#CQL negative

[wutheringskies]

If you sit down to analyze themes from CQL, Lan Zhan's character suffers so greatly.

me writing such a long post in my drafts shitting on cql lan wangji but the overall sentiment is such that:

MDZS! Lan Wangji: Wei Ying, will you allow me to be your husband, your daolu, your lover?

CQL! Lan Wangji: Wei Ying, be my casual, long distance, low commitment girlfriend.

[jiangwanyinscatmom]

I just finished watching through season 3 of the mdzs donghua fully and why do people praise cql for the romantic undertones when the donghua exists and did it much better

Hi there!

I am going to be completely honest here and say it's because a lot of them initially came from American live action media fandoms from 2005-2016 that very much thrived on mean spirited queer content baiting that the fans could transform.

Ironically I came across something from twitter today saying "fanfiction is taking back wonderful characters and worlds from problematic authors", and it made me sad. Because this is how the scape of American media is still like, the "subtext" of not really queer content is put on a pedestal because "I" can make what doesn't exist, better. It can be argued censorship was pushed to a certain limit, but it wasn't due to the writers and producer of CQL in the long run, it only is the bare shadow of the novel due to backlash and the film crew needing to resort to reshooting and edits of what had been a straight washing of the actual gay main characters.

The first season of the donghua, which preceded CQL by a whole year, can be debatably said to be able to get away with more risqué content due to the medium of animation, and tencent animation productions are very notorious with this and had the grace of being an old IP before the massive wave of mainland censorship restrictions regarding overly sexual content.

But the sticking point for me personally, is that even with censors the staff of the donghua hadn't tried to change the core relationship between Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji being the most important part of the others life as what the interviews for CQL's head scriptwriter tried to do when she said "it had to be changed to heavy familial ties" and thus the expansion of the Jiangs. It's morbidly word for word the same as a lot of American comi-con panels back in the day that the same fans hated from American productions.

It's taking the same crumbs from 15 years ago and trying to call it more. When the donghua did what CQL didn't by at least keeping Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian together and the others most important and not needing to explicitly say this or animate it by book text. As well as somehow needing to still say that the subtext is more romantic than the overt. Personally, I am tired of that when I have something in a televised form of my favorite romance that doesn't relegate them to the zone of platonic only zhiji who can never be together, and shows them on screen going to a home they made that they can go to when they want together always, and what others say doesn't matter.

I'm tired of taboo love and I think that the donghua understood the "to hell with that" message MXTX constantly made with each of her romances regarding that and what polite society would think about my love.

[wannabe-f-f-friends]

Tell me why boys kissing is too nasty for television, but they keep showing me the Hundred Holes curse and that's just fine not traumatizing at all.

[wangxianficrecs]

Follower Recs

~*~

Hello, I have a fic to rec. It's really well written, kind of angsty, modern AU with wwx writing a canon divergence fic inside the fic. For some reason, it has very few comments and kudos which leads me to think not enough people have read it. So naturally, I came here 😁

Please read this and give this author some love, the story more than deserves it. @ranfused4ever

Lovesong of the Square Root of Negative One

by honeydrip (lmeden)

M, 55k, Wangxian | Mojo's Rec

Part of Wei Wuxian's Birthday 2023

Summary: The prompt (how it started): wwx's car is broken down in the desert and he uses his 1 bar and remaining battery life to message his fic exchange mod instead of like calling a mechanic or something (from sfs) The fic (how it's going): a meditation on the power of stories, and why we write

~*~

(Please REBLOG as a signal boost for this hard-working author if you like – or think others might like – this story.)

[clearancecreedwatersurvival]

I am Literally never gonna get why the most popular mdzs side ship is xich*ng. Xiyao is right there with the most compelling doomed romance narrative possible. The sheer tragic drama of the guanyin temple scene? Unparalleled.

JC and LXC have like two polite work conversations over the narrative runtime?? Where’s the drama where’s the pizzazz.

