#Wombat's danmei hours

[thepurplewombat]

The Sin List

okay, so as we all know, it is vitally important that any character we stan must be morally pure and a good example to emulate in real life.

So I have decided to create a list of MDZS characters and their sins, which everyone can easily refer to in order to make sure that they are not following some horrible criminal or murderer!

This was a lot of work, but I'm very proud of it. Just doing my bit to ensure the moral purity of the fandom!

Wei Wuxian - Necromancy, disrespecting his elders, disrespecting the dead, killed Jin Zixuan, punched Jin Zixuan in the face one time, cannibalism, mind control, deviant sexual fantasies, trespassing, oath-breaking, urged Wen Qing to perform untested and possibly fatal operation on Jiang Cheng without his consent.

Lan Wangji - Defied his elders, broke the Lan Clan rules, sexually assaulted Wei Wuxian, deviant sexual fantasies, GBH (JGY)

Jin Guangyao - betrayed and killed Wen Ruohan, betrayed and killed Jin Guangshan, murder (NMJ), murdered assorted people, disrespecting the dead, assorted Spy Things for Wen Ruohan.

Nie Mingjue - Killed a lot of people during the war, verbally abused Nie Huaisang, burned Nie Huaisang's stuff, attempted murder (JGY), attempted murder (JGY), attempted murder (JGY), murder (JGY), killed the Mo family (well, his arm did anyway). In favor of the genocide of the Wen Remnants

Jin Guanshan: Sexual assault, rape, murder, ordering human experimentation with resentful energy to be done by his sect, played both sides during the war, didn't take responsibility for his children, ultimately responsible for getting WWX killed because he wanted the YTT so bad

Wen Ruohan: Attempted world domination, murder etc

Lan Qiren: has a stick up his ass

Su Minshan: Refused to die for the Lan, supported JGY in his efforts to prevent undead Da-ge from killing him. Also cursed Jin Zixun.

Sect Leader Yao: Weathervane politician

Jiang Wanyin: strangled Wei Wuxian that one time, keeps trying to talk to him but is way too tsundere about it, killed many during the war, didn't immediately forgive WWX for getting JYL killed, threatens to break Jin Ling's legs weekly.

Jin Ling: rude. rude rude rude. Also stabbed WWx one time

Lan Jingyi: not respecting his elders, rude rude rude. Also loud

JFM: shit dad, throw him in a volcano

Madame Yu: Angry mom, beat Wei Wuxian for things that weren't his fault, yelled at JC a lot, didn't appreciate JYL, very mean.

Lan Xichen: killed people during the war. Randomly starts doing flute solos in conversation

Meng Shi: was a prostitute. Told Meng Yao his dad was amazing and he should totally look him up later.

Madam Jin: awful person, she can go into the volcano with JFM. physical and verbal abuse (JGY)

Nie Huaisang: killed cats, nearly killed the juniors, let his sect fall into ruin, traded obscene materials, disrespecting his sect's traditions, lied to Lan Xichen to make him kill JGY

Wen Qing: went along with WRH's plans, performed surgery on JC without his consent

Wen Ning: Was part of the burning of LP

Mo Xuanyu: Summoned Satan to murder his relatives, harassed his brother

Jin Zixun: asshole, rude, broke the Geneva Convention on the ethical treatment of prisoners several times. Useless person

FOR THE SAKE OF SAFETY AND YOUR MORALS YOU ARE ONLY ALLOWED TO STAN THE FOLLOWING CHARACTERS

Jiang Yanli

Qin Su

Lan Shizui

[thepurplewombat]

Friendly reminder that Jin Guangyao killed Nie Mingjue in self-defense

[thepurplewombat]

So, my physical copy of this is still on the way, but I am not a patient person and for a change the ebook is available for purchase even if you happen to live in South Africa! (mostly when I try to buy ebooks, Amazon tells me to fuck off, so this was a delightful turn of events).

Anyway, I just read this and I have what one might call An Emotions Headache. Seriously, this book? Made me laugh. Made me cry. Made me late for an appointment with my aunt, who will never quite understand the phrase 'I was reading and lost track of time', but hasn't much room to complain. I might not have had my shoes on but I was on time, wasn't I? More or less. five minutes is still on time.

