You know, judging by how fast Wen Qing caved on Wen Ning's showing up in Yiling with wwx and jc, even though she was real mad about it, I bet he has been doing this to her for years.
Probably started by bringing her injured animals to doctor on as a kid. Later on, not necessarily a lot later, he started dragging in bullied disciples to patch up and hide from Wen Xu or somebody, and then probably he'd just kind of...fold a lot of them into his canonical personal retinue of loyal subordinates, however that worked exactly.
Wet kitten Wen Ning constantly dragging smaller wetter kittens back to his big sister to protect. She has tried all the arguments already. She knows there's no budging him.
Also lmaoooo hang on, Wen Ning had Wen Qing outnumbered a lot of the time, didn't he. She didn't have personal minions she could trust like that. These people just extracted a high-status prisoner from the custody of an erratic and violent superior pursuing a personal grudge without blinking, for their Wen-gongzi.
Wen Ning's ability to get up to shenanigans due to all the pathetic life-forms she'd allowed him to accumulate must have dawned on her with belated horror.
@falsegrailwar was like #please. please read op's tags oh my god
and i was like hmmn what did i say??
#they were supposed to watch his back! #and keep him busy! #and take a sword for him if the opportunity arose probably; wen ning wouldn't want that but wen qing would
#these unnamed subordinates with no lines are rapidly becoming my favorite mdzs supporting cast #like what did they think about the plot #wen ning got pressganged by jin zixun in the company of his subordinates #so some of them probably lasted all the way to the Siege
#there might have been a guy who personally carried jiang cheng out of the charnel house of lotus pier #or retrieved his parents' bodies from the corpse heap #and roughly four to ten years later#watched jiang cheng come to kill him #and had his corpse dumped in the blood pool #and knew for a fact that jiang wanyin did not even know he existed and wouldn't care if he did
#it all goes in circles and some of us get ground up in the gears
i can see why i left that out of the main post but yeah. i stand by these tags a;sldjsdfkl;
#this is one of the reasons i really like fics that go#'hm we could do a big war to depose a tyrant oooor#'we could do a coup? current ruling family blows but look! a niece and nephew who hate their uncle and just want to do medicine!'#i'm sure there are reasons why this wouldn't work but hey#wen ning would make an excellent sect heir! he wins people over so well! (tags by @spookymirrorsprite)
Wen Sect Leader Wen Ning lives rent free in my mind. Saves everyone from Wen Ruohan. Frees Wen Qing up to do her medical research to her little mad scientist heart's content. Makes Wen Yuan his heir. Depending on where it falls in the timeline, he can two-birds-one-stone reconciliation with the Jiang sect and getting rid of his own rivals by handing the likes of Wen Chao to them, or just prevent a bunch of tragedies altogether. Time traveling fix-it fic Wen Ning going hmm I wonder if I still have some corpse powers and then punching through his uncle's ribcage to test it.
Seems he does!
....man, time travel Wen Ning murdering Wen Ruohan with his bare hands and seizing power would be such a twist from everyone else's perspective.
like. you could not tell he was the kind of guy who would quietly and unapologetically rescue his sect's enemies out of moral conviction, but he was. people contain multitudes. so same way, in this scenario the political world is rocked by this mediocre, sweet-tempered, unassuming teenage Wen cousin purging the upper ranks of his family and usurping the sect by force.
Wen Qing's reputation before the war (at least the part Wei Wuxian bothered to recall) notably consisted of one part 'medical genius' and one part 'only normal person in the Wen leadership.' Wen Ning turning out to be the most insane murderer in his family would be accepted as narratively coherent, despite being a shocking twist.
bets would be on about whether he and Wen Qing would go on to kill each other off. i feel like they'd lose a lot of vassal sects and guest disciples on account of the sect doesn't seem as stable or powerful suddenly.
diplomatic relations would not normalize for a while, unless he managed to do this during the war so all the other sects felt it was a favor to them, because killing family members for power tends to be frowned upon. nie mingjue in particular i think would be of the opinion that Sect Leader Wen Qionglin was a mad dog.
i feel like Jin Zixun would suddenly be getting a lot of side-eye in case he had similar ambitions lmao.
#the implications of his having corpse powers in his normal body intrigue me#in that this suggests something wwx did fundamentally altered his soul#which cannot have been the intent#also he was in fact a cultivator so i wonder how his body is going to handle having normal cultivation#and whatever resentment-based nonsense he brought back with him#many interesting plot threads from wn doing this insane thing!#not a boring fixit concept lol (@whetstonefires)
The tension in the long term of Nie Mingjue and most of the rest of the cultivation world holding their breath to see what other horrible things Wen Ning would do in the name of ambition, while Wen Ning mostly just doesn't do any of them would be great, I must say.
#also important to remember that wen ning would NOT be normal about wwx through all this (via @maggiedeshiboux)
which would baffle everyone, given they met once. and, huh, that interaction with Wei Wuxian championing this kid against his mean cousin, whom he went on to clear out of the way of his succession, would look really different suddenly in hindsight lmao.
if this was back far enough that the qishan indoctrination never happened, wwx wouldn't even feel more than moderate dislike toward wen chao lmao. he's just an especially obnoxious young master.
further thoughts: if Wen Ning did follow up impulsively killing Wen Ruohan with deliberately getting rid of Wen Chao and Wen Xu so as to carry off a coup, it would not be because he wants to be sect leader.
so to what extent would it be to protect Wen Sect, or at least people in it, from being run by Wen Xu, to what extent would it be to protect all the other sects from the possibility of Wen Sect still waging a war, and to what extent would it be to protect Wen Qing from the fallout of his murder?
i feel like the last part is not non-zero, given she died the first time because he punched someone to death.
but making the decision to double down on the violence in order to be able to control the outcome is a fascinating move, it is not even in the top five most likely reactions for him to have.
the characterization here would be so interesting to get right, because Wen Ning is so passive right up until he plants himself like a mountain, and he's never had to stay in mountain mode the way he would to pull this off. so he'd be taking leaves out of Wei Wuxian's book, deliberately.
but much as he admires him, he knows how comprehensively things wound up going to shit due to partly Wei Wuxian's choices (particularly the impulsive choice to reanimate Wen Ning's corpse to murder people) and is ultimately confident enough about rejecting wwx's reasoning to blow things wide open with Jiang Cheng.
so he'd have to be trying to copy Wei Wuxian's way of seizing control of the circumstances and do insane things because someone has to do them, while also applying his own sense of caution, and pursuing the idea that you can't just seize control when you want to and then let it go again, it's something you have to maintain.
ironically making him more like wen ruohan than he has any business ever becoming.
i think if he didn't tell Wen Qing everything he'd blow up.
but while he's more of a talker than Lan Wangji, he is not someone who uses a lot of words, or who would be good at explaining as large and complicated a story as this would be. so 'everything' would take a really long while to fill in.
also: jin zixun will now, due to the recent precedent of Loser Cousin Murder Usurpation, be super easy to frame for murdering jin guangshan and jin zixuan. if meng yao finds some way to break into the family without a war, he should use that.
to circle back to the original post: from wen qing's pov, her wet kitten abruptly switched to dragging home mangled human corpses.
