꒰ ☆ ꒱

they/she/he :: current hyperfix: tr opm mdzs jjk :: pfp: @kyllooelo on twt

[iheartiizana]

about me !!

hi i'm ren, i love izana an unhealthy amount. sometimes i colour manga panels and write for tokrev, but i mostly just reblog things. i'm also a minor (nsfw blogs can interact, not dm though)

i don't accept hate on my blog. if you are homophobic, transphobic or racist, i will block you.

[nitianer-deactivated20240216]

[sontajo]

wlw x mlm solidarity😔

[absinthecandy]

Saitama and friends.

[hi-raethia]

give me one good movie kiss

[katsukes]

GOJOU SATORU [五条悟] for lena @sleepytortellini ♡

[nutcasewithaknife]

I've been obsessed with Jiang Cheng since halfway through my first watch of cql, and here's why. He always keeps doing better than I expect him to.

(wow, this got long. rest is under the cut!)

He's introduced as the brother-killer, the ruthless sect leader with a reputation for being merciless. Then cut to the flashback, a Jiang Cheng who is fifteen, surrounded by his sister and brother and happy about it, occasionally doing stupid teenager things, trying so very hard to be Ideal Heir, while Wei Wuxian is the prodigy that keeps stealing his thunder effortlessly. And you go, "oh, I know this story. It's a tragedy, because these brothers loved each other once, but one's ambition will eventually breed jealousy which will fester into hate and end, tragically, in the death of the better half." It's Cain and Abel! You've seen how it ends, it's the first scene you see, of course that's where it's going!

And then you see how the three siblings help each other survive a frankly horrible and abusive household. They try to do for each other what their parents couldn't; Yanli tries to be their mother, Jiang Cheng doesn't believe the rumours about Wei Wuxian being jfm's illegitimate son or hold it against him as he very easily could've learnt to from his mother, and Wei Wuxian does his darned best to get jfm to acknowledge and love his son as he does for Wei Wuxian.

You keep waiting for the other shoe to drop!! Yunmeng burns, Jiang Cheng chokes his brother in the rain, and you think this is it, this is where it finally breaks. But he sticks with his brother and sister, he makes some stupid decisions in his grief and pays dearly for it. When he wakes up without a core he is broken, his 'ambition' is destroyed, and you remember him choke his brother and think this is it, and then... it isn't. Other than the one grieving rant in the rain, he never blames his brother for their loss, never demands that he fix it all. When Wei Wuxian does come with a solution, Jiang Cheng doesn't act like it's something he was owed. It's his brother, his brilliant genius brother, who miraculously fixed this impossible thing! He's the most Jiang of them all, of course he achieved the impossible!

And then he's the young sect leader in a bloody war, needing to win, needing to prove his worth and his sect's worth at every turn. This is where he becomes the ruthless, powerful man we meet in the first few episodes! Only.... he finds Wen Qing, who is the enemy in the eyes of the Jianghu, and offers to protect her (only her because he knows his limits, he can't protect all her people and his own, and his duty to his sect is first). He goes looking for his brother, months on end, haggard to the bone.

Then Wei Wuxian shows up wielding a power that's the worst taboo in their world, a power frighteningly similar to the power-drunk villain that they war is being waged against! He's doing unspeakable things, terrible torture in the name of revenge! Ah, so this is what it finally is! The moment they finally fall out for good, where Jiang Cheng cannot abide to tarnish his sect's reputation with Wei Wuxian's, and their love turns to hate.

But.... Jiang Cheng sees what he's done, and the first thing he does is to hug him tight. He asks about Wei Wuxian not carrying his sword, but even after the diplomatic nightmare of a war council, Jiang Cheng is just worrying. It's the most open, the most honest we've seen him so far, and he is concerned for his brother. He shuts it down when Jin Zixun tries to pick a fight. He takes responsibility for the person everyone's wary of, because that's his brother and he trusts him! He's hiding things, yes, but one day he will be ready to talk and Jiang Cheng will wait till then.

Then the war's won (by Wei Wuxian, of course!) and he has a sect to rebuild. And his brother is not at his side. First he's slacking off and drinking around town, then he runs away with the Wens to the Burial Mounds. It's terrible for the sect's and Jiang Cheng's own precarious position in Jianghu. Surely, this is the last thread of Jiang Cheng's love for his brother, the beginning of the man we were introduced to? But it's fucking not! Yes, he's frustrated. Yes, he's mad. And yet, he doesn't force his sister into a diplomatically advantageous marriage (which I strongly believe is the bare minimum of being a decent human being, but is something that wouldn't have been a questionable or dishonourable thing for him to do in the culture and world this story is set in) because she is not a pawn and he respects her choice above the politics! He tries to defend his First Disciple, his brother, and is overshadowed by much more powerful leaders who are bigoted and/or afraid of his power. And when it all goes to shit, they fight! This is the end of it, surely? But no! It's all fake! They fight, make up a lie about how the Yunmeng Jiang has supressed Wei Wuxian and his Wens in the Burial Mounds so they can live without being under attack for however long, and then have shady meetups to discuss their nephew's name!!

