#Jiang Fengmian

[bishy437]

what’s left behind

[scrivenger-grimgar]

Yunmeng Jiang is probably the Florida of the Jianghu

Like, they canonically fought water ghouls with their bare hands, regularly get into brawls with each other, have no concept of appropriate volume, hell they have a town down close to the worldly people with no height separation or massive stone walls or a comical amount of gold plating, if you didn’t know that they was a cult of martial sorcerers in that town you might just think “wow, wealthy trading family. The docks are nice!” and then just leave.

The sect leader has no spine and a vaguely homoerotic relationship with his dead best friend slash manservant, he adopted one is fucking insane and also a radical genius, and you’d expect him to be the outlier but no, the sister is just as fucking weird, she’s probably gone around in soaking wet clothes carry a child like a football because “he fell in, I couldn’t just leave him there!”

The son likes to pretend he’s sane but he’s such a chronic gossip that he probably needed an intervention, his sword was named after the three poisons, and he also spent 13 years thinking that his dead adopted brother would find a way to resurrect himself.

Even Madam Yu isn’t safe because she lashed a teenager with a lightning whip like 36 times in the middle of the fucking Spanish Inquisition. She has such an irrational hatred of this one guy that she starts shitting on anyone even remotely kind to him. Girl. Go to therapy, or go to jail.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Lan Wangji Goes To Lotus Pier AU: Part 1: Dread on Arrival

(Part 2)

[notoisstrange]

Yunmeng Jiang Clan 🪷

[cultivateme]

[batbusiness-schooldropout]

Au where Jiang Fengmian decides that the only way to appease his wife after taking Wei Ying in, is to double down and get her an orphan to raise as well. To the shock of everyone, this works!

JFM: Dearest, this is Xue Yang. He loves candy and biting people. He'll be living with us from now on

Madam Yu: I understand the appeal of taking in a child now. He's delightful

Wei Ying: Uncle, A-Yang bit me

Madam Yu: You shouldn't have been close enough to be bitten

[allpiesforourown]

thinking about the jiang family ... jiang fengmian being nice to wei ying because he was cangse-senren's son, and doing the opposite with jiang cheng. even wei wuxian said it was "difficult to rebut" when jiang cheng said his father doesn't like him because of madame yu

it's so sad. neither of them were treated like their own person, just an extension of their mothers

[tossawary]

Thinking about an AU where Jiang Yanli's "weak / mediocre cultivation" was caused by a horrific training accident when she was pretty young, in part to explore the tragedy and disability of it all and in part for the humorous "older relative casually drops wild personal lore that changes your entire perception of them" angle.

Like, Jiang Fengmian and Yu Ziyuan's firstborn child is a girl, which is not ideal in this deeply sexist world, but the sect motto is "attempt the impossible", right? It's not unheard of for female cultivators to lead sects and Yu Ziyuan wants her daughter to be the first female Jiang sect leader, to show up the cultivation world, and Jiang Fengmian isn't against the idea and wants the best for his daughter (although he probably doesn't want her to be a copy of his wife). So Jiang Yanli starts her cultivation training pretty early. There's a lot of intense pressure, a lot of expectation and projection and some arguments, and it all culminates in this poor child getting badly injured, with permanent damage to both her body and to her cultivation. It's a "no one's fault and everyone's fault" thing.

Jiang Fengmian and Yu Ziyuan quietly drop their plans for Yanli to become the sect leader and focus on a very young Jiang Cheng instead, which is easy in part because everyone expects the son to inherit anyway. A young Jiang Yanli is betrothed to the heir of the Jin Sect and this is basically never talked about ever again. General perception is that Jiang Yanli is a mediocre cultivator at best because she was born that way (she's a WOMAN, after all) and/or because her disposition is just too sweet and agreeable, and OF COURSE the son became the heir as soon as the Jiangs had a son. That's just how things work!

So, in an AU where Jiang Yanli (and Jin Zixuan?) lives and teenage Jin Ling is freaking out about some embarrassing and/or dangerous mistake on a night hunt...

Jiang Yanli, patting her son's shoulder: "It's going to be okay. You know, when I was a young child, I permanently injured myself in a training accident and could no longer become the Jiang sect leader, and it felt like the end of the world, letting everyone down, but it all worked out in the end!"

Jin Ling, whose entire 15-year-old worldview just got flipped upside-down: "...Mother?! What?!?!"

[purpleblch]

delete it later

If Jiang Fengmian has a hundred haters, I'm one of them if Jiang Fengmian has zero haters, I'm dead

[whetstonefires]

Thinking about the parallels set up between Wei Wuxian and Mo Xuanyu, and how actually most of them are oddly specious.

The sketch of the backstory lines up, but on close examination they're mirror images.

Wei Wuxian wasn't kicked out of his sect, he left it. Wei Wuxian didn't hate the house he grew up in, he loved it, and getting the people there killed was the absolute last purpose for which his dark powers were ever intended.

Jiang Cheng was no Mo Ziyuan--his jealousy was a complicated thing all twisted up with love, and while he would lash out at Wei Wuxian both as a casual means of shit communication and more damagingly in moments of high tension, he had neither the desire nor the ability to bully him, and in general respected his boundaries almost too well.

When Wei Wuxian destroyed himself about Jiang Cheng, it was to give him cultivation, and protect his life and happiness. He would never have killed him.

Madam Yu was a domineering aunt-like figure, who hated Wei Wuxian for reasons of reputation, and because she had resented his dead mother, but she crucially did not have the power to actually disrupt his lifestyle to any significant extent.

