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because sometimes it's fun to explore a character's worst nightmare (probably) actually coming true:

fic where Jiang Cheng is a bastard

like, literally

so Yu Ziyuan marries Jiang Fengmian thanks to a political arrangement by their parents, and even though she has a huge crush on him she gets the strong impression that he doesn't like her, and she decides it must be because he's hung up on Cangse Sanren (and also because of her massive insecurities about not being a nice or "desirable" wife) but for this AU it's actually Wei Changze he's hung up on (because he's gay)

so from JFM's perspective his marriage to any woman is purely a matter of appeasing his family and producing heirs anyway, and though he liked and respected Cangse he's heartbroken that Wei Changze actually loves her and chose to be with her for-reals, rather than staying in Lotus Pier and having a secret love affair with JFM behind closed doors. in some universe JFM might have confided something of this to his prospective bride, in the interest of at least having a harmonious alliance if not an actual romance of any kind, but Yu ZIyuan isn't exactly the type to inspire confidence about these things. and to be fair, if JFM told her he was gay, she wouldn't react well

anyway, end result is that he doesn't explain or clarify anything, of course. JFM and YZY consummate their marriage and JFM sort of perfunctorily goes about his duties until it's confirmed that Yanli is on the way, and then he stops. mission accomplished, heir in situ, no more reason to force himself into hetero sex with the socially noxious woman his parents picked out! great work everybody hit the showers etc etc

Yu Ziyuan is, understandably, not thrilled about his conduct here so it doesn't do much for her growing unhappiness with her life and marriage. also she hates being the lady of a household, she just wants to fight shit and go on nighthunts, and she's not allowed to do that while pregnant so boy is she having a time of it (and so is everyone else because she is nothing if not willing to make her problems into everyone's problems). but at least she's got JFM's heir in her, right? at least that's something she can hold over that Cangse Sanren!

well of course Jiang Yanli is born and she's a girl, which is not ideal for sexist cultivation society, and she's also sickly, which is not ideal for ableist cultivation society either

so obviously, they have to try again

except that JFM was enjoying not having to perform those "marital duties" anymore and is reluctant to go back to them. which does excellent things for YZY's temperament too, so she yells and accuses him of cheating and not wanting her and makes a whole big public production of it, which of course feeds rumors that JFM really doesn't like her and also weakens her own position further because sexism and also YZY is not a likable person anyway. she's not popular in the household or sect. people still call her "Madam Yu" to her face, like you're not really "Madam Jiang" here, and there are whispers that it's her fault that Yanli came out sickly (baseless and cruel) and that she can't produce another child and that JFM's going to put her aside (somewhat more plausible)

JFM won't though, because he'd probably just have to marry another woman from Meishan Yu to fix the political fallout, which would be a lot of fuss to just break even. plus he does know that he is part of the problem here, and YZY has given him a child, so he's not actually all that bothered. he has cousins, he can adopt a more suitable heir if he needs to, or Yanli can marry a stronger cultivator into the family instead of marrying out (which breaks up that stupid betrothal with the Jin that he's not especially thrilled about)

but YZY is getting desperate here, so she convinces JFM to take to her bed at least one more time

it doesn't get her pregnant again though

so plan B, YZY finds one of JFM's more envious cousins and fucks him until it does take

this is equal parts actual pragmatism to get an heir, and Yu Ziyuan throwing oil onto the fire that is her marriage. part of her actually wants JFM to call her out or at least seem suspicious, because that would mean he actually gives a single fuck about what she does or who she does it with, even though having the whole thing come to light would pretty much ruin her. she has set herself up on a chair with a rope around her neck and a stool under her feet, waiting to see if Jiang Fengmian will either take her into his arms or kick the stool out from under her

but of course, he does neither

is he suspicious? yes. the dates don't align and some well-meaning servants have mentioned a few things to him. but he was already considering adopting one of his cousins to be his heir anyway, and this actually solves quite a few problems for him. if YZY wants to carry on with a lover who has Jiang blood, it's a win-win. she can give him plenty of heirs now, his own position will stabilize thanks to an abundance of them, and he doesn't have to fuck her!