I don't really want to talk too much about the plot, because I'm kind of worried I'll spoil something. Suffice to say it's good and I love absolutely all the characters. Some of them I want to push off cliffs when I think of them as people, but as characters? nothing but love.

If you read Scum Villain and wanted Shen Yuan to go 'actually no, I want to be evil and sexy about it' this is probably a book you'll enjoy.

[thepurplewombat]

This also came today. Well, part of it anyway - the top room, I already had, but Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji now have their own room to moon at each other in. I'm sure we're all joining Lan Xichen and Jin Guangyao in breathing a sigh of relief.

[thepurplewombat]

So there is now a community for xiyao! It's called Xiyao Days and can be found here.

So far I haven't been able to like, create an invite link or make it open for joining, and it doesn't look like side blogs can be invited? Obviously this is still a baby feature and hopefully they will get some shit sorted out.

But if you want an invite, DM me and it shall be done!

[thepurplewombat]

They're so fucking unhinged I love it

[thepurplewombat]

Three years after the last time he saw Jiang Cheng, Wei Wuxian received a summons to Lotus Pier. The note found him and Lan Wangji out in the wilds of Qinghe where they have been hunting some form of beast. It had been terrorizing the local commoners and the Nie had not been doing enough, so Wei Wuxian had packed up Little Apple and dragged Lan Wangji on another wild adventure.

So far the wild adventure had consisted mostly of rain, mud, and sleeping in the dirt, with no sign of the beast and a number of surprisingly un-terrified villagers, so Wei Wuxian was about ready to put it down to wild rumor and head back to the Cloud Recesses. At which point he received the note from Jiang Cheng, and decided that he might as well see what his once-shidi wanted.

It wasn't that he didn't want to go back to Lotus Pier. For all that had happened after, it was still the first home Wei Wuxian had ever known and, when he let himself, he missed it with a fierceness that left him hollow. He just didn't let himself miss it often, because all that was in the past, and Wei Wuxian was focused on the present.

It took them several days to reach Lotus Pier, and when they got there, Jiang Cheng came storming out of his office like a thundercloud, glaring all the time. He looked thinner than the last time they had spoken, his cheekbones even more pronounced.

"Good," he snapped. "You're here. This way."

He led them through a rambling maze of corridors and open walkways that Wei Wuxian didn't remember - except he did remember, and it all smelled like home and loss and came to rest in a heavy weight in his belly where his nascent golden core spun and sparked merrily to itself. Jiang Cheng led them to the infirmary, where a young woman was lying on a bed.

"Is she alive?" Jiang Cheng asked.

Wei Wuxian looked at the woman, then at Jiang Cheng, his eyebrows climbing.

"Jiang Cheng, I'm not a -"

"You're the foremost expert on ghosts in the world, Wei Wuxian," Jiang Cheng interrupted him. "She was gored by a Soul Devouring Demon two weeks ago."

Wei Wuxian looked back at the girl, then took a careful step closer. The way she lay so still, her breath perfectly even...he reached out to touch her arm and feel for any traces of life.

"She eats, right?"

"She will swallow if someone feeds her, walk if someone leads her. If you leave her to herself she does nothing that a fierce corpse couldn't do, but I don't sense any resentful energy in her. I need to know if her soul is still...here...and if it can be restored."

"Well," Wei Wuxian said. "I can check, there are a few talismans I can look into...It's going to take a few hours."

"Good." Jiang Cheng turned to leave, then paused. "Thank you."

And then he was gone.

***

Jiang Cheng was doing paperwork when a runner came panting into his office, saying that Wei Wuxian wanted him. Jiang Cheng didn't run, because when sect leaders run sect members get uneasy, but he did walk slightly faster than was his wont.

When he got to the infirmary, he found Wei Wuxian looking tired, and Lan Wangji looking blank.

"Her soul's gone," Wei Wuxian reported quietly. "I've tried everything, Lan Wangji played Inquiry...there's nothing there. I'm sorry, Jiang Cheng."

