jiang cheng and onion headlines

Lan Qiren opening his door: ...why are you here

Jiang Cheng holding baby Jin Ling in his arms: I heard you have experience being a cranky single man raising his nephew after your sibling dies?

Lan Qiren gesturing inside: come in. I'll teach you how to love and care about him in such a tsundere way people call you neglectful

i think i made a post about this already, but i think it's really important to understanding both of them and their relationship that (in the novel) the iconic part of Wei Wuxian's first impression on Wen Ning wasn't being kind and friendly to him, after meeting him practicing alone, and wasn't the mere fact of niceness.

and it wasn't standing up for him to his shitty cousin and talking him up, and making sure he got a chance to show off, either.

it was that after Wen Ning choked under pressure and fumbled that chance and made Wei Wuxian look stupid for championing him, Wei Wuxian was not even a little bit mad at him. it did not even occur to Wei Wuxian to be mad at him. most people would be mad at that point! he clearly expected to get yelled at!

but Wei Wuxian was so far from that kind of insecurity he did not even experience these events as humiliating, and he thereby revealed he had not taken those steps to build up Wen Ning on his own behalf, with any selfish motive, but purely from the unfiltered impulse to help.

Wei Wuxian did not in the least feel that having taken Wen Ning's 'side' (unsolicited, probably almost entirely unwanted) entitled him to anything from Wen Ning.

Wen Ning actually has high standards! it was not the little bit of kindness or the brashness that won him over, it was the fact that that kindness persisted undisturbed after Wen Ning provided the provocation of failure.

How i see Wei wuxian leading the band of disciples through out the book:

Bonus: Wei Wuxian and Wen ning, the ghost general 🫶

(Fun fact: i drew Wen Ning as an owl because in my native language, owl is "burung hantu" which literally translates to "ghost bird" lol)

A mxtx crossover event where all the red-black characters had to fight, I believe, would result in a very interesting rock paper scissors scenario.

Wei Wuxian, being the Ghost Whisperer, could probably beat, or at the very least subdue Hua Cheng. We know Hua Cheng is weak to Ghost Stuff a la the Mount Tonglu opening incident, and Wei Wuxian has dealt with extremely powerful spirits in the past.

That being said, I think Hua Cheng could take Luo Binghe in a fight. This guy bested 33 heavenly officials, his swordplay is unmatched, and Luo Binghe is very powerful but I imagine that power comes with the side effect of very little finesse. Additionally his protagonist halo probably wouldn’t save him here since he’s not the only protagonist.

However, Luo Binghe would totally destroy Wei Wuxian. With his itty bitty Mo Xuanyu core he doesn’t stand a chance. Tearing through an army of the undead is the exact sort of op bullshit Binghe excels at, so that option is out too.

That being said, if their love interests are also fighting, Xie Lian bodies those fools. I’m sorry but even though Lan Wanji is excellent and SQQ is a peak lord, they do not stand a chance. Xie Lian’s favorite trick for 800 years was to break boulders on his chest while he had no access to any spiritual energy. Dude folded the heavenly emperor like a lawn chair. No contest.

Shang qinghua decides mobei juns tiddies win by default

Family…

Thinking about the parallels set up between Wei Wuxian and Mo Xuanyu, and how actually most of them are oddly specious.

The sketch of the backstory lines up, but on close examination they're mirror images.

Wei Wuxian wasn't kicked out of his sect, he left it. Wei Wuxian didn't hate the house he grew up in, he loved it, and getting the people there killed was the absolute last purpose for which his dark powers were ever intended.

Jiang Cheng was no Mo Ziyuan--his jealousy was a complicated thing all twisted up with love, and while he would lash out at Wei Wuxian both as a casual means of shit communication and more damagingly in moments of high tension, he had neither the desire nor the ability to bully him, and in general respected his boundaries almost too well.

When Wei Wuxian destroyed himself about Jiang Cheng, it was to give him cultivation, and protect his life and happiness. He would never have killed him.

Madam Yu was a domineering aunt-like figure, who hated Wei Wuxian for reasons of reputation, and because she had resented his dead mother, but she crucially did not have the power to actually disrupt his lifestyle to any significant extent.

Mo Xuanyu was shut up in a small room to rot; Wei Wuxian didn't even attend classes unless he wanted to. Mo Xuanyu was weak and disliked; Wei Wuxian was brilliant and popular.

Mo Xuanyu's uncle is a cipher of a figure, without character or agency, a nonentity who is resented to death apparently mostly for what he didn't do; in theory he is the master of the house, but he certainly never protected his wife and son's punching bag from them.

And this is what got me thinking along this track: because people keep interpreting Jiang Fengmian as this, as exactly like Mo Xuanyu's nameless uncle, a nonentity who lets his wife make all the decisions, and is contemptible therefore.