of course it doesn't work out like that

his cousin is already suffering a crisis of conscience and backs off, and YZY doesn't take up with him again and wouldn't anyway (because it didn't work for accomplishing any of her secondary goals), and then she has Jiang Cheng and Jiang Fengmian just sort of benignly thanks her for the healthy "son" and makes nothing further of the matter. the Jiang sect tutors can handle the kid's upbringing, JFM doesn't feel especially paternal towards him but the kid's not going to want for anything either (materially, anyway) and this frees JFM and YZY both to go back to doing whatever (and whoever) they want in their free time

except

Yu Ziyuan is left in a state of perpetual frustration and anxiety about this, forever waiting for the other shoe to drop, and so she keeps trying to force it to drop. especially after Wei Wuxian turns up. she projects her own affair onto the poor kid, accusing JFM of liking him more than he likes Jiang Cheng (which in this AU is actually true, Jiang Fengmian has a lot of feelings about Wei Changze's son that he doesn't have about The Official Jiang Sect Heir who isn't even his real son), demanding to know if JFM has even heard the rumors (does he know what people whisper? about him? about Jiang Cheng? does he know?) like Yu Ziyuan is really not built for this political intrigue, shrewd strategic live-with-the-lies type stuff

for his own part, Jiang Fengmian is increasingly annoyed and put off by all of this. assuming the genre conventional standards are in play here, if he accused YZY of cuckolding him then he'd be within his rights to have her and Jiang Cheng executed. he wouldn't actually go that far of course, not only because he's been complicit in the whole thing but also because he's not that ruthless, but it's still on the table. and yet here is Yu Ziyuan, basically trying to... what? provoke him into divorcing her?

oh. well. maybe that is what she wants? what she's been trying to get with all of this? she wants him to disown Jiang Cheng and send her home in disgrace so that she can stop being his wife?

that actually would make more sense than what's really going on, in fact

but Jiang Fengmian still needs an heir and this kind of move would leave Jiang Cheng in limbo, and throw Yanli's parentage into question as well, plus it would make him the butt of a lot of jokes. so he just lets Yu Ziyuan basically move into a separate house and avoids her as much as possible, lets her do what she likes and waits for this to blow over

(it doesn't blow over)

then another problem becomes apparent. which is that Jiang Cheng is a concerning heir for the Jiang sect

the kid, understandably, takes after his mother. since she's the parent who actually spends time with him. but unfortunately a lot of that time is spent projecting all of her problems onto him. he's got a temper, he's wildly insecure, and surprisingly conservative and risk-averse. at administration and organization he's not that bad, he can at least do math, but his diplomacy skills leave a lot to be desired and do nothing to soften the blow of his mother's bad reputation. it's obvious that he desperately wants JFM's approval but JFM can't muster up much sentiment except vague disappointment for him. even as a cultivator he's just kind of average

the one benefit of marrying a powerful female cultivator with a strong will was supposed to be that she'd give him strong and talented heirs. but now he's got one daughter who can't cultivate and an adopted son who has inherited every single one of his mother's detrimental personality traits, who is actively the opposite of everything the sect is supposed to stand for, and now Jiang Fengmian is objectively worried that this kid will actually ruin his sect in the long run if/when he becomes sect leader. or at least that he won't be able to rally enough support from the internal factions to even peacefully claim the leadership role

maybe it'd be different if Jiang Cheng actually was his son, but since he's not, JFM can't help but think about the many other candidates in his family who would make more suitable heirs

and the main reason he doesn't take action, over time, is because it would still be bad for his own reputation to reveal the whole torrid controversy. at least with the way things are, nobody really wonders why his marriage with YZY isn't working out, and it's not JFM who takes the brunt of the criticism

but as time passes and Jiang Cheng gets older and YZY's miserable lashing out continues unabated, he finds himself thinking that he'd rather weather the storm of speculation about his prowess or orientation than continue to deal with this

finally, shit reaches a breaking point. something goes awry, another straw is piled onto the camel's back, and then there is a fight and finally Jiang Fengmian decides he's done living like this

so ten years later than anyone ever expected, he finally just kicks out the stool

Jiang Cheng isn't his son. congratulations, Yu Ziyuan, your wish (as JFM perceives it) is being granted. you get a divorce. you're free. go home to Meishan and live out the rest of your life however you please, and take the boy with you

of course this doesn't go over peacefully. YZY tells anyone who listens that JFM is impotent, JFM just kind of shrugs, Meishan Yu is stuck between being offended and being apologetic, but JC fails all the paternity tests so they're kind of forced to settle on the latter, which they also take out on Yu Ziyuan, but that's just the fallout among the adults

Jiang Cheng's entire world is uprooted. overnight he goes from being a sect heir to being a disgraced fatherless outcast. every fear or insecurity he ever had about his place in the world is abruptly validated

Jiang Yanli and Wei Wuxian are also upset, like up until now they have both strongly invested themselves in looking after Jiang Cheng, of supporting him as future sect leader and brother, and now that's all just... gone? and so is Jiang Cheng?

