#winepresswrath

[veliseraptor]

Xue Yang winds up at Song Lan's monastery shortly post finger crushing!

oooh this is an interesting one! I am sort of torn between this happening at a point where it's on purpose and xue yang is still close enough post-crushening to have some belief that somebody (in this case, a temple full of daoshi) will help him or if I want it to be long enough after that he's turned pretty well bitter on the idea of help from other people being a thing that exists, at least for him.

and since I can't make up my mind about it I'll have it "teetering on the edge between the two, maybe slanting a little toward the latter but desperate enough to try seeking out help from these people anyway"

(or it could be he ends up there because somebody brings him there, but I think I'm setting that one aside for this particular ask.)

song lan gets to experience the traumatic experience of proximity to a horrifying aftermath of a very nasty crush injury at a young age! this is probably formative - it's interesting to me thinking about the effects this might/could have on song lan, actually - while I don't think he's ever as rosy-viewed of the wider world as xiao xingchen is, I think being up-close witness to xue yang's specific story and its aftermath would render him a little more cynical than he is in canon.

I definitely like the idea of song lan growing up protective of his shidi as a result of, again, personally witnessing the gruesome aftermath of xue yang's trauma. xue yang enjoys this but also is merciless about needling song lan in general, because it's fun, but also that is his uptight shixiong and nobody else gets to mess with him.

I think being in a nurturing and protective environment that provides him with guard rails, expectations, and a life where his utility/livelihood isn't tied to violence goes a long way toward at least tempering xue yang's worst impulses. the impulses will still be there but having fewer reasons to act on them/forming better habits because of the expectations in place and the rewards of abiding by those expectations would make a substantial difference in the way xue yang moves through the world. it changes the calculus on how he sees other people/what he expects from them - even if the betrayal/hatred of chang ci'an is still very much there, it's tempered by the fact that he found someone to look after him.

when song lan decides to leave baixue xue yang goes with him, and please imagine the two of them as the weirdest pair of wandering cultivators solving peoples' problems that most people have or will ever meet.

when song lan encounters xiao xingchen they are still going to connect with each other on a profound level and xue yang is not going to be happy about it. very jealous, very possessive, immediately decides that xiao xingchen is stupid and annoying and not to be trusted.

send me a potential AU and I’ll tell you five fun facts that would happen in a story

[theleakypen]

But After All I am a Wen!

Lan Xichen welcomes them to his tent warmly enough, but then says, "I confess I was not expecting Wei-gongzi to join us."

Is it Wen Qing's imagination or is his tone a touch cooler than it usually is with her? Back in the Cloud Recesses, he had been Wei Wuxian's champion among the Lan. Perhaps Wei Wuxian was right and Lan Xichen does condemn him for his "crafty tricks."

"You and the other leaders of the Campaign will be discussing how to counter the Yin Iron when we return to the Unclean Realm, won't you?" she asks, ignoring the emotional undercurrents in the tent.

WIP Wednesday Game

[amedetoiles]

Happy Birthday! Please consider Jin Ling loudly protesting a Jiang Cheng-Wei Wuxian hug sandwich because that's what he deserves!

Thank yooou ❤️🥰☺️

He so does!! Just Jin Ling squawking loudly and half choking while Wei Wuxian delightfully rubs their cheeks together proclaiming his love in the most obnoxious way while Jiang Cheng rolls his eyes contentedly. They’re a family!! 🥺

[tanoraqui]

For the ask meme, arranged marriage?

[ask meme]

B - Like It, though it's almost more a factor of... I'm a really big fan of ships in which the characters meet and get together (or fail to get together) in whatever bizarre canon circumstances befall them, but they actually are very socially well-suited, in a way that makes me feel slightly guilty for supporting what is often a canonically flawed social structure but scratches the itch deep in my brain for, like, aristocracy and institutionalized heterosexuality to be Okay Sometimes Actually?

Needless to say, arranged marriage scratches that itch as well, less subtly, and more to the point is a very common fanfic trope for such ships. (Ships eg, perc'ahlia, chengqing, any time a random girl falls in love with a prince and then plot twist she herself is a princess.) Cons: common enough that there's a lot of mediocre ones out there. Pros: the stage (ideally) in which both characters have realized they actually really like their fiance/spouse, but assume it's unrequited.

[quicktothebatjalopy]

OK now you've gotta give me your list of Jiang Cheng's talents that have nothing to do with cultivation! I'm very curious.

