Loved your meta about XiCheng! You put into words something I've never been able to exactly get at about why I'm so neutral about that ship (pretty as the fanart is.)
I'm so curious about your Nie Huaisang comment too! What are your thoughts on SangCheng - either mid- or post-canon?
stacking these two together lmao. thank you! <3
sorry for the delay, i answered it in full and then tumblr ate it and i was sad.
okay, brutal honesty! i don't hate this one as much as xicheng, and it's less because at least nhs and jc had a friendship to fall back on than because we do not, when you come down to it, know shit about nie huaisang.
we have a handful of facts of which we can be reasonably certain, a handful more of which we are not certain at all, and a bunch of hypotheticals. he is a very flexible character.
even the things we seem to know are potentially negotiable: for example, did he really flunk Lan Finishing School twice, or did he deliberately underperform to get sent back, to avoid his brother's pressure to conform to the expectations of the Nie clan? are we sure we know? etc.
therefore, you can fashion a nie huaisang who is entirely plausible as a romantic partner for jiang cheng, in a range of styles depending on the needs of the narrative.
someone who does a good job of this will thus get a romantic story that is both canon-compatible and compelling.
now, 1. it still won't be my cup of tea, but more importantly 2. it is often not done very well, but just more tepid pair-the-spares and 3. very common not to recognize that jiang cheng, in contrast to nhs, is a character with a lot of fixed points.
his difficulty changing as a person or acting like anyone but himself (and often being bad at even that, due to Inner Conflict) is a load-bearing aspect of the story. if you are fielding a jiang cheng who is undergoing Growth you gotta engage with how hard that is for him.
most of the time, i think, this is going to be an intense pain-of-change experience right up until the transition is complete, at which point he will snap onto his new skeleton and be inflexible in a new conformation, although ideally less so. there's room for interpretation here, but not at all ambiguous is that he struggles.
the other problem i have with this ship is that, as in xicheng, we are putting together two male sect leaders in a homophobic society. that's fraught.
they are both highly visible political figures who can't afford to spend too much time around each other, and they have very different approaches and priorities when it comes to managing their images, but they are both very image-conscious.
this is less of an issue with nhs than with lxc, one of the many reasons i like it better, because he is comfortable with things like 'lying,' and being sect leader is a significantly smaller facet of his personality. there's a solid chunk of time where he is not sect leader yet and is not acknowledging he ever could be.
why is nie mingjue not married with kids, btw.
you know what i've never seen? when people are doing the popular 'canon setting but gay marriage is normalized' AU? never seen jiang cheng and nie huaisang having to get divorced because da-ge died. i think that's one of the more interesting things you could do with them within the range of common shipfic content.
has anyone seen that? i feel like if you put in some concubines for reproductive purposes, to explain how you can have normalized gay marriage in period china without massive transformation of most aspects of society, you could do this AU completely in-character.
but, back on topic, that's the thing! that trips me up so much when people skip over it! wangxian are quite deliberately constructed around this, with lwj being a second son explicitly going through a whole character arc of choosing selfishness over his duty to his family, and wei wuxian having in practice no generational obligations.
jiang cheng could be gay as the day is long (improbable), and he would still not consider a man as a serious, let alone exclusive, long-term partner, because being sect heir and then sect leader is a massive part of his personality.
jiang cheng only exists as a vessel for his inheritance. that is why his parents created him. why they saved him alive, while going to their deaths.
i think they loved him, as well as each of them could, but they never wanted him. except to fill the position of the heir. and he knows this, down to his bones.
that's why he had nothing to live for without his cultivation; without the ability to perpetuate Jiang Sect.
not having children of his body is not a realistic option for jiang cheng. having his own kids is not something he wants to do, for a lot of reasons only some of which are distinct to the reader, but he has to. eventually.
the fact that he hasn't yet can be framed internally as a 'later' thing and a 'once Jin Ling is grown' thing, he still has time, he isn't yet forty. but he is incapable of making the decision not to marry and father an heir, as his father was obliged to before him.
(actually it's possible that for a bit there he was hoping jin guangyao would cut a deal where jiang cheng could adopt jin ling into the jiang, clearing the way for rusong to take the jin. he's jiang blood, after all, so it'd be close enough. and then he wouldn't have to confront various personal issues, limbo right under.)
the seismic transformation of jiang cheng's entire character that would have to be involved in letting go of this obligation and choosing a non-reproductive pair bond, and reforming the Jiang away from the clan-centric model pioneered by Wen Mao, would probably be psychologically healing. if he made it through.
but it would require at least a whole additional novel of content to get him through that believably. he's not just going to do that one day. even if he was gayer than lan wangji, he couldn't just decide to go with that. gotta build up to it.
so if you don't want to dedicate some 70k to the character arc, or massively change his context and thus his character, you're restricted to canon setting sangcheng on a strictly messing-around basis. casual liaison. depressed hookups at discussion conferences conducted in the utmost secrecy.
romantic feelings could arise, but would be repressed and ignored--which means nhs might pick up that jiang cheng was attached to him and not acknowledge it whether it was reciprocated or not, while jiang cheng would never let it enter his consciousness that nie huaisang might Like him, and would avoid contemplating the reverse.
like a more deliberate and tormented (i.e. normal) version of wwx's block about lwj.
the more romantic they felt about each other the more fucked up things would get, honestly, because this is necessarily a relationship that is 1) no-strings 2) temporary and 3) secret. so attachment increases avoidance.
you do something along those lines, and slather on either some heaping angst around nhs being a lying liar who doesn't trust jiang cheng with the truth about his brother's death, or a dynamic plot around him doing so and the two of them joining forces as a sort of secret counterweight to the jin-lan alliance, with lots of character growth for jiang cheng and some processing of his issues about wwx? you could build something really solid. story-wise, and in terms of character.
so yeah it's not a pairing with no potential, there are definitely exploitable angles. but i feel like it quite often gets written with the same lack of investment in the narrative, setting, and characterization as xicheng, so i don't regard it fondly.
if you like jiang cheng enough to make him one of your leads, why not put him in the situation and let him react to it on his terms? i do not understand.
