#i assume jiangs determine seniority by age

[winepresswrath]

I have been reading through your JC asks for literally about an hour. Your metas and takes are just *chefs kiss* as are your tags. And because it feels like a lot of CQLblrs have closed and/or moved on to the next (not sure how as I have been consumed by CQL for the best part of 2 years!), I was wondering whether yiu might be able to answer a language question or point me towards someone who could? I can't find an answer anywhere - close but not quite. I get the seniority naming convention when applied to siblings or sibling shaped demonic cultivators. What happens when you toss in cousins (with a different surname) and martial siblings? (Yes I am thinking specifically giving jc a Yu cousin). Which one trumps which if as a disciples WWX is head disciple so da- and jc is er-but the cousin is older? Does jc being SMJ automatically make him more senior even if he's biologically the younger cousin? I just have thoughts about wwx coming back and jc being like reluctantly yes this is my emotional support ?biaoge? he stops me from murdering things. Why are you sad? You didn't want to do that did you?

Anyway I'd love to hear your thoughts (on the scenario as much as the language question!)

Aw, thank you so much anon! I am not the best person to ask about this but I can give it a try! My go to for this kind of thing is drwcn's tumblr, and while I didn't find anything exactly on point I could very easily have missed something and she generally has a bunch of great resource posts. The rules governing martial sects are kind of a mashup of genre convention and whatever the author thought would work for their story, and I basically know just enough to be aware that I know very little, so please take the following with several grains of salt

As far as I know, martial siblings and maternal cousins exist in parallel seniority universes which do not impact each other unless the streams cross by virtue of both of them being disciples of the same clan, so neither of them would really trump the other. Wei Wuxian is still Jiang Cheng’s Da-Shixiong and hypothetical Biaoge is still Jiang Cheng’s Biaoge but they’re not officially anything to each other so they don’t impact each other’s ranking. If Wei Wuxian had been officially adopted, then he’d slot in between Biaoge and Jiang Cheng in cousin seniority. If Biaoge had joined the Jiang as a child for some reason, then since he’s the oldest of the three of them he’d be Da-Shixiong and Wei Wuxian would be Er-Shixiong.

Social standing isn't the same thing as seniority, though it does affect how seniority is expressed in practical terms. Sect Leader Jiang might have a lot more clout than his cousin and that might impact their relationship in a million ways but his seniors are still his seniors, the same way Jin Guangyao is Chief Cultivator but Xichen is still Er-ge.

Since it sounds like Biaoge isn't around much until the second life, I presume either

Jiang Cheng has a friend who is also his maternal cousin and that has no impact on the seniority naming convention so you can proceed straight to the messy feelings

Jiang Cheng's cousin has joined the Jiang Sect as an adult, in which case I've got very little for you. If Biaoge has become Jiang Cheng's disciple and Wei Wuxian gets officially reinstated, then I think Wei Wuxian is his shishu despite the age stuff, in the same way Xiao Xingchen is Wei Wuxian's shishu. What I have no idea about is how a fully trained adult disciple fits into the hierarchy of a clan they joined later in life. Presumably if he's learning Jiang techniques from Jiang Cheng then Jiang Cheng actually is his teacher, in which case I return to you an error message! I don't know how that works.

When it comes to Yu cousins, my feelings are:

Jiang Cheng seems pretty isolated in canon and the Yu are conspicuous in their absence after the burning of Lotus Pier. A powerful maternal family would presumably be a great source of support for Jiang Cheng and Yanli, but they're nowhere to be seen. It makes it hard for me to believe that they both survived as a clan and any of them have a close relationship with Jiang Cheng.

0 fucks given I love the idea of Jiang Cheng being friends with his Yu cousins and I hope you link me when you finish, because the particular angle you have going is fully of delightful knives. I’m always a sucker for Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian being jealous and feeling like they have no real right to be jealous and then awkwardly displacing their misery before they hug.

[red-talisman]

guardian lion jc??? is the best thing i've seen in AGES???? pls may we have some more?

I hope one day I’ll have the executive functioning to write a proper fic which is half warding sorcery and half trauma recovery but IN THE MEANTIME SINCE I HAVE NO ACTUAL PLOT YET -

I’m assuming that Jiang Cheng’s ancestors have lived in or around the land that currently hosts Lotus Pier for at least a good chunk of time because that seems reasonable to me, and we knew he grew up there and was presumably born there (but WHY DOES THIS MATTER a hypothetical person asks).

