ballerina?

CQL writers: We think it might look better on screen if Wei Wuxian doesn't explode Jiang Cheng's shoulder an hour after a qi-less Jiang Cheng protects him from all comers.

Donghua writers: --and then he goes into seclusion and everyone knows and he's sooo humiliated--

MXTX: Alright but I specifically wrote this part to make it almost impossible for Wei Wuxian to face Jiang Cheng again.

CQL writers: Yeah we decided that Jiang Cheng would attack delicate uwu baby Wei Wuxian who never did anything wrong instead.

Donghua writers: Like, everyone knows. You know? And he knows they know. Slut.

[lilapplesheadcannons]

Nie MingJue, the unintentional kidnapper

Or that time A-Yuan almost got adopted into the Nie Sect

Nie MingJue is starting to get slightly uncomfortable. Sure, it has been decades since HuaiSang was a toddler (two decades, to be more specific), but surely toddlers need to blink more? The child is looking at him like he is the most mesmerising vision it has ever seen in its entire 4 years on earth.

He tries to glance through the door without being too intruding. He understands there is a touching reunion happening somewhere inside, and God knows he doesn't want to interrupt the Jiangs screaming and crying and hitting and hugging their wayward prodigal demonic cultivator, but surely someone else can take the child? Is it not a cousin of the Ghost General and her terrifying sister? Now he thinks about it, he is not so sure they are very fit guardians if they are willing to abandon their charge to any random cultivator. And the worst part is A-Yao, the person best suited to deal with this situation, has left with them, presumably trying to find a quieter resting place for the Wen remnants away from the chaos that is the 100 days celebration of the newest Jin baby.

He flinches when a soft finger cautiously pokes his cheek. The child grins guilelessly at him and says, "Pretty gege!"

Nie MingJue blushes to the root of braids. That's it! This child is obviously surrounded by unreliable people who would teach him utter nonsense or dump him in the middle of enemy territories, so as a responsible adult, it is his solemn duty to adopt the child (a boy? It is dressed as one, but who knows with Wei Wuxian?) and take it to Qinghe. He stands up with the child under one armpit, the child seemingly unbothered by being dangled like a sack of potatoes.

"He's mine!"

Lan Xichen's baby brother looks just as angry as he did on the day they first met, when he ended up biting HuaiSang. Except now he is almost as tall as MingJue, and he has already put the tip of his finger on his sword.

Rude!

Nie MingJue, a sect leader and the chief cultivator, is an older brother first and foremost. How can he resist ruffling Lan Er-Gongji's already ruffled feathers even more?

"I didn't know Wangji had a child."

Wangji bristles even further, reminding him of the time he accidentally stepped on Second Mother's cat's tail.

The child waves at him from his precarious position, "Rich Gege!"

Does Wangji's eyes soften a little? Nie MingJue can swear he saw a crack of smile in his lips. Surely, he is just hallucinating. The child chirps out again, "Pretty Gege!" pointing at MingJue. The room temperature plummets several degrees.

"GIVE HIM TO ME!"

If Wangji doesn't want to take over from Lan Laoshi, he can easily earn his living teaching enunciation to rich masters. Nue MingJue heard every syllable distinctly, including the single exclamation mark at the end. Is he serious?

Nie MingJue stares at him. He has heard rumours. The light bearing lord! The war has done awful things to the cultivators. Once kind, just men have been reduced to butchers with enough trauma to last a few lifetimes, but surely it hasn't changed the upright young man in front of him to such an extent that he was willing to...

He moves the child from underneath his arm and settles him down on the ground behind him.

"Look here, Wangji, he is just a child..."

He gets interrupted again by the same clear, obstinate tone.

"Give him to me! Now!"

Has Wangji lost it? Does he want to kill a child, practically a baby, to avenge his father and his sect? Does he really think he can get away with killing the adopted child of Wei Wuxian when Wei Wuxian himself was just a few doors away? Not to mention the Ghost General and the Jiang sect leader in the vicinity?

You can probably cut the tension with a blunt sabre. That's the first thing Lan Xichen notices when he walks in, the second thing being his brother and his best friend locked in a staring contest. Wangji looks like he is ready to start a fight, and Da-Ge has that little mocking smile, which means he is happy to indulge. Behind him, little A-Yuan is studiously examining the pattern on the carpet.

Wangji breaks the stare first. He turns to his big brother and says, almost petulantly,

"He's not giving A-Yuan back!"

Lan Xichen smiles and shakes a deprecating finger at MingJue in mock sensor,

"Now, now, what do you mean by not handing over my nephew to my brother? Da-ge! If you indeed want a child,..."

Wait a second! The jibe about the child being Wangji's, that was purely a taunt. Is it true? Did Wangji really have a child? A 4 years old? But, he begs your biggest pardon, Wangji is a child himself! How can he have a child? When? With whom?

Having his sympathetic brother on his side seems to encourage Wangji to speak further.

"A-Yuan called him pretty!"

If only people could see their Light bearing Lord pouting! Xichen tuts.

"For shame, Da-Ge!"

But before Nie MingJue can demand explanation, A-Yuan decides he has had enough of the carpet and stands up, then walks over to Lan Wangji in a brisk, businesslike manner, who bends down to pick him up without breaking eye contact with Nie MingJue and pointedly kisses the child's forehead.

Nie MingJue is pretty sure he is having a Qi deviation right now. Ah well, there are worse ways to go, he supposes.

[eleanorfenyxwrites]

WIP Wednesday

As promised, Ghost!WWX this week since it tied for second in the poll! I was going to go back and link the other posts individually but here's the tag for it, I'm pretty sure the three bits in there are all I've posted for it. In case you forgot and/or you don't want to read through the other snippets, WWX is a ghost haunting Cloud Recesses (specifically LWJ) about a year post-cql-canon (so he's been wandering alone) and once they all realize what's going on LWJ is handles it soooooo well. This new bit directly follows the previous snippet from Ch. 2, enjoy! (Next week's post will be the third place winner in the poll, something from 'Technically A Cutsleeve?' 😌)

--//--

“Jingyi, please escort the rest of the disciples inside. Reports on the hunt are due in the morning.”

“Yes Hanguang-Jun,” Lan Jingyi hurries to agree, the junior disciples behind him and Sizhui bowing the same before they troop past him and up the stairs. They’re too well-disciplined to whisper or look back at their seniors over their shoulders, but Lan Wangji is fairly sure that the whispers about his son will begin again soon, if only amongst those who remember the first time they’d made their rounds through the Sect.

“Hanguang-Jun,” Sizhui says, stricken. “It really is Wei-qianbei –”

“I know,” Lan Wangji says, because his son has never once been a liar. No matter how much his entire being wants to scream that he’s wrong, that it’s a mistake, that it’s impossible for Sizhui alone to see Wei Ying standing beside him, he knows that his son does not lie.

Which means that Wei Ying’s spirit is here, and his body is not.

Which means that if he is not already dead, then he is likely in grave danger.

“What is he saying?” he asks, and his naturally level voice is the only reason he can ask it without breaking.

“He’s..he’s been here for a few days —” Lan Wangji swallows hard around a knot in his throat “— and that he’s definitely a spirit, but he doesn’t know how. He also says that the wards around Cloud Recesses only allow him to cross sporadically, he’s experimented very briefly with it this morning. And — Wei-qianbei, slow down please –”

Lan Wangji allows himself two slow breaths to make his very temporary peace with the agony coursing through him. His composure will not last forever, but it must last at least a few more minutes.

“We will discuss it further at home. Sizhui, will you go with Wei Ying first to the library and retrieve anything that will be useful?”

“..Hanguang-Jun?”

“You know the library well, as does Wei Ying,” Lan Wangji manages, though he doesn’t have many words left before his composure slips too far. Already he can tell Sizhui can see that he’s unwell, but his son is too good, too filial to acknowledge it out loud. “I will meet you in the Jingshi in a shichen, I have business to attend to before we may begin researching what has happened.”

Sizhui looks at him far too keenly for a moment before his attention abruptly shifts to Lan Wangji’s left again and he grimaces. “Wei-qianbei, we don’t know for sure that you’re –“

“There are many ways to separate the spirit from the body,” Lan Wangji hurries to cut in despite how rude and uncharacteristic it is of him, because if Sizhui says the words ‘Wei-qianbei’ and ‘dead’ in the same sentence he doesn’t know what he may do. “I will see you in a shichen.”

