#est family

[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.

[borgialucrezia]

"Certainly there are moments in the 2nd season where [Juan] manipulates other people in a similar way they’ve been manipulating him. if Lucrezia hadn’t come over during the first war, he would have led all his troops into death. He’s not afraid of dying in that sense, he’s afraid of not being liked or loved and being left by his family. If Rodrigo disowned him he would have done it. I don’t think he’s a coward in that sense." — DAVID OAKES

[moviesludge]

[havendance]

(Batman and Robin (2011) #16)

Jokerized ‘Batman’: Hehhehheh. Joker: Yes! Damian: No. It’s alright father… …I’d rather die by your hand than you by mine. Jokerized ‘Batman’: Hahahahahaha! Damian: Go ahead… end it…

;-;

The non-joker parts of this tie-in are quite good.

[jupiterovprsten]

praznični ručak

[sesamenom]

elladan has Opinions about aragorn's elessar outfit

(btw arwen & elladan have silver hair in this one bc of their treelight hair thing)

[thiziri]

Princess Anne and Sir Tim Laurence, attend day four of the 2024 Cheltenham Festival, on 15 March 2024.

[cologona]

Meet the Waynes

This is what I think happened, from when Damian is 10 years old to around ~14 years old.

I'm thinking Bizarro starts out at 200cm at the beginning of RHATO but keeps growing over time. Also, oops Artemis is supposed to be 193cm

Jason sticks out like a sore, swollen thumb amongst his family but with the Outlaws he fits in just fine :)

[manaosdeuwu]

hellaur beloved people of tumblr. how have you been? any new disasters I should know of?

[donde-el-diablo-parquea-la-moto]

Thinking about Leo and the mansion she wants.

Thinking that maybe they just want a project that her whole family can work on and she can help build.

Thinking that maybe she wants a home, un hogar where their whole family can be together.

[tj-crochets]

Crafting update: I've crocheted a few more rounds on the lovey, am almost done with another knit beanie, quilted a few more squares on the hand quilted baby quilt experiment, and keep getting sidetracked I've also gotten to the point in my Spanish learning where it's started to help on days where my brain loses access to a random assortment of words for a bit, in that I can usually still come up with the Spanish word even if the English word is unfindable, but unhelpful in that no one else in my family speaks Spanish I mean, they are learning some because of me? But not much lol

[whetstonefires]

also i like that canonically wei wuxian taught jiang cheng how to steal shit when they were kids, and jiang fengmian was like 'lol' and 'youthful high spirits' and just casually paid all damages because he liked that they were getting along.

and like. it's just food, he is prepared to pay for any and all food even if they're acquiring it in an elaborately roundabout way ig. who knows how much thought he put into it tbh. but he totally supported the shoplifting hijinks.

anyway this never comes up again, but my headcanon is jiang cheng used the how-to-steal-food-from-markets skill wwx had acquired through experience and passed on to him, while traveling alone in that window of time after the core surgery between wei wuxian not turning up at the arranged time (due to being in the burial mounds by then) and however he made contact with Nie Mingjue et. al. and started rebuilding his power base for the war.

[harusitoftc]

I started drawing circles, then Dave, and ended up with Dee, I'm not complaining tho

[moviesludge]

[havendance]

But like, imagine a world where Jason was voted to live. I can’t help but wonder how we’d talk about the phone poll then. Would it still be as iconic without the primal draw of blood shed? Or would it just be a piece of trivia that people share. ‘Oh, Jason Todd, did you know he was almost killed off in a fan poll?’ Would there be ‘Jason dies AUs’? I wonder what those would look like riffing off of comics that diverged from our own. Would people believe that he was ever in danger? I’m thinking about the way that the narrative around Jason has shifted, how he becomes tragic in the wake of it. Once Scrödinger’s box is opened, the cat is no longer alive or dead, but only one. Jason is dead and can never escape. What if we opened the box and he was alive? Could our understanding of him as alive be shaken? If he is alive and has always been alive, maybe it was a stunt. Maybe they didn’t mean it. Maybe it was always going to end that way.

[jupiterovprsten]

days of family