#like clearly her family was v encouraging of early marriage

[littlecornerinbrooklyn]

It is WILD that Dean gets married at 18 and within a year is sleeping with his ex girlfriend

[mewbrilysis]

MDZS Jiang Cheng Character Ending Analysis (Novel/Drama Spoilers) - BY BRI >v<

If I asked you to change the ending of mdzs, without completely impacting the actual plot, by removing one character from the story, who would you choose? Obviously, removing any major character would change the story completely, and removing a character post-reincarnation wouldn’t affect enough to change anything, since most of the cultivational world would still despise and fear Wei Wuxian, which is an important plot point. Nie Huiasang and Mo Xuanyu also carry a major role, since they are the catalysts for the post-reincarnation storyline. So now you may be considering minor characters pre-reincarnation, such as one of the clan leaders or a sibling such as Lan Xichen or Jiang Yanli. These answers, granted, would change the storyline, but they wouldn’t result in much of a better ending, if a good ending at all.

In my opinion, the sole reason mdzs arguably has a very bittersweet ending (one that leaves some readers with a sense of unfulfillment) is: Madame Yu.

The saddest part about the ending of mdzs is arguably the lost friendship between Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian. The story begins with them as brothers and ends with Jiang Cheng being the cause for Wei Wuxian’s death during the siege of Yiling (novel pre-reincarnation ending). One of the things that makes mdzs so captivating is trying to discover why this happened (a plot point the drama highlights more than the novel). Before diving into why Madame Yu impacts this story so much, let’s review some important aspects of Jiang Cheng’s and Wei Wuxian’s character.

Jiang Cheng is born with an older sister and is destined to become a clan leader one day. At a young age, a young boy is adopted by his family and they spark a friendship. However, as they grow up, it is noticeable how different the two are. Wei Wuxian is mischievous and seeks danger and adventure, he doesn’t like listening to rules that he finds too strict or unnecessary, and he has a habit of exploiting qualities people are shy about so he can tease them about it later (good-heartedly, of course, but something that is clearly bound to get him in some trouble). Jiang Cheng, however, is more serious and respectful with a habit of joining Wei Wuxian in causing trouble, after all, he is a teenager (and the Lan Clan rules weren’t going to stop a group of teenage boys, lmao, let’s be honest).

They are obviously very close, something that the Donghua seemed to focus on a bit better than the drama. However, it is also noticeable that he gets treated differently from Wei Wuxian when it comes to punishments. There are several points that explicitly suggest that Wei Wuxian tends to receive lesser punishments from Jiang Fengmian compared to Jiang Cheng (something Madame Yu likes to bring up every argument). Jiang Fengmian also seems to praise Wei Wuxian more than his own son, and seems to compare the two more than he should (such as when he reprimands Jiang Cheng for encouraging Wei Wuxian to think selfishly about his survival rather than the lives of others). And so, Jiang Cheng has something plaguing him: inferiority. It is arguable by some people that he has an inferiority complex; after all, despite being the next clan leader, he is not head disciple and pretty much always falls short of Wei Wuxian.

However, I offer another theory: he hates being humiliated. Yes, a quality that pretty much every person on the face of the planet has. Yes, I am saying this is the underlying cause of why everything else happens.

The reason I say this is because Jiang Cheng doesn’t seem to care that Wei Wuxian succeeds, but rather that he himself doesn’t receive the same recognition when he does something similar. When Wei Wuxian along with Lan Wangji defeated the Tortoise of Slaughter, Jiang Cheng isn’t particularly mad that Wei Wuxian killed the tortoise, but rather his words reflect: 1) worry, and 2) anger at himself. He was mad because Wei Wuxian, someone who he clearly sees as a brother figure, put himself in danger because he wanted to save people, and not just in any danger, but a life-or-death situation. Jiang Cheng makes it clear that he spent days without rest or break running to get help so that he could get back to Wei Wuxian as fast as possible, even while injured from the fights with the Wen Clan, who guarded the outside of the cave and attacked everyone who escaped thanks to Wei Wuxian’s efforts (novel scene); he even passed out the second he found people to help. Yet, when they went to save Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji, everyone only praised their valiance in defeating the Tortoise of Slaughter, and Jiang Cheng’s actions were overlooked.