Without another word, Lan Wangji turns and sweeps back up the path into Cloud Recesses on numb legs, muscle memory the only thing keeping him upright and able to walk through his home as if nothing is wrong. He dimly registers the sound of Sizhui talking quietly to Wei Ying, under his breath so as to not be spotted talking to what looks like empty air, and he’s relieved when they split off from the same path as him to head for the library pavilion, leaving him free to return to the Jingshi in silence.

He makes it three steps beyond the threshold before he collapses into a graceless heap on the floor.

[admirableadmiranda]

i’m going crazy rn bc someone on twt said smth like “no wonder wwx had internalized homophobia he grew up with jc” and i’m sitting here like. holy shit. like i never even considered that and yeah ('@⌓@’) do u think that’s like got any supported evidence or if it’s just a somewhat plausible thing based on what we know bc i can’t rmbr if we learn that he’s homophobic in their cr days

It's mainly just plausibility based on what we know and how Wei Wuxian reacts to the things Jiang Cheng says long before he even knows he's in love with Lan Wangji. There's nothing specifically in the book that points to him having internalized homophobia or anything like that, it's just inference based on Jiang Cheng (and to a lesser extent Yunmeng Jiang as a whole) being as he is.

I wouldn't say he has internalized homophobia exactly, ExR translation barring he never says anything negative about being a cutsleeve or anyone who he meets being that way, and is in fact very sensitive to any suggestions of that negativity. He's very kind about Mo Xuanyu, he never has a problem with any suggestion of Lan Wangji being gay, only the way that Jiang Cheng says it (meaning that it's bad and disgusting in Jiang Cheng's mind) and accepts it in himself quite comfortably once he does track having feelings for Lan Wangji.

What he probably does have is a decent amount of comphet from the society he grew up in, given that there is very much the idea that being gay is odd and not usual and that even characters who later are very verbally supportive later on use language that is homophobic early on (Jin Ling is the biggest example and you can watch his understanding and acceptance grow through the book, but Lan Jingyi qualifies as well), it is pretty easy to extrapolate that a very socially aware person such as Wei Wuxian would have noticed that even before he was necessarily old enough to connect it to himself and adjusted accordingly. The setting of Modaozushi is classist overall, but there are also heavy elements of misogyny and homophobia threaded in that, as is usual in such societies, and Wei Wuxian is very aware of the ways in which he cannot move as others can.

(A side note on Jiang Cheng, while his overt homophobia is all contained to the present day, it is not out of the realm of possibility for Wei Wuxian to be somewhat aware of a homophobic attitude that has yet to be as targeted at him back in CR days, what is very clear in the Lectures arc is that Jiang Cheng can see that Wei Wuxian is fascinated with Lan Wangji, that all of his focus is on being nearby and trying to befriend and teasing Lan Wangji, and throws out barbs, rude comments and tells Wei Wuxian that Lan Wangji hates him at every turn. Look at his dialogue the next time you read Lectures, there are like maybe two lines that he says in the whole arc that aren't bitter and nasty because he's angry about this turn of events and trying to get Wei Wuxian to stop what he's doing and failing every time. It's not explicitly homophobia, but it's definitely still nasty and rude all the time)

[lansplaining]

JC is like my #1 blorbo but I've always wondered, are ancestral shrines actually restricted to family members? People make a huge deal of wwx and lwj being in the jiang shrine uninvited, but is it not open to the general residents of lotus pier? Did they in fact need permission to be there? It's been ages since i read the novel but maybe you got a better sense of the context on reread

so I really do not know enough to comment on the etiquette of ancestral shrines! I hope someone else can weigh in?

I think the fuller context in terms of the book is that Jiang Cheng has just been tailing Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji across half of Yunmeng and seen them canoodling, so he is poised to be suspicious of what they've come to the shrine to do. I don't know how rude it is to do a "meet the parents" without permission culturally, but for Jiang Cheng specifically, it's a slap in the face-- especially as Wei Wuxian (as far as he believes) immediately lies about it! It's not really about the shrine, it's about Wei Wuxian sending such mixed signals about whether he considers himself a member of the Jiang clan or not.

[theawkwardvillainess]

decided to make the introduction post! (or how do you call it....)

I'm "the awkward villainess", Victoria or Vee for short, she/her. I'm 18 years old - an adult by my country's laws. I'm a egyptology student at university, and my passions are art, history, learning languages and food from different cultures! Here I blog all types of stuff, but now I'm mostly in the Mo Dao Zu Shi (the Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation) fandom.

Other fandoms I like: Scum Villain Self-Saving System, Heaven's Officials's Blessing, 2ha (Husky and his White Cat Shizun), the Lord of the Rings, Chronicles of Narnia, the Wizard of OZ, Winx Club and historical fiction✨

Favorite characters from MDZS: Nie Huaisang (my husband lol), Jin Guangyao, Su Minshan, Mo Xuanyu, Xiao Xingchen, Xue Yang, Wei Wuxian, Lan Wangji, Jiang Cheng, Wen Chao and Wen Ruohan.

this is a character positive blog so here you won't meet hate for any character! I can criticize them but never hate. It's okay if you dislike some of my favorite characters though

I ship oc x canon and make weird AUs and fanfiction, so you've been warned!

Apart from MDZS I also have my own OCs and original world/stories which go under "#the Ta-nbt world" tag!

I occasionally draw something ("#my art" tag), I'm really bad at art but I try to learn and improve! Please don't criticize the drawings too harshly, I have extremely low self-esteem and am only confident enough to post it, but become to ashamed of myself if somebody says mean words about my art :(

Also warnings:

English is not my native language, so I can use the incorrect words sometimes or construct sentences weirdly. Feel free to correct me about this, and sorry if I accidentally say something rude/weird, I promise I don't mean it!

I'm not really socialised and tend to get VERY passionate and excited about stuff, so really sorry if I act too unhinged in the asks/comments/tags! Please don't be angry at me and block me, better let's discuss what I did wrong and I will do better next time🙏

I don't have any specific DNI (except minors DNI!🔞) but I will be annoying about my opinions so you won't be able to bear it if you're some hater.... especially if you're fatphobic >:P

I'm weird. Like "was bullied in school for it" weird.

I suspect myself of being autistic, though not diagnosed officially (haven't checked)

Well I think that's all! Hope we will get along❤🖤

a picture which describes my aesthetic ☝

[winepresswrath]

baby boy jin ling

How I feel about this character

Unabashed adoration. He’s the best. I love a brat with a heart of gold, and I find his whole deal both hilarious and tragic, which is the exact right way to get me over invested. The only fic I’ve ever actually completed and posted in this fandom is about him. There’s this very fun and sad bait and switch the show pulls with him- he was such a loved and privileged baby. He was supposed to have everything. His parents, his uncles, even his shitty grandfather are just so over the moon about his existence. I could cry for days about how smug Jiang Cheng and Yanli are in the wedding clothes scene when they start talking about him, or how delighted and grateful Wei Wuxian is when believes he’s been granted the grace of getting the chance to be a part of Jin Ling’s life. The entire cultivation world basically comes together to throw parties celebrating his existence and gossip about how the Jin and the Jiang are pulling out all the stops for this kid who, at the age of one month is already “showing such promise” as a swordsman. There’s such hope associated with his birth. And then the adults fuck it up horribly for him and he grows up being co-parented by a sociopath who has complicated feelings about other people’s privilege and legitimacy and a traumatized teenager who, as a maternal uncle, probably had to fight pretty hard to be involved. And they are terrible at cooperating with each other and are also busy running different countries. I have endless feelings about how he’s always dressed in Jin colours but yelling for Jiang Cheng.

Jin Ling has clearly been fucked up by the experience of being Jin Ling but he’s also doing fine. He’s spent a lot of time being slapped down by life but there’s this optimism and vivacity to the way he throws himself into new situations that I find wildly endearing. I will forever love that he gets to break the cycle of vengeance and decide that he’s not going to hate anyone and also his uncle should stop being a pain and go talk to his brother. It’s great. He’s great. What a good kid.

All the people I ship romantically with this character

I don’t really ship him with anyone! I’m not opposed to Jin Ling dating but I’m also not very interested in it.