Well, there is plenty of overlap with your thoughts so a round of pats-on-back for us all! My thoughts:

Stick-to-it-tivity, bloody-mindedness, DETERMINATION (It fills you with!)--whatever you want to call it our boy has it in spades. The only times it really falters are understandably extreme (and extremely horrible) situations: other than that he digs his feets in and will not be budged! My little badger buddy! (I mean badger in the best possible way, namely as someone who grew up reading Redwall novels)

Intelligence: he’s got a brain and he’s not afraid to use it! This is combined with what you described as an ability to ‘read a room’. That social awareness is no doubt muchly based on his dreadful upbringing, which also explains why he isn’t practiced in how to use it to his advantage: if he learned to manipulate what he sees he would be indomitable. This also lends itself well to solid battlefield awareness--he recruited followers as a teenage leader of a destroyed sect during a war where they were outnumbered, I don’t think he could do that if he didn’t have a reputation for getting his people off a battlefield alive. No core needed--just give him some armor and a bullhorn and he could still lead a battle.

Dazzling good looks. It counts. 

He is a TERRIFIC duncle. Not perfect, but then no parent is perfect, and he certianly suceeds marvelously in not carrying the sins of his parents into the next generation. You’ll never make me believe that Jin Ling ever doubted his uncle’s love: he has never even considered that his uncle’s love for him is contingent on his usefulness to his uncle. (If Jin Ling lost his core he would be horrified, of course, but he would go straight to uncle. “What do we do now?”. And if ‘what we do’ doesn’t include getting a core back somehow, he loves and trusts his uncle enough to deal with it, I think.)

Excellent taste in women. Ok, the matchmaker list is silly, but it was clearly written by a boy who thinks Jiang Yanli is the best woman in the world and in that regard I respect him entirely. That and he met Wen Qing and was in no time flat like “*gentle gasp* Yo.”

as tumblr user @souridealist devastatingly said, he has an immense capacity for love--what would he be like if that had ever been treated as a strength instead of a weakness?

Very capable in many arts/skills honestly--the fact that he was always JUST behind WWX when the latter is a horrifying genius speaks to his abilities, I think.

Martial skills. Obviously this would be hampered by losing spiritual power, no more fukkin flight, but that doesn’t mean his skills with a sword or bow would disappear. In the fic I’m never gonna write (cause I already got 3 others in the pipes) where either WWX or WQ realizes he’s an adult human who deserves a say in his own fate and consult him before golden core transplant, I think this would be the gist of his argument against--because of course he wouldn’t agree. “You can’t be a sect leader!” WWX would argue, and JC would say “One, what sect! Two, who the fuck says! It’s my core that’s gone, not my brain. And what, are you and A-Jie going to not help me? Idiot.” “But, you are helpless! Defenseless,” WWX would say. “No kidding! After the war I look forwards to watching you travel around Yunmeng informing all the hunters and rangers that they are no longer capable of using a bow on account of they lack golden cores. IDIOT.”

(this is tangential, but related to the above: based on show-canon, at least, I don’t see how it’s a given that he couldn’t control Zidian without a golden core. Another spiritual implement we see, Suibian, responds to WWX’s-core-without-WWX but also to WWX-no-core. Madame Yu attuned Zidian to Jiang Cheng, not to his core. idk I just think it would be neat!)

This isn’t very well-articulated as a ‘skill’, but I think JC’s big problem is that when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Given space to breath (you know, without constant war or murder or That Family Life) I think he could easily learn other ‘tools’ that make him a very effective leader, person, whatever.

[fatalism-and-villainy]

Thoughts on Turgon?

So I’ll confess for a long time I didn’t have much interest in Turgon (despite having numerous friends who were fond of him), but he has been growing on me recently, especially with the help of @alackofghosts. This is also because I got much more interested in Fingon the last time I reread the Silmarillion, and thus I’ve been giving more thought to the Nolofinwean family dynamic. 

So for Turgon I’m more interested in the Valinor era than the Gondolin era, and particularly his relationships with his siblings. I think the text gives indications that he and Fingon were close - they’re both friends with the Arafinwean brothers, and I take it that they all hang out together, and they’re also described as being similar in personality. And I really like the ways those personality traits they share - a tendency towards very intense and stubborn conviction - eventually create a rift between them when emotional baggage and political disagreements come between them. I also like his relationships with Aredhel - Ghosts brought up the potential of him being indulgent and permissive towards Aredhel’s wild child tendencies, which I love.  

[viterbofangirllovestheuntamed]

Barefoot and Celibate

OH NO the eighth gif his HAND i feel like everyone knows how i feel about this very touching moment but uh re: that specific shot i am also having a whole different problem with the zidian and the...

