#use that

c00lkidd and 007n7!! (The F0rsak3n 1xs AU)

Certainly lot of fanon has gotten into the habit of having of a dumb but sometimes smart Wei Wuxian. They take a lot of what he does at face value and only part of it has to do with CQL and the changes made.

The other part is basically it being lost in translation.

Mo Dao Zu Shi is based firmly on common xianxia tropes. Which it then deconstructs and even subverts at times. But some of them are played straight before being skewered by the deconstruction elements.

One of which is how Wei Wuxian is a Master of the Six Arts. He is, in fact, a prodigy, a genius, and all around the best of his generation.

What are the six arts?

Rites: Religious rituals, but also social manners and how a gentleman should conduct himself.

Music: A good gentleman can do an instrument perfectly, knows how to make good music too.

Archery: Skill in archery is also associated with gentlemen.

Chariotry: Being able to use a chariot and horse? Must be a gentleman. Though I get the impression it’s just horsemanship in MDZS.

Calligraphy: Elegant, proper handwriting is a must.

Mathematics: You have to be able to handle this as well.

And if he’s a master of all of these, he can do them. We know he is the best archer of his generation, we see him use his dizi in a masterful way (to the point he can fake being bad and still use musical cultivation perfectly even so). Math isn’t exactly given a focus, but considering his analytical brain in canon it’s easy to assume he can do it.

Horsemanship is mention to be good in the novel. His actor having a bad seat in CQL is just the actor himself failing there. In-universe he’s meant to be good!

That leaves Rites and Calligraphy. And guess what? It’s an absolute choice. His style of calligraphy is actually a genuine style, a form of cursive so to speak, and he is shown to be very careful in how he writes out Jin Rulan in the donghua. He can very well write properly.

Rites? He could very well be as well-mannered and gentlemanly as Lan Xichen. He shows understanding of good manners, he deliberately is a gremlin on purpose. This guy could be a proper gentleman, he just doesn’t want to be.

And early on, we are shown he’s actually smart and knows very well his education as a cultivator. He answers difficult questions from Lan Qiren on his first day in class and only doesn’t answer one because he wants to get out of the class and so deliberately brings up the manipulation of resentful energy.

In fact, let’s remember that he invented demonic cultivation in canon. No one is shown to have his power in canon, he’s dismissive of anyone being able to prevent him stealing control of their corpses without the Yin Tiger Seal.

And this, by the way, is why people scorned and labelled him “Yiling Laozu”. Why they came up with so many horrible rumours.

These classist jerks were jealous and spiteful over a “son of a servant” being that good of a cultivator, that brilliant. At being the one who shined the best out of his generation and even out preformed previous and future generations with his feats!

That’s the twist in the original novel. Wei Wuxian getting that horrible reputation was mainly because he is a genius and the classist cultivator society could not STAND the fact he is. Because he’s “low born” so shouldn’t be that great, shouldn’t be that wonderful. Cultivation is mostly in the hands of essentially the noble class here, they are the ones meant to be the greatest. They go out on night-hunts mainly to showcase their power and ability, not to help out people in need.

And Wei Wuxian still out shines them with his abilities. Even without his golden core -- though they certainly didn’t and still don’t know about that! -- Wei Wuxian managed to prove himself the best even so. He went through a whole war and came out the other side alive despite having no golden core.