My non-romantic OTP for this character

Jin Ling and Jiang Cheng. It is absolutely horribly unfair that Jin Ling is stuck translating from Jiang Cheng to reasonable human being, but he’s very good at it and I am moved by that echo of Yanli and the way she always knew what he meant even if he couldn’t say it out loud. I find the idea of Jiang Cheng as a single parent both tragic and hilarious, which, again, is my jam. I’m glad Jin Ling has a person he trusts to love him unconditionally and protect him and put him first, even if that person is an emotionally constipated angry grape whose parenting report card has needs improvement scribbled on it at various key intervals. I am also just generally in my feels about how whatever else you can say about Jin Ling, he is very clearly Jiang Cheng’s baby. “You’re the one who loves him most,” indeed.  Hug your amazing nephew, Jiang Cheng! He deserves everything >:(

My unpopular opinion about this character

I do not blame him even a little bit for stabbing Wei Wuxian. He is a tragic orphan whose whole life is defined by being a tragic orphan. He lives in an honour culture where you are supposed to avenge your murdered family, and he thinks the monster who killed his parents tricked him into believing he was his friend for shits and giggles and consequently made him betray their memory. Not even Wei Wuxian, canonically very good at noticing when something about his culture is fucked up and bad, avoids the vengeance trap. I legit think Jin Ling is astoundingly forgiving and open minded. Wei Wuxian didn’t deserve to be stabbed (again) and I have many feelings about how it’s very tragic and awful for him that Jin Ling believes this horrible thing, but it’s not Jin Ling’s fault. Blame Jiggy. Or possibly honour cultures. Though honestly Jin Ling calling the cops on Wei Wuxian and tearfully explaining that his parents’ murderer has been stalking him in disguise because he’s a sick fuck who likes tormenting his victims and making them trust him before he strikes might actually be worse for him, emotionally, than a little light stabbing.

I guess I also think that while Jiang Cheng is not winning any parenting awards he has clearly surpassed his own shitty parents by a considerable degree. His parents were impressively shitty tho so i’m not telling anyone they should be impressed.

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon.

A-Qing should have lived and he should have taken her back to Lanling Jin and made her his personal advisor so they could invent heelies and glowsticks together. They would have been such great friends. Zizhen could visit and pine dramatically for her.

[giraffeter]

Characters in The Untamed, Ranked by the Extent to Which They Are “This Fucking Guy”

Sect Leader Yao: The ultimate This Fucking Guy. Chock full of opinions and all of them are bad. Couldn’t mind his own business if his own business was on fire. Also robs my terrible son Ouyang Zizhen of his rightful title of Worst Wig, which is rude and unnecessary. 10/10.

Su She: This Fucking Guy to such an extent that nobody knows his real name. I was shocked, upon rewatch, to learn that the other guy LWJ saves from the Waterborne Abyss and the guy who gives them up to the Wens were the same guy, and that guy was Su She. Only possible response to him is “who?” followed closely by “oh, THIS fucking guy.” So upset by his TFG status he does a bunch of murders about it. 10/10.

Wen Chao/Wen Ruohan/Wen Xu (tie): Could be chill about being villains but instead they’re all “bluh, bluh” about it like they’re a bunch of fucking Draculas. Nobody likes a try-hard, guys. 10/10.

Jin Guangshan: Can’t keep it in his pants; only person to achieve the title of This Fucking Guy literally as well as figuratively.  10/10.

Xue Yang: Look, he’s my emotional support sociopath too, and it’s very sexy of him, but imagine trying to have a conversation with him.  Such an edgelord he’ll stab a potato at you. People are constantly rolling their eyes as soon as his back is turned. 9/10.

Jin Zixun: Ugh. 9/10.

Lan Wangji: Listen, I love him, he is my favorite character, but you must admit that Lan Wangji is not exactly easy to get along with, and has no compunctions about being actively unpleasant to you if he doesn’t like you. I imagine meeting with him as Chief Cultivator being super stressful, even though he’s generally a pretty fair person, because the risk of being obliterated by a look of Icy Disdain is high. Su She is already launching a 20-minute rant about how he should be higher on this list. 7/10.

Wei Wuxian: I know. I KNOW. But my darling boy is a LOT. You can’t tell me the Lan disciples weren’t going “This Fucking Guy” during his class clownery. He and LWJ are constantly doing horny wrist grabs and staring at each other for a full minute of time, right in front of everyone’s salad. In the scene where the angry mob confronts him, they might as well be chanting “This! Fucking! Guy! This! Fucking! Guy!” Most of this is not his fault but he’d be exhausting to be around. Then again, so am I. 7/10.

Nie Huaisang: Nie Huaisang WANTS to be This Fucking Guy. Nie Huaisang is ACTIVELY TRYING to be This Fucking Guy. Nie Huaisang is angry he’s not higher up on this list but he’s just too Babie for me to give him more than a 7/10.

Jin Guangyao: “What?” you say. “How dare! Villainry!” But this is not a list of Who is a Bad Person, it’s a list of Who is This Fucking Guy, and JGY has spent too much of his life in positions where he can’t be This Fucking Guy indiscriminately. His dad and Nie Mingjue both think he’s TFG for their own reasons, but to people in general? Customer Service Smile all the way, baybee. Points off for all the murdering, though. 6/10.

Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan (tie): Happy to swoop in for some dramatic swashbuckling, completely uninterested in doing any of the ensuing administrative work. Like those people who only want to work on the fun part of the group project and then make the rest of the group do the rest. Would never say it, but deffo think they’re better than you. 6/10.

Jiang Cheng: Unless you are a demonic cultivator he’s torturing to death for complicated emotional reasons or his estranged brother-in-law, Jiang Cheng keeps his TFG tendencies more or less in check. 6/10 mostly for his behavior toward Lan Wangji specifically.

Lan Qiren: The actual literal Fun Police. Only reason he’s not higher on this list is because he never goes anywhere so most people aren’t exposed to his TFG-ness. 5/10.

Jin Zixuan: The flashback portion of The Untamed is, in a sense, the story of Jin Zixuan’s journey from This Fucking Guy to Wife Guy (and then Dead Guy 😬) Averaging out to a 5/10.

Nie Mingjue: We all know how I feel about da-ge, but man does Nie Mingjue think he’s right about everything. He’s willing to listen to arguments to the contrary and change his opinion based on new information, which is cool and better than a lot of people, but he really thinks he’s got it all figured out and has spent pretty much 0 time unpacking that. 5/10.

Lan Xichen: He’s like that guy in high school who’s like super hot and a big jock and smart and student body president and you can’t even hate him because he’s also really nice?? And somehow all that combines to make him, just a little bit, This Fucking Guy. 4/10.

Wen Ning: A baby. A precious baby. However, I am almost positive that his cousins referred to him as This Fucking Guy on occasion in between being Draculas. 2/10.

The Juniors: I don’t think it’s fair to rate the juniors on their This Fucking Guy-ness, because all teens inherently have a soupçon of TFG — it’s natural. N/A, with the exception of:

Lan Sizhui: Best boy. Number one best boy. -1000000/10.

Previously: Sect Leaders by How Likely Their Disciples Are to Accidentally Call them “Dad.”

[robininthelabyrinth]

Nie Huaisang and Jiang Cheng start hooking up post-canon and Wei Wuxian assumes it's part of a scheme on Nie Huaisang's part. Possibly it was actually a scheme but Nie Huaisang got into it anyway. Or if sadness is more your thing, he didn't, and Wei Wuxian is left being like "see Jiang Cheng? I knew he couldn't have been hanging around with you for fun!"

ao3 (short)

“You need to stop,” Wei Wuxian said, his eyes narrow and expression fierce.

It was a lot less effective on Mo Xuanyu’s face than it had been on his original features. No one had yet told him, presumably out of a desire to avoid being murdered by Lan Wangji for making his lover sad.

Nie Huaisang frowned at him. “Stop…what?”

“Whatever it is you’re up to!”

Oh, were they doing this again?

Nie Huaisang opened up a fan and hid his face behind it in a single movement – he’d gotten really good at it over the years – and started idly fanning himself. “Wei-xiong, really, you’ll need to be more specific. I’m up to so many things, don’t you know…?”

Normally Nie Huaisang wouldn’t bother playing along, but he could see Jiang Cheng coming down the hallway at an angle that put him directly in Wei Wuxian’s blind spot – if there was one thing Jinlin Tower was good for, it was not seeing people – and he could already see Jiang Cheng starting to smile at his nonsense, which was obviously far more important than whatever it was that Wei Wuxian thought he’d figured out.

