You know what kind of drives me crazy in MDZS fic set in the modern day? They don't seem to recall the that the Jiangs are just as rich as the Lans/Jins/Nies. Wei Wuxian (and JC and JYL) all grew up in that same tax bracket, probably going to the same or similar events. Even if, for some reason, WWX is in a poor financial state as an adult, he's not going to be awed by the Lan estate or whatever.
It feels like it tries to make WWX more of an Average Guy but the entire point is that he is exceptional in most ways! It's just really weird to me.
Hah! Yeah, that's a goofy one, but I think it bugs me less than a lot of similar foibles. Because it's so often the result of someone applying 'modern AU' as a package, as opposed to implementing it item-by-item in a deliberate sort of way, and the 'modern AU package' involves retooling the characters to fit not into a modern equivalent of their original scenario or role or anything, but into the norms of realistic fiction.
Something that is in many ways just as arbitrarily stylized as any other frequently used fiction conceit or setting. We particularly get norms lifted from the highly stylized romance genre(s) in mdzs, but you'll see stuff from contemporary literary fiction mixed in, too.
Much rarer that you'll see people doing modern AU in a way that's directly based on, rather than just inspired-by, their lived experience.
And there are a lot of extant Rules about how to do fiction set in Normal Life correctly, in a way that doesn't make you look like a fool or a child, and this typically requires an Everyman protagonist. Being superspecial is for genre fiction, where self-indulgence is to be expected. (Even there there's backlash but still.) Gotta be So Normal. Gotta be relatable.
So since this version of writing Modern AU is basically a genre pastiche, I just sort of accept the Normalization Beam as the mildly stupid genre conceit that it is, and am mostly only slightly annoyed. Sure okay, Wei Wuxian comes from a middle-class background, as all normal people do. Fine.
It's like if I read an E-rated fic it's gonna have porn, and I might find it gross. Welp.
But yeah, there are a lot of very specific class things being done in the source material, which it can be very valuable and interesting to try to translate! I've seen stuff done with it that was interesting, and stuff I didn't like, and stuff that was interesting though not well-founded in the canon, as well as all those people just doing Contemporary Normal Genre Fiction With Wangxian.
So like. Okay, the Jin have the most money, but the Lan have the most class.
The Jiang probably have less money than the Lan--they are at any rate less numerous--but they're in similar ranges; however they don't interact with class in the same way at all.
The Jiang meanwhile seem to have more class than the Nie on the whole, though less formality, but both have something invested in the avoidance of pretension.
Well, under Jiang Fengmian anyhow. Based on Jiang Cheng's stunt with the nets to get Jin Ling a good grade in crowd hunt, his version of the Jiang is kind of more comfortable throwing their status around. Which I suppose was to be expected.
And Nie Huaisang is nothing if not a huge gauzy ball of pretensions. So his tenure may have steered the Nie in that direction as well. (But we don't know how their grandfathers ran things.)
I do think that that's a big part of the tension that's expressed by Nie Mingjue burning Nie Huaisang's fans and scrolls and so forth in what was probably a relatively subtle early psychotic break: the Nie use sabers and a cultivation style built on animal death because their sect arose from traditions developed around the unclean trade of butchery. They value honesty and straightforwardness in a way that's defined in opposition to court-style scheming; there is something of the unvarnished nature of the common man around their self-image, which is also present to a lesser degree in the Jiang ideology.
The fact that the Nie are now rich and powerful does not mean it's acceptable for Nie Huaisang to eschew the traditions of his family and function as a gentleman of leisure. But that's who he is. Is it then pretension?
For the Lan--who have on the whole enough class that they have a lot of space to be taken seriously doing things that from anyone else would be pretentious--upholding virtue and maintaining a visible presentation of being very upper class are not concepts that can be entirely disentangled.
Moral superiority and gentlemanly appearance, bearing, dress etc are the same thing, and their being 'above' other people is core to their identity in a way they're so secure about, they can frame it as not even being a pride thing, they are totally humble, and not notice this is absurd.
(I think this is one of the cognitive dissonances Lan Wangji is unable to notice before Wei Wuxian starts interjecting contrary concepts into his worldview, and has to grapple with after.)
In the lotus pod extra, there's this very instructive dichotomy. The Twin Jades of the Lan are brought cut watermelon by a servant. The shirtless disciples of Lotus Pier are brought it by the Sect Leader's only daughter. (And then her mother throws a fit about the shirtlessness and they don't get to eat it, but still.)
This was a deliberate writing decision--the Lans could have just had a plate of watermelon already by no visible agency; mxtx for economy of prose reasons never mentions servants without a specific reason, although ofc they're around. The aristocratic serenity of the Cloud Recesses is set up against the chaos of Lotus Pier.
Jiang Fengmian at a couple different points asserts active opposition to this idea of the importance of the above-and-below. He doesn't like it and doesn't enforce it.
Wei Wuxian has a melancholy bit of narration after the war about how the servants he grew up with would pull funny faces at the disciples, but they're all dead, and the new people aren't like that.
And even Madam Yu, the Jiang character with the most positive attachment to the assertion of hierarchy for its own sake, has a scene where she says that in Jiang Sect having a servant pour tea for you is for disabled people who actually need the help. In context, she's saying this to get under someone's skin, so her personal sincerity may be in question, but the framing does suggest she's speaking accurately.
This is the sort of vibes-based material that I think leads to the wealth gap being wildly exaggerated a lot; the Lan as classier and thus higher class and thus must have more money, right? But those don't actually group up so neatly like that.
So yeah, that's an interesting set of dynamics to translate into the modern day!