He shows up in fic characterized this way all the time, handled narratively as a gap rather than a person, an absence where there should have been a parent, and it's...totally inaccurate? The man only has a few scenes but the things that are most firmly established about him are:

Now almost none of this made it into cql besides point 4 and maybe 6, 5 is technically there but buried by the cinematic framing, so I totally get why the fandom on the whole struggles to characterize him well, and it's easier to write him off.

But it keeps bugging me to see him and Yu Ziyuan squashed into the mold of the Mo, because not only is that boring and reductive and kind-of-missing-the-point, it's like. Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng's characterization suffers a lot when you alter the environment and take away the influence exerted by their shared father figure.

Jiang Fengmian was Wei Wuxian's primary adult role model and it shows.

Jiang Cheng's relationship to his own sense of ethics is fraught because 'teaching him good ethics' was his dad's number one parenting goal, but they misunderstood each other so badly (partly because Yu Ziyuan kept loudly misinterpreting them to each other, which is so realistic I can't get over it, that's exactly how it works good lord) that Jiang Cheng has a direct association between the concept of 'doing the right thing even when it's hard' and a feeling of personal inadequacy.

The fact that Wei Wuxian got their dad-person's approval for being exactly himself and Jiang Cheng not only couldn't do that, he couldn't even get that same level of approval when he really pushed himself to rise to expectations, because Jiang Fengmian did not intend that warmth as a 'reward,' and so never realized he was withholding it, and therefore misunderstood Jiang Cheng's visible jealousy as a dangerous sense of personal entitlement that had to be carefully restrained, which reinforced his distrust of Jiang-Cheng-the-person and fed into a shitty loop where they were less and less able to relate to one another--that's fantastic. That's so human! I love it so much.

Both their failures are their own but at the same time it would never have gotten so bad if Yu Ziyuan hadn't been interjecting herself in there, in the middle of their relationship, fucking it up. That's family, baby.

I would ofc like if there was more fic engaging with the subtleties of all this because it's so good, mxtx did such elegant work here and it is not sufficiently appreciated. But it's the kind of thing that's hard to write good fic about; I am struggling with it myself.

So mostly I wish there was just more fic that didn't impose Mo Xuanyu's cliche angst backstory on Wei Wuxian, who has a whole different thing going on.

And I'm pretty sure that the structure of the thing, where we're sort of primed to interpret Wei Wuxian in Mo Xuanyu terms but as his backstory trickles out it turns out he's the exact opposite in most respects, is very deliberate setup.

Part of ensuring that the twist about why he took up demonic cultivation, and how this led to the rest of his destruction, feels absolutely natural and like the only thing that could have happened, even if you didn't see it coming.

With the number of times I've seen Jiang Fengmian made casually complicit in selling Wei Wuxian down the river in AUs like this isn't even shocking to anyone involved, despite the fact that when Jiang Sect abandoned him canonically the fact that Jiang Fengmian would have never (probably) no matter how much jeopardy he put them all in, and Jiang Cheng resents that knowledge and feels it was Bad Sect Leadership, plays a nonzero role, I feel I'm due an AU where Jiang Fengmian survives and is every bit as much 'pig eating my cabbages' about Wangxian as Lan Qiren.

Except he has a diametrically opposed personality and value system, so the way he expressed it would be entirely different.

Lan Wangji getting a shovel talk from Wei Wuxian's 'uncle' come onnnnnn.

Teen Wangxian during the cloud recesses arc!

I still can’t believe that Wei Wuxian shared that book with Lan Wangji and he didn’t even look at it himself 🙄

characters who dig themselves out of their graves (whether literal or metaphorical) are at the top of the list. nothing beats a character who should have died but didn't and comes back to haunt their own life and the world around them, benevolent or violent it doesn't matter, it's enthralling either way

Which MXTX Character Would Be Most Insufferable Online?

Full Bracket

(Bonus match theme: Stomping their foot irl while arguing)

maybe a hot take: I don't think there's any act of revenge in all of MDZS that we are meant to take pleasure in

wow this year-old post is back for some reason and everyone is misinterpreting it like heck

my point is: every time someone gets revenge in MDZS, there is something in the narrative that puts a little crack in any sense of triumph. you can ignore that, sure, and take pleasure anyway, but you know. that’s on you. you’re choosing to ignore the questions these acts raise, the empathy for the unintended victims and even for the perpetrators that the story is asking you to have. enjoy your less complicated and more boring story, I guess.

something I've noticed a lot recently - I can't say if it's a trend or just "thing I happened to start noticing" is people adding noncanonical (in fact, sometimes outright contradicting canon) horrifying details to already horrifying things and every single time it lessens the impact.

