WITH PLEASURE, @moonbelowsea. I mean, that was a wild 4am brainwave, but I mostly stand by it anyway? SO LET’S TALK ABOUT JEDI.
(Also, this is gonna have spoilers by implication for anyone who hasn’t finished the show/book, so read with caution! And the spoiler will be for something that, from the bottom of my heart, I, someone who cares about spoilers not at all, would encourage you to remain unspoiled for.)
So first off, in the Star Wars universe, there is no way to recreate the circumstances that had Wei Wuxian inventing demonic cultivation in canon. You cannot take away someone’s access to the Force without also taking away their access to the Dark Side. In the immortal words of Han Solo, “That’s not how the Force works.” And if that’s true, then Wei Wuxian doesn’t end up in a situation where the only option available to him is his single-plank bridge, because either the Force is there or the Dark Side also isn’t. Yeah, sure, the Dark Side is dubiously more powerful than the Force, but I don’t think that matters much, because the Force is pretty damn powerful, and…
Wei Wuxian has never loved anything so much that he’s unwilling to lose it. He’s not ‘attached’ to anything. There’s a lot of stuff and people he loves very much, but never in a particularly possessive way, and never in a way that supplants his other goals. Wei Wuxian will fight to the ends of the earth and to his own destruction, but only for moral imperatives. Things he’s willing to give up: his golden core, his family, his home, his reputation, literally everything he has. He fights to save the Wens not because he doesn’t want to live without them, but because it’s the right thing to do. He doesn’t even know most of them. And when he does, he loses pretty much everything he has, which, so we’re clear, no one else is willing to do.
There’s no possessive side to his love, nothing that he clings to when the only other option is letting go of his moral absolutes. You can make an argument that his inventing demonic cultivation is this on its own—that his use of an ethically dubious method to preserve his life and save the cultivation world from the Wens is comparable to going to the Dark Side for similar reasons (save the galaxy from the Wens, etc)—but again, I don’t think that’s necessarily a useful comparison, because you can’t replicate it based on Star Wars canon.
LAN WANGJI, ON THE OTHER HAND. Lan Wangji’s love is deeply possessive (and not just in a kinky way, though, you know, that too). He’s incredibly attached to Wei Wuxian; he’s willing to go to incredible lengths to keep from losing him a second time. This turns out to be fine, because Wei Wuxian is, without a doubt, a good person and someone who deserves to be saved, but I don’t think that’s at the forefront of Lan Wangji’s mind—this is more explicit in book canon, but when they first (re)meet at Dafan Mountain and Jiang Cheng tries to hit Wei Wuxian with Zidian to force his soul out of the body he assumes Wei Wuxian is forcibly possessing, Lan Wangji blocks the strike. Zidian doesn’t work anyway because Wei Wuxian got resurrected via sacrifice, but Lan Wangji would have no reason to block it if he thought that—he assumes Wei Wuxian is forcibly possessing Mo Xuanyu (a Bad Thing) and therefore moves to prevent him being removed.
I’m not even a little bit saying this makes Lan Wangji a bad person (it’s actually a personality trait I’m extremely fond of in fictional characters), but I am saying that being willing to do morally dubious things to prevent the loss of people you love (another book thing, but saving Wei Wuxian after the massacre at the Nightless City is frankly another example of this) is literally exactly what turned Anakin into Darth Vader in canon. Lan Wangji has no interest in vengeance (except on a very petty and non-violent level), which is a point in his favor and definitely lessens the possibility of him turning to the Dark Side, and he’s got enough self-restraint that I’m not saying it’s a done deal, but.
Lan Wangji is the kind of character who would be an amazing Jedi, held up as a shining example to all, up until the point at which circumstances conspire to fuck Wei Wuxian over and he becomes a Sith Lord without warning, leaving people all around him going, “What? Him? Him???”
Wei Wuxian, on the other hand, is the kind of guy who spends days in the Jedi vaults inspecting Sith holocrons and having terrible ideas and being disapproved of for being too reckless and emotional (though he actually isn’t? Lan Wangji is way more likely to make a choice based on emotions than Wei Wuxian is—this is why Wei Wuxian is a better Jedi), but then when it comes right down to it, his interest is purely academic. The Dark Side can’t touch him.
I mean, to be fair, in Star Wars, your fellow Jedi can sense some of your feelings—so instead, Lan Wangji is always being reminded to chill and be more like Wei Wuxian, and other than Wei Wuxian’s distressing tendency to yeet himself out of speeders and go in without a plan, he’s the one the Council treats as the Perfect Jedi. And everyone around who isn’t a Jedi is just sitting there like, “What the fuck. What the actual fuck. How is this the dynamic. How does that guy need to calm down. THAT OTHER GUY JUST JUMPED OFF A BUILDING SCREAMING, ‘COME AT ME, WENS.’ What the fuck.”
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