and it's extra difficult because Lotus Pier is more peaceful without Madam Yu storming in to pitch a fit once a month. but also the status quo has been totally changed around, Jiang Cheng is gone, and there are a lot of rumors and whispers and even speculation about Yanli's parentage too. the fact that some days it seems like life has improved just colors it all in this deep layer of guilt, because it's like someone wished to get rid of Yu Ziyuan and accidentally took Jiang Cheng out in the same blast. talking about it is taboo, too, so there are not a lot of chances to even sort out all the emotions involved. at one point Wei Wuxian tries to borrow a boat and go to Meishan, full of half-baked plots to somehow fix things, but he just gets caught and sent back

anyway, flash forward several years

the Lan lecture series begins

the Jiang send Yanli and Wei Wuxian to go mingle with the other young heirs and learn from Lan Qiren

and Meishan Yu sends... Jiang Yu Cheng

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Just finished the cover for 2024 MXTX Food Zine!

@mxtxfoodzine contains 55 recipes going along with art and fanfiction as well as a printable no-title version of the cover. Releasing this November.

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vintage phone

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I don't feel like being nice:

Jiang Cheng is actually horrendously stupid upon another reread because he was there when Wen Qing and Wen Ning's supposed ashes are scattered in front of him for the clan and sect Leaders to feel high and mighty. Yet thirteen years later when Wen Ning surfaces he doesn't think to question the Jins "hey why is the corpse you said was destroyed and burned actually not" he goes on a rampage of wanting to burn and kill Wen Ning himself with no actual thought of the political upheaval that entails and the lies Jin Guangyao was covering and omissions. Goes along with the clan and sect banquet not bothering to again question any of this discrepancy in front of his face now. As if it wasn't actually anything to do with the honor, care and protection of his family and clan that he was raging about to Wei Wuxian constantly.

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For anyone out there who might have been confused by certain posts - back when MXTX first published this story online, readers originally thought Lan Sizhui was the gong, NOT Jiang Cheng.

These are MXTXs original author notes, as translated by Taming Wangxian. This is in relation to chapter. There are some mistranslations of this particular note floating around on socials, inferring this is talking about his "shidi", meaning Jiang Cheng. But it is Lan Sizhui she is referring to, just as the chapters directly correlate.

Ironically, MXTX did write about people hating on Jiang Cheng from early on lol.

The above notes are in relation to Chapter 10.

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a thing about mdzs I’m still so amused by till today is how when mxtx released the first few chapters, there were apparently so many readers who thought that the gong was gonna be jiangcheng/shidi that mxtx had to write an a/n saying the gong was not shidi

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Because I've been blocked from replying to this embarrassing post...

That is because you lack the knowledge of such a culture. I am Chinese and an avid xianxia/wuxia fan and I can tell you right now you are completely and utterly INCORRECT to think WWX was in anyway wrong to visit or indeed take the man he wants to marry to present him to his once guardians tablets. Since WWX doesn't have his own parents remains to visit and JFM and YZY technically "raised" him from the age of 9... He has every right to do what he did and only those ignorant enough to ignore such formalities would say such utter crap.

I find it amusing that the very same people crying that WWX was "in the wrong" here are the same idiots who claim WWX and JC are "brothers"... Yet conveniently forget their strong opinion on this when it suits them 🤔 Of course, they weren't brothers in the slightest and the novel shows us this. But, he was taken in by the Jiang clan and JFM and YZY are technically the next best place to visit when seeking blessings for marriage, considering he's never even seen his parents ashes.

Absolutely everyone is allowed to visit an ancestral hall if they intend to show respect. Clans were integrated into the very villages they were part of and anyone could visit, so stop all this bullshit and check your history before you spread such baseless nonsense.

Can't believe this post is supporting homophobic abuse as well... Then again they even think WWX had a "choice" of leaving the clan back in his first life and don't understand what an awful ultimatum he was given between his clan and saving innocent people... Something JC should have, and was in fact honour bound to do himself...

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Further to my original post on ancestral halls and how they are quite different from what most seem to assume - there is in fact more evidence that these buildings are very different to western concepts.

In volume one of the novel, we are told that anyone who breaks curfew too many times will have to collect punishment at the Lan Clan ancestral hall. So this should already be a major indicator that this area is very different from a restricted place or a private graveyard. They use this area for penance and punishment as well as honouring the dead and worship..

After the beating was over, Lan Wangji quietly stood up, bowed to the sect disciples inside the ancestral hall, then immediately left, showing no sign of having been wounded. Wei Wuxian was the complete opposite. After he was carried out of the ancestral hall on Jiang Cheng’s back, he whined nonstop the whole way.

