Find me @morethanwonderful

I'm not using this blog anymore, but you can find me mdzsposting @morethanwonderful

[morethanwonderful-archive]

Heyy besties, so for various reasons, I’ve decided to put a pause on this blog (formerly known as morethanwonderful) and remake this url as a multifandom page.

So if y’all wanna see my mxtx posting (mixed in with a few other things), find me at the new @morethanwonderful

You can also always find me at my main @grassbreads

[samairuart]

Welcome to arc three ☠️✌🏽

[morethanwonderful-archive]

Heyy besties, so for various reasons, I’ve decided to put a pause on this blog (formerly known as morethanwonderful) and remake this url as a multifandom page.

So if y’all wanna see my mxtx posting (mixed in with a few other things), find me at the new @morethanwonderful

You can also always find me at my main @grassbreads

[softmeals]

Judith

[untamedmetablogiguess]

Thinking about how Lan Xichen tells WWX that Wangji’s complicated feelings for him are mirrored by how he felt regarding their mother, but doesn’t seem to realize that his own feelings for JGY are equally shaped and mirrored by his feelings regarding their mother!

Like, he looks at his brother and sees that stubborn, unyielding love and is like ‘ah yes i recognize this’ but he cannot see in himself that his lack of desire to know the details of his mother’s crime are exactly like his reluctance to look at JGY’s actions with any real scrutiny.

because lwj has had to grapple with “what if the person you love did something unforgivable?” and made his choice, but xichen has been studiously avoiding thinking about that question at all for his entire life.  lan xichen wants to give everyone the benefit of the doubt!  he wants to believe the best of everybody!  and sometimes that means deliberately not asking the questions he really should ask, because if he did he’d have to hear the answers!

he knows his mother Did a Murder.  If he asks why, and finds out her reason, then he has to decide, is that a good enough reason?  And if it wasn’t, if the reason was just, like, he annoyed her and she lost her temper, then he has to deal with reconciling his memory of his sweet, kind, loving mother with the knowledge that she did something morally reprehensible and completely unjustified.  but if it was a good reason, if for example the teacher had attempted to assault her and she was defending herself?  well, then she’s vindicated but the rest of his clan is implicated.  now he has to deal with the knowledge that her punishment was absolutely unjust and that all her suffering (and his, and his father’s, and his brother’s) was a terrible injustice perpetrated by his family!  now he’ll have to look at his clan’s elders, who he is supposed to respect, and know that they did something inexcusable to a woman who didn’t deserve it!

by not asking the question, he maintains a state of shroedinger’s-cat-like paradoxical neutrality - he can assume the best of both his mother and his clan.

Likewise, he has carefully maintained a neutral state regarding his sworn brothers, trying to make peace between them and assume only the best of each of them, because if he looks too closely, then either NMJ is right, and JGY is a bad and untrustworthy person, or JGY is right, and NMJ is being cruel and unjust.  as long as he doesn’t actually look directly at the conflict, he can continue to pretend it is just a troublesome personality clash instead of a fundamental and irreconcilable difference of worldview in which he might have to make some kind of moral judgement call!

[tadpole-art]

Mobei wants his husband to match him <3

[kelenia]

He’ll get it… eventually

[kelenia]

Just in, worst person to get love advice from is actually right for once

[foxyjoy-art]

two commissions for @ / WXMSfan on twitter! 

Do Not Repost

[morethanwonderful-archive]

One of the reasons Wei Wuxian is so hard to characterize well is that he has this really odd combination of high self esteem but absolutely no expectation of being treated well.

Like generally, if a character passively accepts any and all bad treatment without really fighting back, it's because they see themselves as deserving the mistreatment, or are otherwise too depressed and/or self-loathing to protest. But Wei Wuxian is different. He doesn't really hate himself at all, save for maybe a couple specific bad moments in his past, and he doesn't see himself as deserving to suffer. However, his whole upbringing with the Jiangs very deeply imprinted in him the idea that, even when it's unjust, he is always going to be treated as a bad actor (and punished as such), and there is nothing that he can do to change this.