Hmm. Maybe Nie Huaisang was being too hasty in judging Lan Wangji’s rudeness – love really did make you do the stupidest things…

“I meant in relation to Jiang Cheng.”

Nie Huaisang stopped fanning and stared blankly at him. A few steps away from the turn, he saw Jiang Cheng come to a halt as well, already scowling.

“Jiang – Cheng?” he said hesitantly. “What exactly does Wei-xiong think I’m doing with Jiang-xiong?”

Wei Wuxian crossed his arms. “I’m not sure,” he said. “What are you doing?”

Nie Huaisang blinked at him. “But if I knew that, Wei-xiong, I wouldn’t have asked you, would I?”

The main problem Wei Wuxian had with confronting Nie Huaisang about anything, really, was that he genuinely found Nie Huaisang terribly funny. The twitching lips made the glaring more difficult.

(Behind him, Jiang Cheng was rolling his eyes, a full-body production that involved a great deal of heaving of shoulders and clutching at his head at the rampant stupidity on display. Nie Huaisang appreciated his lover's dedication to the art.)

Still – and this part was worrisome – Wei Wuxian’s smile faded away soon enough, replaced by a solemn expression.

“We may not be on the best of terms right now,” he said. “But he’s still very dear to me. I won’t put up with you using him as part of one of your schemes.”

“I don’t actually have any schemes,” Nie Huaisang said, mostly because Jiang Cheng was frowning now and Nie Huaisang did not want Wei Wuxian to mess up his budding relationship. “Really, Wei-xiong! I had one scheme, and it took me over a decade – I’m hardly the shadowy puppet-master mastermind you seem to sometimes seem to take me as. Why would you think that I’m using Jiang-xiong?”

“You’re deceitful,” Wei Wuxian said. “You made Jin Guangyao think that you were weak and dependent on him for years even as you plotted to bring him down. And now you’re pulling the same thing on Jiang Cheng – what am I supposed to think?”

Wei Wuxian must have seen them in the market, Nie Huaisang thought. He’d been carping around, playing up his good-for-nothing self – Jiang Cheng liked it when he did that. Mostly because Nie Huaisang really was a bit of a good-for-nothing, his one scheme claim to fame being firmly in the past; his cultivation was weak, his achievements few, his personality…questionable…

(Jin Ling had, upon discovering them spending time together, told Nie Huaisang that he fit everyone one of the criteria that Jiang Cheng had set out for a wife, right down to the weaker level of cultivation and the proper family background. Nie Huaisang had bought him some candy on the basis that ‘be nice to Jin Ling’ was on the list, and told him to think about the type of mileage he could get out of something like that. Jin Ling had looked appropriately thoughtful, after.

Nie Huaisang was a very good influence – or possibly a bad one, he wasn’t sure.)

At any rate, Jiang Cheng liked indulging him, liked and was reassured by the contrast between them. No one looking at them would ever put Jiang Cheng second – Nie Huaisang wasn’t even prettier! – except maybe in terms of insults, and even Jiang Cheng had to admit that he didn’t really want the privilege of being called the worst Great Sect leader, even if it was a superlative.

Wei Wuxian must have seen.

Wei Wuxian must have totally misunderstood.

“Jiang-xiong was at the Guanyin temple as well,” Nie Huaisang pointed out. “It’s not like er-ge at all.”

Wei Wuxian frowned. “Do you really have the right to call Lan-da-ge that?”

“My brother’s no less my brother because he’s dead, and he kept his oath to the end,” Nie Huaisang pointed out. “Why should the other two be released from the obligations of their oath just because they chose to foreswear their side of it?”

“Stop getting away from the point,” Wei Wuxian said, probably because Nie Huaisang was right. Bitter and mean and resentful, but right. “Whatever you’re scheming that involves Jiang Cheng, stop it.”

“No.”

Wei Wuxian blinked.

“I’m not scheming, but even if I was, the target would be Jiang Cheng,” Nie Huaisang explained. “You don’t understand, Wei-xiong. You see, I like Jiang Cheng.”

“I’m sure you do,” Wei Wuxian said. “But I also think you liked Jin Guangyao, a bit.”

Maybe he had. A bit.

But it wasn’t the same at all!

“I especially won’t tolerate you using him for sex while also –”

“Wei Wuxian!” Jiang Cheng bellowed, and Wei Wuxian jumped a chi into the air.

Nie Huaisang fanned himself. “Oh good,” he said. “I was about to be worried that you’d misunderstand, Jiang-xiong, but luckily Wei-xiong decided to take all the awkwardness onto himself.”

“What do you think you’re doing?” Jiang Cheng snarled at Wei Wuxian, who blanched but scowled back.

“I was just trying to help –”

“By embarrassing me?”

“How is it embarrassing to you?!”

“You think I’d be – what – led around by my dick like some new model Jin Guangshan –”

“Oh, that’s a good insult,” Nie Huaisnag said approvingly. “I’m going to need to use that in the future. What do you think the odds are for Lan Wangji biting me if I said it to him?”

That got both of them to stop fighting and turn to look at him.

“What? Does he only bite people he likes now? He used to bite everybody.”

Blank staring.

“That was back when he was five,” Nie Huaisang allowed. “It’s been a while.”

“You have stories about baby Lan Zhan?” Wei Wuxian said at once, as one might’ve expected. “I want them. All of them. Now.”

“Weren’t you threatening him a moment ago?!”

“That’s different! That was for you!”

“Right, because you don’t think anyone would actually like me,” Jiang Cheng said.

He sounded hurt.

Unacceptable.

“I’m sure Wei-xiong just meant that you were so unbearably attractive that people would compete for the opportunity to manipulate them into your bed,” Nie Huaisang assured him while Wei Wuxian was still trying to find words. “And since Wei-xiong thinks I’m the best schemer, obviously I won hands down, and secretly eliminated all my love rivals to boot. It's all my fault. Alas! I've been caught red-handed!”

“Are you actually capable of saying a single word that isn’t complete nonsense?” Jiang Cheng asked him, his tone having returned to exasperated and fond, which was worlds better than hurt.

Nie Huaisang considered the question seriously and then shook his head.

“You…! Good-for-nothing!”

Nie Huaisang nodded happily. “Your good-for-nothing,” he said cheerfully. “I’m going to make you do everything for me from now on.”

He was, too.

Wei Wuxian looked between them. “Wait,” he said. “Is this – a thing?”

“If you mean Jiang-xiong and I, yes,” Nie Huaisang said. “He’s been courting me for years, and I refused.”

“Only on the basis of a secret murder plot which you didn’t want to get me involved in.”

“How was I to know that everything would turn out well in the end? I thought there was every chance san-ge would find a way to drag me down with him. I couldn’t let that happen to you, of course.”

“Of course,” Jiang Cheng jeered, but he looked pleased and smug the way he always did when Nie Huaisang admitted to having been won over by the very first day of his courtship, years ago. He liked being successful at things.

“No,” Wei Wuxian said. “Not that. The – good-for-nothing thing. It’s a thing. For you two.”

“Fighting words,” Nie Huaisang remarked, even as Jiang Cheng flushed red. “Coming from the dreadful Yiling Patriarch that needs to be defeated by the mighty and righteous Hanguang-jun and then taken away for a good ravishing –”

“Wei Wuxian!”

“Uh - listen – I can explain – actually, no, I can’t. Nie-xiong, you have my blessing, just don’t break his heart, bye.”

“Come back here you -!”

Yes, Nie Huaisang decided, watching Jiang Cheng chase Wei Wuxian. This was the best possible result.

[pumpkinpaix]

hello there, hope you're having a nice day <3

so i've been reading a lot of fics lately, uk for sanity's sake, and i've noticed that in most of them, lwj doesn't use contractions (eg., says do not instead of don't)?? and i think he doesn't in the novel either but i don't remember lol so i can't be sure but anyway that made me curious - does chinese have contractions as well? does he not use it bc it's informal?

hello there! I’m doing all right, i started to answer this ask while waiting for a jingyeast loaf to come out of the oven 😊 many thanks to @bookofstars for helping me look over/edit/correct this post!! :D

anyways! the answer to your questions are complicated (of course it is when is anything simple with me), so let’s see if I can break it down--you’re asking a) whether chinese has contractions, b) if it does, how does they change the tone of the sentence--is it similar to english or no?, and c) how does this all end up with lan wangji pretty much never using contractions in english fic/translation?

