Who do I think fell in love first? it was definitely lan wangji, and it was right here:
[id: screenshot of lan wangji watching wei wuxian making a wish to “protect the weak and curb the strong, with a clear conscience for all my life” from episode 7 of the untamed drama. wei wuxian’s eyes are closed, his hands clasped. lan wangji looks on with a surprised tenderness. /end id]
I think it’s safe to say that he already finds wei wuxian attractive/intriguing (see: his reaction to wei wuxian drawing his portrait, tying the lan ribbon around their wrists, the PEAK gay panic in his voice when wei wuxian trips and falls on top of him), but this is the first moment he’s really moved by him. up until this point, wei wuxian has been teasing, immature, A Nuisance™, too clever for his own good, troublemaker energy personified etc but he hasn’t ever revealed his deeper moral values in front of lan wangji—and he does it like this, without pretension, without irony. He doesn’t spend his wish on something frivolous or material: he wishes to be able to do good for all his life, to be righteous, to be kind. it’s the wish he makes for both of them. “the promise we made together all those years ago,” as he says, half a lifetime later.
like just. imagine, for a moment, being lan wangji, whose whole world is being constantly challenged and needled by this unfairly attractive, chaotic bastard and then he just comes out of left field with this. I think this is where lan wangji first recognizes himself in wei wuxian—that at their core, they share their most important values.
look what i’m saying is this is where I fell in love with wei wuxian.
(sidenote: I really think a lot of the tragedy of mdzs/the untamed is stems from this moment. wei wuxian fails, over and over and over, even when his wish never changes, even when all he ever wanted was to do good without fear.)
i had to think for a really long time to try and decide which moments i wanted to talk about on wei wuxian’s part, because i don’t think he’s nearly as easy to pinpoint. lan wangji falls in love like a lightning strike, but wei wuxian’s love is something that grows so slowly, i don’t think he realizes what it is until pretty late in the game.
so let’s begin with this moment on phoenix mountain:
[id: screenshot of lan wangji and wei wuxian facing each other on phoenix mountain from episode 25 of the untamed drama. lan wangji is waiting expectantly for an answer, having just asked, “what am i to you?”, hand behind his back. wei wuxian is holding his flute, expression complicated and uncertain. /end id]
this is the first time i think wei wuxian is asked directly to label his feelings about lan wangji, and he says, “i once thought of you as a lifelong, intimate friend.” and when lan wangji presses, “and now?”, he doesn’t respond.
two episodes later, when wei wuxian is taking the wen refugees out of their prison camp and lan wangji appears before him, I think he has some kind of answer to lan wangji’s question:
[id: screenshot from episode 27 of the untamed drama. wei wuxian holds out chenqing before him in challenge to lan wangji, who is offscreen. he is smiling, just slightly, resigned and fond and terribly sad. /end id]
“if there really must be a battle between me and them, then I would rather fight to the death with you. if i must die, then at least i would like to die by hanguang-jun’s hand. it wouldn’t be an injustice.”
if that isn’t some kind of confession, I don’t really know what is.
but it’s too late—he’s now a defector in the eyes of the four sects. lan wangji lets him go and wei wuxian rides away. the remainder of his first life, that’s how things stand. even through everything with a’yuan, the final massacre at the nightless city—even though there’s something really meaningful there between them, it’s all tinged with a sense of impossibility, you know? there’s no outcome where they can resolve it happily. wei wuxian has gone too far down that single-plank bridge.
the first moment i think wei wuxian has to confront the unresolved and unsaid things between him and lan wangji comes when lan wangji gets drunk that one night and tells him, “i have regret.”
“that at the nightless city, I did not stand beside you.”
[id: screenshot of wei wuxian looking at lan wangji (offscreen) with tears in his eyes as the full realization of what lan wangji just drunkenly confessed hits him from episode 36 of the untamed drama. /end id]
“so all this time, you’ve been searching for me?”
earlier i said can you imagine being lan wangji for a sec, and i’m gonna say it again except god. can you. IMAGINE being wei wuxian in this moment. finding out that this person that you maybe suspected you had deeper feelings for but never acted on has spent the entire sixteen years of your death searching for you, regretting that he didn’t stand with you before you died? a regret that he’s been carrying in secret, alone, for sixteen years?? that’s A Lot to unpack.
however, I don’t think wei wuxian really, fully understands and accepts how he feels and how lan wangji feels in return, how far they’re both willing to go until episode 42, at the confrontation at jinlingtai.
[id: two screenshots from episode 42 of the untamed drama, right after lan wangji takes a stand beside wei wuxian against the four sects. image 1 is lan wangji smiling at wei wuxian: he is gentle and sure. image 2 is wei wuxian smiling back at him, eyes red-rimmed and wet. /end id]
even though lan wangji has been walking with him since dafan shan, he’s been doing it with a plausible deniability. and here, when wei wuxian is trying to give him an out, lan wangji puts everything he has on the line so that he can clearly stand with wei wuxian, without dissembling, without hesitation. “the feeling of of walking on a single-plank bridge into the dark truly is no worse.”
lan wangji is finished with regrets.
“it’s just funny, that’s all,” wei wuxian says, “back when the whole world flattered me with praise, you were the only one who would scold me. but now that everyone is calling for my death, all hating and condemning me, you’re nevertheless the only one standing by my side.”
i think after that, for all the remaining episodes, there’s an unspoken commitment between the two of them that underpins the rest of their interactions, which I think I can say without reservation that I like more than how it played out in the novel. there’s something really profound about it, the trust in their unlabelled relationship. it really feels like the inexorable culmination of two adults in their mid-thirties coming together after falling in love for almost twenty years. there’s a maturity to it that isn’t present in the way the novel does the confession (which does have its own disaster energy™ charm) that I think highlights the fact that they love each other, not just because they admire each other, not just because they’re attracted to one another, but because they understand each other—because when they look at each other, they also see themselves.
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