Jiang Cheng nodded.

"Thank you, Wei Wuxian," he said again. "And...thank you for coming. I thought you would avoid Lotus Pier forever. It's good that you came home."

Wei Wuxian's eyes went wide and his mouth opened, but thank all the gods and ancestors for Lan Wangji, because he swept Wei Wuxian off to get some breakfast before Wei Wuxian could get emotions all over Jiang Cheng.

Once he was along, Jiang Cheng sighed and pressed his fingertips to the bridge of his nose. The little fool, what had she been thinking? Of course he knew what she was thinking - she was thinking that she owed a debt despite all they'd done to assure her otherwise, she was thinking that she had found a solution to the problem they'd been working on for three years, and she was thinking that it required a soulless body that yet lived.

And wouldn't you know it, there was a Soul Devouring Demon wandering the countryside, and wasn't it the Head Disciple''s duty to go after it.

"This is the last thing he would have wanted," he snapped at the slow-breathing corpse on the infirmary bed. "The last thing."

He could still remember when she had come to the Jiang, brought by Jin Guangyao under cover of night. One of his father's other bastards, Jin Guangyao had whispered once they had been private. It had been a year or more before Jin Guangshan had died, and nobody wanted to hand him a daughter to use and abuse the way he was already using Jin Guangyao. But her mother had died, and Jin Guangyao had had nowhere else to go. They'd been something close to friends by then, and Jin Guangyao knew that the Jiang were always ready to open their arms to a new disciple.

Nearly twenty years, Jiang Bao had been a member of his sect. In the last few years, as she'd grown into adulthood, she'd even become a friend.

And she loved her brother beyond reason. She'd told Jiang Cheng herself, how the small and smiling dark-eyed man had threatened the madame into giving her up when her mother had died with her contract unfulfilled, and brought her that same night to the door of the Jiang Clan of Yunmeng, where she was treated just like any of the other orphans Jiang Cheng had brought into his sect. Jiang Bao had believed that she owed Jin Guangyao her life, and now she had decided to pay the debt.

Jiang Cheng sighed again, and picked up the feather-light body to carry it away. Like all of Jin Guangshan's bastards, she was slim and short and lighter than she should have been - he wondered if Wei Wuxian's new body ran on nerves the same way Jin Guangyao and Jiang Bao did.

***

In the end the ritual was stupidly easy. The most complicated part was procuring a body - healthy with no wounds, yet soulless. Jiang Bao had so kindly provided, and left Jiang Cheng to either make use of her unwanted gift or squander it.

Jiang Cheng was no fool. He hadn't lived through the Sunshot Campaign and the lean years after the war by squandering opportunities. Wei Wuxian had checked for her soul and it was gone - but Jiang Cheng had known it was the moment the juniors brought her back, but he burned incense for her anyway. And he would carve her a tablet, not for the memorial hall because if all went well nobody would know that she was dead, but for his private shrine, where he kept the tablets for those the world would rather he not mourn. Wei Wuxian's tablet had stood there once. Jin Guangyao's stood there now.

Casting the ritual was a matter of scrawling some talismans, sacrificing some blood, and naturally having a soul handy to stuff into the body. That was the least of his problems, if he was being honest. Since he already had the soul and all - he wasn't about to let a man who had become family be tormented for a century, and it turned out that Nie Mingjue generated enough resentful energy to mast a quick and careful soul-syphoning spell.

He placed the softly glowing crystal over Jiang Bao's heart, and started channeling spiritual energy through it.

The crystal became bright, then brighter, until Jiang Cheng started to worry that the ritual was going to cost him his eyes as well as his head disciple, and then with a final flash like Zidian's power, the crystal cracked.

And Jiang Bao breathed deep, and screamed.

***

It took some time to get the newly reborn Jin Guangyao calmed down enough to have a conversation. The man was understandably distraught, and he'd been having a bad week even before he died, but he did eventually calm down.

Enough to glare at Jiang Cheng anyway.