I’m gonna start by talking about how formality is (generally) expressed in each language, and hopefully, by the end of this post, all the questions will have been answered in one way or another. so: chinese and english express variations in formality/register differently, oftentimes in ways that run contrary to one another. I am, as always, neither a linguist nor an expert in chinese and english uhhh sociological grammar? for lack of a better word. I’m speaking from my own experience and knowledge :D

so with a character like lan wangji, it makes perfect sense in english to write his dialogue without contractions, as contractions are considered informal or colloquial. I don’t know if this has changed in recent years, but I was always taught in school to never use contractions in my academic papers.

However! not using contractions necessarily extends the length of the sentence: “do not” takes longer to say than “don’t”, “cannot” is longer than “can’t” etc. in english, formality is often correlated with sentence length: the longest way you can say something ends up sounding the most formal. for a very simplified example, take this progression from least formal to absurdly formal:

whatcha doin’?

what’re you doing?

what are you doing? [standard colloquial]

may I ask what you are doing?

might I inquire as to what you are doing?

excuse me, but might I inquire as to what you are doing?

pardon my intrusion, but might I inquire as to what you are doing?

please pardon my intrusion, but might inquire as to the nature of your current actions?

this is obviously a somewhat overwrought example, but you get the point. oftentimes, the longer, more complex, more indirect sentence constructions indicate a greater formality, often because there is a simultaneous decreasing of certainty. downplaying the speaker’s certainty can show deference (or weakness) in english, while certainty tends to show authority/confidence (or aggression/rudeness).

different words also carry different implications of formality—in the example, I switched “excuse me” to “pardon me” during one of the step ups. pardon (to me at least) feels like a more formal word than “excuse”. Similarly, “inquire” is more formal than “ask” etc. I suspect that at least some of what makes one word seem more formal than one of its synonyms has to do with etymology. many of english’s most formal/academic words come from latin (which also tends to have longer words generally!), while our personal/colloquial words tend to have germanic origins (inquire [latin] vs ask [germanic]).

you’ll also notice that changing a more direct sentence structure (“may I ask what”) to a more indirect one (“might I inquire as to”) also jumps a register. a lot of english is like this — you can complicate simple direct sentences by switching the way you use the verbs/how many auxiliaries you use etc.

THE POINT IS: with regards to english, more formal sentence structures are often (not always) longer and more indirect than informal ones. this leads us to a problem with a character like lan wangji.

lan wangji is canonically very taciturn. if he can express his meaning in two words rather than three, then he will. and chinese allows for this—in extreme ways. if you haven’t already read @hunxi-guilai’s post on linguistic register (in CQL only, but it’s applicable across the board), I would start there because haha! I certainly do Not have a degree in Classical Chinese lit and she does a great job. :D

you can see from the examples that hunxi chose that often, longer sentences tend to be more informal in chinese (not always, which I’ll circle back to at the end lol). Colloquial chinese makes use of helping particles to indicate tone and meaning, as is shown in wei wuxian’s dialogue. and, as hunxi explained, those particles are largely absent from lan wangji’s speech pattern. chinese isn’t built of “words” in the way English is—each character is less a word and more a morpheme—and the language allows for a lot of information to be encoded in one character. a single character can often stand for a phrase within a sentence without sacrificing either meaning or formality. lan wangji makes ample use of this in order to express himself in the fewest syllables possible.

so this obviously leads to an incongruity when trying to translate his dialogue or capture his voice in English: shorter sentences are usually more direct by nature, and directness/certainty is often construed as rudeness -- but it might seem strange to see lan wangji’s dialogue full of longer sentences while the narration explicitly says that he uses very short sentences. so what happens is that many english fic writers extrapolated this into creating an english speech pattern for lan wangji that reads oddly. they’ll have lan wangji speak in grammatically incoherent fragments that distill his intended thought because they’re trying to recreate his succinctness. unfortunately, English doesn’t have as much freedom as Chinese does in this way, and it results in lan wangji sounding as if he has some kind of linguistic impediment and/or as if he’s being unspeakably rude in certain situations. In reality, lan wangji’s speech is perfectly polite for a young member of the gentry (though he’s still terribly rude in other ways lol). he speaks in full, and honestly, quite eloquent sentences.

hunxi’s post already has a lot of examples, but I figure I’ll do one as well focused on the specifics of this post.

I’m going to use this exchange from chapter 63 between the twin jades because I think it’s a pretty simple way to illustrate what I’m talking about:

蓝曦臣道：“你亲眼所见？”

蓝忘机道：“他亲眼所见。”

蓝曦臣道：“你相信他？”

蓝忘机道：“信。”

[...] 蓝曦臣道：“那么金光瑶呢？”

蓝忘机道：“不可信。”

my translation:

Lan Xichen said, “You saw it with your own eyes?”

Lan Wangji said, “He saw it with his own eyes.”

Lan Xichen said, “You believe him?”

Lan Wangji said, “I believe him.”

[...] Lan Xichen said, “Then what about Jin Guangyao?”

Lan Wangji said, “He cannot be believed.”

you can see how much longer the (pretty literal) english translations are! every single line of dialogue is expanded because things that can be omitted in chinese cannot be omitted in english without losing grammatical coherency. i‘ll break a few of them down:

Lan Xichen’s first line:

你 (you) 亲眼 (with one’s own eyes) 所 (literary auxiliary) 见 (met/saw)？

idk but i love this line a lot lmao. it just has such an elegant feel to me, probably because I am an uncultured rube. anyways, you see here that he expressed his full thought in five characters.

if I were to rewrite this sentence into something much less formal/much more modern, I might have it become something like this:

你是自己看见的吗？

你 (you) 是 (to be) 自己 (oneself) 看见 (see) 的 (auxiliary) 吗 (interrogative particle)？

i suspect that this construction might even be somewhat childish? I’ve replaced every single formal part of the sentence with a more colloquial one. instead of 亲眼 i’ve used 自己, instead of 所见 i’ve used 看见的 and then also added an interrogative particle at the end for good measure (吗). To translate this, I would probably go with “Did you see it yourself?”

contained in this is also an example of how one character can represent a whole concept that can also be represented with two characters: 见 vs 看见. in this example, both mean “to see”. we’ll see it again in the next example as well:

in response to lan xichen’s, “you believe him?” --> 你 (you) 相信 (believe) 他 (him)? lan wangji answers with, “信” (believe).

chinese does not do yes or no questions in the same way that english does. there is no catch-all for yes or no, though there are general affirmative (是／有) and negative (不／没) characters. there are other affirmative/negative characters, but these are the ones that I believe are the most common and also the ones that you may see in response to yes or no questions on their own. (don’t quote me on that lol)

regardless, the way you respond to a yes or no question is often by repeating the verb phrase either in affirmative or negative. so here, when lan xichen asks if lan wangji believes wei wuxian, lan wangji responds “believe”. once again, you can see that one character can stand in for a concept that may also be expressed in two characters: 信 takes the place of 相信. lan wangji could have responded with “相信” just as well, but, true to his character, he didn’t because he didn’t need to. this is still a complete sentence. lan wangji has discarded the subject (I), the object (him), and also half the verb (相), and lost no meaning whatsoever. you can’t do this in english!

and onto the last exchange:

lan xichen: 那么 (then) 金光瑶 (jin guangyao) 呢 (what about)？

lan wangji: 不可 (cannot) 信 (believe)

you can actually see the contrast between the two brothers’ speech patterns even in this. lan xichen’s question is not quite as pared down as it could be. if it were wangji’s line instead, I would expect it to read simply “金光瑶呢？” which would just be “what about jin guangyao?” 那么 isn’t necessary to convey the core thought -- it’s just as how “then what about” is different than “what about”, but “then” is not necessary to the central question. if we wanted to keep the “then” aspect, you could still cut out 么 and it would be the same meaning as well.

a FINAL example of how something can be cut down just because I think examples are helpful:

“I don’t know” is usually given as 我不知道. (this is what nie huaisang says lol) It contains subject (我) and full verb (知道). you can pare this straight down to just 不知 and it would mean the same thing in the correct context. i think most of the characters do this at least once? it sounds more literary -- i don’t know that i would ever use it in everyday speech, but the fact remains that it’s a possibility. both could be translated as “I do not know” and it would be accurate.

