Do you ever just think about the Lan Sect’s famous 3,000+ rules?
Because I can’t get over how there’s all this vague, high-minded stuff, like, “follow the righteous path,” and “be strict with yourself, and gentle with others,” and then, like, “Take a shower and change your clothes” and “no more than 3 pieces of bling on your belt.” Like, OK, none of this is exactly bad advice, but there’s some serious oscillation going on between the abstract and the mundane.
And to me, it’s even funnier when you realize that the Wall O’Rules is a living document, with new rules added as things come up.
I picture some long-ago Lan ancestor, stuck in a classroom full of stinky teenage boys, who are all claiming to be too busy with their spiritual development to take a goddamn shower and just being like, “Do I need to put it in the rules? Fine, I will put it in the fucking rules.” (Breaks out a chisel, right then and there.) “Take a shower. And change your clothes, while you’re at it. There. If you want to attain the highest level, you have to wash, you filthy animals.”
And then the Bling Rule is probably a generation or two later, when there has been a backlash against the performative asceticism of the previous era, and now the adolescents are all trying to show how Serious they are about Cultivation by accumulating an assortment of spiritual trinkets. It’s gotten to the point where, after a class bows to the teacher, you have to wait five minutes for all the clattering to die down, and for pity’s sake, the other day my neighbor’s sister-in-law’s youngest nephew turned up with what he claimed was a spiritual spoon. Heaven alone knows what he paid for it, or how far away the vendor saw him coming, bless his heart. Chisel time!
IDK, man, maybe I just enjoy thinking about Lan teenagers having normal teenage impulses, but looping them through the weirdness of having spent their entire lives in what is essentially a monastery crossed with a military installation. They always follow the rules, but somehow, every new generation comes up with a new and creative way of being insufferable. You add it to the wall, and then their kids come up with something even worse!
(There was serious debate, during Lan Wangji’s adolescence, about adding a rule clarifying that it is, in fact, preferable to occasionally have facial expressions, but they couldn’t quite figure out how to word it, and then all the other stuff happened and it was the least of their worries.)
