#yana reads mdzs

[each-uisge-and-glashtyn]

you reblogged 2 posts back to back correctly identifying the fandom and tagging appropriately (mdzs, aa). did you follow me into them and if you didnt then what fandom do you recomend? you are clearly a person of excellent taste. i'm looking for something that will leave me completely unhinged please and thank u

I have reblogged much of those fandoms, but i did not follow you into them!

A couple of my friends have loved AA for YEARS, and I've been (excruciatingly slowly) working my way through the first trilogy since like 2020. I just finished the second game. For as much as I adore Edgeworth, AA is.........not my favored game series. I'm debating figuring out how to rom the one with Simon Keyes so I can see my blorbo-in-law, though.

And my roommate got into MXTX right about when everyone else english side got super hyped up for the English release announcements, and ended up taking me down with her. MDZS is good, it's her favorite, but HOB/TGCF has my heart in a chokehold. You just can't beat 800 years of devotion like that!! Also the level of weirdo4weirdo hualian are is just *chef's kiss*. (Yes I've also read, and reblogged, svsss. Shen Yuan is just like me for real for real, and it infuriates me. I'd be more self aware if I transmigrated, and as soon as OOC lock came off? Fucking MY world now.)

Anyway, you're looking for recommendations. Uhhhhh. Truthfully, I'm not sure, since most of my unhinged brain rot series are (relatively) old and terminal at this point, as well as not being able to entirely account for personal taste. You're catching those two cause they're New and Active. And I apologize if i rec something you already are into, i can NOT keep track of all the fandoms I've seen people in over the years. But! Things I have brain rot over, in somewhat decreasing rot:

☆ D. N. Angel (manga by Yukiru Sugisaki) (the OG brainrot)

☆ Kuroshitsuji (manga by Yana Toboso)

☆ Devil Survivor & Devil Survivor 2 (jrpg video games by Atlus)

☆ Persona 4 & Persona 5 (jrpg video games by Atlus)

☆ K (anime by GoHands and GoRA)

☆ Fire Emblem: Three Houses & Fire Emblem: Three Hopes (jrpg video games by Intellegent Systems and Koei Tecmo)

☆ Amnesia series (japanese otome vn by Idea Factory)

☆ The Queen's Thief series (books by Megan Whalen Turner)

☆ The Queen's Blade series (books by TC Southwell)

☆ The Sylph series (books by L. J. McDonald)

☆ Captive Prince trilogy (books by C. S. Pacat)

Please be aware that most of these come with Content Warnings, and please either look them up or ask what they are if you're concerned!

I think most other things have brain rot characters in them, but aren't overall something I'm gone for. But!! I'm probably forgetting things!! Because I have a shit memory even for my beloveds!! If you want to know what gave me brain rot, even if only for a short time, checking out my tags or my AO3 bookmarks is the way to go. If I liked it enough to give it a tag or bookmark it, it's rotted some part of my brain at some point (esp bookmarks). I'd say if i wrote it too, but a couple things I wrote for an exchange despite not being what I'd normally care about. Good luck!!!

[agendratum]

by the way by the way BY THE WAY can we talk about su she? can we talk about su she telling jgy to go without him when he has the chance to escape, not asking to rescue him too, just hoping that jgy will get away safe? or how he, already wounded, crawled to jgy to help him? or how he gathered his remaining strength and in incredible burst of inspiration, of just wishing to protect jgy, generated so much energy, that even wwx, and, honestly, everyone else in the temple, was impressed by it, so much energy, his sword couldn’t take it and shattered before he could reach nmj, but if it didn’t, he would actually cut his head off successfully. but su she’s sword was unfamiliar with that kind of strength, so it shattered, and su she died, trying to protect jgy.

and how jgy allowed himself to cry when it happened, because in that temple su she was the last person who still truly believed in him, because once jgy simply remembered his name, because at this point no one would care anyway.