So as a result, adult Wei Wuxian ends up with what is really a very strange mindset. I think his outlook on himself and the world more or less boils down to "I am extremely awesome and capable, and I'm going to do the right thing, but I am going to be villainized and mistreated for it no matter what."

He knows exactly how incredible he is, but his life has trained him to take "others will hate me, mistreat me, and see me as a villain" as an immutable fact, so he's completely stopped expecting good treatment from the world at large, and he never really tries to defend himself or fight back. So it's not that his arc is about having low self esteem. He's got plenty of that. His arc is about finding people that will treat him well and not assume the worst, and also about being forced to correct at least some of the many old misconceptions about him.

It's about learning that he doesn't have to accept his unjust casting as the villain.

[k1201a]

It's not odd, people with stable high self esteem do not place much of their self worth on how people treat them. You don't have more value when people treat you well, you don't worth less when people treat you bad, so why bother with changing how people treat you? it's their problem. wwx did defend himself when he's falsely or unfairly accused. he did fight back when he's attacked. he's also arrogant and cringe when he felt like it, he just didn't really care all that much how others react or think of him. Honestly, this isn't so much about if wwx deserved to be treated well, it's about the mob didn't have any reason to treat others fairly when the conditions allowed them to exploit others. The wen ranmants were treated horribly, wwx was only targetted because he stood with them, most of it wasn't personal. At the Jiangs, only YZY treated him bad.

His arc was about being himself and being awesome when everyone else was being shitbags and cowards.

[xiaobenhuo]

what do you do when you do not accept how others treat you? stand up for yourself? cut them off? fight them? wwx did all that. yzy treated nobody right, none of her family stand up to her, it's not because they had low self esteem, it's because she's crazy, defiance would've provoked her even more. wwx didn't always assume the worst, wen ning and wen qing were as good as or perhaps even better he'd assumed, jc turned out to be worse than he assumed, lwj turned out to be better. by and large, his judgment of people was decent.

[morethanwonderful-archive]

It occurs to me that, before I launch into a discussion like this, I should probably clarify that I am specifically talking about the novel canon here. I cannot speak for donghua/cql Wwx, as I think they're subtly different in important ways, and I'm not sure which versions of the story y'all are coming from.

But with that said, I mean, @k1201a, you're absolutely right that Wwx's self esteem is high enough that he doesn't need other people to bolster it. Like I said, he knows that he's amazing! And honestly, I went back and took another look at the nightless city and the second siege, and he does actually stick up for himself and call out others' errors and hypocrisy with regards to him more often than I originally remembered him doing. So you're right about that, too.

I do still think I have a point about his arc in the present day being about not accepting unjust treatment, though!

I think what I should have said, rather than that he doesn't fight back against mistreatment, is that he always seems to take others' mistreating him as a foregone conclusion. Like, when he's confronted by others and accused of things he didn't do, or when he's treated as a villain for behavior that others could get away with, he always points out these things to whoever he's arguing with. But his arguments always come with this sort of cold, jaded tone to them, like he was expecting this all along.

You can see it clearest when he's confronted by somebody that actually does want to help, rather than assume the worst of him, and he's unable to accept that as a possibility. When Lan Zhan and Jin Zixuan try (admittedly in less than perfect ways) to help him in the nightless city and Qiongqi pass, he's unable to see it in part because he can't believe that someone from the cultivation world wouldn't be working against and villainizing him.

And even all the times that he's right about the fact that people are going to villainize and scapegoat him for their problems, that doesn't mean that "everyone's going to assume the worst of me" is a healthy default assumption to take to the world.

