#wei wuxian my beloved

[morethanwonderful]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[morethanwonderful-archive]

It's honestly adorable how little it takes for Wei Wuxian to activate mama bird mode.

The guy sees a bunch of random Lan disciples that he only just met the day before get insulted one (1) time and just immediately goes off on Madame Mo, no holds barred.

Oh, your son just died? Well Wei Wuxian has just spontaneously adopted every disciple in this room, and that is no excuse to be rude to them.

[yurokiku]

happy birthday wei wuxian! 💞

[phantazmz]

Wei wuxian, prince of my heart

[lukeskqwalker]

he's so callous <3

[the-marathon-continues-nip]

I love the tags you added to the Wei Wuxian post you reblogged. you are absolutely right!

thanks for dropping a line!!

yeah, wei ying is my fave, and sometimes my boy gets done wrong😓

I'm not really in the fandom (you can't pay me to get on stan twitter🤣) however I read a ton of fic and a lot of times Wei Ying gets blamed for things that really wasn't in his control, or his responsibility.

Ah well, such is fandom!

[julchenawesome]

Happy birthday, Wei Wuxian!

[ID: Background with Pink, orange (warm) colours and a little bit of blue and purple. In the middle a smiley Wei Wuxian, and around him from the left is (top to down) Jiang Cheng as pikachu with stars, hearts and lotus, Wen Ning as his corpse self with radishes and hearts, Jin Ling wearing a crown, with lotus, hearts and stars. In the right, Lan Wangji as a vampire with hearts and music symbols, Lan Sizhui with an aureole, radishs, butterflies and hearts, and Lan Jingyi with devil horns stars around him. In front of Wei Wuxian, there are the words "HAPPY BIRTHDAY, WEI WUXIAN 31/10" END ID. ]

[emkini]

Oh how the turn tables

[cloudpalettes]

we're so back

[lotuslate]

oh, your love is sunlight!

[morethanwonderful]

Out of all of Wei Wuxian's traits, one of the ones that fascinates me the most is how incredibly casual and chummy he is with corpses. All the other cultivators are a bit desensitized to the dead by nature of their profession, yes, but Wei Wuxian in particular treats the dead very much the same as he treats living people, and I think it's simultaneously one of his best and most concerning attributes.

On the good side, the way Wei Wuxian treats the dead is absolutely an extension of his overall goodness and empathy. He stands on the side of those that are looked down on, and nobody faces more discrimination that the dead. He treats the dead like people because they are people, and they deserve to have their voices heard. That's what Empathy's for, and that's why he revives Wen Ning to stand as witness to his own murder. Wen Ning is not a thing! And even when Wei Wuxian is raising armies of dead Wens to fight on his behalf, we get illustrations of him giving a helping hand to a weak old corpse that can't stand on its own.

Wei Wuxian is painted in very deliberate contrast to Xue Yang, who treats the dead as tools and deprives them of agency. His closeness with them is a symbol of his kindness.

However, beyond treating the dead decently and like people, there is a point where his chumminess with them starts to get unsettling, and that's the point where it becomes a reflection of his loneliness and trauma. In particular, I'm thinking of his cuddliness with the ghosts he uses to torture Wen Chao and the corpse girls he's hanging out with when he invites Lan Zhan to drink with him. Because treating the dead with respect is a very different thing from having a corpse lay in your lap as you stroke its hair. And fierce corpses by definition do not have personalities (with Wen Ning as the exception that proves the rule), so treating them as companions to socialize with is rather concerning behavior.

So why is he like this? Isolation and trauma!

It's easy to understate the trauma of Wei Wuxian's three months in the Burial Mound, especially given that we don't see them play out but do get details about so many other horrible moments. But those three months? They Fucked Him Up. In particular, beyond the trauma of the near death experience (or presumably many many near death experiences in a row), he spent the better part of three months without seeing a single other living human. People are not meant to do that.

So what is a person gonna do when he spends three months in Worse Solitary Confinement? And when that solitude is spent on Fierce Corpse Mountain? He's gonna get really weird about corpses. He's gonna turn into the kind of man that would let a murderous ghost he's controlling lay in his lap as he strokes her hair, because for an extended period of time, that is the closest thing to human contact he's had access to.

And later, post-sunshot-campaign, Wei Wuxian does regain access to living humans and society, but he's still incredibly isolated. Just about everyone besides his siblings and Lan Zhan hates and/or is scared of him by the time we hit the scene of him and the fierce corpse girls throwing flowers, so it's no wonder he's hanging out with dead people. He already picked up the habit of replacing company with corpses once, so of course he doesn't see anything wrong with it. Maybe they're there as bodyguards, maybe he's just extremely lonely and doesn't have any human companions to drink with him, or maybe (probably) it's a mix of both. But in any case, it's a pretty clear expression of a horrifying degree of both past and present isolation.

That's why, though he doesn't lose his respect for the dead or his desensitization to touching corpses, we never see him just Hanging Out With Mindless Ghosts in his second life. It's a substitute for real companionship, not a healthy behavior, but lack of company is no longer an issue he has after being resurrected.

He doesn't need an entourage of corpse girls, because this time, when he wants company, he's always got Lan Zhan.

[morethanwonderful-archive]

Wei Wuxian's relationship with his own reputation when he first wakes up post-resurrection is so interesting to me. He's so foggy when he first takes Mo Xuanyu's body, but through what he first remembers through the fog, you get a pretty clear picture of what’s most important in his head.

Like, on one hand, he knows quite well that he isn't evil, and he's a little offended that everyone thinks of him as such. He protests being called a malicious ghost! And he's uncomfortable with Mo Xuanyu's summoning him, as he doesn't particularly want play vengeful spirit and slaughter the Mo clan. That's not who he is.

But on the other hand, it's clear how much he's grown used to being regarded as an object of fear. His first half-conscious thought is shock that Mo Ziyuan would "dare" to kick him, and he jokingly marvels at how someone as violently powerful as the Yiling Patriarch could be reduced to eating leftovers on the floor. His reputation is very much there at the top of his mind.

So if we take his thoughts just after resurrection as the thoughts that are most deeply engrained and automatic for him, the picture is paints is just a little bit tragic. The belief in his own goodness is second nature, but so is the assumption that others will give him a berth, and that they will do so because they're scared. The "Yiling Patriarch" had become Wei Wuxian's default state of being when he died, despite how much he never approved of that name, and it's strange for him to no longer have the lonely armor of his horrid public image.

[zunaki]

Wangxian in public being disgustingly in love and the Juniors on a matchmaking mission

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

If I was in a lucid dream with a ghost, I would simply impress them with my blunt rolling skills

[sandushengshou]

the untamed + text posts

[retiredpeach]

Yiling laozu T.T