[bublegvm]

there are two weeks left for this goddamn semester before finals start. goddd two bloody week left (or one. this week is the most hectic i hope next week will be easier.) before i can finally binge watch the untamed then binge read mdzs. im vibrating

[agendratum]

ok so

as usual after finishing an arc of mdzs my head is full, many thoughts. so let’s talk about the guanyin temple confrontation.

first thing that i kept paying attention to were actually the changes made in order to turn it into live-action. so in cql they had to make the gray-gray characters, the “there are no good or bad guys, just people and their circumstances” characters (unless you’re jgs, than yeah you’re a bad guy and everyone agrees on that actually) into slightly more black and white characters. by the end of cql we are lured into this fake sense of security, “haha, we know who the bad guy is!” (then a year passes and here you are, now a jgy apologist), by the end of mdzs, you just know that, well, decisions were made, unfortunate decisions, by many different people. 

cql had to make wwx into a bit nicer version of himself. the good protagonist couldn’t lose control and accidentally kill a bunch of people, and then kill another bunch of people fully willingly, cause his sister just died and that was the last connection he had to the idea that something still matters in this world. no, out protagonist should be... like a little bit nicer than that. so they lifted some of that responsibility for atrocities off him, but they couldn’t just evaporate it, could they? they had to put it somewhere. they put it on jgy. after all he’s the big bad in the end of the story, well, the only surviving person from all people that could be considered big bads, he’s the one that “did every terrible deed imaginable”. he could take that responsibility, they had to make his grayness into a slightly darker shade anyway.

i am actually kinda surprised by how different my reaction to jgy was in mdzs. obviously, there is a year difference between me watching cql and me reading this part of mdzs, and over that year i changed my opinion on jgy 5 thousand times and joined the camp “actually meng yao deserves all the best things in the world”, but anyway. when i was watching cql i was like, oh my god, can someone just kill him already, before he does something bad again, before more bullcrap comes out of his mouth, and also stop yelling at this kid about all the “valid” reasons to why you killed his dad. in mdzs my reaction to jgy’s confessions was like, “huh. he has a point”.

now don’t get me wrong there, some shitty things were done, but the thing is, the things he did really made sense from his point of view, from this position and life experience he really had no other way to go. i especially was convinced by his reasoning to why he couldn’t cancel his engagement with qin su. not only he would suffer from this story, because he already went through so much to make this marriage possible, but also qin su’s parents and herself would most likely suffer, their public image would be destroyed, only jgs wouldn’t lose anything. and you could feel the hatred and bitterness he felt towards his father talking about this, and everyone in the temple could agree with that, because he “just forgot he made another child”, he didn’t even notice.

another interesting detail for me was lxc saying, “it’s not that i didn’t know that you did some of these things, it’s that i thought you had a good reason for doing them”. so yeah, a reminder, lxc isn’t blind and he isn’t an idiot. he trusted a person he thought he knew better than anyone else, and he believed in this person. the problem, i think, is that “a good reason” is different for lxc and for jgy. lxc would understand a righteous reason, doing something for the greater good. working for wen ruohan? that was explainable. they all were fighting in a war, fighting for the better, brighter future, and meng yao’s contribution to that future was immeasurable. what if he killed some people there? he had a good reason in lxc’s eyes. but meng yao had other good reasons in his life, some of these reasons lxc never had to deal with in his life. survival, for example, is one of them. meng yao’s early years were very different from lxc’s. not to say that lxc’s life was easy, but it was never truly unstable. meng yao had to learn how to survive in a world where no one wanted him. he lived with one dream, promised to him by his mother, a future where he wouldn’t have to suffer anymore, where he wouldn’t have to smile at people he hated, please every one of their desires so they wouldn’t harm him. and then he entered this life promised to him and he still had to survive, but now in a luxurious man-eats-man world of lanling jin.

meng yao’s life really was this unstoppable ball of snow rolling down the mountain, and every decision he made just made the ball bigger and it would just roll faster. there is even a moment where jgy accuses lxc of being naive. lxc isn’t really naive, of course, it was said in the heat of the moment, but it is a fact that lxc was never kicked down a staircase, never had to crawl back up, and the thing is, at the bottom of the staircase, there are other good reasons to do things.

and in a way lxc understood that jgy in his position really didn’t have any other choices, he just couldn’t find peace in this mindset. he kept repeated through that part, “and yet, and yet, you shouldn’t have done that, you should have...” and he never said what exactly jgy should have done. because lxc doesn’t know. jgy doesn’t know. no one knows. what choices were better? how could he fix all that and still survive? in a way, lxc saying that reminded me of wangxian farewell in the burial mounds. when lwj asks, “you really indent to keep going like this?” and wwx, who wished, who longed for another solution, for some way out, asked him, “what else can i do? what method can i choose to resolve this, not use this technique and still protect people i want to protect?” and lwj didn’t have an answer. lxc didn’t have an answer either.