[grewlikefancyflowers]

mxtx: the flow of the story will be ruined if the flashback structure is changed

cql: but what if we changed it tho

[veliseraptor]

Please tell me all the reasons xxc and nmj wouldn't get along, I'd love to hear that as a rant

I kept meaning to get back to this one and then forgetting and then going "oh I should answer that" and then going "but I don't want to be too bitchy" and then - and anyway that's why this took me like two months to answer.

basing this more on novel canon than cql, because that's where I tend to see the comparison being made more often, I think because they're more directly in contact in one specific scene.

so I think why people say this is basically because they see nie mingjue's "xue yang must be punished/killed" and xiao xingchen's "xue yang must be punished/killed" and also look at nie mingjue's relationship to jin guangyao and xiao xingchen's relationship to xue yang and go "oh so they're morally aligned and are parallel to each other :)" and that's just! not true!

for one thing, and I think this is something that gets lost a lot - xiao xingchen does not live within the hierarchy and structure of cultivation society at large, and is in fact not a huge fan of it. he and song lan are actively trying to do their own thing! that is part of xiao xingchen's problem specifically - he walks into great sect politics with the expectation of justice and runs headlong into, well, politics. and a big part of that is that he doesn't have a whole lot of respect for power if he sees that power as unjust or acting badly: despite pressure from the Jin, "neither coaxing nor coercion had budged Xiao Xingchen."

I think then people look at nie mingjue's showing up and arguing for the same and take those two things as equivalent, but they really aren't, because while nie mingjue is younger than jin guangshan and therefore owes him respect in that sense, he is also a sect leader and approaching from a far more equal position, which is why he can get away with actively threatening violence in a way that xiao xingchen...couldn't. nie mingjue has power, even if it ends up not working for him; xiao xingchen doesn't.

furthermore, I think another important distinction between the two of them is around the question of violence. specifically in the scene around xue yang's initial trial (ish), the distinction between xiao xingchen's bringing xue yang back to jinlintai to ask for him to be punished (by the sect whose responsibility he is), versus nie mingjue's attempt at direct personal execution, including an attack on jin guangyao when he doesn't get his way. again, some of this is likely based on power dynamics (nie mingjue, again, is closer to equal status and therefore has more allowance to step into jin guangshan's affairs), but I think some of it is a difference in approach, too, and inclination. I think it's also notable that (at least in translation) xiao xingchen doesn't specifically say that xue yang should die ("severely punished" is the phrase), as opposed to nie mingjue going for outright beheading.

so I think presenting them as similar/aligned in this scene, basically, is overselling it.

it's not that I think they would hate each other, or anything. I just don't think they'd be friends, or particularly see each other as allies. xiao xingchen occupies a space outside of the social order; nie mingjue, I would argue, is deeply wedded to the social order as it stands. xiao xingchen has a loose sense of the importance of traditional hierarchies of power; nie mingjue is very much embedded in those hierarchies of power and believes in upholding them.

furthermore, looking at the nie mingjue/jin guangyao dynamic versus the xiao xingchen/xue yang dynamic, I think the idea that they're narrative parallels really falls apart. nie mingjue is jin guangyao's superior officer and continues to perceive himself as an authority over jin guangyao; it is his job to correct his behavior and discipline him as he sees fit. xue yang is a criminal that xiao xingchen apprehends, and xue yang turns around and takes revenge on him for interfering. the latter are much closer to equals, at least in the way they perceive each other, and xue yang's revenge on xiao xingchen is considerably less motivated by self-preservation.

they're just not similar except in terms of very specifically both having the opinion "xue yang must be punished" and being willing to push against jin guangshan to do something about it, which isn't a lot to build on for a relationship of any kind, and I have a hard time seeing them vibe personalitywise.

boy this got long. you did ask for a rant though so I guess you got one? climbing down off my soapbox now and going back to my yi city cave where I belong.

[absolutelyfibulas]

Reminded that tierlists exist, immediately go "ooooooh time for toku takes >:)", remember that I'm actively trying to be positive rather than negative in this fandom, put the tierlist down.

[ouyangzizhensdad]

people like to give a lot of shit to mxtx for how she writes female characters but I think more shit needs to be given to the cql writers for how they handled the female characters

Thoughts in a bullet point format:

The way they did my girl Wen Qing so dirty. Like, so dirty.

They didn’t think for a second about what they were doing to MianMian as a character and it enrages me to this day. Like give me the number of the people behind the show and I will explain to them IN DETAILS--

And although A-Qing's actress was so cute, she was too old for the role.

I can’t say anything about Shijie because I love Xuan Lu too much, actually we were blessed to be able to see her smile at us.

Wang Lingjiao I think is given more depths in the novel imo, and the way the actress portrays her doesn’t quite match.

I don’t think they understand Lan Yi. Like. At all.

Or Yu Ziyuan.

