#i love daO so much

[monhiio]

To battle

[unkonageki]

MDZS!Wangxian meeting their CQL selves [Part 4]

Some people asked for the two Lan Zhans' version, so here it is!

Poor cql!Lwj found out about the "everyday" thing. Is he shocked? Is he having a horny awakening? We'll find out next time

[gentlegentian]

i feel like one of the biggest things the mdzs fandom tends to forget is that lan wangji is silly

like yes he's stoic and jade faced and perfect but he also:

blushes SO often

loves bunnies and anything related to them

throws little tantrums when he's away from his husband for too long

gets flustered easily

is a MENACE when drunk

messes around with his husband

buried his son in a bunny pile

is a biter

so yes, whilst hanguang-jun is a big scary warlord, lan wangji is just a silly guy who likes bunnies and messing around with his husband :3

[ladyhavilliard]

mo dao zu shi tarot

wheel of fortune: good luck, karma, life cycles, destiny, a turning point

the tower | jiang cheng

death | wei wuxian

[still-snowing]

wangxian in love for qixi 🤍

[dontbegreedy]

Alistair & Surana by @ineed-to-sleep 💛

[gvalesdraws]

CW blood and rendon howes head

Roses have Thorns

[withthewindinherfootsteps]

I sometimes see the opinion that MXTX took the clichéd tropes she'd critiqued in Scum Villain, and played them straight in MDZS. But though a lot of them appear in MDZS, I'd argue that none are actually played straight at all!

The main point of MDZS's tropes is subversion. Yes, WWX has a 'tragic backstory', even an arguably overused one (orphaned by his parents at a young age, forced to live on the streets with nobody to rely on, etc) – but how things differ in how it's used. Tragic backstories are normally used to build sympathy for a character, to make us care and get invested in them. But... we're never actually shown any of those street days, we're never shown and never dwell upon how much he suffered during them. They're only really mentioned in passing and whenever dogs come up! If the goal was to make us feel bad for WWX, this would be very ineffective writing. But what's actually important here isn't that WWX went through tragedies – it's how he doesn't let the tragedies he went through define him. He doesn't dwell on them, the narrative doesn't dwell on them, it's never used to earn sympathy points... because what defines WWX is his choices and how he chooses to act, not a backstory completely out of his control. What gets us invested in him is his personality and the character writing of MXTX, not tragic events used as a substitute for identity.

And this trope treatment fits extremely well with WWX's personality itself – he's someone who 'forgets the pain as soon as the wound has healed'*, but also who actively chooses to focus on the present because you can't change the past; someone who holds the belief that 'gains and losses [should] remain uncommented on' when choosing what to do.

The use of the tragic backstory isn't the only thing that's subverted, either – the other main thing is the 'blackening' of the protagonist, and its impact on the protagonist's fall. After being thrown into the Burial Mounds, on a surface level it does seem like this blackening has occurred: the first thing we see when he returns is his gruesome torture of the Wen cultivators; he's 'forsaken' traditional cultivation in favour of an 'evil but more powerful' path; and frankly, Sunshot-era WWX is terrifying. But MDZS is not a blackening story, and so the events of the Burial Mounds aren't used as a catalyst for that purpose. Though it's true that WWX's not entirely the same person he was before (because how could be be?), underneath it all, his morals, worldview and core** stay the same. Though gruesome, his revenge is directed towards the ones who wronged him, not those past that and certainly not the entire world. His experience in the Burial Mounds doesn't lead to him being some evil, blackened overlord... like everyone says he is at the start! That's subverted, because again, WWX's values and choices are more important to the story than genre conventions.

But the most crucial thing? What leads to WWX's downfall isn't any blackening! It isn't any vengeance or morally dubious actions***– he was praised for those things during the Sunshot Campaign! No, what leads to his downfall is something completely unrelated to that, something which would've disappeared had the trope been played straight. It's him doing what's right by defending the Wens, it's him following his moral code when it opposes the world's, it's him standing up to the injustice of others – not others standing up to the injustice of him. That's the subversion here.

(Also, once again, the fall of Lotus Pier, the Burial Mound, etc, aren't used for sympathy points – and if it was relevant, they wouldn't have been used to excuse any actions, either. Using tragic events as an excuse for doing bad things is critiqued many times in MDZS, through characters like Xue Yang and Jin Guangyao. And that's not exactly a trope subversion, but it is a critique of badly handled 'excuses'.)

These are by no means all the tropes MDZS subverts – the nature of guidao vs the usual nature of modao being another very major one – but they're the main ones that feature in Scum Villain.

