Drunken Blunder

You know what the last thing Jiang Fengmian, the man who supposedly "loves Wei Wuxian like a son" says to Wei Wuxian ? "A-Ying... look after A-Cheng". That's it. Not a goodbye, not a "take care of yourself", nada. Just instructions. Jiang Cheng gets "A-Cheng. Be well". Wei Wuxian gets told to ensure that

You know who else did pretty much the exact same thing, five pages ago ? Yu Ziyuan, who tells Wei Wuxian that "even in death, you have to keep [Jiang Cheng] safe"

I cannot stress enough that this is fundamentally the same interaction. Sure, Yu Ziyuan is infinitely harsher with her words and more abusive with her actions, but her last actions are an exact replica of her husband's - they comfort Jiang Cheng like parents, because they ARE his parents, and then they order Wei Wuxian to protect their son.

And that's why I'll never buy the idea that Jiang Fengmian loved Wei Wuxian more than he did his own son. He may have LIKED Wei Wuxian more, but that was because he LOVED the man Wei Wuxian reminded him of - his father Wei Changze. And he may not LIKE Jiang Cheng, for being more akin to Madam Yu than Fengmian, but it's undeniable that he loves him

And the real fucked part ? Wei Wuxian KNOWS this. He KNOWS that he's second-best !! He's accepted that !! You know who DOESN'T know that ? Jiang Cheng. Madam Yu. To a certain extent, I believe even Jiang Fengmian himself.

Like maybe, possibly, there is a universe where JFM and YZY actually did get married because they fell in love or had some passionate affair or something. But that was never going to be this universe, because in this universe there was a political match arranged for them. Usually in fiction, if two characters are compatible then having a match arranged for them just kind of expedites things. But here we see that it's cast a pall on their entire relationship. JFM probably didn't want to marry YZY at first in fact, and YZY knows that, and every subsequent interaction in their marriage is tainted by this knowledge that they are together because it's politics, which means that all the resentment from their early drama lingers and sticks and never gets addressed both because JFM is avoidant and YZY is bitter, but also because there can be no assurance that anything between them isn't just about the path of least resistance. JFM does something for YZY as her husband? Well he's just seeing to his obligations, he's just trying to appease her temper, of course he's treating her like his wife they're married they've had children and the two other people he might have been into are both dead. YZY does something for JFM? Same deal, like at this point they don't have any sensible alternatives, they are stuck together but rather than resolving their differences, it exacerbates it.

This trickles down to their relationships with their children. Jiang Yanli is the failure, but she's a tolerable failure because she's a girl and sexism in their culture wouldn't have let her amounted to much more than a baby factory in the long run anyway. She gets to be her mother's tool in cementing an alliance with Madam Jin, combining their bloodlines, and mirroring the exact same situation as her parents own marriage. JFM meanwhile sees that this is a mirror of their situation and opposes it on those grounds, but this just offends YZY and seems to reiterate that he regrets being "forced" to marry her.

Then there's Jiang Cheng, the ostensible living POINT of all this drama. The male heir who is capable of cultivating to the standards expected of a sect leader. The whole reason YZY and JFM were set up was not only to politically cement the Yu clan's loyalty to the Jiang, but also to try and genetically combine their cultivation potential and get a prodigy out of the deal. That's how it "should" work according to the reasoning behind all the bloodline supremacy in their culture, their kids should be Strong Cultivators. But what did they actually get? A girl dud and an heir who is just good-ish, who actually if anything inherits some of the worse superficial traits of his parents between his mother's temperament and his father's communication skills.

Meanwhile there ARE actual widely recognized cultivation prodigies in the same generation bracket. Among them is, of course, Wei Wuxian.

The thing is, for Jiang Fengmian, Wei Wuxian probably is a way to repair the past but just not in the sense that most people think. Wei Changze left the Jiang to become a wandering cultivator with Cangse Sanren. We don't know the details, but for JFM to be so caught up on that that it's widely known he is even years later, one can imagine that he actually didn't take his buddy leaving very well. He's just not all fire and brimstone about it the way Jiang Cheng later is about Wei Wuxian, because his personality is totally different. But still, we get confirmation when he assigns WWX as JC's permanent bodyguard that this is in fact what he's after here. He doesn't want to replace his son with the child he maybe he could have had with someone else, he wants to get Jiang Cheng the servant that Wei Changze was supposed to be. The eternal loyal righthand man. The carefully groomed lieutenant, exactly like Madam Yu's own personally trained handmaidens who die beside her, or a Jiang equivalent to Wen Zhuliu.