[multsicorn]

@winepresswrath replied to your post “in a last-ditch effort to convince my hindbrain...”

Jiang Cheng, Wei Wuxian, truth spell :D?

[ahaha i said a couple hundred words lol]

Jiang Cheng wasn’t even supposed to be here today.  Not on this night hunt, not in a remote mountain village that was closer to Lanling than to Yunmeng, and, last but not least, certainly not throwing himself bodily between a literal cloud of resentful energy and Jin Ling.  Just because it had proved so far invulnerable to swords and to Zidian -

Wei Wuxian (and why was he even here?  But he had a way of being in the most inconvenient place.  And Jiang Cheng wanted Jin Ling to learn to assert his independence as sect leader, and so he was trying not to overrule his nephew too much) had been playing Chenqing, and the spirit had been - responding, somehow, swaying in the air over them like an ominous cloudy snake being charmed.  But then, for no reason, it had lunged, and Jiang Cheng had leapt, and now he’s on the ground, coughing blood, unable to get up and do anything against the spirit’s next strike.

Looking up, though, it appears to be... gone?

There’s only Wei Wuxian, offering him a hand up, and asking, “Are you okay?”

“Winded,” Jiang Cheng says, “but, I think so,” and then he frowns at himself.

Wei Wuxian frowns at him, too.

Why didn’t he just say fine?  Or better yet, worry about the kids, or where did the spirit go, or...

Wei Wuxian thinks faster than he does, though, like always, and he’s already smiling that sharp and pointed smile that he gets.  “Ah ha ha, Jiang Cheng,” he says.  “Do you like... bunny rabbits?”

What the hell.  Jiang Cheng frowns one extra notch fiercer.  “No.”  They remind me of you, he manages to clamp his teeth shut on.

“Okay, okay.”  Wei Wuxian looks back up at the sky, and Jiang Cheng does too.  It’s suspiciously clear....

“Did the spirit go inside of me?” Jiang Cheng asks.  Jin Ling and some of the junior Jin disciples are standing a polite few paces away, watching their elders but seeming uninclined to get in the middle of whatever’s happening.

“It looked like it did,” Wei Wuxian agrees.  “Whooosh!  Very cool, like the opposite of my - well, it’s my turn for a question.”  He taps his nose twice, pondering, and Jiang Cheng thinks, who says it’s your turn, who says we’re playing a game, there could be a dangerous spirit still out there, but he doesn’t trust what’d come out if he opened his mouth.  So he waits, glaring, totally ineffectively.  “What would it take for you to forgive me?”

Jiang Cheng opens his mouth.  Then closes it.  Then opens it again.  Which is - not at all what he’d expected.  This spell, this awful horrible spell, the jailbreaker of his weakness and grief - it ought to, at the very least, provide an answer.

But it doesn’t.

Wei Wuxian watches him standing there, silent, face crumbling, as he turns away at least from all the watching eyes.  From Wei Wuxian, from Jin Ling, from the young Jin sect disciples he doesn’t know... but Wei Wuxian follows his motion, staring intently, face open with awful sympathy, eyes alive with gears turning.

“Is it that nothing would do it?” he asks.  “Or is it that you don’t know?  Or is it that you’re refusing to tell me?  Or it’s not about that at all?  Jiang Cheng?”

Wei Wuxian’s stepped even closer, well within touching range.  Jiang Cheng doesn’t know why he still can’t speak.  He clenches his eyelids on the tears that are forming, and his hands shake.

Wei Wuxian gasps.  “No,” he whispers, as if to himself, but they’re close enough now that since Jiang Cheng’s listening, he can hear it.  “It can’t be.”  He bites his lip.  “Or can it be that... you’ve already forgiven me?”

How dare you say such things, Jiang Cheng would say, if he had control of his own faculties, but because he doesn’t, he whispers, “Yes.”

And he sees Wei Wuxian take it in like a body blow - take it in, and recover, and smile, his eyes full of tears, too.  “So does that mean that you’ll come to visit me in the Cloud Recesses this summer?  Or that I can come to Lotus Pier again?  Oh, or maybe we’ll drink together in Jinlintai tonight.”

“No,” Jiang Cheng says, “it doesn’t mean any of that,” and thank god this spirit in his throat, whatever it is, isn’t making that sort of decision for him.  “And shouldn’t it be my turn to ask a question, anyway?”

Wei Wuxian nods, thoughtfully.  “Eight, if you want.”

Jiang Cheng sighs.  His stupid brother.  “This spirit, you said it’s in me.  How are we going to get it out?”