So, though at first glance MDZS seems to play the tropes MXTX critiqued there straighter, it's not a simple case of using them as cliches, and we see that by how they're used to impact the narrative, and how that differs from what they're traditionally used for. MDZS doesn't fall back into clichés Scum Villain satirised – it's the subversion to Scum Villain's exploration and critique.

--

*Which I know is generally used negatively, to describe someone not learning a lesson from a punishment, but it really describes WWX in general, too. He doesn't dwell on that pain, he does his best to move on from it.

**...heh

***And, because it's often debated – whatever the morality/culpability of Nightless City is doesn't even matter! The events happened at a pledge conference against him that was already taking place. WWX's actions there didn't make people want to kill him because that was explicitly happening beforehand.

[truckeecheeze]

I was talking with the moon last night. The moon told me something about the sun and I told something about you. - absolutely BRAINROTTING :)

available as a print on my store !! 🖤

[khattikeri]

thinking forever and ever about how wei wuxian ignores the homophobia that jin guangyao tries to weaponize against him by shamelessly loudly extremely publicly declaring at guanyin temple with dozens of witnesses that he's in love with and wanted to have sex with lan wangji.

SPECIFICALLY the inclusion of sex. their society already hates any deviance, but wei wuxian doesn't cave to their sensibilities! he doesn't back off and pretend that their closeness is chaste, or similar to sworn brotherhood.

wei wuxian doesn't try to deflect or downplay for the sake of either of their reputations. wei wuxian says with his entire chest, i wanted to fuck him and i regret not fucking him last night, and i don't give a shit what you think about it.

[bishicat]

"Would you be offended if I said I fancied you?"

[monhiio]

Er-ge my sweet pathetic princess,,

[phoenixkaptain]

My favourite part of MDZS is how cool Wei Wuxian is.

Like, we don’t talk enough about how cool he is. He performs Empathy three times. His ability to use a flute is so powerful, the song doesn’t even have to sound good for it to work. He brought a dead guy back to life (kinda sorta).

But especially, I love how Wei Wuxian treats ghosts and corpses! Wei Wuxian just hangs out with corpses, for FUN!! He scares away low-level corpses just by existing! He hears the voices of the dead to the point that he can’t enter a place too full of resentment without getting a headache from the constant chatter.

I also really like the Extra where Wei Wuxian is just like “Well, the ghost will go away when he’s done screaming. I’m not worried about it.” And he just leaves a screaming ghost at some guy’s house so the ghost can move on peacefully (as peacefully as is possible when one moves on by screaming).

I love all of this so much because Wei Wuxian is constantly saying that people have too high of expectations of him. Xue Yang telling him to put Xiao Xingchen’s soul back together is just one example of this. Someone will tell Wei Wuxian to do something and he’ll be like “How powerful do you think I am?!” And it’s like… Wei Wuxian, you spent six hours hanging onto a cursed sword in the Xuanwu’s mouth, you survived three months in the Burial Mounds and then returned to make it into a semi-livable place, you killed at least a thousand people that one time, and you came back from the dead, just to name a few.

Wei Wuxian is so strong. He’s so cool. He is terrifying. He is unstoppable and unflappable if only because he gets over his embarrassment in about fifteen seconds! He just rolls with it! He rolls with anything that happens! He remains Shocked and Apalled by Lan Zhan’s behaviour for all of five minutes before basically going “lol okay”! He told Lan Zhan that he wanted to sleep with him in front of Lan Xichen, Jin Ling, a handful of Jin disciples, and the literal bad guy of the novel!!!

(I’ll never get over that scene. It is so funny.

WWX: “I need to say something, it can’t wait.”

JGY: “Then just say it right now as you are.” (Referring to the fact that Wei Wuxian has a wire wrapped around his throat that can kill him in seconds)

WWX: “Good point! Lan Zhan, we should’ve fucked.”

This scene is so fucking funny, I will absolutely never get over it)

I love powerful protagonists and honestly, Wei Wuxian is at the top of the list when it comes to overpowered protagonists. The only thing that phases him is dogs, and even then, he himself admits that he can get used to their presence as long as they aren’t barking.

TLDR: Wei Wuxian is so powerful and I totally get why Lan Zhan fell for him.

[violetscanfly]

Once again I offer you art that I didn't post when it was made✌🏻 One thing I have learned is to never throw away your art because even if you don't immediately like it you might some day

[anqelbean]

My favourite thing about Wei Wuxian is he literally got resurrected and then decided "We're not gonna unpack all of that", indirectly murdered his host's abusive family, threw his son's friend in front of a murderous arm, then stole a donkey.

[notarakhae]