- 7Seas

Even JC himself steps into the Lan Clan ancestral hall... *Gasp!* Is he being just as disrespectful as WWX and LWJ were?! He was uninvited after all... No. Of course not! Because they are literally open areas that are very different from graveyards. So, it is already demonstrated very early on in the novel that ancestral halls are quite different from what some might think.

Of course, ancestral halls are also the place traditionally used for weddings as well. They are a place not just for immediate family but for the wider community to gather for events and celebrations! Completely different from graveyards - unless you're a goth or a vampire I guess...

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Just wanna say for those of y’all who came into this fandom late: just a few years ago, speaking on Jiang Cheng with anything less than glowing praise used to bring so much harassment that “angry grape”-related tags had to be created to circumvent jc stans finding and subsequently dogpiling your posts. I’ve since seen this tagging convention appropriated by his stans to be an “affectionate” petname for his character. If you wrote a wangxian fic in which Jiang Cheng did not appear, your fics would get bombarded with stans flooding your comments with their own headcanons on why Jiang Cheng isn’t around but “this is how he’d react if he was” and “everyone loves him, they’re definitely thinking about him, rn” and “when is he supposed to show up, op???” If you read a wangxian fic and Jiang Cheng did appear, there was a 95% chance that you would have to slog through thousands of words of abuse apologia paired with every character (except maybe Lan Wangji, maybe) claiming that Wei Wuxian deserved to be abused and should just learn to handle it better because abuse is really love. It took me a year of reading purely (only, exclusively) wangxian fics to find a single fic that had both 1) canon Jiang Cheng and 2) did not twist the other characters into fanon iterations to justify canon Jiang Cheng’s abusive behavior. When more canon writers started appearing, their fics got flooded with negativity, claims that the fic wasn’t realistic because “jc isn’t like that,” and demands to change things. They started moderating their comment sections. Eventually, jc stan writers even stopped tagging Jiang Cheng in their fics despite writing him as a major character because people began to avoid reading fics if they knew from the tags that his character appeared.

The “canon jc” tag was created on tumblr because jc stans said that if we didn’t like being attacked for canon opinions we should “create our own tag.” It was not a tag that always existed. Nobody used it until my friends created it. And every few months after that, we’d get a new “flood the tag” campaign by jc stans pissed at the name until it died down… until twitter refugees arrived, bringing with them a new faction of jc stans. That jc appreciate week or whatever they call it that starts on Halloween? Created by jc stans in an attempt to flood out Wei Wuxian appreciation posts on his birthday by making sure that new Jiang Cheng content would dominate all the major tags on that day. I watched the creators brag about that.

One BIG fandom upset happened when a jc stan wrote a horribly mistagged rape and murder wangxian fic and had their friends promote it so that wangxian lovers would read the fic and be traumatized. They gloated about having "successfully baited people," then tried to delete their tweets admitting it when they got them in trouble. I was there for that, too, and I only dodged being triggered because I saved the fic to read for later instead of cracking it open immediately.

Some of y’all may see me around now, but I’ve been watching this fandom for much longer than I’ve been making posts, before even the friends and mutuals I know now even knew I existed (yes I was a lurker lol). I’ve seen the development of all this play out across tumblr, ao3, and twitter (despite my best efforts to avoid the twitter side, that’s how ubiquitous it was). That’s how inescapable it was. I saw so much shit go down that I already had a mile-wide blocklist before I made my first post, and even then, I still got hate commentary on some of my posts the moment I dipped my littlest toe into metas. I had anon off for like a year because I didn’t want to deal with any harassment, and the moment I turned it off, I started getting bait anons (though not as bad as the others I’ve seen, holy shit). When I started this blog, all I did was liveblog and reblog other people’s art and metas. I was so stressed entering this fandom because the shit I had seen off rip was absolutely disgusting. That’s why I have very intentional rules of engagement that I try to hold to for myself. I may never be the first to start the fight, but I damn sure will defend myself and my friends. I also will never run away from admitting my mistakes, but I will also never be bullied into treating someone’s personal fantasies as equal to the actual factual text.

This isn’t to say that fanon enjoyers don’t get harassment. Another big fandom scandal was that a popular fanfic writer obsessed with canon had been harassing other writers through a series of bot accounts into leaving the fandom. What a lot of people don’t bring up in their bid to paint canon enjoyers as particularly prone to “fandom bullying,” however, was that the “canon” they were obsessed with was tied almost exclusively to the canon wangxian’s top/bottom sexual dynamic. I’d read that person’s works before—enjoyed them, even, before the scandal happened. They wrote fanon into their fics in other ways. The fanon/canon divide isn’t the problem; entitlement to unanimous fandom praise and recognition is.

