#how much of his strategy and tactics are reliant on a darker kind of psychological warfare?

[hunxi-guilai]

so i'm writing this fic where wei wuxian never gets into demonic cultuvation but he's still a terrible chaos gremlin and he terrorizes the wens during the sunshot campaign with some of his inventions + ambush, sabotage and raid style warfare and it got me to wondering if he was never named 夷陵老祖 he probably would've gotten a title like 含光君 or whatever during the war. i can't decide what that title would be bc he's pure chaos (like no one would name him "light-bearer") any thoughts?

oh that is a fascinating concept anon, hmm...

I’m afraid I don’t have any marvelous perfect magical ideas off the top of my head, but here are some options for directions you could go in?

you could certainly lean into hellish terminology like 阴曹 yincao / hell, the inferno (which gestures nicely at that line when Wei Wuxian confronts Wen Ruohan and says ‘we came from hell’); 幽冥 youming / dark, gloomy, but with that special undertone of underworld vibes; it might be fun (but also borderline sacrilegious, so tread carefully) to give him some kind of title related to 阎罗王 yanluowang, i.e. Yama, the Buddhist king of hell

alternatively, you could move towards terms that are more sensory or visual; Wei Wuxian is heavily associated with the color red, and I’d love to see some kind of visual poetry in a possible title. Unfortunately, my brain is only supplying me with bad puns at this particular moment; 雪花 xuehua / snowflake is a dainty, beautiful term, but 雪 xue / snow is a quick and easy tonal shift to 血 xue / blood, which is unsubtle but the image of vividly scarlet blood pooling across pristinely white snow is one that fits so well with Sunshot-era Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji

what might be even more chilling than either of those two options, though, is to go in the polar opposite direction -- to give Wei Wuxian a title that means something along the lines of lord of mercy or the benevolent one (I’m channeling Scott Lynch’s Gentleman Bastards series right now; the various titles for Aza Guilla, their goddess of death, are the “Lady of the Long Silence” and the “Lady Most Kind,” which is a whole other level of creepy). 垂怜 chuilian / lit. ‘to hand down pity/mercy,’ is one that comes to mind, which I think also appears in Wei Wuxian’s character song

so I’ve been avoiding giving you translations of ‘chaos,’ because the truest translation of chaos would be 混沌 Hundun, which refers to that primeval state of total chaos and disorder before the beginning of the world. It’s kickass and maybe the perfect referent (‘chaos theory’ in Mandarin is 混沌理论 hundunlilun), until you realize that 混沌 hundun is very closely homophonous to 馄饨 hundun/tun, which is... wonton. And that kind of ruins any sort of intimidation factor you might’ve had going

the part of me who loves the inherently chaotic energy of the Zhuangzi wants to suggest a Zhuangzian reference? But aside from the 鹏鲲 pengkun (listen it’s a giant fish that transmogrifies into a giant bird with no explanation) in the opening lines, I’m drawing up a blank

hope that helps! I’m afraid that I don’t have a good answer, but I can always offer a ramble