alex

joined to follow my friend, posts fandom thoughts every now and then

[karlyboyyy]

Maaan poor Mo Ran this dude on the verge of a mental breakdown sobbing wanting to confess all his past life sins to his boyfie shizun and Chu Wanning’s autistic ass is just like “it’s ok babe how about I touch your boner? No seriously let me touch your boner.” And Mo Ran’s like “noooo ok ok let’s make out I guess” which turns into “ok yeah we’re fuckin tonight I don’t even care let’s gooooo” only for Xue Meng to be like “knock knock shizun I frew up ☹️” so Chu Wanning’s autistic ass is like “Mo Ran you beast! unhand my cock I must attend to the sad puppy outside” and Mo Ran’s just like “😐 bruh are you kidding me right now”

[romanceyourdemons]

chu wanning is great because his incredibly bizarre experiences get filtered through eighteen layers of ocd and autistic masking until he ends up thinking something like “it’s got to be normal to have incredibly vivid and distressing sex dreams with an overwhelming sense of deja vu about a fucked up mirrorverse version of your crush. that’s just a normal part of human sexuality. i’m the one who’s being weird about it” and he really believes it

[alsantsblog]

characters who get called emotionless and heartless. characters who would rather shoot themselves than show even a hint of vulnerability around anyone but especially around people they care about. characters who could never get the words "i love you" past their lips without it choking them.

i love these characters. i would kill for them.

[evenerr]

wdym i barely started book nine and mo ran is dead????

[evenerr]

I LOVE YE WANGXI OMFG

i hate how little respect women and female cultivators have like can we shut these horrible people up omg. i just started book 9 and i love her sm her despite everything speaking up in mo ran defense her and xue meng and his parents i love them all for that. but the scene were she goes to weres hes being held sits with him for days holding and umbrella and giving him water, making ofhers stop theowing things. staying with him so he knows hes not alone while she is still grieving nangong si? also i loved mo ran apologizing to her saying he should have sacrificed himself instead and her not blaming him. NOT THE MENTION HOW POWERFUL AND JUST GOOD SHE IS

its ridiculous how everyone respected and listened to her when they thought she was a man but the moment they found out she was a women all the sudden shes emotional, meddling, or getting in the way.

[crowned-crimson-flower]

“Are you man enough” but it’s Wei Wuxian desperately trying to crawl out of the burial mounds because he promised his brother he’d stand beside him. “Are you man enough” but it’s Xie Lian being nailed to a coffin for a hundred years because it lets his people live safety. “Are you man enough” but it’s Chu Wanning rewriting his morality and fighting everything in his path to save Mo ran. “Are you man enough” but it’s Shen yuan grieving a man whose alive and living in guilt for a mistake he had no choice but to make

“Are you man enough” but it’s characters destroying and rebuilding their lives again and again until the boulder falls and the cycle breaks. “Are you man enough” but it’s characters surviving the lives they’ve never gotten to live

[popqorn]

[evenerr]

“an absolute unit, truly awe inspiring.” IM DYING OMG I CANT WITH THIS

[blue-rhapsody]

The confession scene in erha is so interesting.

Because it does all the things every other confession scene does, but it also does so much more.

For starters, from Chu Wanning’s perspective, this is simultaneously the best and also most embarrassing moment of his life. Like, his long time crush just told him he likes him back, and that he’s the most beautiful person in the world (not that he believes him of course). But also Chu Wanning is mortified because now he basically admitted to being the mushy little guy that he’s tried his entire life to pretend not to be.

In essence, he’s just so flustered that he might explode.

And then you get to Mo Ran.

And at first, he acts exactly how you expect. He’s thrilled, he’s ecstatic, this is everything he’s ever wanted and more.

Then he takes two steps away from the moment and suddenly everything cracks. Because he’s gotten everything he’s ever wanted, and now he realizes what that means.

He could have had this before.

Because if Chu Wanning has loved him since before the ghost marriage, then that means that he also did in their past life. And this is so much worse then just when he realized that Chu Wanning had always been looking out for him, because this was all there before and Mo Ran then proceeded to treat him terribly.

And all of this just absolutely shatters Mo Ran and I absolutely love it.

[benevolenterrancy]

every new thing I learn about this man leaves me speechless

[crowned-crimson-flower]

Danmei is a very unique genre of queer literature which both centers and de-centers queerness. None of the Danmei I’ve read have been essentially “about” being gay. They’re just stories of life, of magic, of fantasy, of love, in which the main characters happen to be gay. Which is a kind of representation I have often seeked from western media and related intermediaries because why is every gay story, a coming out story? Is there not more to queer people than that?

However, while capturing the personhood of queer people; Danmei also captures the queerness of people because none of these stories would work if the characters weren’t gay/queer

Wei Wuxian’s absolute buffoonery of misunderstanding Lan Zhan’s feelings in a decade long telephone game in which neither of them open their damn mouth would never work in a non-queer story because between a man and a woman romance would be the natural assumption of everyone around them and therefore wouldn’t leave space for confusion. The misunderstanding of their romance is so closely tied to the plot succession that the plot would be… non existent without it

In TGCF Xie Lian and Hua Cheng’s absolute aspirational love is literally in the backseat and front seat of the story. Not too different from a classic hero’s journey but instead of the hero being one person, it’s two people. They are so intertwined with eo that they become one character and witness a lot of the story together. Witness being a very interesting word choice. Their queerness doesn’t drive the story but replacing one of them with a woman would dampen the effect— it’d remove the uncertainty, the confusion from everyone around them, the genuine slow burn of the romance. There’s also this idea of Hua Cheng falling in love with Xie Lian so far separated from concepts such as gender or whatever which wouldn’t have been hammered home in a straight romance where those conversations aren’t always had between the audience and the story

And Erha.. well obviously. Half of Chu Wanning’s “this is so inappropriate” spiral wouldn’t exist if he was a woman. And, the idea of Mo Ran being a “cut sleeve” builds up the under current of his character being so far dismissed by society because he’s seen as immoral. Which just wouldn’t serve to the same effect if he was into exclusively women because so was every other character.

