I will say. It really does piss me off a little when people on here try to act like yaoi scholars and then they don't even engage with actual yaoi as a genre AT ALL and what they mean by yaoi is just like. House MD slash shipping.

My understanders will Understand me

and As Such . My misinterpreters will Misinterpret me . The price for speaking my truth .

i think a lot of what's compelling about the thirteen years of grief is that like by any particularly thoughtful reading it's not Just grief. like it's additionally thirteen years of general loneliness not just missing wei wuxian but missing there being Anybody who treated him as a friend and equal. but it's also thirteen years of Making A Point. it's thirteen years of wearing white which means that anytime anybody of that era interacts with him they're forced to remember and acknowledge. jiang cheng cannot even look at him without being reminded of what he ostensibly did and of being too much of a coward* to mourn his brother. lwj does not really resent xichen in that same way but nevertheless any time xichen sees him he has to see wwx's death. and therefore also the wens' death. which lwj decided to get involved in preventing simply too late and so in many ways the being a constant visual reminder of the jianghu's allowing wwx to die is all he can do to make up for that! and it's also like. and relatedly a lot of what he is grieving is not just wwx the person but his own failures to make choices he can stand by! he's not just standing around being suicidal with grief for thirteen years he has very obviously spent those years figuring out who he is and what he Wants to be and who he wants to help and then Doing all of that. the way wwx factors into his life for those thirteen years is so much more complicated than "i miss my teenage crush". yknow. he literally self-actualizes. and there's a damn reason jiang cheng hates him! even without knowing that he fought anybody at all in wwx's defense!