#fantasy china tpoe

[stolligaseptember]

#chanting: do it! Do It! DO IT! #id read the hell out of that (via @swizzlemalarkey)

well. i did ask you to ask, so. here we go i guess;

remember that post that was like "every character in mdzs lives in wildly different genres"??? yeah well this is kind of a continuation of that, because while i still stand by my previous essay that the romance aspects of this story is just an adaptation of pride and prejudice, wei wuxian and jiang cheng's relationship is indeed just the fantasy china version of the prince of egypt. and here are 2000 words on that;

(also, disclaimer, i'm an atheist, and this is just a media analysis of the dreamworks movie and not of, like, the actual religious story, please don't hang me.)

okay so i think we need to get this out of the way right away; i love jiang cheng. i love jiang cheng so much. he's my most favorite poor little meow meow. but his canon self is also an awful bastard man that doesn't deserve to share a single speck of his brother's post-canon happiness (unless he goes through so much grovelling and repentance). but he's also a justified baby sibling and did nothing wrong ever in his entire life. and those two statements can and do coexist, and if you can't live with that mindset you probably shouldn't be reading this.

because, yes, he's rameses in this. as in, you know, irrevocably the villain of the story. a villain who was really just a traumatized boy who misses his brother and wishes that things could just go back to the way they were during his happy childhood, but the villain nonetheless.

you can't deal with that? then please stop reading, because i'm not here to discuss this.

because yeah!!!! wei wuxian and jiang cheng as moses and rameses.

because i kid you not, the only thing that went through my head as i watched the chariot race during my rewatch yesterday was "twin prides behavior".

because, honestly. adopted brother who is mischievous and reckless and always drags his considerably more stuck-up brother into shenanigans, but who also loves and supports him unconditionally, and who would do and give almost everything to see him happy and successful? the dutiful biological son who is weighed down by the responsibility and expectations placed on his too young shoulders but who nonetheless always finds it in himself to loosen up in the company of his beloved brother and to be just young and carefree every once in a while, but always getting the worst brunt of the backlash of said carelessness, even if his brother always tries to shield him from it?

they're the exact same characters, i swear to god.

and then how their character arcs develop; jiang cheng growing fastidious in upholding the jiang legacy and traditions, while wei wuxian grows more open to question everything around them for the improvement of everyone, not just themselves.

jiang cheng, who just wants to honor the memory of his parents and to continue the legacy they had built, and who eventually sees wei wuxian as a threat to that very ambition, and who finally grows to resent him because of it. but who also still just loves his brother so very dearly and just wants him to come home again.

because while neither rameses nor jiang cheng's childhoods were perfect, their adulthood gets considerably worse, and they both hold onto those happy childhood memories with a corrosive desperation. they both want everything to go back to the way things were back then, and they're both willingly blind to the fact that everything around them has changed and that that's no longer possible.

they're both such miserable men in the height of their success that they both look back at their childhoods with rose tinted glasses.

i would say that seti and tuya are considerably better parents than jiang fengmian and yu xiyuan, but the building blocks of a the toxic relationships and the trauma that they instilled in their sons are still there. like, moses has a considerably better childhood environment than wei wuxian ever had; he's loved by both of his adopted parents and he doesn't have to suffer any abuse at their hands. but the way seti and tuya raise their two sons are still very similar to how wei wuxian and jiang cheng grow up.

rameses and jiang cheng are held to much higher standards than their brothers, which is to be somewhat expected, seeing how they're the heirs to their realms. but the discrepancy is extreme.

we never get to see seti or jiang fengmian give their biological sons any sort of positive reinforcements, we only ever just see them patronizing them and criticizing all of their faults and flaws, the fact that they don't truly understand the heritage they are meant to bear. and almost exactly in the same breath they coddle their adoptive sons instead, not holding them responsible to anything.

and not getting any positive reinforcements from their fathers, it falls upon their brothers to build rameses' and jiang cheng's self esteem and sense of self up. a task their brothers are more than happy to take upon themselves with gusto, but which also leaves their self worth brittle and easy to topple as soon as said brother is out of earshot.

and which also means that when the one person who has always said that you're worthy and meant to reign suddenly turns around to question that very reigning, it's very easy to very suddenly turn into a self destruction spiral.

because jiang cheng and rameses always expected their brothers to always be right beside them. they were their emotional support brothers who literally held them together at the seams, and then they both just left.

and when they returned it was to question the foundation of their brothers' very existence.

like, the jiangs never held as much power over the wens as rameses held over the hebrews, but the wens were very much antagonists to the jiangs very existence in jiang cheng's eyes, and wei wuxian abandoning him to defend the wens instead must have stung just as much, if not worse, to jiang cheng as moses suddenly returning and demanding rameses to set the hebrews free.

