not to bring up the wei qing discourse again, but i was reading your yiling wei au again and i thought of an explanation that better fits both canon and chinese naming traditions, and i'm pretty sure no one brought it up during the discourse itself. iirc you cited madam jin as a reason to change wq's name, but the thing is that when you use furen (madam), you're supposed to attach your husband's name, which means that madam yu is actually the odd one out skdhskf. an argument could be made for how it symbolises the fraught tension between yzy and jfm, but yeah.
however, your name still stays the same. so madam jin's name would have stayed the same. she just would've been referred to as jin-furen. you can see this with jyl, who's referred to as jin-xiao-furen (young madam jin). also, i'm pretty sure cultivators keep their name regardless of their sect (see: su she and luo qingyang). it's just that most of the disciples we see are clan (familial) disciples, not sect (outer) disciples, which is why their family name is the same as the sect name.
so what i initially thought, upon reading your au, was that wq changed her name to emphasise her declaration of loyalty to wwx. family names in chinese culture is incredibly important, and to change your family name is to essentially turn your back on your ancestors. so what i read was wq turning her back on the wen legacy and declaring her loyalty to wwx in a way no one can refute. even marriage can be written off as political, but the changing of a family name hits a lot harder and more irrevocably.
her marriage to wwx, then, would've been inferred from her position in the entourage and her proximity to him.
btw, if you're comfortable with it, could you publish this publicly so more ppl are aware of this? it's okay if you're not skdjjs but i know a lot of cql fans don't have a lot of knowledge of chinese customs and stuff so yeah this might be helpful
hi! it’s nice of you to point all this out, but it was where i was going to begin with
my point with madam jin wasn’t that she changed her name after she got married because she got married. i’ve written people getting married in the untamed universe before i made that tumblr fic, and i didn’t have them change their name, because i was aware that that isn’t really a thing in chinese culture. and tbh i find character name changes to be a little jarring as a reader, so i avoid them when i can.
my point with madame jin - and at the time i thought she had a jin last name that she used outside of the madame title but i’m pretty sure that’s incorrect - and others is that in canon it seems like people are running around with clan family names without actually being part of the main family. this could just be because of messiness of the drama or because i’m just bad at keeping track of everyone’s names
so how i handled this in lynchpin was i had it being a thing where people take on the clan name while they’re apart of the clan. except for the jiang, who are little rebels.
so it would be like, for example:
birth name: wei ying; courtesy name: wuxian; clan name; jiang wuixan
so like, anyone could refer to any disciple in gold “young master jin” without knowing their real name. and people could either use their clan name or not, but most would as a sign of status and allegiance, but doing so wouldn’t be giving up their name
I UNDERSTAND THIS IS NOT CANON
the point is that i thought it would be interesting and a fun and useful convention to throw into fic. even though it’s not historically accurate, i think that that’s fine because there’s no historically accurate way to address large governing clans of magic knights because those didn’t exist
so when wei wuxian clarifies wen qing’s name is now wei qing, it’s to show he’s gone against the jiang practices he grew up with and in his clan people use a clan name.
it’s significant for the wen especially, because there’s a reveal in that universe (that, in all fairness, i never got to because after everyone got so upset about it i really didn’t feel like getting into) that they give up their birth name wen to only go by wei.
i’d had this scene that i really liked where someone claims all the wen have to be killed and wei wuxian was just like “what wen? there are no wen here. there are only wei.” but again, this whole thing caused so much drama that i just wasn’t interested in getting into it again
even though i didn’t go into that, when we see wen ning later in the fic, he’s going by wei ning
it was never about wen qing getting married. that’s why she’s introduced first as madame wei - to show that’s she’s married to wei wuxian, the clan leader of the wei - and then wei wuxian gives her name as wei qing. they’re signifying different things. if the point had just been to show they’re married and her name is wei now, he wouldn’t have clarified her name in front of everyone, since people obviously already know who she is
jiang yanli is in the same fic, married to jin zixuan, and i don’t refer to her as jin yanli. it wasn’t a marriage thing
did i expect that everyone who read my tiny tumblr fic would have also read my 100k monster fic and know i was bringing in similar ideas?
but i also hadn’t expected everyone to jump down my throat about changing her name because she got married when i at no point ever claimed that was why she changed her name, nor had i had literally any other married character change their name
i thought i could just do what i usually do and go on to fill in worldbuilding and reveal in other installments so i didn’t feel the need to go into a deep dive of my motivations from page one
thank you for the information. i like the idea because it’s similar to the idea i already had. great minds think alike.
