#I know people love the wangxian nuclear family dynamic

[waitineedaname]

🐝❄️🍬

🐝 ⇢ tag your biggest supporter(s) and say one nice thing about them

I'm honestly a little confused by this question lol does it mean biggest supporter in general? or biggest supporter as a fic writer? I think lately as a fic writer it's been @patron-saints who has been very kind listening to me infodump about my own fic ideas lately and recently helped me through some stuff I was stuck on! my very nice thing to say is that they are ALSO a fic writer and a really talented one at that!! they're putting so much thought into their au and every time i get to peek behind the curtain I'm astounded by how much work they've done, it really takes a lot of dedication

❄️ ⇢ what’s your dream theme/plot for a fic, and who would write it best?

that's a really hard question bc I am generally operating under the rule of "if you want something to exist, you have to write it yourself" lol but I guess if I could hand someone more talented one of my fic ideas, I'd love it if someone else would write wwx as the juniors' camp counselor at a summer camp bc I think he would be so good at it but there are only so many fics I can write at once lmao

🍬 ⇢ post an unpopular opinion about a popular fandom character

I do not think sizhui thinks of lwj as his dad!! I think lwj definitely had a hand in raising him and I think he definitely plays favorites among the juniors, but I think their relationship isn't as simple as father and son. it's probably a more nebulous area somewhere closer to a mentor or a teacher and his favorite student, maybe with a dash of older family member, like an uncle or older brother. it doesn't have to be a nuclear family!!! especially since lwj was Not Well around the time sizhui was adopted. it's more likely that sizhui was raised in like a collective lan family situation or adopted into another lan family unit or xichen took care of him while lwj was recovering. personally I think it would be very cute if sizhui was adopted into jingyi's family, they should be brothers

[lgbtlunaverse]

Now this is meaner than i like to be when talking about fandom because i am pro people having fun and doing what they want and playing around with dynamics. So let me preface by saying that if you like this headcanon there's nothing wrong with you and I hope you have a great day. That said, aside from the Wen erasure and trying to flatten a more unconventional family dynamic into a nuclear family shaped hole one of the main reasons I vibe less with the "wangxian are a-yuan's dads" headcanon is that I honestly think it's kind of... Lan Wangji character assasination.

Yeah that sounds really harsh but the headcanon recquires Lan Wangji formally adopting a-yuan as his own and/or raising him as his son and i cannot stress this enough he would not do that. Because that would be actively endangering A-Yuan's safety.

To be clear: Lan wangji and wen yuan canonically look so alike that strangers who'd never met either of them assumed they were father and son. If Lan Wangji suddenly comes back with a child that he is insisting to raise, and that child looks exactly like him, people aren't going to assume that's hanguang-jun's adopted son. That is hanguang-jun's biological son with a mystery mother!

Jiang Fengmian didn't even formally adopt wei wuxian, and people knew who his actual (married!) parents were, and they still regularly assumed that he was secretly jiang fengmian's bastard instead of the child of the man cangse sanren literally eloped with.

If that's how eager people are about bastard rumours, what do you think happens if one of the most eligible bachelors in the jianghu turns up with an "adopted" son who looks just like him and refuses to say anything about where he came from?

Yeah, Hanguang-jun knocked someone up and apparantly the union was so scandalous he's deperately trying to cover it up while literally bringing this bastard kid into his own clan. Can you imagine a more juicy rumour? Everyone would want to know who this kid's mother is. A-Yuan's background would be one of the hottest pieces of gossip around.

Which, if you're triyng to make sure that no one finds out that this kid is actually a Wen and came straight from the burial mounds, is really fucking bad. If everyone is looking for A-Yuan's backround and someone succeeds, his life is in danger.