In the carnage of Nightless City, their sister dies at his hands, and the horrible realisation dawns that this is what pushes them over the brink, literally. And then!! AND THEN!!!!! EVEN THEN IT WASN'T ENOUGH FOR HIM TO KILL HIS BROTHER!!! The first scene was a lie, WEI WUXIAN HAD TO THROW HIMSELF OFF!!!!!! And when he's finally back, what does Jiang Cheng do? Kill him? ban him from ever returning to their home? No! He wants to drag him back home and make him apologise, explain himself!!

A lot of this is very focused on the brothers, but even outside of that, Jiang Cheng keeps subverting the expectations that the story builds for him right in the beginning. For all the talks of 'disciplining' his nephew (which could unquestionably entail some form of corporal punishment, as we see in other parts of the story) and the childhood Jiang Cheng himself had, the idea of his Jiujiu raising his hand against him is unthinkable to the point of incredulity for Jin Ling. When Jin Ling has his breakdown over Suihua on the Lotus Pier docks, I was full bracing myself for Jiang Cheng to yell at him for crying in public without any shame or dignity, but what does he do? Calls his nephew to his side and demands to know who made him cry, so he can fucking wreck them for daring to do that! He has a mere day to process the Golden Core reveal, and after all the yelling, he actually apologises to his brother!!

Then, in the mother of all sucker-punch moments, we find out that the one grief-riddled, frustrating moment of apparent stupidity whose domino effect this entire thing has been, was in fact Jiang Cheng willingly sacrificing himself, sect be damned, to save his brother and sister. And like!! How do you have such a character who simultaneously is and is not what he seems to be!!!

I (and a lot of the audience) immediately played into the simple brotherhood-destroyed-by-jealousy plot that it seems to be at first, but that's the intention! The entire story keeps showing how misleading, how vicious rumours can be and how horribly it can affect who someone is in the eyes of society. We see this happen in the story, of course, but the narrative also relies on the audience to make the same mistake, to take the tropes that seem obviously implied at the start, and then unravels the true complexity of the story as it moves forward. We got played by the narrative and it was so worth it!! Wei Wuxian is the prime example, of course, but cql (and mdzs from what I gather, though I haven't read the books) does it with such nuance and brilliance for Jiang Cheng, how do you not immediately lose your entire mind about it for the rest of forever!!!!!

[moonestonite]

self-care is doodling your favourite character over and over and over and over again

thai jiang cheng is such a beaut like goddamn

[lavenderprose]

Sometimes I say to myself “I had a pretty normal and boring childhood” but then I remember that 11-year-old me may have accidentally convinced some other kids that I was kidnapped by a shady government agency.

[planeoftheeclectic]

Care to elaborate?

[lavenderprose]

WELL, SINCE YOU ASKED

2006 was the year that I discovered the internet. I spent most of this time doing nothing but watch Harry Potter fanvids and tracking down so much Harry/Ginny fanfiction that it’s probably the reason I hated that ship for so long, kind of like when you were in fourth grade and you realized that bologna was actually Really Bad and you started aggressively avoiding it? Yeah, it was like that. Harry/Ginny was the bologna of my formative fandom years.

So I’m eleven years old and for the last two months or so I’ve been just shoving my brain full of all kinda of mature narratives that I really, probably, should not have been putting my mind to at the time. My parents knew that this was how I was occupying my time but I think that they thought, since Harry Potter was a kids’ book series, the people who were writing the fics were…kids. And they eventually did wise up to the fact that I was reading Really Very Adult Things and put kid blocks on the computer for all of five minutes. But, y’know, that’s another story.

It wasn’t really porn that I was reading, per say, as much as writing that just…wasn’t meant to be consumed by an eleven-year-old. For instance, stories about government espionage and criminal crime. Things that the HP books touched on, sure, but in a way that was consumable by the very young and very naïve. These fics weren’t for the uninitiated. And I take full responsibility for exposing myself to those things. I very purposefully did a few things that I should not have in order to access this content. One of those things was making myself an email, without my parents’ permission, at an age two years younger than the Yahoo terms of service allowed at the time. I listed my age as eighteen on the email account because that was the age you needed to be to get into some of the archives I wanted access to and I had no idea that the administrators had literally no way of checking if my email was registered to an eighteen year old person or not.