Not in a single one of these stories is queerness and homosexuality the central theme of the story yet without them, the romance wouldn’t be the same. Liking the same gender as you comes with baggage in our society which is so heteronormative and that effect has to exist in the person characters become for them to be authentic but at the same time, limiting that effect only to produce coming out stories/falling in love stories is unfair. Danmei mends this through a middle ground where the plot is the focus but it doesn’t exist in a vaccum, it exists in queerness itself

[krebkrebkreb]

volume 1 → volume 11

[evenerr]

guys just started reading erha this week anyway im on volume three but like I NEED TO TALK ABOUT THAT ONE SCENE when chu wanning had first deaged physically into his kid self and hes eating with mo ran and xue meng, and hes having tons of the pastries.

cuz he loves sweet things but he was still his older self he had ate to much and them got a cavity, and was like crazy embarrassed having to deal with the doctor.

and now hes a technically his kid self and its not permanent so he doesnt have to worry about that so hes like eating tons of the sweets and mo ran jokes ‘oh youll get a cavity if you eat too many sweets’

AND THEN CHU WANNING NOT EVEN GLANCING AT HIM SAYING,

‘its fine, im six so it wont be embarrassing.’

I LOVE CHU WANNING literally dying of laughter but also he is SO REAL for that. same dude same.

[moondal514]

Today on danmei-aftg parallels no one asked for:

Been thinking a lot about the similarities between Chu Wanning and Kevin Day. Both are child prodigies dehumanized in the way they are held up on a pedestal. Both are raised specifically to inherit a legacy of someone dead that their respective caretakers both caused the death of and are hung up over. Both inspire insane one-sided devotion in the various men they spend significant time with. Both have major revelations about their blood relatives that they did not discover until later in their life. Both are raised sheltered in a cult. Both find a home in a place founded by a good man to help the people that slip through the cracks of their respective societies. Both are exceedingly nitpicky about their respective areas of expertise, prone to give constant harsh critiques rather than praise. Both straddle the line of being respected but also disliked by their peers for their cold asshole-seeming personalities. Both form attachments to dog-coded characters with possessive tendencies. Both are arguably autistic. Both have incredibly complicated relationships with their respective abusers. Both, at some point in their stories, experience a life-ruining injury by a person that they love that blocks them from their area of expertise. Both can drink a lot.

But most importantly: both have milf-y teacher whose students desperately want to fuck them vibes

[evenerr]

reading the novel i find it interesting how in the yi city arc when wwx and the juniors have to talk to the young girl’s spirit, they discuss how every sect has a technique they used to communicate with the dead but wei wuxian specifically has always been the best with the spell empathy.

and then it explains how is one of the more dangerous ones because the caster not only sees that spirits memories but feels and thinks what they did understanding and becoming one with them. which can cause spirits to attack or casters to lose themselves very easily.

idk i just think its interesting how out of all the techniques and spells that is the one wwx not only chooses but says he prefers. its like how all through the novels its slowly unveiling everything that happened in the past and were slowly learning more about wwx character and a big part of his character and his whole story us his deep empathy for others but also lack of empathy towards himself.

[shitpostingkats]

The strange relationship Wei Wuxian has with Mo Xuanyu absolutely kills me. Wakes up in a confusing place and the very first thing he does is go through every scrap of paper he can find and learn the story of the man who gave up his body for him. Puts everything on pause so he can mentally curse out the people who did this to him. The instant sympathy. It's about the human connection and the grief felt for the very person whose death is the very reason he has a second chance. Never forget that the reason Wei Wuxian snapped back to Jin Ling was because he felt he had to defend Mo Xuanyu's honor. It's never an angst Wei Wuxian feels, but instead a reaching across to the afterlife he just came from and saying "I see you. If no one else in your shitty life ever spoke up for you, then I will." The series doesn't spend too much time lingering on it because we have places to go and people to see, but the fact that before he did any of that, the first thing Wei Wuxian wanted to do was wash their face and simply acknowledge the life of a man who died too young.

[evenerr]

that final scene between lan xichen and jin guangyao actually hurt me. the death scene with jg saying how he killed everyone and never once though about hurting lx. lx sad yearning eyes the whole time. when their both about to die and jin guangyao yells that lan xichen will die with him and lx slowly stopping to fight and accepting it and jg shocked and sad face as he shoved him back and saves lan xichen from dying.

and then when jg does die and lx is just watching and remembering all the memories of them when they were younger together and honestly no one can convince me they didnt love eachother in whatever way at least lx did. and also when everyone in the end starts gossiping and hating jin guangyao and lan xichen just stands and listens and it so obviously hurts him because yes jg did horrible thing but he still loved him.

that scene specifically made me think of wangxian except if everything everyone else said about wwx was true. idkkk