Because all of those factors together means that Jiang Cheng is going to have a spiritual, emotional, and physical awareness of Lotus Pier and its environs that would lend itself to some extremely powerful (and efficient) warding possibilities in the post-Sunshot rebuilding, regardless of the extent to which we headcanon any special qi-related talents or whatever.

So IMAGINE being able to draw on the natural flows of qi running through Yunmeng’s lakes and rivers in particular (a renewable resource which means the....human borrower? doesn’t have to rely on their personal reserves as much).

In the months after the Sunshot campaign and before WWX takes off with the Wen Remnants, WWX and JC work together to develop talismans/arrays which allow senior disciples to tap into this reservoir - designs that can then be incorporated into architecture as ‘harmless aesthetic.’

Because humans are part of a landscape whether they mean to be or not, JC (and WWX and JYL while they’re still there) learn how to fit Lotus Pier into the spiritual ecosystem around them so that the land’s own natural defenses automatically cover a good chunk of Lotus Pier itself (I think that’s basically feng shui but I welcome correction orz), which has a lot of lovely benefits as a result.

JC would also be in a good position to be acquainted with the local spirits, who run the gamut from resentful cooperation to enthusiastic attempts at affection.

At least one of these spirits is a nonverbal guardian lion which only JC can see; the only thing the two of them can agree on beyond “protect home at all costs” is that Lanling Jin is ruining a perfectly good son nephew, damnit, and they communicate primarily through irritated stares and growls.

Jin Ling doesn’t find out until post-canon that the only reason he never killed himself as a toddler trying to put everything in his mouth was because of the guardian lion roaring its head off to make JC come running no matter how Important the political meeting. (”HOW DOES EACH GENERATION LIVE LONG ENOUGH TO BIRTH THE NEXT WHEN THESE BRATS ARE SO DETERMINED TO KILL THEMSELVES I FUCKING SWEAR.”)

JC rarely leaves Yunmeng’s borders if he can help it, exceptions being the occasional political meeting he can’t avoid himself without causing even more offense and to pick up/drop off Jin Ling at Koi Tower. The longer he’s away, the more his skin starts to crawl and the more he starts imagining all the various kinds of ruin he could return home to. If Lan Wangji earns the reputation of traveling “where the chaos is,” Jiang Cheng’s reputation includes commentary on his observed reluctance to leave Yunmeng.

Strangely enough, that part of his reputation has the accidental benefit of easing some of the political pressures from sect leaders - including Jin Guangshan himself - who see Yunmeng Jiang Sect’s impossible incredible recovery and seek to exploit the (painfully obvious) vulnerabilities of its teenaged leader with no family backing him up before the boy grows up some more and learns how to play politics better.

(Jiang Cheng does indeed learn better, in ways that make him miss his mother’s lessons. At least then he could usually see the hand or the whip coming before it landed. It takes way too long, but he also learns how to hide it when someone lands a hit and, sometimes, how to throw it right back three times harder so that the enemy never wants to try again.)

The first of JC’s attempted matchmaking dates actually started out well - he hosted the woman and her family in Lotus Pier, and the awkwardness was about as low as he could have hoped for something like this when he had zero desire to marry but felt too overwhelmed and politically clumsy to ignore the pressures of the older folks around him. Hell, she even got him to crack a smile at one point. The problem came when he was working in his office late that evening and got the sudden sense that something was wrong, and he slipped down the hallways toward Jin Ling’s nursery with a hand on Sandu, and he came across the woman speaking with one of her handmaidens about how to ensure Lanling Jin had full custody of Jin Rulan the moment she confirmed she was pregnant (”Sect Leader Jiang is not burdened by a heart,” she says bluntly, “and it should be a simple matter to remind him of his familial duty by the time his own heir is born in order to separate him from the Lanling Jin heir properly”). By dawn, she and her family have been dismissed from Lotus Pier, rumors are spreading of Jiang Cheng’s coldness even towards kind women willing to marry despite his temper, and Jiang Cheng has amended his list of not-actually-thought-through qualifications for a wife: she must be kind to Jin Ling. (In other words, she will not use children in games of power or punishment.)