You're also absolutely right that one of the big themes of the book is the failings of the mob mentality and the ways that cultivator society exploits the weak. People resent Wei Wuxian and the Wen remnants and use his saving them as an excuse to vent that hate. In addition to that, though, I think that post-resurrection, Wei Wuxian's character arc (the biggest way he changes as a person of the course of the story), is about what kind of treatment he expects.

He starts, immediately post resurrection, shocked that Mo Ziyuan isn't scared of him, as he's used to being an object of fear. And when Lan Zhan first brings him back to the cloud recesses, he can't believe it's not because he's being arrested. He's still assuming that everyone is going to hate and assume the worst of him. But over the course of the present storyline, he discovers that Lan Zhan has never thought the worst of him, and he eventually comes to rely on having someone at his side who believes in him.

Because the thing is, like you said, Wei Wuxian doesn't need others to think well of him. He can get by perfectly well on his own (and do a lot of good while he's at it), but that doesn't mean that being alone and hated is a pleasant way to live your life. That doesn't mean that Wwx, even if he claims not to care what anyone thinks, isn't thrilled to find somebody that thinks he's incredible.

I think that one of the most important lines in the novel, in terms of Wwx as a character, is the one we get when he jumps from the tree into Lan Zhan's arms. "He wasn't scared of falling. All these years, he'd fallen many times. But falling on the ground still hurt, after all. If someone was there to catch him, it'd be more than wonderful."

He's finally affirming for himself that Lan Zhan really is there by his side believing in and helping him, no matter what, and now he can come to rely on that. He may not need the help, but he spends the present arc discovering that he can have it anyway, and he doesn't have to assume that he'll be misunderstood and mistreated.

And @suyanzhi, I actually largely agree with you. You're right in that I did initially get it wrong when I said Wwx doesn't stand up for himself enough, because he really does. The important part, though, for the point I was making, is that even though he corrects people when they're wrong about him, he never seems to actually expect anything different.

And as for Madame Yu, I absolutely agree that Wei Wuxian didn't have a choice about not fighting back against her. It only would have provoked her more. You really cannot expect a child/teen experiencing long term abuse by an authority figure to stand up against that authority. My original point was, in fact, largely that it's this original mistreatment by Madame Yu which sets up his outlook for later in life. It's the expected, forgone conclusion that when something goes wrong in the Jiang clan, be it anything from the disciples making trouble in town to the Wen clan wiping them out, Wei Wuxian is going to be blamed. Madame Yu does it, and Jiang Cheng, because he is also a child under Yu Ziyuan's influence, sometimes does the same.

The problem is that, though, is that he carries this sentiment with him as an assumption when he grows up. "I should assume I'll be unjustly treated as a bad actor" is a pretty realistic mindset for his time in the Jiang clan, but it's not a happy or healthy way to see the world. And when he gets more and more desperate toward the end of his first life, and when more and more of the world really does turn against him, he becomes unable to see when someone like Lan Zhan really doesn't think that way.

So to circle back a bit to my original point, I do think what I said still stands. Wei Wuxian is someone with very high self esteem, but absolutely no expectation of good treatment. He might argue with the people who mistreat him, might point out that how they treat him is hypocritical and wrong, but he never actually expects any different.

He doesn't really expect anyone else to see how amazing he is, and a big part of his journey is finding how happy it makes him when someone can see it.

[kseniacho]

апошняе лета // last summer

[meyaoyu]

late afternoon in the cloud recesses

[rouguang]

that hannibal quote "you and i have begun to blur" with yi city arc. xiao xingchen's eyes in song lan's head. xue yang and song lan's minds connected with the nails hammered into his skull. xue yang wearing xiao xingchen's face. even shuanghua letting xue yang carry and use it and its spiritual powers.

[wrathyforest]

[rounove]

They are happy, everybody is loved! The end.

[mincenoodle]

oh god oh fuck xue yang oh my god u forgot to add the ‘happy ending’ tag xue yang no xue yang hey no listen xue yang u forgot to add th

[morethanwonderful-archive]