There’s nothing wrong with enjoying canon or fanon, nothing right or wrong or morally superior for either camp. But do me a favor: go into the main jiang cheng character tag right now, and count how often you see a post about Jiang Cheng that portrays him in a negative light. Not one that portrays him as an snarky asshole or a teacher’s pet or a helicopter parent or a crybaby who only wants to be loved, but one which shows him in all of his uncensored glory as a piece of shit antagonist. How often do you see fanart of Jiang Cheng that isn’t “best jiujiu” or “sad didi” or “badass sect leader”? How often do you see metas that don’t include some iteration of “everyone is just so mean about poor little jc who just didn’t have a choice in anything he ever did 😢”? Go to the main novel tag and do the same. Hell, go to the wangxian tag and see what you find while you’re at it. How many of those posts are viral compared to “look at jc with his dogs!” or “look, I made lxc and jc kiss!” Then tell me whether or not you believe that jc stans are being specifically targeted for some unique and undeserved persecution by the fandom at large.

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mdzs fandom before the untamed was so good i have so much resentment for that show for bringing in the worst people flooding everything with slop to the point where i keep liking danmei a secret

If you go to ao3 and read wangxian fics from the earliest to the latest, you can almost pinpoint exactly when cql hit the English-speaking fandom because 1) Wangxian’s dynamic changes, 2) Wei Wuxian’s potrayal in fics ubdergoes an extreme shift into what is now his mainstream fanon today, and 2) Jiang Cheng starts appearing. Not fanon!Jiang Cheng, but Jiang Cheng, period.

In the earliest fics, he is very rare to find, and where he appears, it is only a mention or a brief cameo. After cql, though? Suddenly he is a major character in fics. Suddenly every fic features him, even if it’s just through letters or Wei Wuxian playacting convos with him when he’s physically absent for whatever reason. Suddenly, “yunmeng bros,” “yunmeng trio,” “twin prides” takes off. Suddenly it’s Wen Qing siding with Jiang Cheng and berating Wei Wuxian for being a stupid idiot. Suddenly it’s Lan Wangji forcing Wei Wuxian to reconcile with his “brother,” if it isn’t Wei Wuxian threatening Lan Wangji to get along with Jiang Cheng or be dumped. Suddenly it’s weepy Wei Wuxian crippled by the guilt of having “stolen” affection away from Jiang Cheng as a child, of having “broken his promise” of eternal servitude brotherhood, a crime that needs the entire fic to rectify, even if the fic is about something else entirely. Suddenly it’s “if only Wei Wuxian had listened to Jianng Cheng’s advice (that he never gave), none of this would have happened!”

There is a palpable shift in how every character is treated once Jiang Cheng became a fandom favorite, and it’s actually made the experience of reading fics worse as a whole.

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What CLAMP should I read?

I made this flowchart as part of @boateggs Christmas present, but hopefully it’ll help others make good choices as well.

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I wish whoevers write fics/headcanon about JC adopting Wen Yuan will have the same taste buds as the white families who ripped off indigenous children from their families which are destroyed by the US government directly and by those white families indirectly.

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There is something hilariously ironic that any promo art from pop up shops have to default to Jiang Cheng and the dogs as one of his "soft and cute" moments because he has none in the actual novel, not even with Jin Ling his nephew he apparently loves and cuddles according to the jiujiu truthers...

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In the store where WWX was buying a gift for JL, it was insinuated that it was because of the family's power that JYL, an ordinary woman, reappeared as the prospered JZX's marriage partner. So I can see that the Jiang sect was already powerful in the postwar period. In the same scene, it is mentioned that the husband's mother (Madam Jing) and wife's brother (JC) would not allow the ceremony for JL to be even slightly shabby, and here again, many people know that the Jiang family is as wealthy as the Jing family. Considering the timeline, all of these can only be the spoils of the Sunshot Campaign.

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I remember there being a post about the wealth of the Jiang Clan after the war, but I can’t seem to find it. Any chance you know of it? If not, do you know which chapters it discusses how land treasures and so-forth were distributed after the war?

There is the amount of renown the clan received after?

The second especially, says that Qishan Wen was split between the clans that remained as territories. As well as Yunmeng Jiang especially gaining strength to attract new disciples for its numbers due to Wei Wuxian's abilities and Jiang Cheng's status of being the youngest sect leader to claim his place.

The implied assumption being, no Yunmeng Jiang was not struggling in terms of its own funds or its lack of soldiers to fight with them between the reputations of both Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian.

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Just got back from fan expo and I just had to share these prints I got 🥹😍

Artists can be found on instagram