A-Yuan lost his memories, and that must've hurt like hell for Lan Wangji, both for A-Yuan's own sake and because that means this child that Wei Wuxian loved and who loved him in turn now no longer remembers him, will only ever know him from the lies the world tells about him. But he didn't do anything about it, because not knowing was safer for A-Yuan. Even if Lan Wangji wanted to personally adopt him, he would not risk A-Yuan's safety to satisfy his own feelings.

On the other hand, A-Yuan looking like Lan Wangji means he looks like a Lan, and wonky as the mdzs timeline is it's pretty clear he was born during the sunshot campaign. The Lan lost a lot of people in the war, they probably have loads of war orphans, and this kid clearly looks like one, they'd have no problem taking him in. Are they 100% sure who his parents were? No, but they probably died shortly after he was born and weren't able to safely return him to cloud recesses.

It's really easy for Lan Xichen and Lan Wangji to come up with a story from here. Someone came across the kid on the streets, saw the family resemblance, and decided to take him back to his home! After the burial mounds Wen Yuan probably wouldn't look too different form an average street rat. Or maybe the boy was raised by a common family who told them about the cultivators that left him there for safekeeping, unable to idenify them exactly but mentioning the signature white robes and forehead ribbon. Who knows!

The point is that Lan Wangji and Lan Sizhui could, for Sizhui's own safety, not be seen as father and son. From Sizhui's comments that Lan Wangji was "like a father or older brother" to him, and the fact that Lan Wangji chose his courtesy name we can infer that after he got out of seclusion Lan Wangji was more involved in his life than he would've been with other disciples. But from the outside that could be explained as a teacher having a favorite student, and an honoured sect elder (and family member, though now the assumption is "distant cousin/nephew" instead of "bastard child") helping to name a child in lieu of parents that are no longer there. By all accounts, Lan Yuan was raised collectively by the Lan as one of the several war orphans they must have had. Just like how he was raised collectively by the burial mound Wen before that.

[veliseraptor]

I'm interested in your strong and somewhat complicated feelings actually about Sizhui as "adopted son" to Wangxian nuclear family parents? if you want to talk about it

Oh man, other people have written about this much more articulately and coherently than I probably will, but I don't think I could track down the posts to link to and who am I if not someone who loves to ramble unnecessarily about my opinions!

I feel like there's a couple of things going on for me, mainly (a) concerning the Wens and (b) the nuclear family problem.

To get into those a little more - the first one is about the way that frequently when Sizhui is identified as Wangxian's "child" with them as his parents, it tends to...sweep away Sizhui's other family - which is to say not just Wen Ning but the Wen remnants as a whole. The importance of his relationships to his birth family gets...if not written out then it often feels like underwritten, and this is particularly relevant when Wen Ning is still very much there, and Sizhui (certainly in the show, I can't remember in the novel) indicates that he feels a connection to that side of his family that he wants to pursue/honor.

And while certainly there's nothing precluding an adopted kid having connections with their birth family, this is something I tend to associate with Sizhui's Wen connections, and the fact that they matter to him, being ignored. Again, particularly with Wen Ning...right there.

The second one is more fundamental - and therefore harder to address with, like, just avoiding a specific trope, and that's that...I don't have this as strongly as some people I know, but I have a certain aversion to taking a nontraditional family arrangement of one kind or another (the phrase "found family" is also one I have ambivalent feelings about at this point) and organizing it into a nuclear family unit where there must be two parents and a child. I could talk about how I feel like it flattens dynamics and often can end up pigeonholing characters into stereotypes based on their designated "role", but also I think it's just...

I'm a fan of complicated the nuclear family unit as a concept! I like being able to have arrangements of people who are connected in ways that are more complicated and less, idk, structured than that. I just find it more interesting, I think, and when characters get set into Designated Nuclear Family Unit, complete with the language to match...it just tends to set my teeth on edge a little.

and some of this is definitely about language. It doesn't bug me nearly as much if people talk about a dynamic that is parental, or something similar - but then it feels more descriptive than prescriptive, I guess, which is probably why it works better for me.