ANYWAYS, getting all the way back to one of your original questions: does chinese have contractions? and the answer is like... kind of...?? but not really. there’s certainly slang/dialect variants that can be used in ways that are reminiscent of english contractions. the example I’m thinking of is the character 啥 (sha2) which can be used as slang in place of 什么 (shen2 me). (which means “what”)

so for a standard sentence of, 你在做什么? (what are you doing), you could shorten down to just 做啥? and the second construction is less formal than the first, but they mean the same thing.

other slang i can think of off the top of my head: 干嘛 (gan4 ma2) is also informal slang for “what are you doing”. and i think this is a regional thing, but you can also use 搞 (gao3) and 整 (zheng3) to mean “do” as well.

so in the same way that you can replace 什么 with 啥, you can replace 做 as well to get constructions like 搞啥 (gao3 sha2) and 整啥 (zheng3 sha2).

these are all different ways to say “what are you doing” lmao, and in this case, shorter is not, in fact, more formal.

woo! we made it to the end! I hope it was informative and helpful to you anon. :D

this is where I would normally throw my ko-fi, but instead, I’m actually going to link you to this fundraising post for an old fandom friend of mine. her house burned down mid-september and they could still use help if anyone can spare it! if this post would have moved you to buy me a ko-fi, please send that money to her family instead. :) rbs are also appreciated on the post itself. (* ´▽` *)

anyways, here’s the loaf jingyeast made :3 it was very tasty.

[canary3d-obsessed]

Restless Rewatch: The Untamed Episode 20, part three(!)

(Masterpost) (Other Canary Stuff) (Previous Post)

Warning: Spoilers for All 50 Episodes!

This episode has so much crucially important stuff in it I had to write 3 posts about it! Part one is here, part two is here. 

Don't Start None, Won't Be None

Lan Wangji has never had a real fight with Wei Wuxian before--remember, in their rooftop fight Wei Wuxian never even drew his sword. And since this is going to be a verbal fight, Lan Wangji is going to lose, badly. He's an elegant and articulate speaker, but he's not quick with words, and he speaks directly and sincerely. Weaponized speech is not his area at all, so he's pretty much bringing a knife to a gunfight. A guqin to a flute fight. Whatever. He tries to turn it into a physical confrontation, twice, but Jiang Cheng holds him back.

This throwdown is 100% about religion and orthodoxy; something that is fundamental to both of these young men's lives. Lan Wangji has made it his mission to be as orthodox as possible, doing shit like volunteering to be beaten for drinking when he didn't choose to drink. He's constantly overwhelmed by emotion, and the Lan rules are a source of regulation and safety for him. His emotions around Wei Wuxian are among the most overwhelming he's got, possibly only second to his feelings about his mom.

Right now his feelings are extra overwhelming. 

It's complicated because his relationship with Wei Wuxian literally started off with him punishing Wei Wuxian for heterodoxy. All that time they spent together in the library? Was because Wei Wuxian talked--JUST talked--about using resentful energy for cultivation. Which is precisely the ability he's just shown them, along with a style of killing enemies that's borderline evil and definitely, DEFINITELY unsportsmanlike.

So this is not, Lan Wangji is lovingly worried about Wei Wuxian and Wei Wuxian is pushing him away to avoid an uncomfortable conversation. This is Lan Wangji freaking out because his entire system of belief is being challenged and he's in love with the person who's challenging it.  

Wei Wuxian has shown up to the party wearing an International Mr. Leather tee shirt with a enamel pin stuck to it that says "I get my kicks on route 666" and Lan Wangji just. cannot. deal.  

Never Start a Fight But Always Finish One

Wei Wuxian has a couple of options here. One is to accept, kindly, that he and his friend can't be friends any more because of religion. In this option, in order to preserve his friend's comfortable sense of being right, he would have to tacitly accept that he himself is bad in some way, and allow his friend to keep having his value system, while walking away from him.  

The other choice is to hit so hard that he makes his friend feel really, really bad, and potentially rocks him off of his comfortable foundation. In the short term, the friendship breaks, but if it forces him to actually question his value system, it might lay the groundwork for a new, more accepting friendship.  Anyone who is queer with an anti-queer-religious best friend is probably familiar with this dilemma.

Wei Wuxian chooses the second option, and goes all in from the first moment, calling Lan Wangji "Lan Er Gongzi" and then upgrading to "Hanguang Jun" and even bowing. If it's possible to bow sarcastically, that's what Wei Wuxian is doing. Then he meets his eyes and sticks his chin out, essentially saying "how do you like them apples?"

(more after the cut!)

Lan Wangji's feelings are probably hurt, but he's too busy being mad to show it, and he goes straight to grilling Wei Wuxian, asking him about the killing, the talismans, and giving up the sword, all while Jiang Cheng stands by and wonders what the fuck is happening. 

Lan Wangji is making a fundamental error here, which is he's speaking as if he's an authority instead of as a peer. Wei Wuxian has only ever accepted one authority in his entire life, and that was Jiang Fengmian. Jiang Cheng is the one who, for a change, is approaching as a worried friend, while Lan Wangji approaches as if he has the right to call Wei Wuxian to account.  

Wei Wuxian won't answer his questions and is getting in his face, provoking him in a very quiet and controlled way, and Lan Wangji responds by just being really aggressive. It's interesting to see Wei Wuxian completely mastering his emotions while Lan Wangji is completely....not.  Wei Wuxian pushes harder, saying he's being rude, saying he's being a bad friend.  Which doesn't make any difference to Lan Wanji, who keeps pressing for an answer while Jiang Cheng wonders what the fuck is happening.

Come to Gusu

Wei Wuxian says he already explained, that it's complicated, it will take time to explain, so then Lan Wangji makes the utterly dumbassed demand that Wei Wuxian return to Gusu with him to explain it. What, exactly, is his plan? Bring Wei Wuxian to Gusu and have Lan Xichen (at the very least) and probably also Lan Qiren help him to convince Wei Wuxian that resentful cultivation is bad? How is that likely to work out? Let's have our own flashback, to that classroom interaction that led to the punishment in the library.

Lan Qiren: How will you make sure the resentful energy will only listen to you and not harm others? [Note: he's not wrong, Wei Wuxian] Wei Wuxian: I haven't figured that out yet ["details," as OP's dad used to say] Lan Qiren: If you did, the cultivation world would not allow your existence [i.e. we, the Lan Clan of Gusu, will kill your ass]

Lan Wangji probably doesn't think he's threatening Wei Wuxian with death by inviting him to Gusu, but he kinda is, if Lan Qiren was serious back then.  Lan Wangji is so upset and fearful that he's not really thinking clearly at this point. He loves Wei Wuxian and he's certain that cultivating with resentful energy will destroy him. [Note: he's not wrong, Wei Wuxian]  But Wei Wuxian is beyond fear. He's already been destroyed once.

Wei Wuxian rips on Gusu and then says, in a super-provocative way, that he prefers Yunmeng, which prompts Lan Wangji to say "don't joke around" as angrily as possible. 

This part of the interaction always confuses me because...shouldn't he prefer Yunmeng? He's actually from there and lives there and belongs there and stuff? He's just saying "I think I'll go with my brother" yet WWX and LWJ both act like he said he'd rather go to Demon City.

Lan Wangji takes a big step forward and Jiang Cheng blocks him while Wei Wuxian continues to act unperturbed and puzzled while holding his demon flute out in between them. 

Finally, FINALLY, Wei Wuxian calls him Lan Zhan, and asks him a serious question: What do you really want. Lan Wangji calms down for a second--although he keeps leaning into Jiang Cheng's sword block--and gets to the point, which is that the unorthodox path is dangerous, and harmful to his temperament.  

Kill one turtle together and you think you're the boss of me

So, these dudes are talking about 2 different levels of unacceptable cultivation, in this episode and the next few. Netflix translates these as "wicked tricks" and "crafty tricks," which both sound absolutely ludicrous in English, so I'm going to use my own preferred terms, going forward.  

I think what they are calling "Wicked Tricks," which includes spirit snatching and feeding people to the murder turtle on purpose in order to harvest their resentment could be translated as Heresy--adhering to a forbidden belief or practice; standing in opposition to Orthodoxy.  

