whump enthusiast

I love aspec wwx so much and even though I usually go with demi for him, I’ve been thinking about the idea of wwx being aroace but very romance/sex favorable. He knows this about himself but doesn’t really make a big deal out of labels so he kind of just. forgets to tell lwj. honestly he thinks it’s a little obvious with the way he constantly says he doesn’t need a relationship as long as he can be best friends with lwj for the rest of their lives. IN FACT he kind of just assumes lwj is aroace too. after all, /he’s/ never shown any interest in sex or romance either.

so basically they live together and are best friends and in wwx’s mind they’re already in a qpr of sorts. he knows he loves lwj and that he wants to stay with him forever. he doesn’t really care about anything beyond that. he thinks lwj doesn’t really care about anything beyond that. these things don’t need to be said. they’re in sync, right?

all their friends bother them about the fact that they’re “basically dating” but wwx doesn’t mind. he doesn’t feel the need to explain himself to them. unfortunately this means no one really knows he’s aroace and therefore all think he’s either hiding his relationship with lwj (jc) or stringing him along (lxc).

enter lxc in Protective Gege Mode

wwx does eventually warm up to kissing even more and starts to initiate more once he realizes he's Obsessed with the pleased little face lwj makes every time.

they do have sex and wwx does enjoy it. besides the physical sensations being nice, he likes being held down bc it "feels like your love is pressing into my whole body that way." lwj is very satisfied with that.

nie huaisang is upper class. he's specifically stated in the novel as behaving more like the idle rich than like a distinguished second young master of one of the five great cultivation sects, but he's still an heir by birth. even if nie huaisang had been more openly caught, who would do anything to him?

wei wuxian notices that bicao's testimony was bought with a few shiny baubles— that nie huaisang was the one who bribed her with a nice bracelet for her testimony. he intentionally kept his own sect half dead, barely afloat for years, just to keep up the guise of an incompetent loser!

but the only actual consequence he's faced for such poor leadership that probably hurt a lot of common folks in his territory over 13 years is that people think nie huaisang is an annoying, useless crybaby. nie huaisang has a level of protection from consequences that jin guangyao had to fight much harder for (and that jin guangyao ultimately never truly got).

nie huaisang knew his own class and social position extremely well, and he knew how most people of that position behave and think. he was more than willing to use this in his revenge.

jiang cheng, whose abilities are consistently evaluated as average and who has been envious and bitter about it for decades, could not have maintained his position if not for the efforts of the servant beneath him (wei wuxian) literally being carved out and implanted into jiang cheng's own now empty cavity. it elevates jiang cheng and leaves wei wuxian ultimately losing whatever flimsy place he originally had among other upper class cultivators.

jiang cheng may have been tricked about the specifics of the transfer, but remember: when wei wuxian suggested sacrificing his own personal gift from his mother's shizun, baoshan-sanren, meant for wei wuxian’s exclusive emergency use, jiang cheng snapped up the offer immediately and without any concern whatsoever for wei wuxian possibly getting harmed for it. the only thing he does is get excited that he can get his core back and get suspicious that wei wuxian is lying.

jiang cheng takes this gift that renewed his own core completely for granted. to him, it's practically a given that wei wuxian should offer a gift like this up to him; he questions the mechanics and specifics of baoshan-sanren and her mountain, but never once worries or even seems to think of the impact it might have on wei wuxian.

nor does this incredibly generous use of wei wuxian’s mother's gift temper jiang cheng's later choices to force wei wuxian out of the yunmeng jiang clan to save his own face (even if they faked a falling out at first), and to lead the siege of the burial mounds which kills wei wuxian.

naturally you can argue that jiang cheng's parents and all their fellow disciples were just killed, their home was just destroyed, they're hardly 18 years old and clearly mentally and emotionally unstable from everything... but wouldn't someone in that position worry equally as much about the safety of the one and only other companion they escaped alive with?

what happened to asking "what about you?"

it's a very natural turn of phrase that makes it easy to reciprocate concern. but it didn't come out of jiang cheng's mouth even once.

it all makes the ending of the book emotionally that much more impactful. because when jiang cheng finally finds out the truth-- that too, from wen ning, arguably the one person he hates more than wei wuxian, while wei wuxian had just fallen unconscious after jiang cheng stressed him out to the point of bleeding from all seven apertures-- jiang cheng realizes exactly how unequal he and wei wuxian have been.

after screaming, crying, and running around the whole night frantically demanding everyone test out the sword, jiang cheng is unavoidably confronted with what he was unconsciously always expecting and demanding of wei wuxian, and the way wei wuxian delivered without a word.

and it leads to jiang cheng letting go. he stops chasing, stops demanding eternal payback, and lets wei wuxian go. they both move on without each other. a phenomenal end to a relationship that was ultimately never healthy for either of them.

SPECIFICALLY the inclusion of sex. their society already hates any deviance, but wei wuxian doesn't cave to their sensibilities! he doesn't back off and pretend that their closeness is chaste, or similar to sworn brotherhood.

that isn't to say those who died or were bereaved after nightless city or the first siege of the burial mounds weren't hurt by wei wuxian’s retaliation. but calling them "wei wuxian’s victims" while ignoring that cultivation society scapegoated and hunted him down, and that wei wuxian never attacked without being threatened first, is a massive oversimplification.

sure we have minor characters like the cultivator who lost his leg or the cultivator who lost his parents, and sure mxtx writes them as part of a mob of more unreasonable people who were largely not even present for these events, but the thing is... there are major named characters who were present, or who had loved ones there, and their grief and pain are given full attention by the story. they're called jiang cheng and jin ling.

my sister/my mother died at nightless city because of you! except no, jiang yanli actually died because an entirely different nameless cultivator stabbed her, and she intentionally pushed wei wuxian out of the way to protect him out of sincere love. it wasn't the first time. she already demonstrated this when she stood up for him and called him her blood brother in front of her fiance and his family at an event they were hosting, when she had zero backing support and could've easily been dumped and had her marriageability ruined for speaking out of turn.

who's to say that jiang yanli's death wasn't the only instance of cultivators dying at nightless city from friendly fire during all the chaos? we don't know. the one thing we do know for certain is that once it was all over, the survivors attributed the (dubiously counted) thousands of casualties to wei wuxian alone.

saying that wei wuxian was the sole cause is overly convenient for cultivation society. in particular the major sects politically did not want to help the wen remnants and were content to mistreat them in forced labor camps. they thought that wei wuxian was too dangerous with his unique ghost path of cultivation and use of resentful energy, so they gathered everyone up and tried TWO different times to assassinate him. the first time just killing wei wuxian alone. the next time, taking all the remaining wens out with him.

there's a lot left unsaid about these major battles and sieges which leads to a lot of our discourse as fans to begin with-- we have such limited information about all these major events of the past! and unfortunately for us, that's the point!

that's the thesis of the book! the details of the pain and grief you go through don't actually matter! regardless of it, you have to eventually move on. you have to actively choose good, to do what you think is right for the sake of doing the right thing, and not just to act based on your idea of fulfilling debts or deserving to be repaid a certain way!