If the genre is explicitly horror, this pile-on either destroys the tension built by mystery and the unknown; or turns down the contrast so that instead of a starkly horrifying event everything turns into a dull sea of gray badness in all senses of the word. And in a work that is not specifically horror, but in which horrifying things are occurring, it results in overkill in which the viewer simply becomes numbed to how bad it is because you keep throwing detail after detail and in many cases it rips open plot holes that didn't exist in the source text by making a situation go from "subtly horrifying in a way the protagonist could ignore until it was too late" to "obviously so fucked that the protagonist now looks either like a monstrous person turning a blind eye, or the biggest idiot who ever existed."

(Note: this is actually very loosely tied to this post, funnily enough. A few examples I have in mind are people adding bigoted views to a character who never displayed them in canon, and without fail it turns the story from "oh, I see how people trusted this horrible person until they betrayed them" to "why the fuck didn't you leave the second they started with the slurs." It also often says some uncomfortable and unfortunate things about the person adding these details, namely, why did you think Mr. Gaslighting And Torture needed to also be homophobic for people to catch on to the fact that he is The Bad Guy.)

the mdzs fandom does this a LOT. everything they make up about every character backstory is just so overblown I can't take it seriously. And it's not like canon isn't already pretty bad!

a while back I read a fic where they decided to try and portray wwx's time stuck in the burial mounds, which the original author intentionally did a fade out for, knowing that the reader would likely imagine things worse than would be described in specifics. The fic had him running around looney-tunes style from zombies, repeatedly getting beaten to death, for a month straight. and i was meant to take this cartoon nonsense seriously. author, please, they already trapped him in campell's abyss. you don't need to pile on reasons for it to be worse!

That's just the one specific case that came to mind but in this fandom specifically there's a problem of taking every silence and trying to fill it in. the story of the lan parents gets this treatment a lot too. to say nothing of inventing childhoods for several characters even more terrible and traumatizing than the ones they actually had.

I know that because the story takes place after wwx comes back jiang cheng's whole "i don't believe wei wuxian is actually dead i'm gonn keep obsessively looking for him" shtick got retroactively legitimized, but it is prety important to remember that wei wuxian was in fact super dead the entire time and if it hadn't been for a depressed 20-something doing a suicide ritual, influenced to an unknown degree by a revenge plot that wasn't in play yet at the time off wwx's death, he would never have come back at all. And jiang cheng would've kept going "No! He's still out there I know it" for eternity with absolutely no proof or results.

Jiang Cheng, my man, what the fuck

breaking news: area man unlocks rare skill to occupy both the denial and anger stage of grief at the same time! Also posesses innate ability to never move on from this stage at all ever.

Wei Wuxian: Has chronic memory problems that cause him to forget important information about both who is love with him and who wants him dead

Wei Wuxian: At most briefly met Jiang Cheng’s dogs one time over two decades ago before they were taken out of his sight and given away

Wei Wuxian: Needs only to meet a dog named Fairy to instantly recall that as a small child Jiang Cheng named his dogs Princess, Jasmine, and Love and develop an instant conviction deep in his soul that it is Jiang Cheng’s fault their nephew gave his dog a stripper name.

[image description: distracted boyfriend meme. the boyfriend is labeled “wei wuxian’s memory,” the girlfriend is labeled “names and faces of people who want to kill him,” and the woman passing by is labeled “treasure trove of embarrassing childhood stories with which to make fun of younger brother.” /end id]

Tags from @winepresswrath

thinking about him (jiang cheng, and the way we dont even see him unsheathe sandu– symbol of his training, hardwon skill, and control– in the entire present timeline, BUT he excessively and immediately uses zidian, which is indicative of the way he’s just been fucking festering in his wounds and his trauma for almost two decades and wwx’s return brings it all back to the surface and he loses all the restraint of a sect leader and reverts to relying on impulse and emotion)

an important note on wwx's characterization that i think is important and sometimes people will get wrong, is that wwx doesn't have low self-esteem ("i'm stupid, i'm ugly, i'm annoying, i'm bothersome, nobody likes me") nor does he have low confidence ("i can't do this" "i don't know this" "i can't do anything right"). in fact, both of these are extremeeeely high in his personality as a teen and young adult

what wei wuxian does have, however, is low self-worth, specifically when it comes to his own needs and well-being compared to other people. couple that with his high confidence and urge to pay off debts of gratitude, and you get his extremely self-destructive behavior ("it's fine if i lose my core as long as jc has it for the good of the sect, i can survive without one", "it's fine that i'm being forcefully kissed by a stranger because she's nervous and i don't want to embarrass her", "it's fine, it's all fine, as long as it's me, because i can take it")

thank you @lovepsychothefirst @protect-namine and @runespoor7 for your additions as well, you are very right!!

it wouldn't even be low, but some weird, extremely distorted sense of self-worth, considering he does recognize and protest when he is treated unfairly. he does not think he deserves poor treatment either! it's never a matter of "i deserve this", but always "i can take it, i can handle it" for the sake of other people, even if it means lying to himself until he's been convinced