About JC's Courtesy Name and Title
I've been seeing new fics that use Wanyin and Sandu Shengshou so freely, when in the 100+ chapters of MDZS, LWJ is the only one who regularly calls JC Wanyin and WWX calls him as such only when he's truly pissed off.
No one ever uses Sandu Shengshou except for that scene with the children playing as Sect Leaders. Not even during the talks and celebrations among cultivators during the prologue and Dafan Mountain Hunt--they call him Jiang Cheng.
Which leads me to believe that Jiang Cheng hates his courtesy name and title. He might still introduce himself as Wanyin out of courtesy but he doesn't use it. Preferring his milk name or Jiang-gongzi when he was young and Jiang-zongzhu when he was older.
And there could be an interesting explanation for this:
Wanyin (ęå) comes from a poem about someone who has ended up alone on a nightly stroll with "no one to recite the poem to." It is a very inauspicious name to give your child. It's like you're cursing them into a life of loneliness.
But I think Jiang Fengmian gave JC such a name with Sandu (JC's sword) in mind.
Sandu (äøęÆ) refers to the Buddhist belief that the root of all evil are the three poisons: greed, anger, and ignorance.
So JFM is telling JC that every time he wields Sandu (AKA he has let greed, hatred, ignorance rule his heart), he would end up alone.
And that's exactly what happens in canon LMAO. And people started calling him Sandu Shengshou (Master of the Three Poisons) which is a lowkey way of saying he's greedy, hateful, and ignorant.
Not only that, but cultivation has always been closely tied to enlightenment. Even for something as genre-subversive as MDZS, this is still true.
(The guy who has no desires and no envy has easily excelled and surpassed others even when he started cultivating later than his peers. When WWX made the ultimate sacrifice, he [arguably] broke through so many cultivation bottlenecks and has become even more powerful than when he had his core.)
So by calling JC the Sandu Shengshou, people are lowkey saying that he has cultivated such heart demons. So much so that he will never grow as a cultivator and will never amount to anything more than what he already has.
