I firmly believe that if there were a Yao who cursed men to bear children only to suffer like women do, Jiang Cheng would react with something like "are u telling me i could have an heir without an arranged marriage???".
Yao: Dare to attack me and i will deform your bodies so that you can breed child—.
Jiang Cheng: ✋ It's a deadly curse?
Yao:
Yao: No?
Jiang Cheng: Side effects? Health risks? Contagious?
Yao: ???? You will have a functional uterus.
Jiang Cheng: Forever?
Yao: Yeah?
Jiang Cheng: Well... okay i can take the risk.
Jiang disciples: THE WHAT.
EXTRA
Yao: You will still need sperm to get pregnant.
Jiang Cheng: That's true, the hard part will be finding someone who wants to spend a night with me.
Disciple: I VOLUNTEER I HAVE JIANG BLOOD I AM YOUNG, AND I WILL SERVE YOU FOR ALL MY LIF—.
2Disciple: Don't pay any attention to him, he has asthma and is allergic to nuts, HOWEVER I AM—.
A chill ran down the spine of the young leader of the jin sect and a hoarse ringing sounded in the ears of Wei Wuxian and Lan Xichen.
favorite flavor of any Jiang Cheng ship is when rhe other peraon is on their knees begging for a scrap of attention and jc is just there looking pretty and dangerous and incredibly sexy and also really concerned for their mental wellbeing
Do you like any other Jiang Cheng ships that aren't Chengxian?
surprisingly enough, yes lol my ao3 history is proof of that. none of them to the extent I ship chengxian but i also like zhancheng, despite my mixed feeling about lwj, xicheng, a soft spot bc it was my first ship in the fandom and if i want something unserious, chengyi (jc x ljy). but yeah, just give me good jiang cheng characterization and i'm down for it
We've got 26 characters admiring(?) Jiang Cheng, from the expected to the unusual.
I would have added more and fully rendered the color if I had the time for it, but lining/flat coloring 26 frames was already pushing me to the brink of slamming my head against the desk. I did have a lot of fun with all the different designs though.
Let me know if people want to see the individual frames, uh, it would probably take a couple of posts.
allcheng in which jc’s experience of first (unrequited) love with wwx informs all his future relationships [wholesome]
xicheng: it’s ingrained in jc that you’re supposed to have to share the person you love with everybody else! even when you have your loved one’s attention, isn’t it just natural for their attention to stray and be caught by other people and things all the time?
when jc first becomes closer to lxc, the undivided attention makes him uncomfortable. he’s scared he’ll get used to it, especially if it’ll eventually be taken away. so he pushes lxc away first, gets irritable when lxc goes everywhere with him, gets irrationally angry when lxc politely tells other people he is busy so he can keep hanging out with jc. why!!! it makes no sense? is there something wrong with lxc? isn’t he being too obsessive? jc gets anxious because this isn’t the kind of love he understands.
one day he shouts for lxc to leave him alone!! and lxc does!! and jc suddenly feels… lonely…
everyone notices how slj’s mood seems so off that week, until lxc pops in to ask if he’s ok and jc goes “!!!! please don’t ever leave me again!” and lxc goes “my pleasure~”.
mingcheng: like everybody else in the jianghu, jc greatly admired nmj for his martial prowess. when they got together, nmj was extremely caring and protective, which was great—a love language jc understood. however, jc was worried nmj would look down on him for being a young and inexperienced sect leader. sometimes he didn’t believe in himself either.
but nmj always trusted jc to handle himself. maybe even a little too much, because jc would be waiting for nmj to take over fighting a yao or fix a tricky political situation, but instead nmj would just wait for jc to take a stab at it first (sometimes literally). even when jc felt like he was out of his depth and couldn’t handle things, nmj would always give him the opportunity to try to work things himself first. jc thought it meant nmj didn’t care about him, that he didn’t mind seeing jc struggling. but after he defeated that yao (with difficulty), after he came to that political agreement (with great difficulty), jc felt so happy. and nmj would pull him close and tell him he believed in him all that time. it was terrifying, but it was good. ~~
xuancheng: jc was always used to having the person he loved be in the spotlight while he watched from the shadows. it was only natural after all. jc was born second, born second-best. so it was a strange feeling when jzx, who had just won first place in the yearly lanling archery competition, picked jc up and waved him around in the air, calling for everyone to look at his very talented lover and be amazed at him for splitting an arrow with his second shot during warm up. jc grew completely pink, unused to the attention he felt was surely undeserved.
and it wouldn’t stop there! jzx was amazing in his own right, a high achiever with an incredible record. but he was never afraid to lose to jc, and would always celebrate jc’s wins without having to upstage him in some way. jzx was genuinely always so proud of his lover!
whenever jzx was better than jc at something, he would always offer to give jc some tips to help him improve, and would always ask jc for tips too. jzx loved sharing the spotlight with jc, even more so did he love looking at his lover smiling wide from above him in first place.
sangcheng: jc was always snappy and combative as a kid. as he grew older, he naturally mellowed out and was generally more agreeable to others around him. with his lover nhs, though, jc would scold and berate him even for little things. jc imagined it would be equal, that nhs would point out jc’s mistakes too, make fun of him where everyone could see. but nhs just…never did. nhs never really complained about jc’s harsh words, only ever pouting and pretending to cry. jc would roll his eyes and leave. nhs would chase him —
“jiang-xiong don’t go! you have to cheer me up now!” jc thought that nhs was boring at first, that he didn’t have the wits to banter back. then one day, jc accidentally broke one of nhs’s fans and received the scolding of his life. that was when he learned nhs was in fact very good at giving jc hell. he just usually didn’t want to.
at first that was so strange. isn’t it more fun to hate on each other? and then jc realised that whenever he wrote a character imperfectly or practiced a sword form wrong, the little pang of anxiety he used to get was no longer there. oh, he thought. that’s…nice. after that, jc would still scold nhs every now and then, but not without giving nhs the head pats and praises the man would demand afterwards. it was quite a comfortable arrangement. ~