Edit: After rewatching Episode 35, in which Nie Huaisang explains why their whole blade thing doesn’t count as “wicked tricks,” I’ve changed my mind about what to call this. NHS says that “wicked tricks” specifically involve the use of humans & human spirits (killing, sacrificing, etc.). Which means Necromancy is probably the better term for this particular type of cultivation, although it is still (also) Heresy. 

"Crafty Tricks," which is using resentful energy to raise and control already-dead people (ghosts and zombies) as well as just generally using resentment for basic stuff like beating Jin Zixuan's ass, could be translated as Heterodoxy--deviating from the accepted belief or practice, but not to the point of complete opposition.

Wei Wuxian laughs while Lan Wangji tries to be convincing, but since Lan Wangji is just repeating what he's been taught, he's not making much headway. Instead of saying "there's no exception throughout history" he could have, instead, gone with his own actual observations, such as "you are acting like a sadistic prick" or "you seem amazingly miserable" or "you aren't hugging your brother, what the fuck is that about?" But no.

Wei Wuxian responds to the charge of heresy by saying nuh-uh, and explains his methods, sort of, while going back to calling him Lan Er Gongzi. Lan Er Gongzi responds by actually literally yelling at him, and saying he's not allowed to decide for himself about what he's doing, as if the words "allowed to" have ever meant a goddamn thing to Wei Wuxian.

Temperament

At this point Wei Wuxian is done. He goes and gets right up in Lan Wangji's face and sticks a metaphorical knife right in his heart, smiling as he does it. "How do others know my temperament?" he asks; "and why should it be their concern?" i.e. you are not in my heart. 

This makes Lan Wangji so mad he calls Wei Wuxian "Wei Wuxian" for possibly the only time in the show, and he also flashes a whole bunch of angry teeth. (Gifset here). In a callback to the JFM-YZY fight back in Lotus Pier before the war, Wei Wuxian just calmly says "Lan Wangji" back at him, and then tells him to go fuck himself.

Jiang Cheng still doesn't understand what the fuck is happening, but this is a sentiment he understands, so he also tells Lan Wangji to go fuck himself, reminding him that Wei Wuxian is Jiang clan property and it's not the Lans' place to discipline him. Adding "and I'm not going to discipline him any way, look how good he is at killing people!"

Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji continue to stare into each others' eyes from a distance so close that it really should lead to making out, but they are both much too angry for that. 

Wei Wuxian is as cold as we ever see him, smiling as he silently confirms: I do not belong to you. Lan Wangji glares back, his anger maybe finally giving way, a little bit, to being hurt.

Finish Him!

Wen Chao picks this moment to wake up and crawl over to the trio, begging Lan Wangji and Jiang Cheng to save his life, since he presumably knows it's pointless to beg Wei Wuxian. Wei Wuxian turns around and gives him the EXACT SAME dead-eyed smile he just gave Lan Wangji, and kicks him.

Then he tells Lan Wangji to please leave so he and his brother can finish torturing this dude to death, and caps it with an official Jiang Clan eye roll.  

Lan Wangji, poor bb, just throws in the towel, and turns and leaves, the anger finally starting to leave his face and be replaced with something else...chagrin, maybe? Or maybe just softer anger, for the moment. 

After he's out of sight Wei Wuxian turns and looks after him sadly, all of the cruelty and hardness gone from his expression, while Wen Chao says "forgive me,"  possibly voicing what Wei Wuxian is thinking.

Lan Wangji walks out the front gate, troubled, and hears Wen Chao scream. He stops and replays the most pointed part of the fight in his head - the part where Wei Wuxian asked him, "who do you think you are?" Lan Wangji went into the fight believing he was completely right and was entitled to judge Wei Wuxian, but he's come out of it with his certainty shaken. 

Family Time

The Yunmeng brothers go to the ancestral shrine in Lotus Pier even though the whole "reclaiming Lotus Pier" scene doesn't happen until Episode 24. So apparently they just kind of sneak into the the shrine, and then sneak back out. Or, you know, continuity error.  Anyway Wei Wuxian is nothing if not adept at sneaking around death-related places.

Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng bow and offer incense. It's nice that the Wens didn't fuck up everybody's name plaques when they were in control of the place...or the tassels, candles, etc. 

Wei Wuxian quietly tells Yu Ziyuan and Jiang Fengmian that he did what they asked--taking care of Jiang Cheng and Jiang Yanli--and they can rest now. Nosy parker Jiang Cheng wants to know what he's saying, but Wei Wuxian just changes the subject. 

They talk about going to Qinghe for the final combat of the Sunshot Campaign. Wei Wuxian says that's why he returned, which...dude, you can't even pretend you came back to be with your loved ones? Ouch. Jiang Cheng doesn't really react to that, but he's happy when Wei Wuxian says he wants to see Jiang Yanli. Wei Wuxian wants to know if she's ok and if she's mad at him, and Jiang Cheng says wait and see, because direct answers are not the Jiang Clan way.

Jiang Yanli is helping tend to the wounded, and we see her telling a particularly fussy wounded dude to suck it up and stop complaining. 

When Wei Wuxian shows up she totally stops paying attention to the wounded dude so that she can smile at Wei Wuxian. 

He looks back at her tearfully, briefly managing to smile but then just trying to hold it together. He has been to hell and back, and doing his very best to hide it, but when he sees the person who loves him most--the person who will NOT spend 20 minutes yelling at him as soon as they see him--he starts to crack open.

[bloody-bee-tea]

Permanent - All Star Xicheng White Day 2

Day 2 of All Star Xicheng White Day brings some Current Year and in my country they talked about only having one chosen household to interact with during a lockdown, which in the end didn't quite come through, but it serves us well for fic purposes XD

Jiang Cheng knows that’s going to happen before his phone even starts to ring. So it��s no surprise to him to see Lan Xichen’s name flash up on the screen.

“Xichen,” he greets him as he accepts the call, though he lets his head drop against the couch.

He knew this would happen the moment he heard the news, so this isn’t that much of a surprise.

“Did you hear?” Lan Xichen asks him and he sounds anxious.

“Of course I did,” Jiang Cheng scoffs. “It’s everywhere after all.”

“True,” Lan Xichen says with a small laugh before he goes serious again. “Wanyin, I won’t be able to come over anymore,” Lan Xichen then tells him and he sounds honestly sad about that, too.

“I know,” Jiang Cheng says with a sigh. “You have to take care of Lan Qiren.”

“Yes,” Lan Xichen agrees with a whisper. “He doesn’t need that much help, but if he does and I’m always at your place—”

“I understand, Xichen,” Jiang Cheng says, and he does.

Besides, it’s not like they are living together or anything. Jiang Cheng still doesn’t know how it happened that Lan Xichen spends more time in his apartment than his own, but they are not living together and there are no obligations on either side.

“I’m really sorry,” Lan Xichen says and Jiang Cheng honestly feels upset over the fact that Lan Xichen feels like he has to apologize for wanting to be there for his family.

“Don’t be,” Jiang Cheng says and then forces out a laugh. “At least like this I’m getting rid of the leech who made a home in my apartment,” he then teases and there’s a beat of silence before Lan Xichen laughs softly.

“And here I thought my cooking and company would be enough to pay for rent. Foolish of me, I see,” he gives back and Jiang Cheng laughs.

“Your food is not actually that good. Completely tasteless, it’s an affront,” he says, and neither of them mention that Lan Xichen makes a special portion just for Jiang Cheng, spiced up to his liking.

“Then you’ll be glad to be rid of it for a while,” Lan Xichen whispers and Jiang Cheng immediately agrees.

It wouldn’t do to make Lan Xichen feel bad about wanting to be there for his family and so Jiang Cheng won’t.

“You got that one right,” Jiang Cheng says. “I guess Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian will be each other’s household?”

“Of course,” Lan Xichen says with a sigh. “Wangji called me while they were still airing the news. I don’t know why I ever expected anything else, to be honest,” Lan Xichen tells him and Jiang Cheng feels a flash of anger for Lan Xichen.

Lan Wangji truly is selfish; he didn’t even ask his brother what they should do with Lan Qiren, he just expects Lan Xichen to cover that part, so Lan Wangji can continue to do disgusting things with Wei Wuxian.

“That sucks,” Jiang Cheng says and even though Lan Xichen would never say out loud that he agrees, his silence is also pretty telling.

He long ago gave up on correcting Jiang Cheng or defending his brother, and Jiang Cheng learned that it’s the best admission he will ever get from Lan Xichen regarding this topic.