Which is deeply fucked up! And I don't just mean that it's fucked up for Wei Wuxian, although first and perhaps foremost it is, but it's fucked up for Jiang Cheng and Jiang Yanli too. Like there's often discourse about whether or not the Yunmeng trio really do see each other as siblings, but the thing is regardless of how they actually think about it in the privacy of their own minds, they were raised by the same people in the same house. Wei Wuxian didn't have any family that wasn't them, and they grew alongside him for much of their childhoods.

So like, regardless of the societal concepts surrounding it, functionally they were siblings, they were just siblings being subjected to perverse and contradictory treatment at every turn. Wei Wuxian simultaneously being propped up as this "favorite" golden child by word-of-mouth while also being devalued as a servant who's not really part of the family at all. Jiang Yanli the treasured and beloved daughter who is also an abysmal disappointment and walking embarrassment. Jiang Cheng the most important male heir who represents every social pressure that ruined his parents' happiness, like everything happened just so he could exist, but instead of being Great he's just a wet sack full of furious cats.

The Untamed + text posts (pt. 4/4)

bonus:

Chapter Spotlight 8:

"'Censorship Made It Better': Anti-Fans and Purity Culture in English-Language Chen Qing Ling Fandom" by Abby Springman

Describe your topic/chapter in one sentence/one meme/140 characters.

Rejoice! MDZS has been cancelled!

What drew you to this topic?

When I got into CQL fandom and started lurking on its outskirts on Twitter, I started getting this weird sense of déjà vu. There was this bizarre similarity between the arguments I was seeing about the aspects of CQL/MDZS and their fandoms being "problematic" from a progressive, social justice point of view and the demands for censorship in American libraries that conservative groups were (and still are) making at an alarmingly increasing rate. In an attempt to make sense of this, I fell down what ended up being a really long rabbit hole, and, well, here we are.

Was there anything you were surprised to discover while researching?

I was surprised by the wide variety of fannish backgrounds found amongst members of English-language CQL fandom! I'm not used to seeing so many different "areas" of fandom intersect over a single piece of media like this. Some folks are primarily into the live action movies and TV shows side of things, some are mostly in bandom, some (like me) are traditionally a part of the anime, manga, and gaming contingent, etc. I think that's fascinating, honestly.

Did researching/writing your chapter change how you saw the text, the fandom, or the media? How so?

I didn't use the block button on Tumblr or Twitter for anyone in the fandom while I was working on my chapter. It definitely changed how I saw fandom on those platforms—literally. It really highlighted how much power social media algorithms have over what kind of content is presented to us front and center.

If there’s one thing you hope the fandom takes away from your article, what would it be?

I'll be thrilled if it makes people think about "problematic" content in less black-and-white terms. They don't have to necessarily agree with my conclusions! But if my words make even one person stop and think more about context before posting a reactionary comment, then that would be great.

If you were isekai-ed into MDZS/CQL, what sect affiliation would you choose and why?

The Lan. My existing skills are most likely to be applicable there (see: the library), it seems easy to find some peace and quiet when you need it, there are bunnies, and Hanguang-jun is there.

Chaotic one-sentence pitch to get your friends into MDZS/CQL?

My elevator pitch for CQL has historically been, "It's the adaptation of a book about a gay necromancer, except they can't actually show the gay romance or the zombies on screen."

What is one (1) book/media you would recommend to a MDZS/CQL fan? Tell us about it.

Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio by Pu Songling. It's probably the most accessible collection of Chinese stories of the supernatural available in English. If MDZS/CQL was your first exposure to traditional Chinese cultural beliefs about ghosts, exorcisms, and the like, this is a great introduction to the less xianxia-specific aspects. If that isn't the case for you, I still highly recommend it on its own merits!

Character you keep getting in those "which MDZS/CQL character are you" quizzes?

Wen Ning

Anything to say to potential readers of the collection?

Thank you, and I'm sorry—no, that's a joke. More seriously, I really am thankful for anyone interested in the collection. It's the product of years of hard work by many people, and I'm sure there's an interesting chapter in there for everyone.

© 狐狸大王a