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how would wwx react if, during one of his and lwj's travels, he heard rumors in the marketplace that omg did you hear sandu shengshou got married??

maybe the rumors about this spouse differ per region. in one city he married the most beautiful woman ever seen, in another he's having a scandalous affair with her brother and in yet another his alleged wife is actually a good digger, or after mysterious cultivation secrets, or a spy for the emperor.

(is he even married? who knows, and certainly not wwx!)

I don’t know what Wangxian are doing or why, but the second Wei Wuxian hears this rumor, it’s head empty, no thoughts but WHAT KIND OF CONNIVING SCHEMER HAS HER HOOKS IN JIANG CHENG? Everyone knows Jiang Cheng is too unpleasant for a woman to actually like him! This purported wife can’t be up to any good!

With every new version of the rumor, WWX’s internal mental string board is becoming more and more elaborately yarn-crossed. He’s staying up late after sex to scribble down contingency plans for dealing with a crane wife, a ghost wife, a demon wife, a femme male prostitute (“I don’t think Jiang Cheng has ever seen a woman without her clothes on, Lan Zhan, he might not be able to tell!”), a sexy assassin from the Emperor’s Court (“I’ll be honest, Lan Zhan, I thought the Emperor’s Court was just made-up, but I guess it’s real after all?”), and—just to cover all his bases—a Heavenly Immortal undergoing one mortal life as a trial so that she may know true suffering and grief when her mortal husband betrays her, or her children all die from the plague or something. (“Being married to Jiang Cheng would constitute a trial all by itself, right, Lan Zhan?” WWX says to a dead-asleep Lan Wangji who stopped finding this remotely funny two weeks ago.)

But when they finally make it back to Yunmeng to investigate, Wei Wuxian doesn’t even have time to investigate before some Jiang disciple recognizes him and bodily hauls him to Lotus Pier and plops him in front of a stressed out Jiang Cheng, who is so relieved to see him.

Jiang Cheng: Wei Wuxian? Wei Wuxian? Oh thank god, DO YOU REMEMBER THE INVOCATION OF THE SHELLED ANCESTORS? I’ve been asking around on this one, but no one knows it.

Because what’s actually happening is that it’s time to visit a shrine upriver and pay thanks to a supposedly 3000-year old turtle that blesses the Yunmeng Jiang sect. But the Jiang only do this once every fifty years and all the records got trashed during the Wen occupation and yes Jiang Fengmian tried to teach Jiang Cheng this, but he was four years old at the time and all Jiang Cheng remembers is that “the turtle in her shell is like a shy maiden under her wedding veil”, and we have to say something SPECIAL to lure her out and feed her this sacred lettuce I’ve been growing in my personal garden for seven months, Wei Wuxian! Wei Wuxian! What the fuck am I supposed to say to the sacred turtle!!!

Wei Wuxian: …..uh. um. yeah! I know this one! You have to tell her she’s prettier than her sister

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actually it tickles me to think about how every member of the psych crew is perfectly designed to survive a zombie apocalypse regardless of its severity or flavor. even a the last of us style gritty end of the world would be no match for their belligerent plot armor and perfectly-designed basket of stupid eccentricities

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Spicy Probably Bad Take Unpopular Opinion Time:

While I think Jiang Cheng’s reaction to the Jiang massacre and blaming Wei Wuxian was extreme and largely fueled by grief and trauma, I also think the fandom as a whole also goes too far in the other direction of calling it completely irrational and illogical. Acting as if there’s no logical reason at all for Jiang Cheng to ever for one little nanosecond even consider that Wei Wuxian’s behavior was a factor in their being targeted.

At the Tortoise of Slaughter cave, Wei Wuxian doesn’t just defend Mianmian the same way Lan Wangji and Jin Zixuan were doing. He goes out of his way to verbally eviscerate Wen Chao in a particularly humiliating way, laughing at him the whole time, and followed that up by directly threatening his life and holding him hostage at sword-point.

It wasn’t mere defiance. It wasn’t merely defending people. It was funny, it was clever, it was brave and dashing and all of the things Wei Wuxian can be. It was an awesome moment - for the reader, anyway - that perfectly crystalizes all the flair and personality he had.

But there was no way someone like Wen Chao was ever, ever going to let that go.

It simply does not matter how right Wei Wuxian was. It doesn’t matter how wrong Wen Chao was. The matter was never going to fade without serious retaliation. People with the sort of petty cruelty and pride of Wen Chao can tolerate nothing less than being laughed at.