another amazing thing about guanyin temple confrontation, is that it’s very heavily wwx’s pov. most on the novel is his pov of course, but there were a loot of his thoughts in this arc. and he was rather understanding towards jgy. not in a way “i agree with every reasoning behind every decision you made” but in a way “i understand that you had your reasons, but all of them will become irrelevant really soon, they already are, because the crowd will only remember you as a son of a whore who did every terrible deed imaginable, and all the good deeds will be forgotten” 

now his thoughts on nhs, or who he suspected nhs to be, were way less nice. especially compared to live action, nhs didn’t make such an impression on me as he made through wwx’s thought process in the end of guanyin temple arc. of course, wwx is no sect leader yao, he is not the one to jump to conclusions, he just noticed that if you put some facts together, they actually start making a lot of sense, and formed a full picture. but he didn’t have any proof, so he kept it mostly to himself. yet he still thought for a moment about nhs as someone who didn’t care about collateral damage that much, who was ready to sacrifice lives of juniors, sect leaders, anyone, if it would add to jgy’s kill count and make his fall and destruction even more disastrous. not that those are not the things that happened in live action, but you know, when wwx put it all together like that in one paragraph, i really felt it. like, oof, dude it’s ROUGH. and not even jgy’s death was enough, as nhs basically admitted to stealing meng shi’s body and planning to repay jgy for what he did to nmj’s body. yikes

i mean i still support nhs in everything he does, but yikes

also side note, glad that the dead cats situation finally became clear for me. this whole year i was so confused about who left all these dead cats for juniors to find. i thought maybe xue yang did?? to lure wwx?? so apparently it was also nhs. good to know.

another detail, probably the last one my brain can generate for now, that pained me a great deal was my poor child jin ling. i already cried about some things related to him and this arc, but there was another little one in the very end here, after jgy died. jin ling realised, that there were now three people, wwx, wn and jgy, his little uncle, that were responsible for his parents’ death. people he had every right and reason to hate. all three of them. and yet he couldn’t hate any of them. he couldn’t avenge his parents, that died so long ago he couldn’t remember them, because all three people responsible for what happened, had something, some reasons, some circumstances, that made them really not the bad guys in jin ling’s life. and they all cared about him, protected him. how could he hate them? how could he not? and in this way this poor child repeats, unfortunately, his uncle’s curse. to have someone he wants to hate so much but just simply can’t. it warms my heart at least that jin ling has a much better support system than jc had when he had to live through that experience. so there is hope.

[agendratum]

god all these posts on this website that promised me that once i read the novel i will see all these extremely obvious things, like, jiang cheng the spoiled villain, lan wangji the terrible ab*ser, wei wuxian the poor victim who did nothing wrong ever in his life and i read it and i’m still waiting like

so when will i see it?

[agendratum]

god thinking about that jiang cheng's rant in the temple again. like how he continued to say "you're so good wei wuxian, there is a reason for everything you did wrong, you sacrificed so much and suffered in silence, what am i compared to you, just a joke" (not word by word, but this is how i remember it, the book is on the other side of the room and I'm not getting it right now).

because yes, there is, there is a reason for everything wei wuxian did, we as a reader know that, jiang cheng at this point also knows that, and all of these reasons are so GOOD, of course jiang cheng sees himself as a fool in everybody's eyes if he still angry with wei wuxian after finding out all that. can he be angry, if everything wei wuxian did had such a GOOD reason? of course he can, wei wuxian didn't ask him before making such a huge sacrifice for him, the sacrifice jiang cheng didn't ask for and would never ask for, making meaningless jiang cheng's own sacrifice, he is a fool, he saved wei wuxian just for wei wuxian to ruin his own life, ruin jiang cheng's life and die?? can't he be angry at him, can't he hate him, for runing his own life just to save jiang cheng?

but

that's the thing, right

he did it all because he tried to save jiang cheng. isn't that ironic. everything ruined because they loved each other so much.

he did it to save jiang cheng, so does he even have the right to feel angry? does he have the right to feel anything but guilt and gratitude?