Mo Xuanyu was shut up in a small room to rot; Wei Wuxian didn't even attend classes unless he wanted to. Mo Xuanyu was weak and disliked; Wei Wuxian was brilliant and popular.

Mo Xuanyu's uncle is a cipher of a figure, without character or agency, a nonentity who is resented to death apparently mostly for what he didn't do; in theory he is the master of the house, but he certainly never protected his wife and son's punching bag from them.

And this is what got me thinking along this track: because people keep interpreting Jiang Fengmian as this, as exactly like Mo Xuanyu's nameless uncle, a nonentity who lets his wife make all the decisions, and is contemptible therefore.

He shows up in fic characterized this way all the time, handled narratively as a gap rather than a person, an absence where there should have been a parent, and it's...totally inaccurate? The man only has a few scenes but the things that are most firmly established about him are:

he regularly goes out of his way to protect Wei Wuxian

he's extremely fond of Wei Wuxian

he cares a lot about ethical behavior

he's conflict-avoidant and gentle

he can and will overrule Yu Ziyuan when he's made up his mind, and there's nothing she can do about it

his communication skills are mediocre at best

he doesn't understand jiang cheng

he has a dumb sense of humor

Now almost none of this made it into cql besides point 4 and maybe 6, 5 is technically there but buried by the cinematic framing, so I totally get why the fandom on the whole struggles to characterize him well, and it's easier to write him off.

But it keeps bugging me to see him and Yu Ziyuan squashed into the mold of the Mo, because not only is that boring and reductive and kind-of-missing-the-point, it's like. Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng's characterization suffers a lot when you alter the environment and take away the influence exerted by their shared father figure.

Jiang Fengmian was Wei Wuxian's primary adult role model and it shows.

Jiang Cheng's relationship to his own sense of ethics is fraught because 'teaching him good ethics' was his dad's number one parenting goal, but they misunderstood each other so badly (partly because Yu Ziyuan kept loudly misinterpreting them to each other, which is so realistic I can't get over it, that's exactly how it works good lord) that Jiang Cheng has a direct association between the concept of 'doing the right thing even when it's hard' and a feeling of personal inadequacy.

The fact that Wei Wuxian got their dad-person's approval for being exactly himself and Jiang Cheng not only couldn't do that, he couldn't even get that same level of approval when he really pushed himself to rise to expectations, because Jiang Fengmian did not intend that warmth as a 'reward,' and so never realized he was withholding it, and therefore misunderstood Jiang Cheng's visible jealousy as a dangerous sense of personal entitlement that had to be carefully restrained, which reinforced his distrust of Jiang-Cheng-the-person and fed into a shitty loop where they were less and less able to relate to one another--that's fantastic. That's so human! I love it so much.

Both their failures are their own but at the same time it would never have gotten so bad if Yu Ziyuan hadn't been interjecting herself in there, in the middle of their relationship, fucking it up. That's family, baby.

I would ofc like if there was more fic engaging with the subtleties of all this because it's so good, mxtx did such elegant work here and it is not sufficiently appreciated. But it's the kind of thing that's hard to write good fic about; I am struggling with it myself.

So mostly I wish there was just more fic that didn't impose Mo Xuanyu's cliche angst backstory on Wei Wuxian, who has a whole different thing going on.

[lady-of-the-spirit]

At least Yu Ziyuan was a boss bitch AND a terrible parent. Jiang Fengmian is just a terrible parent.

[enby-axels]

imo reducing the jiang clan dynamics to "wei wuxian was only a servant, never family" undermines the tragic reality that he was both. his position was a dubious, unclear thing, complicated by his debts and the jiangs' varying intentions.

jiang yanli had called him her brother and treated him like one in direct defiance of their class differences and her mother's words. jiang fengmian had seen wwx as a replacement for his parents, not a son, as evident in his passive refusal to defend wwx and his prioritization of his actual son's life. yu ziyuan had seen him as an arrogant servant transgressing class norms and threatening her son's position, and she had consequently scapegoated him at every turn. jiang cheng, the youngest, inherited all of their sentiments in one way or another.

the love was there, it was not enough. so mdzs concludes the jiang clan sub-plots by having jc let wwx leave. that's important. he chose to let to go of the yunmeng shuangjie promise, the oath of fealty. because wwx's position with the jiangs — a brother, yet also a servant, an outsider, never an equal, certainly never a son, bound by duty — made a mockery of love. i think that's more tragic than him being solely a servant and nothing more.

and not to make this lan wangji (actually, everything is always about lan wangji), but that's why it's so important that wwx found a home in him, in a relationship that has no need for debts like "thank you" and "sorry."

[berryberrytaeberry]

Jiang Cheng to Jiang Fengmian: oh, you raised the child of someone you cared deeply about so that they wouldn't grow up an orphan.

Lan Zhan to Jiang Cheng: oh, you raised the child of someone you cared deeply about so that they wouldn't grow up an orphan.

Wei Wuxian to Lan Zhan: oh, you raised the child of someone you cared deeply about so that they wouldn't grow up an orphan.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Bonus 8: How met your mother (CSSR design by @qourmet!)

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[thegreatgremlingang]

broke: Jiang fengmian thirsted after cangse sanren and took in wei ying bc he was cangse sanren's child

woke: Jiang fengmian was literally just good friends with cangse sanren

BESPOKE: Jiang fengmian and cangse sanren formed the Wei Changze simp club so they could collectively thirst after wei changze and jiang fengmian took in wei ying bc he was WEI CHANGZE (and his homie cangse sanren)'s child

[bunbunbunbunnybnuuy-bunbun]