"How could you let her do this?" he demanded, sitting on the edge of the altar table and gripping his knees as though holding on to them was the only thing stopping him from going for Jiang Cheng's throat. "I trusted you with her, Jiang Wanyin! My sister!"

Jiang Cheng could do nothing.

"I'd forbidden her from even considering it," he said. "She offered, repeatedly, and I said no, I said that you would rather stay dead than have your resurrection cost her life. So she went out and fed herself to a Soul Devouring Demon because she thought she owed you her life. Because, and I don't know if you've noticed this, you Jin are a bunch of stubborn assholes!"

Jin Guangyao sighed.

"Why did you even bring me back? I was supposed to be dead, Wanyin."

"Because you didn't deserve to die like that, and because I'm tired of letting go of people I care about."

Jin Guangyao looked up, just a flash of bright dark eyes under long lashes - it was truly amazing that nobody had ever seen the resemblance, but then again the Chief Cultivator and the Head Disciple of the Jiang had never had much cause to interact in public.

"I...Thank you, Jiang Cheng," he whispered. Then he took a deep breath. "How...how is Lan Xichen?"

"Still in seclusion," Jiang Cheng said gruffly. He'd thought they had been friends, at least. Over the years they had bonded over their friendship with Jin Guangyao, and he had to admit that it stung that Lan Xichen had refused to see him and sent his letters back unopened. "He's been refusing my messages. You know how he gets."

Jin Guangyao nodded. If there was anyone in the world who knew how the great Zewu-Jun got, it was the man who loved him more than anything.

"I'll send him a butterfly," he said. "You will have to put up with us cluttering up your sect for a while, I'm afraid."

"Don't be ridiculous," Jiang Cheng snapped before he could think. "You're staying, of course. I mean...if you want to - but I-"

"If you want me to stay," Jin Guangyao said, and smiled, "I will stay. And if Lan Xichen wishes to see me, he will come to see me here. Now let me get that butterfly sent. Did you know it's his birthday today?"

[thepurplewombat]

If you or someone you know has recently been hit with sticker shock about the fact that erha is going to have 11 volumes, I'd recommend reading this.

And if you didn't know erha is going to have eleven volumes because you haven't seen the latest update to the Seven Seas website, I'm sorry you're finding out this way.

[thepurplewombat]

Do you ever get into a conversation with someone and then they say something and you're like, have we even read the same book? Are you sure?

Anyway I was playing with the little jingly balls of bad JGY opinions people are kind enough to provide for me on Reddit, and it's all about rumors in MZDS, and someone says this:

and I'm like, okay, am I going to respond to that? but then the OP comes in from stage left with the steel chair of

I mean, there's more to that comment but I'm only replying to this one, and I'm like 👀 and respond with

which I think was a very sensible and reasonable response. I even gave page numbers, although it would have been better and more pedantic if I had also provided which version and format it is. I would have sounded so fancy. sighs for lost opportunities.

And then the OP comes back with this! I'm going to split it up into bits because I want to respond to every part of it individually.

That is literally the opposite of what you said in the comment I replied to but go off I guess.

Okay but his precise wording isn't relevant? Because like, the question isn't what specific word he used, but whether the rumor that he harassed JGY is made up or not. And fair enough, the page I cited does not prove definitively that he harassed JGY.

However, it does pretty definitely prove that he harassed someone - a disciple of the sect he was in, who was in a position to get him thrown out. (and honestly? The list of people whom MXY, an acknowledged son of the previous Sect Leader, would automatically be thrown out for harassing is...it's one person. Well, maybe two. Like, if he was creeping on Jin Ling he would have been executed, not exiled - and even if he was exiled, if Jiang Cheng ever heard of it he'd have wished the Jins had just quietly chopped his head off. But realistically the people MXY could have harassed and been kicked out because of, given the way the jianghu works, is basically Jin Guangyao and nobody else. Anyone else, it would have been hushed up or they would have been banished. The list of potential targets is one person long)

She's not 'keeping us in the dark for suspense' she is playing mind games. Everything in an mxtx book is a mind game. the reason her books are so good is because they don't just pull you into the world, they make you think like the people in that world.

