#genuinely i think i've perfected that shit i'd love to give a recipe for it

[archivist-the-knight]

biggest accomplishment of this year is having a supportive friend group. other one for sure has to be my egg sammy recipe

[gloriousmonsters]

character ask game 💚🤍🖤 - so uh, talk to us about Lan Sizhui? 😁😏

one aspect about them i love

Honestly I did not spend that much brainspace on LSZ before writing trust me as though I were your enemy, which is a very *cough* specific and premise-based take on his character, so... speaking from my brief newfound interest in the character, I love the untapped potential of his character? Most of what we see is very surface level--not to say his kindness and proactive Good-Boy-ness isn't genuine if it's not backed by the correct impulses, I think on one hand he genuinely values being considerate and careful and kind (and him being the only Lan junior who tries speaking gently to 'Mo Xuanyu' when he's just acting deliberately 'crazy' still gives me feelings. i, like wwx, have the 'such a nice kid! how tf did the Lan sect spit HIM out?' reaction 😂)

...but on the other hand, 'Lan' Sizhui has no real choice but to be a Good Kid. He's kind of adopted into the Lan family, but his main point of adoption is Lan Wangji, and it happened during the years LWJ was thoroughly destroying all of his Good Boy rep within (parts of, at least) the sect--something I thought about but didn't manage to work thoroughly into the fic was that LSZ probably deals with a lot of spillover dislike by, say, the 33 elders that were severely wounded by LWJ. And then there's all the shit he'd just barely remember... In conclusion, LSZ pretty probably grew up with the impression that Something Bad happened when he was a kid but nobody will talk about it, and dealt with feeling like he was on Thin Fucking Ice with a significant portion of the Lan elders without knowing why. Perfect recipe for a kid to repress any 'bad' feeling or behavior he might ever have!

So... what's under that surface? Especially when he starts learning about the truth of everything that happened at the end of canon, and learns where he actually came from?

Fun to think about.

one aspect i wish more people understood about them

I am not familiar enough w how people usually characterize him to really speak on this...

one (or more) headcanon(s) i have about this character

something that I did decide on during writing is that while he's not disliked by many people in the younger generations, he really doesn't have any friends except for Lan Jingyi. He doesn't get close to people easily, so it takes someone as enthusiastic and bad at reading subtlety as Jingyi to hang in there and earn the position :P

one character i love seeing them interact with

Tbh I'm not immune, his interactions with WWX and LWJ when he's a little kid hit me right in the heart. It's especially adorable in CQL, when he's sitting in LWJ's lap and you can see LWJ getting baby fever in realtime. They may not be the best guardian-ish figures, but his connection to both of them is still obviously important to him, and seeing the beginnings of it is still painfully sweet.

one character i wish they would interact with/interact with more

Honestly there's a lot I wish here! I'd like to see something of him traveling with Wen Ning (I've heard there's a movie, but also that it sucks, and based on Fatal Journey i believe it); I'd like to have seen more one-on-one interaction with LWJ when he's older, instead of always just being part of the Group of Juniors. After writing this fic, I'm also wishing that he'd ever really interacted with SMS, lol.

one headcanon i have that involves them and one other character

Separate from any fics i may or may not be writing < <.... I think he had a good, if not at all close, relationship with Jin Guangyao, and looked up to him a little bit (lsz: wow you're repressing EVERYTHING and you're doing it so well i wanna be you when i grow up). He felt a little guilty about it because while LWJ never said anything specific, he didn't seem to like Lianfang-zun much, but whenever LSZ saw him (at conferences and meetings in Jinlintai, or during JGY's frequent visits to the Lan sect) JGY was always super nice and friendly, and jokes aside was modeling a type of poised strength that was very different from LWJ's uncaring-of-social-consequences conduct that LSZ, to say the least, did not feel like he was capable of.

(jgy, on his end, is having a 'wow what a nice kid how tf is he someone adopted by that rude boy lwj' moment)