but can you not be angry? when right there, in the temple, wei wuxian still doesn't get it. "it's what i owned to jiang sect" "let the past be past, i know you can't forget it, but please, try"

that's another thing. it doesn't matter when and how, but jiang cheng loses wei wuxian. back then, when he allows himself be caught by the wens, or when wei wuxian decides on his own to give him his core, when he gets thrown to the burial mounds and comes back as a stranger, when he leaves with the wens, when he dies, when he comes back, miraculously, and there in the temple looks jiang cheng in the eyes, but doesn't see him, doesn't understand him anymore. "try to move on" did he ever understand him at all?

weren't they the closest in the whole world? how come, that they never really understood each other, that the cost of them being able to live on is each other? can't he be angry about that?

but does he want to be angry really? he was angry for so long after all

and that rant, that pained monologue, it doesn't even take that much space in the book, but it incapsulates so well all the mixed feelings, emotions, thoughts

and then it stops, he quietly says that he's sorry, quietly cries and you can see, that in reality he is just very very tired

[agendratum]

they’re checking kids’ homework together, while wei ying is bathing in the barrel drinking emperor’s smile

domestic post-canon wangxian can actually kill me, i think

[agendratum]

love that jgy and xy’s friendship is literally that text post: “did you try to poison me yesterday? be honest”

(it’s ok, it’s not poison, just cut-out tongues i guess)

also love how jgy basically nonchalantly asked xy, “are you free next friday?” before telling him he has to go and burn down the brothel

[agendratum]

i don't remember how to hide stuff behind read more on mobile so mm sorry

but ugh i love the way wei wuxian's ghouls switch from being incredibly creepy to incredibly mundane and sometimes childlike and back in a matter of a few moments. good stuff. it adds so many points to creepiness. one moment they're sinking their teeth into someone's flesh, the next they're hiding behind their master's legs, eyes looking curiously at people they have never met before, unsure what to do. one moments they're laughing, throwing flowers at someone, fairytale like, magical, beautiful, and the next moment the smiles drop from their faces, they all go quiet, too pale, too unnatural to be there, eyes following that same someone cautiously. the book is painting such an interesting picture here, a picture that i love to see

bonus points for wei wuxian, who spends the day hanging out with undead creatures, then goes home to pretend to be three year old for his senior sister.

[agendratum]

suddenly thinking again about how some people believe that mdzs!wwx wasn’t interested in lwj before his resurrection, when there are numerous flashback scenes focused on wwx giving lwj extra attention seemingly for no other reason than to fool around. extra attention being emphasizing how handsome and beautiful lwj is, giving him various gifts and showering him in flowers. like, ok??

[agendratum]

“see you tomorrow, lan zhan”

“see you tomorrow, wei ying”

as they fall asleep in each other’s arms

[agendratum]

[agendratum]

love how the entirety of family dinner extra is about wwx's adjusting to his life in cloud recesses, following rules to not get lwj in trouble, hanging out with lan juniors, but also about lotus pier, jc and jl

like, he goes to lan sect dinner and spends it dreaming of the parties they used to have in lotus pier, he meets juniors and asks them about how jc and jl are doing, lwj sneaks in some normal food for wwx and wwx remembers how during gusu lectures they would always go out in town and get food from that specific tavern, and lwj asks, "we?", and wwx, "jiang cheng and i"

I'm just like

inch resting

[agendratum]

oh my fucking god you’re so stupid wei ying

so first of all, he does HAVE A GOOD MEMORY, just not for things you would expect him to. he fucking remembered the kiss

that’s so fucking embarrassing

both for lan wangji and for me, cause I AM the one sitting with the red face reading this

second of all, lan wangji is all terrified of like the worst thing he had done in his life, “that was your first kiss??” and wei ying is ling, “ohhh so you were angry cause you thought i already kissed someone before that” WEI YING

[agendratum]

you know, thinking about it, i can live without a chapter about swordfucking, but i just think that if i’m purchasing a book that originally had that chapter, it shouldn’t be cut out and i should have the right to read the swordfucking chapter is all i’m saying

[agendratum]

list of yiling laozu’s hobbies:

- planting vegetables

- building houses 

- reviving corpses

- creating artefacts 

- playing with a two years old kid