#untaming

Untaming

okay i have small small crumbs, unfortunately ive like barely written anything for ch2 BUT my exams have just finished so i will be soooo locked in on getting this chaoter together from now on

IN THE MEAN TIME heres a wee crumb

So I think it’s relevant that all of the most traumatic periods of time in Wei Wuxian’s life involve starvation in some way. There’s living on the streets as a little kid, having survived his parents’ death and not having any caretaker, and having to scavenge for food; there’s spending three months in the Burial Mounds, after what is certainly a very traumatizing medical procedure, getting terrorized by resentful spirits while having to subsist on corpse cannibalism and god knows what else; and then there’s living at the Burial Mounds with the Wens, during which he’s demonstrably in extremely poor mental health, where it’s mentioned that they frequently don’t have enough food, and where the stress of procuring food is a part of daily life. 

So I think it’s safe to say that Wei Wuxian associates food with care, with protection, with security. Especially since one of the most prominent caretakers in his life, Jiang Yanli, shows care regularly through food. And there are several occasions where Wei Wuxian asks for help, or rather obscures his need for help, by asking for food. I’m thinking of these two scenes in particular:

The first is for his little mock-whiny “i’m baby!!” ritual. He’s trying to hide that he lost his core and deflect attention from his PTSD and assorted Issues, which he does by joking around and acting childish, and also distilling his distress into something seemingly trivial like not getting his basic needs met. But given the parentified role Jiang Yanli has had in both his and Jiang Cheng’s life, I think there’s a degree to which he doesn’t know how to ask for support from her except by acting like a child.

And then in the second one, on the boat with Lan Wangji and Wen Ning, he’s explicitly remembering the former scene, while hallucinating his sister (with Lan Wangji and Wen Ning looking on in concern). And the way he says “I’m hungry” with that little laugh seems to me like he’s trying to assuage their concern for him, sort of akin to “oh, i’m fine actually, it’s nothing.” But he’s also grieving for Jiang Yanli, and probably the general loss of the familial support system he had with her and Jiang Cheng, and his craving for food is very much tied to his emotional distress in the moment and his loss of that particular kind of care that she provided for him. 

Like, Jiang Cheng’s demonstrably bad at expressing his feelings with words, and I also think that the most positive aspect of his own personhood, for him, is his status and power and wealth. That role he’s inherited, and the security that comes with it, are the cushioning for the festering pit of self-loathing inside him. And so his outward behaviour towards other who matter to him often manifests as spending money on them.