“Will you be alright, Wanyin?” Lan Xichen suddenly asks him and Jiang Cheng huffs out a laugh.

“I’m used to living alone,” he shoots back. “Will you be alright? Do you even still remember your way around your own apartment?”

“Of course I do! I will be alright,” Lan Xichen promises him and Jiang Cheng hums.

“Good,” he whispers and can’t deny that the easy confirmation stings a bit.

He doesn’t want Lan Xichen to be miserable—of course not—but he could have at least pretended to think this over a bit more.

“I’ll let you go now,” Lan Xichen says. “I’ll see you after this lockdown ends.”

“If,” Jiang Cheng grumbles and then sighs. “Don’t go and forget my face, alright,” he can’t help but to say and he can hear the smile on Lan Xichen’s face when he answers.

“How could I ever,” he gives back and then hangs up on Jiang Cheng.

It’s fine. He can totally do this, it’s not like he got used to Lan Xichen always being in his apartment or anything.

~*~*~

Jiang Cheng is definitely not fine, he has to admit on the second day.

It’s not only that he misses Lan Xichen’s presence in his apartment, but also the knowledge that he can’t see any of his family or friends.

Wei Wuxian chose Lan Wangji as the one household he’s allowed to see. Jiang Cheng has no desire to see his parents, so they are out as well. Nie Huaisang’s health is not actually well enough to take even the slightest risk of contracting the virus, so he’s not meeting anyone.

Jiang Yanli has called Jiang Cheng very regretfully right after he hung up on Lan Xichen and told him that the peacock still needed to go to work, and she wouldn’t let her workers alone at the restaurant and Jin Ling would be in day care because of that so they were seeing altogether way too many people for her to be comfortable with and so Jiang Cheng couldn’t see them either.

It is in times like this that Jiang Cheng realizes that he is in fact a family man, and that he doesn’t do too well with absolutely no contact at all.

Especially since he got so used to Lan Xichen being there with him all the damn time.

At first it was a way for Lan Xichen to escape seeing Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian being all disgustingly in love in his home, but that excuse disappeared when Lan Wangji moved into his own apartment—thankfully not directly together with Wei Wuxian, though Jiang Cheng would never understand how Jiang Yanli managed to convince them that living alone for a while would do both of them some good first—and still Lan Xichen didn’t stop coming over all the time.

He was there when Jiang Cheng came from work, he was there when he woke up, and Jiang Cheng had long since ago converted his study into a second bedroom, just so that Lan Xichen doesn’t have to sleep on the couch anymore.

Jiang Cheng got used to Lan Xichen being a permanent fixture in his life and his apartment.

It was all fine and dandy, but now the apartment feels awfully empty with just Jiang Cheng in it.

He misses waking up to the smell of coffee, which Lan Xichen specifically brewed for him, and he always forgets that he doesn’t have to put down two plates for dinner, and most of all he misses coming home to someone else and having someone to banter and talk with.

He misses Lan Xichen.

Jiang Cheng misses him so damn much, that he even loses sleep over it, because it feels wrong not having to be a bit more quiet after nine and having no one to wake up to, and it’s definitely putting a damper on his mood.

Sure, Lan Xichen and he constantly text and they call each other once a day, but it’s not the same and Jiang Cheng hates it.

It’s on the third evening when he puts down one too many plates yet again that a realization hits him over the head like a hammer.

“Oh,” Jiang Cheng whispers and sinks down on the chair, staring into nothing. “Oh fuck,” he whispers again and then gets his phone to call his sister.

“A-Cheng,” she warmly greets him, but he is too shocked to properly reply to that.

“Am I in love with Xichen?” he asks her, damn well knowing the answer, but he needs to talk about this with someone right this instant or he’ll go insane.

“I should hope so, seeing as you’re living together,” Jiang Yanli gives back, clearly confused and Jiang Cheng drops his head on the table.

“We’re not,” Jiang Cheng whispers. “We’re not living together. We’re not even togetherlike that,” he tells her, and her silence is really worrying.

“What do you mean?” she asks after a very long moment and Jiang Cheng groans.

“He’s just—we’re friends. He comes over a lot, but we’re just friends!”

“Are you, though?” Jiang Yanli asks, clearly recovering faster than Jiang Cheng.

“Yes!”

“But you do have feelings for him?” Jiang Yanli carefully asks and Jiang Cheng groans.

“I didn’t know!” he desperately says. “I was so used to having him here all the time, and we’re so comfortable together, and I just didn’t know! I didn’t realize.”

“Is he not with you?” Jiang Yanli wants to know and Jiang Cheng realizes that he might have forgotten to tell her that Lan Xichen decided to make Lan Qiren his one household.

“No,” he admits. “He’s staying at his own place in case his uncle needs him.”

“And you miss him,” Jiang Yanli softly guesses and Jiang Cheng hates how right she is.

“I miss him so much,” Jiang Cheng whispers. “Fuck, I miss him.”

“Oh, Ah-Cheng, of course you would miss him. I bet he misses you, too.”

“I don’t actually want him to miss me, because then he’ll feel bad about wanting to prioritize his family and I don’t want that,” Jiang Cheng rushes out and Jiang Yanli laughs softly.

“You really do love him,” she says and Jiang Cheng lightly smacks his head against the table.

“Fuck, I really do.”

“It’s not something bad. I’m pretty sure he feels the same,” Jiang Yanli tells him and Jiang Cheng stares off into nothing again.

He thinks she might actually be right, because there are a thousand little moments Jiang Cheng can name where Lan Xichen smiled that special soft, small smile at him, or where he reached out for Jiang Cheng or where he made it seem like they were living in domestic bliss.

“I hope so,” Jiang Cheng whispers and then whips his head up when someone rings at his door.

“Did you order food from somewhere that is not my restaurant?” Jiang Yanli asks him, and her voice is noticeably colder than just a few moments before.

“Of course not!” Jiang Cheng gives back, affronted that his sister would actually think that. “I didn’t order anything. I’m not expecting anyone.”

“Then you better go check who it is,” Jiang Yanli says. “Let’s video call soon so Jin Ling doesn’t forget what you look like,” she then says, and before Jiang Cheng can enthusiastically agree, she hangs up on him.

“Rude,” Jiang Cheng mutters, and gets up, but he freezes in his steps when the door to his apartment is opened.

“Wanyin?” Lan Xichen calls out and Jiang Cheng rushes to meet him in the hallway.

“Why did you ring first if you brought your key?” he asks and then his gaze falls onto the suitcase Lan Xichen has with him.

“Are they sending you on a business trip? In this situation?” Jiang Cheng asks, and he feels angry on Lan Xichen’s behalf.

There are restrictions to traveling right now and while Lan Xichen is doing a stellar job at his work, it hardly justifies to expose him to danger like that.

“No, no, relax,” Lan Xichen says with a smile but then he grows serious again. “I actually—you see—” he starts but he seems to nervous to say it and Jiang Cheng rolls his eyes.

“Just spit it out,” he urges him on, completely ignoring his own rapidly beating heart because he thought he would have more time to come to terms with the fact that he’s in love with Lan Xichen before he has to see him again.

“I thought I’d move in,” Lan Xichen rushes out, and then goes red in the face.

“You what?” Jiang Cheng asks, completely taken off guard.

“I thought I would move in,” Lan Xichen repeats, his voice steadier this time. “That way we would be one household and I could still meet with shufu if the need should arise,” Lan Xichen explains and when he meets Jiang Cheng’s eyes, it’s his turn to go bright red in the face. “If you would be okay with that, of course,” Lan Xichen tacks on and Jiang Cheng laughs because he is so much more than alright with that.

“We’re so goddamn stupid,” Jiang Cheng whispers and then steps right into Lan Xichen’s personal space, convinced that he’s welcome there.

He’s proven right, when Lan Xichen doesn’t only step even closer, but also puts his hands on Jiang Cheng’s hips.

“Oh, are we?” Lan Xichen asks, and there’s a teasing twinkle in his eyes. “It wasn’t me who failed to pick up on a lot of flirting,” Lan Xichen tells him and Jiang Cheng presses his lips together before he shrugs.

“Well, better late than never, right?” he asks and is rewarded with a blinding smile and a soft kiss.

It’s a combination Jiang Cheng hopes to get many, many more times in the future.

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