I know that as writers we can do whatever we want with our characters, but I’m still nervous about people telling me that Lan Zhan is OOC because I actually put a lot of thought into why he is the way he is, so here’s a thing.
If MDZS was the same except it was omegaverse and Lan Wangji was an omega, then I don’t think very much would change at all. Him being an omega itself doesn’t mean a lot, but it’s how the society treats omegas in general and how he in turn is treated that changes his personality. The Lans generally are very sheltered, so I don’t think Lan Wangji would be that different in a canon setting.
However, this is a university setting where Lan Zhan was raised from birth around young adults, especially young adult male alphas.
I’ll start with talking about Lan Wangji (the alpha). The reason Lan Wangji is as wimpy as he is in social situations is that he was taught from a young age to be that way because he is an alpha. His mother and uncle (and also his brother, who was taught the same) hammered it into him that he has to not get in unnecessary fights and to be polite to omegas. Being around so many unruly alpha men growing up, he learned that the best way to avoid confrontation is to submit because anything else will put him in a sticky situation. Posturing and being aggressive went against what he was taught, so the other option was submission. Lan Xichen is very similar.
Now, Lan Zhan was not taught these things. In contrast, his mother mainly taught him to stand up for himself and protect himself from alphas. Both he and Lan Wangji were trained to fear confrontation with alphas but for different reasons and therefore it had different outcomes. For Lan Wangji, he learned to submit. For Lan Zhan, he learned to be cold and mean. If Lan Zhan were to act submissive, then he was put at the mercy of the alpha in question and he learned that he can’t trust alphas not to take advantage of him. So he put up walls and guarded them fiercely.
If you think of Lan Wangji as being closer to 35yr old Lan Wangji in canon, then think of Lan Zhan as being closest to 15yr old Lan Wangji in canon as far as interacting with people around him.
The other big effect of being raised as an omega in a university setting is that Lan Zhan learned too early on that he was a sexual person meant for the sexual pleasure of alphas. He learned to be very aware of his own body and how alphas looked at him. This left him with some trauma regarding his bodily autonomy and it shows its head later on in part 2 when he experiments with rape roleplaying with Wei Wuxian as a (albeit probably unhealthy) coping mechanism to explore consent and the violation of it.
This means that Lan Zhan is much less sexually repressed than Lan Wangji, and he has a lot less shame surrounding his sexuality. He’s more comfortable with sex than he is with romance, which brings me to my next point.
Lan Zhan, unlike in canon and unlike his alpha counterpart, was raised by both of his parents. His parents did not have a happy marriage and his mother wasn’t happy until they divorced when Lan Zhan was a child. His mother had told him for most of his childhood not to fall in love and marry, mostly as an offhand comment that she later turned around on once he became an adult. So Lan Zhan has a lot of conflicted feelings about romance and believes that it is a trap and that marriage will only lead to misery and a life of subservience.
The next thing about Lan Zhan is that he has very very low self-esteem. Because of the expectations put on omegas that he fails to meet (he is not overly kind and submissive), he believes that he is genuinely not a good person and that he only pretends to be so. For most of his life this wasn’t a problem for him since being cold and mean to alphas kept him safe from their harassment, but when he falls in love with Wei Wuxian he’s forced to introspect and he realizes that he doesn’t want to be cold and heartless, but he fears that that’s all he is. I relate this to in canon when Lan Wangji struggles with his feelings for Wei Wuxian and violates his consent and bodily autonomy on Phoenix Mountain and has to struggle with himself and whether he’s going to follow in his father’s footsteps or be a better person. In the end he chose to be a better person, but he carried that guilt with him for over a decade.
The last thing I’ll bring up about Lan Zhan is his feelings about having children. It is conflicting in the narrative because he’s conflicted about it. The truth is that he really, really wants to have children someday. But because of his low self-esteem, he believes that he doesn’t have what it takes because he’s not a “good omega.” It’s not a situation where he doesn’t want kids and is convincing himself to want them, but it’s the other way around.
Oh and one more thing that isn’t super important but I wanna add, Lan Zhan likes omegas. If we were to replace real world sexualities with dynamic rather than gender, he would be bisexual. Lan Wangji is the same. At times it might seem like Lan Zhan would prefer for Wei Wuxian to be an omega, but that isn’t true (after he and Wei Wuxian truly start a romantic relationship, his thing about Wei Wuxian being an omega is mostly a kink. He gets off on it).
Romantically, it’s like this. In a world where Lan Zhan and Wei Ying existed together, he would have no problem admitting his love for him and he would be quite romantic from the start, whereas with Wei Wuxian it took a long time struggling with himself to admit it.
This is because for him, loving omegas is safe. He doesn’t care about societal expectations that would forbid him from loving an omega, but he does care about societal expectations that would force him into a marriage with an alpha to whom he would be subservient. He is afraid of that kind of life and so falling in love with an alpha scares the shit out of him. But if anything, the fact that he faces that fear and marries Wei Wuxian anyway goes to show how much he loves and trusts his alpha. His love for Wei Wuxian is only all the more intense and passionate because of that fear he held for so long.
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