#winepresswrath

oooh this is an interesting one! I am sort of torn between this happening at a point where it's on purpose and xue yang is still close enough post-crushening to have some belief that somebody (in this case, a temple full of daoshi) will help him or if I want it to be long enough after that he's turned pretty well bitter on the idea of help from other people being a thing that exists, at least for him.

and since I can't make up my mind about it I'll have it "teetering on the edge between the two, maybe slanting a little toward the latter but desperate enough to try seeking out help from these people anyway"

(or it could be he ends up there because somebody brings him there, but I think I'm setting that one aside for this particular ask.)

song lan gets to experience the traumatic experience of proximity to a horrifying aftermath of a very nasty crush injury at a young age! this is probably formative - it's interesting to me thinking about the effects this might/could have on song lan, actually - while I don't think he's ever as rosy-viewed of the wider world as xiao xingchen is, I think being up-close witness to xue yang's specific story and its aftermath would render him a little more cynical than he is in canon.

I definitely like the idea of song lan growing up protective of his shidi as a result of, again, personally witnessing the gruesome aftermath of xue yang's trauma. xue yang enjoys this but also is merciless about needling song lan in general, because it's fun, but also that is his uptight shixiong and nobody else gets to mess with him.

I think being in a nurturing and protective environment that provides him with guard rails, expectations, and a life where his utility/livelihood isn't tied to violence goes a long way toward at least tempering xue yang's worst impulses. the impulses will still be there but having fewer reasons to act on them/forming better habits because of the expectations in place and the rewards of abiding by those expectations would make a substantial difference in the way xue yang moves through the world. it changes the calculus on how he sees other people/what he expects from them - even if the betrayal/hatred of chang ci'an is still very much there, it's tempered by the fact that he found someone to look after him.

when song lan decides to leave baixue xue yang goes with him, and please imagine the two of them as the weirdest pair of wandering cultivators solving peoples' problems that most people have or will ever meet.

when song lan encounters xiao xingchen they are still going to connect with each other on a profound level and xue yang is not going to be happy about it. very jealous, very possessive, immediately decides that xiao xingchen is stupid and annoying and not to be trusted.

Lan Xichen welcomes them to his tent warmly enough, but then says, "I confess I was not expecting Wei-gongzi to join us."

Is it Wen Qing's imagination or is his tone a touch cooler than it usually is with her? Back in the Cloud Recesses, he had been Wei Wuxian's champion among the Lan. Perhaps Wei Wuxian was right and Lan Xichen does condemn him for his "crafty tricks."

"You and the other leaders of the Campaign will be discussing how to counter the Yin Iron when we return to the Unclean Realm, won't you?" she asks, ignoring the emotional undercurrents in the tent.

Thank yooou ❤️🥰☺️

[ask meme]

B - Like It, though it's almost more a factor of... I'm a really big fan of ships in which the characters meet and get together (or fail to get together) in whatever bizarre canon circumstances befall them, but they actually are very socially well-suited, in a way that makes me feel slightly guilty for supporting what is often a canonically flawed social structure but scratches the itch deep in my brain for, like, aristocracy and institutionalized heterosexuality to be Okay Sometimes Actually?

Well, there is plenty of overlap with your thoughts so a round of pats-on-back for us all! My thoughts:

Stick-to-it-tivity, bloody-mindedness, DETERMINATION (It fills you with!)--whatever you want to call it our boy has it in spades. The only times it really falters are understandably extreme (and extremely horrible) situations: other than that he digs his feets in and will not be budged! My little badger buddy! (I mean badger in the best possible way, namely as someone who grew up reading Redwall novels)

Intelligence: he’s got a brain and he’s not afraid to use it! This is combined with what you described as an ability to ‘read a room’. That social awareness is no doubt muchly based on his dreadful upbringing, which also explains why he isn’t practiced in how to use it to his advantage: if he learned to manipulate what he sees he would be indomitable. This also lends itself well to solid battlefield awareness--he recruited followers as a teenage leader of a destroyed sect during a war where they were outnumbered, I don’t think he could do that if he didn’t have a reputation for getting his people off a battlefield alive. No core needed--just give him some armor and a bullhorn and he could still lead a battle.

Dazzling good looks. It counts. 

He is a TERRIFIC duncle. Not perfect, but then no parent is perfect, and he certianly suceeds marvelously in not carrying the sins of his parents into the next generation. You’ll never make me believe that Jin Ling ever doubted his uncle’s love: he has never even considered that his uncle’s love for him is contingent on his usefulness to his uncle. (If Jin Ling lost his core he would be horrified, of course, but he would go straight to uncle. “What do we do now?”. And if ‘what we do’ doesn’t include getting a core back somehow, he loves and trusts his uncle enough to deal with it, I think.)

Excellent taste in women. Ok, the matchmaker list is silly, but it was clearly written by a boy who thinks Jiang Yanli is the best woman in the world and in that regard I respect him entirely. That and he met Wen Qing and was in no time flat like “*gentle gasp* Yo.”

as tumblr user @souridealist devastatingly said, he has an immense capacity for love--what would he be like if that had ever been treated as a strength instead of a weakness?

Very capable in many arts/skills honestly--the fact that he was always JUST behind WWX when the latter is a horrifying genius speaks to his abilities, I think.

Martial skills. Obviously this would be hampered by losing spiritual power, no more fukkin flight, but that doesn’t mean his skills with a sword or bow would disappear. In the fic I’m never gonna write (cause I already got 3 others in the pipes) where either WWX or WQ realizes he’s an adult human who deserves a say in his own fate and consult him before golden core transplant, I think this would be the gist of his argument against--because of course he wouldn’t agree. “You can’t be a sect leader!” WWX would argue, and JC would say “One, what sect! Two, who the fuck says! It’s my core that’s gone, not my brain. And what, are you and A-Jie going to not help me? Idiot.” “But, you are helpless! Defenseless,” WWX would say. “No kidding! After the war I look forwards to watching you travel around Yunmeng informing all the hunters and rangers that they are no longer capable of using a bow on account of they lack golden cores. IDIOT.”

(this is tangential, but related to the above: based on show-canon, at least, I don’t see how it’s a given that he couldn’t control Zidian without a golden core. Another spiritual implement we see, Suibian, responds to WWX’s-core-without-WWX but also to WWX-no-core. Madame Yu attuned Zidian to Jiang Cheng, not to his core. idk I just think it would be neat!)

So I’ll confess for a long time I didn’t have much interest in Turgon (despite having numerous friends who were fond of him), but he has been growing on me recently, especially with the help of @alackofghosts. This is also because I got much more interested in Fingon the last time I reread the Silmarillion, and thus I’ve been giving more thought to the Nolofinwean family dynamic. 

Jiang Cheng, Wei Wuxian, truth spell :D?

[ahaha i said a couple hundred words lol]

Jiang Cheng wasn’t even supposed to be here today.  Not on this night hunt, not in a remote mountain village that was closer to Lanling than to Yunmeng, and, last but not least, certainly not throwing himself bodily between a literal cloud of resentful energy and Jin Ling.  Just because it had proved so far invulnerable to swords and to Zidian -