Also, it was at this point that I decided I wasn't going to respond to this person, and was instead going to rant about it on Tumblr. Because this poster has called the Qin Su Situation 'disgusting' twice in two comments, and like, I'm not sure they realise that they are referring to an act of sexual assault perpetrated against both Qin Su and Jin Guangyao as 'his tragic and disgusting secret'. Because something that I haven't seen addressed a lot in fandom is the fact that the consent situation wrt the sex Qin Su and JGY had before he knew is extremely wonky.

It's generally acknowledged that if you later find out information that, had you been in possession of it, you would have not consented to sex, is fucked up, and deliberately withholding that kind of information is a form of sexual assault (ie, not disclosing that you have an STD before having unprotected sex and things of that nature) that can even be legally prosecuted in some places.

But who is the perpetrator here? It's not Qin Su, who didn't know. It's not Jin Guangyao, who never had sex with her again after he found out.

I don't even know why I immediately noped out when I read that, but it rubbed me completely the wrong way.

(also can we take a moment to appreciate OP saying that Wei 'you like Mianmian' Wuxian, who died convinced that Lan Wangji hated him, is incredibly astute and tends to make correct guesses about people and situations)

BUT!

THE OP IS NOT YET FINISHED!

HERE COMES THE KICKER

I mean, has this person read the same book I read? There are no innocent victims in an mxtx novel. Every single person in the entire cast of all of her novels (with the exception of the Juniors in mdzs) is fucked up in some way, and has fucked up in a way that contributed to whatever Situation unfolded in their book. Even Xie LIan! EVEN FUCKING XIE LIAN has fucked up.

And you're telling me Mo 'let me summon Satan Himself to murder my family' Xuanyu is an innocent victim? The man unleashed the Yling Patriarch on the world. Frankly he's lucky about 80% of what they said about WWX was utter bullshit because otherwise he'd have been responsible for wiping out the world.

And here's a point - while the stories about WWX are not all true, they're not all lies either. He didn't kill the guards at the prison camp for no reason, but he did kill them. He didn't kill Jin Zixuan deliberately, but he did kill him. He wasn't building a sect and plotting to take over the world, but he was experimenting with necromancy and raising fierce corpses - including Wen Ning! A sentient fierce corpse!

The point of mdzs is not that all rumors are lies. The point is that rumor and innuendo twist the truth. Most of the rumors in mzds have at least some basis in truth, but are distorted to serve the needs of the moment.

That's the point.

So the rumor might have exaggerated what actually happened. But we know from MXY's own writings - the only time we hear directly from him, even if it is filtered through WWX's reading of his papers - that he harassed someone, and was thrown out of the clan for it.

Anyway, that last paragraph was the one that made me wonder if we were talking about the same book.

[thepurplewombat]

[thepurplewombat]

[thepurplewombat]

Tagged by @thatswhatsushesaid

tag 9 people you want to get to know better! (i’m tagging however many people i feel like tagging because i’m lazy)

last song: DOWN DOWN DOWN BY THE RIVER

currently watching: I'm doing a rewatch of A Female Student Arrives at the Imperial College, and I love it just as much as I did the first time. Also slightly stalled on Romance of Twin Flowers because I didn't watch for a week and now have no idea what's going on.

currently reading: I just finished the Scholomance and it was excellent, am currently reading the Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao, it's very good so far.

current obsession: Jin Guangyao, and also Astarion (my beloved!). Seriously, Baldur's Gate 3 is amazing, 10/10 game of the year please let me give Larian all my money.

Tagging @wishthefish, @r95irth, @nutcasewithaknife, and anyone else who wants to have a go!

[thepurplewombat]

It's my 9 year anniversary on Tumblr 🥳

[thepurplewombat]

Look what just arrived this morning!

It's even more beautiful than I expected, and the texture of the pages is amazing - buttery soft, I just want to touch it.

[thepurplewombat]

like yeah sure it is indeed terrible that WWX didn't ask JC whether he wanted the core transfer or not but like, how does that conversation go? Can you imagine if he'd said no? or for Worst Timeline options, can you imagine if he'd said yes and then they both had to live with that