So, I don’t know if it was because of being registered as an adult or because of the forums I was visiting, but I got a lot of very weird spam. And since I was eleven and I had no idea how any of that stuff worked, I thought it was real people…sending me emails. Thankfully my parents had only raised a little fool, not a big fool, so I never clicked any of the links or anything. I was just quietly upset that people thought I cared about car insurance and online gambling when all I wanted was to read the Marked Mature Chapter Of That Harry/Ginny Wedding Fic. A fic in which ‘glass of water’ was used as a euphemism for orgasm, which was something that I did not pick up on until I suddenly remembered that line when I was sitting in a lecture hall ten literal years later.

Yes, I know.

So one day I’m looking through my email to see if I have any new reviews on my Harry Potter/Hannah Montana crossover fic (Yes, I know) when I come across an email the subject line of which is just “Confidential.”

“Cool,” says little Maggie, who maybe at that point didn’t really know what confidential meant, and clicked on it.

This was a very long time ago so I really don’t remember the content of the email, let alone the exact warning, but the gist of it was something like:

WE KNOW WHAT YOU DID SEND 10,000 DOLLARS TO THIS BANK ACCOUNT OR THE GOVERNMENT WILL BE NOTIFIED.

This is very obviously recognizable as a scam to somebody who isn’t eleven years old. It’s not even a very good scam. It’s the kind of thing that only children and elderly people with dementia would react to.

Unfortunately, I was a child. A child with a guilty conscience because I had been reading Things I was not supposed to for several months now, and had also lied about my age by some SEVEN YEARS to access the very email account by which I had been sent this ominous message.

Predictably, because I was both an overreactive child and apparently an idiot child, I freaked out. I deleted the email and panicked, very quietly, in the corner of my dad’s home office for a good ten minutes. Then, for reasons that are completely unknown EVEN TO ME, I retrieved the email from the trash bin and printed it out. I then slipped it into my backpack and brought it to school the next day.

Even worse, the first thing I did was drag my two friends into the situation.

“Meet me in the bathroom,” I said to them, because some part of me seemed to think that my life had now become a Cool Spy Movie. We huddled into a stall in the bathroom and stared at the paper.

“I don’t have ten thousand dollars,” I told them.

“What did you do?” asked one of my friends.

“That’s none of your concern,” I said.

“Do you think it’s the FBI? Or the CSI?” (Not a typo—she said CSI)

“Yes,” I said, and did not elaborate.

“What happens if you don’t pay it.”

“I’ll be kidnapped,” I said, with utmost conviction. “That’s what happens when the government doesn’t like you. They make you disappear.”

We eventually returned to class. I was pretty jazzed at being the center of our friend group’s attention for the day. It was a Friday, and the height of my concern for the actual situation had waned and, by the time I got home later that day, I had mostly forgotten about my fear of being violently kidnapped by the CSI.

Something that I’ve not mentioned to any of you—and something that I had not mentioned to my friends at the time, either—was that this was my last day at that school. I was due to start at a new school that coming Monday. I hadn’t told anybody because I was switching to a public school from a private school and I thought that telling people would make them think I was dumb? I don’t know, but I hadn’t told literally anybody that I was switching schools. Not even my teachers. I assume that my parents informed them at some point but I still have the middle school-level math book hanging out in my closet that I never returned because I never told anybody I was leaving.

I had no way of contacting any of my friends from the other school. I wouldn’t get my first cell phone for probably another six or seven months. I also stopped going to the Youth Group that I was in with one of them because my dad got spooked when I dropped some Knowledge About Christ on him at one point and decided that the group was way too fundamentalist. (It was, but I was very upset about being pulled out at the time.)

So please imagine. Friend comes to school with ominous email from ~the government~. Friend stops coming to school. Friend stops coming to unrelated activity. Friend doesn’t ever contact you again. You’re eleven years old.

I’m not saying that there are two girls out there who still remember me as “That girl who might have been kidnapped by the government.” I like to think that they probably came up with a more reasonable explanation as they got older. But it’s a possibility that, for a little while sometime in 2006/2007, I accidentally convinced my friends that I had been kidnapped by a shady government agency.

[absinthecandy]

ONE, every five minutes:

[aforrestofstuff]

[fluffnflightillustrations-deact]

Renruki week day 2: Academy!

For this one, I wanted to show off my practice on bgs ive been working on so my comms wont look so yucky! anyways, here they are chatting when they should be studying under a wisteria tree <3

[rukiadriedhisrain]

Bleach Girls Icons

[arinavah]

Higuruma my beloved ❤️

[sattosugu]

tokyo revengers - christmas showdown (season 2) opening 

official髭男dism

[rozuberry]

Day 14: Thank you… Inoue…

Day 12: Ichigo’s resolve fights! Orihime’s will protects!

[sarcophagid]

scraps