Don’t get me wrong, it was effective. It achieved his goals in the moment perfectly: he did save LWJ and JZX and Mianmian - by redirecting Wen Chao’s anger, attention and the rage of a wounded pride onto himself. By so far eclipsing and outshining their defiance that they were nearly forgotten in the aftermath.

You can argue ‘till the cows come home about the hypotheticals of what might have happened if he’d done nothing (do they all just die? does Wen Chao’s plan that appears to be both cruel and stupid somehow work and only Mianmian gets the axe? seems unlikely), or perhaps if he’d merely stood with LWJ and JZX instead of wildly outshining them (do all three sects get annihilated as punishment instead of just the Jiang, making the Sunshot Campaign an impossibility?). I’m certainly not arguing that Wei Wuxian was inherently wrong for saving them, both in the specific action or in the possible outcomes.

But the truth is: Wei Wuxian did make himself a target, and even in-text he does not quite seem to realize the gravity of it, or at least avoids acknowledging it.

As Jiang Cheng slowly walked over, propping Wei WuXian up, they happened to hear the ‘without any food’ part of the conversation. Wei WuXian, “Jiang Cheng, there’s a piece of cooked meat here. You want to eat it?”

Jiang Cheng, “Get lost! You really haven’t learned your lesson, have you? Just what situation do you think we’re in? You don’t know how much I want to sew your lips together.”

– Ch. 53, ExR translation

This interaction pretty much sums up the entire ‘evil summer camp’ arc of the story. Throughout, it’s been Jiang Cheng worrying about the Wens and Wei Wuxian largely dismissing the seriousness of the situation, and it continues right on through their return to Lotus Pier. (Though of course Wei Wuxian also frequently deflects from serious situations with humor in general.)

That’s why when people insist that Jiang Cheng’s displacement of blame to Wei Wuxian is completely, wholly, and totally irrational, and Wei Wuxian never did a single thing wrong, well… they were in a situation with no winning solutions. But Wei Wuxian did hold Wen Chao hostage at sword-point and go out of his way to humiliate him.

Which leads us to the famous Blame Wei Wuxian For Everything scene:

Holding him on the ground, Jiang Cheng continued to roar, “Why did you save Lan WangJi?! Why did you have to speak up?! How many times have I told you not to stir up trouble! Not to strike! Do you really want to play the hero so much?! Have you seen what happened when you played the hero?! Huh?! Are you happy now?!

[…]

In his heart, Jiang Cheng knew clearly that back in the cave of the Xuanwu of Slaughter at Dusk-Creek Mountain, even if Wei WuXian hadn’t saved Lan WangJi, the Wen Sect would have found some reason to come over sooner or later. But he had always felt that, if the whole thing with Wei WuXian didn’t happen, maybe it wouldn’t have been so soon, maybe there would’ve been some way to turn things around.

It was this torturing thought that filled his heart with hatred and wrath. Unable to be let out, they cut up his innards.

People are certainly free to not really like ‘don’t be a hero’ as a character’s guiding philosophy, even if I personally find his approach realistic and refreshingly pragmatic. And it’s exactly the amount of doubt involved, the ambiguity of it all, the endless what-ifs and maybes, that makes it so incredibly painful. What makes it tragic and compelling is that nobody is completely wrong or completely right; there are no winners here. That sometimes doing the right thing isn’t enough to save you.

Anyway, all I’m saying is that I find it’s not entirely illogical to feel like ‘publicly humiliating and then threatening the life of tyrannical dictator’s son’ could in fact lead said son to hate and target them in particular, if only to accelerate the timeline. (As always, the real question is ‘wtf were the adults doing this whole time, why weren’t they more prepared’ but that’s not really the point right now.)

It almost goes without saying that Wei Wuxian was never the core problem - that was always the Wens. And even Jiang Cheng himself, in the midst of this extreme reaction, doesn’t actually say they wouldn’t have attacked, or that Wei Wuxian was morally wrong, or not a hero. Only that it wasn’t worth it, that he didn’t want to pay the price, that he’d rather people he doesn’t care about die than the people he loves.

Even in this scene, as harsh as his words and actions are, his thoughts are actually a lot more nuanced than a lot of fandom seems to give him credit for. In the midst of that sort of extreme loss, I just can’t blame him for feeling that way.

'Do the right thing, no matter the consequences’ sounds great until losing everything and everyone you love are the consequences of someone else’s right thing.

The collateral damage did not get to choose.