now, this is where things get a little muddled. because while the prince of egypt, a 100 minute animated pg movie, is so very neat and linear. and mdzs is. so very not.

it's not possible to draw neat parallel lines between the plots, but here is an attempt:

moses and rameses have a very clean separation before they're reunited however many years later. jiang cheng and wei wuxian, because they're jiang cheng and wei wuxian, are of course so much messier.

and while they're separated the first time during wei wuxian's first three month stint in the burial mounds, i would say that the first real separation is the burial mounds era. or rather, it's the betrayal, that is the stab in the back, that is moses returning from his years in midian to reclaim his identity as a hebrew and demand the hebrew's freedom.

because moses' years in midian is actually the thirteen years that wei wuxian was dead, but it's also a part of his post-resurrection arc when he finally found peace and happiness with lan wangji, and i said that it got messy.

anyways.

when wei wuxian first takes the wens' side instead of jiang cheng's, and moses demands the hebrew's freedom from rameses' reign of terror, it's a spit in the face of everything that jiang cheng and rameses has been trying to build and establish.

and the reason why i decided to put my foot down so firmly on jiang cheng being rameses is because while i was doing my research before sitting down to write this is i saw that some people, while drawing comparisons from the prince of egypt, pointed out jiang cheng as aaron and jiang yanli as miriam. and i just???? what the fuck???????? what are y'all people on. aaron and miriam are obviously wen ning and wen qing.

they're the spokesperson for the destitute whose connection is the first step for their savior throwing his entire life of comfort and familiarity away in order to save them. the pair of siblings that take him in as their own after he's both abandoned and been abandoned by his brother. the wens are the hebrews. that's a VERY neat parallel.

now, moses succeeded in his mission of keeping the hebrews safe, while wei wuxian did very much not, but then again, mdzs is a very different story, so. we'll skip over that tiny little detail.

"but september," some of y'all may be thinking, "the yunmeng siblinghood isn't just jiang cheng and wei wuxian, what about jiang yanli then?"

i'm so glad you asked!!!!!!

because her role is the role of rameses's son.

now that may be confusing to some of you, because there's a huge difference between the familial relationships between a sister and a son, but hear me out.

she's the death that finally pushes jiang cheng over the brink, that finally wedges the chasm between him and wei wuxian into a distance that they are no longer able to cross and which finally drowns jiang cheng in his own pain and grief and resentment to the point where he's no longer able to resurface. it's the death of the family and the history and the legacy that jiang cheng has been trying to hold together by the skin of his teeth, and he holds we wuxian responsible for just ripping it all away from him.

it's the death that both jiang cheng and rameses can no longer come back from, and it's the point where all of their love and adoration and longing for their brothers finally turn into pure, unbridled resentment.

for like 5 seconds, and then they're back to both hating and loving and missing and resenting and grieving and raging over their brothers all over again. they're absolute garbage fires the both of them. i love it.

and yes, that means that the massacre at nightless city is also the last plague. i did say it got messy.

and it's in the way that after all of that, both moses and wei wuxian are both able to cut the cord clean, to finally say a proper goodbye and wish their brothers nothing but the best, but far away from where they've found and grown their own happiness and leave their love and shared memories, but also the pain and the suffering, in the past, while rameses and jiang cheng can never let go of their grief and resentment and love and memories of happier days, and keep hanging on to that last thread with a helpless desperation.

because while the last plague is the massacre at nightless city, the crossing of the red sea is also somehow the fallout of the guanyin temple???? are any of you following this at this point?????

anyways.

both rameses and jiang cheng grew up endlessly loving but also holding a kernel of resentment for their carefree brothers who stood by their sides through thick and thin, until suddenly their own consciousness forced them to step away, and that kernel of resentment eventually grew to overtake that endless love, but never entirely. and while rameses and jiang cheng both did their best at trying to completely ruin their brothers, none of them succeeded, and they're both left as broken husks of men while their brothers finally found their own happiness, even if it was after their own endless share of grief and hardships.

it's the exact same narrative. they're the same stories.

and while mdzs obviously have a much richer cast of characters and a more convoluted story, there are some more minor parallels that i want to touch upon. (xichen as jethro in my heart.) because while lan wangji was never presented as wei wuxian's sex slave even though i'm certain a whole lot of you have already had a lot of fun with that au, he is a paragon of morality, always standing up for what is right and just, and once he falls in love with him, he is the one to unflinchingly stand by wei wuxian's side throughout all of his hardships.

and as i said in my own tags already; the juniors are just tzipporah's sisters cheering them on from the sidelines. wei wuxian gets resurrected and immediately saves the lan juniors from nie mingjue's dismembered arm; moses barely survives a sand storm and immediately saves tzipporah's sisters from the sheep thieves. and then they're both immediately adopted by a bunch of middle schoolers. love that for them.

...............................so anyway, the yunmeng brothers are just the xianxia version of moses and rameses