[sleepy-salami]

this is such a small moment, and I totally missed it the last time I read this chapter, but

if I had a nickel for every time Wen Ning went out of his way to save Jiang Cheng and got kicked in response, I would have two nickels, which isn't a lot, but it's kinda funny that it happened twice

[leatherbookmark]

on one hand delighted by the zzj screencaps, on the other kinda headtilt eh in a way that like, it essentially doesn’t change anything...? regardless of what directions zzj/lhk got, what matters is how they played the characters. and they certainly made some choices! but at the same time i’m a bit... headtilt ehhhh about the “canon xi/yao” joy. isn’t it 2023 already

[ashdoesfandomarchieved]

Absolutely fucking wild to me that in certain post canon fics authors will elevate one clan over the other. And I'm not talking about fics that are fun aus exploring different endings to MDZS, I'm talking about fics that directly bash Lotus Pier or the Cloud Recess in favor of saying that the other would protect Wei Wuxian from the big bad cultivation world.

Which doesn't make any sense because the entire POINT of the books (and cql, manhua, donghua, etc) is that the cultivation world is fucked up!! They all fucked up!! If your fav is someone who ISN'T Wei Wuxian the wen renments or mianmian then they are culpable to genocide, which (btw) is fine, you're allowed to have problematic favs but like. Girl what.

Idk it's just WILD to me when someone writes Lan Qiren as defensive of Wei Wuxian (less so when it's Jieng Cheng bc like. At least that makes KINDA sense) when these are characters who, as well as ideologically not even being in the same book as Wei Wuxian, literally labeled him as evil bc of #classism.

[jiangwanyinscatmom]

"CQL best adaptation"

[llycaons]

life is so hard for a jc centrist :/

[spriteofmushrooms]

Your tag in this post about how wwx never sees jc for who he is. You are right and I am crying right now

Jiang Cheng takes after his mother, and that's an immutable fact so it doesn't matter that Jiang Cheng begged Yu Ziyuan on his knees to spare Wei Wuxian. They're the same! It doesn't matter that Jiang Cheng is more diplomatic than his mother or more active than his father, or that he raised Jin Ling in such a way that he feels safe talking shit to Jiang Cheng (which Jiang Cheng NEVER did, only Wei Wuxian talked back).

Wei Wuxian's torture of Wen Chao was all a display for Wen Zhuliu because Wei Wuxian wants him to know how it felt to watch Jiang Cheng suffer. And aren't they the same?

Wei Wuxian knows exactly who 34-year-old Jiang Cheng is: he's 9- and 12- and 15- and 17- and 19- and 21-year-old Jiang Cheng.

Jiang Cheng was most upset about his dogs, who all had stupid names anyway; but actually Jiang Cheng was most upset that his father could love on and comfort Wei Wuxian but not Jiang Cheng. Jiang Cheng was upset at losing because he's sooo competitive, but actually he smiles when he learned Wei Wuxian won in both CQL and the donghua.

Wei Wuxian is the one who knows Jiang Cheng best! Jin Ling is never right. It's impossible that Jin Guangyao knows Jiang Cheng well enough to hurt him.

Jiang Cheng is truly the child who cannot be taught! Jiang Fengmian said so. Which means that Jiang Cheng could never give up any negative feelings he has for Wei Wuxian, and there's no point in explaining anything, and it was all lost long ago without hope of recovery.

[sepia-mahogany]

Please stop intentionally mistagging content.

“Canon Jiang Cheng” tag is for discussion of things he did in the novel, explicitly, that means if you want to talk about how brave he was for saving Wei Wuxian from the guards or about how terrible it was that he made things worse for WWX and WRs. Positive or negative interpretations from the novel source are welcome here. The main “Jiang Cheng” tag is for everything, headcanons, fanart, cql donghua every other adaptation canon than just the novel, gif sets, video edits, fanon content, canon content whatever you wish to do.

It is honestly disappointing that after requests from other Jiang Cheng fans (and also to avoid the mess that was people getting hate over posting the direct novel quotes) we made a separate tag so everyone could curate their content and consume what they wished, only for some people to intentionally mistag content (fanships for example, or cql gifs) as a misguided attempt to “reclaim the tag”.

What exactly are you accomplishing by intentionally mistagging content? All you’re doing is making curating content harder, so please stop intentionally mistagging content when you can just block the tag you wish to not interact with but making it so people don’t have a safe fandom space is beyond being rude.