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[Dramatic music plays next to two chairs and two beers. As a froggy chair and baby bottle fade into view, Julia and Jacob start laughing.

Text on screen: COMING MAY 23RD 2025

Julia: That might be the stupidest thing we've ever made.

Jacob: That's right baby! We're adding one more chair to the family! There's gonna be a tiny chair in Secret Sleepover Society. We got a baby on the way. And we're finally able to tell people.

Julia: Yeah!]

Here's the clip! So you can get both the funniest ways of finding out (this blog, and the actual announcement trailer)

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#Black skeleton

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Dear Big Brother

kind of a sequel to this comic

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imagine you are palamedes sextus. you spend twelve years exchanging letters with a woman who is seven years your senior. you become the heir to your house just to meet her as an equal. you love her to the point of invention. you both know that her time spent alive has an expiration date sooner than most, and so one day you decide to propose to her - even though you know that she can spend the rest of her life with you but you can’t with her, even though there are imperial rules forbidding interhouse marriages between necromancers, even though you’re here and she’s there and you’ve never even met in person - but you want her to spend her days with someone who cares about her. but you’re so young, only nineteen, and there are still all of those reasons listed above, and so she turns you down. but it isn’t because she doesn’t want to say yes. and then over the next year the letters come fewer and farther apart. and then you’re both invited to the emperor’s house - both of you, together, physically in the same place for the first time - and you show up and she’s here. and it’s like she doesn’t know you. she doesn’t spare you a glance. and you’re still so tender with her - you can’t help it, there’s care baked into you, and you can’t resist helping her, loving her, going so far as to kiss her knuckles in front of company - but still. she doesn’t acknowledge anything that happened between you. she’s moved on. she must have, because she’s spending all this time with the cavalier from the ninth - who is, by the way, two years younger than you, and that doesn’t escape your notice because nothing does - and what can you do? what are you supposed to do?

you tell your cavalier that you’re glad she’s spending time with someone who makes her laugh.

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midna and that ugly dog

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I noticed you into persona again and drew botw link in zelda what would their link and zelda perssona and outfit be like if they were in persona?

this was. an interesting exercise in character design if nothing else. not entirely vibing with the golden goddesses which is why i didnt color them fully & also i exclusively referenced p5 personas (& orpheus p3 purely because i remember that design). not entirely sure they're reading as game-accurate because i honestly don't pay much attention to the actual persona designs so i was really just focusing on silhouette and vibe lmfao. anyway if you're an artist and you ever feel like torturing yourself try designing a character or 5 based off the persona franchise

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Open your eyes...

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isn't it funny how every song by lady lamb is about griddlehark

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isn't it funny how every song by lady lamb is about griddlehark

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A SVSSS fic I want to write one day is Airplane and Shen Yuan being ejected from the System and sent back to the mundane world, but with the difference that Shen Yuan's 'edits' to the story have been retroactively applied to PiDW and as a result it's gone from 'top story in a hyper specific web culture niche' to 'international sensation with a Netflix adaption in the works'.

Keyly, PiDW is still told largely from the PoV of Luo Binghe- so neither he nor the audience is at all aware that it's now Isekai story. Instead it's billed as this heady romantic drama about prejudice, the passage of time, and redemption- where a big part of the appeal is trying to piece together the otherwise enigmatic Shen Qingqiu's motives.

Was he harsh on Binghe initially because of he sensed/knew about Binghe's demon heritage (as it's now possible to find hints that he may have in fact known all along)? Or because he saw Binghe's potential and wanted to do the tough-love training thing? Or was it because he was trying to chase Binghe away from Cultivation because he knew it would lead Binghe to misery one day? Did he throw Binghe into the Abyss because he was genuinely shocked and disgusted by the Demon reveal? Or because he knew Binghe would be killed if he stayed and he was trying to 'protect' him? Or was it because he genuinely wanted Binghe to fulfill his demon Emperor destiny and thought a clean break would do it? The fandom has no idea but lovvvvvves arguing about it.

This all leads to things coming full circle, as Cucumber, sounding like an absolute insane person, is left to rant online about how the obvious answer is that Shen Qingqiu was Isekai'd earlier in the story and replaced by a completely different person- a theory which is mocked to the point of memery, and leads to Cucumber being dunked on endlessly, no matter how much evidence he brings up or how many essays he writes.

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Halt giving his Oakleaf to Crowley.

Ranger Gathering 2024 - 19. oak

Halt basically gave up his whole life for Will and then almost cried about it.

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