So, why did he get so mad at himself about this? BECAUSE OF HIS HEADASS MOM, DUH, I’VE BEEN LEADING YOU TO THIS CONCLUSION!!

Imagine, you are next in line to be clan leader, yet you aren’t head disciple, and now your mother is breathing down the back of your neck because your father is praising someone who is doing better than you. On top of this, you don’t even have the chance to speak to your father about how you feel upset that he treats you differently, because every time the topic of your father being more strict and less praising of you comes up, your mother takes the reigns and doesn’t give you the chance to speak for yourself. Now, all of a sudden, your mother is yelling at your father, saying he doesn’t love his own son and he prefers your adopted brother, and she is also yelling at your adopted brother because he is better than you, and all this is happening IN FRONT OF YOUR EYES ALL. THE. TIME!!

After putting that into perspective, are we really surprised Jiang Cheng turned out the way he did? This entire ordeal must have been HUMILIATING for him, and you KNOW it happened all the time.

Jiang Cheng grew up with this happening, and Jiang Fengmian was only stricter with him because he was going to be a clan leader, and, granted, we can all acknowledge that Jiang Cheng said some shit that his dad was justified in reprimanding him for (such as the whole thing where he told Wei Wuxian he never should have put the lives of others over himself and their clan). Of course, we should also acknowledge that Jiang Fengmian had his faults, and he should have been stricter with Wei Wuxian. As much as we all love this mischievous boi, he was the head disciple of the Jiang Clan and was far too undisciplined and unruly for the position he represented, especially while he was a disciple at Gusu and during the Archery Competition hosted by the Wen Clan (novel scene). And for real, the shit he told Lan Qiren when he asked about why Wei Wuxian was like this, this boy really replied, “It’s just the way he has always been.” That type of response wouldn’t even pass in modern era!

Of course, after all this, Jiang Cheng was going to hold some resentment for Wei Wuxian.

However, the real kicker is Madame Yu’s final words before she sends Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian away… THE WOMAN TAKES A GOOD FEW MINUTES TO JUST STRAIGHT UP YELL AT WEI WUXIAN AND BLAME HIM FOR EVERYTHING!! LIKE WTF!! Look, I’m sorry, MAAM, but the Wens were kind of trying to take over the entire cultivational world, I promise you that Wei Wuxian’s existence affected that all of zero percent. She said that he was the cause for the fall of Lotus Pier, but let’s consider how, oh yeah, LITERALLY EVERY CLAN WITHIN 100+ MILES OR SOMETHING OF THE WEN CLAN WERE INVADED AND FORCED INTO SUBMISSION NOT THAT LONG AFTER; THEY WERE GONNA DO THIS NO MATTER WHAT!! Sure, the Wens may have decided to go after Lotus Pier a bit early because they hated Wei Wuxian, but it’s not as if him not being there was going to stop any of this…? They literally went after GusuLan first, I don’t understand how Wei Wuxian can be faulted for any of this.

But, of course, Jiang Cheng is not here to listen to reason, he just lost both his parents, and years of lowkey (highkey) verbal abuse finally caught up, especially since some of his mother’s last words were blaming Wei Wuxian for everything. This is the start of our downhill slope.

I would like to take a moment and review how Jiang Cheng really received no closure with his father. His father died before Jiang Cheng ever got the chance to speak for himself and just communicate with him, and after all the arguments his mother had with him, it is clear that Jiang Cheng will always carry a part of him that believes his father didn’t truly love him.

But this is something the reader can view as misjudgment. His mother seemed to use Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian as a way to argue with Jiang Fengmian, and in Jiang Cheng’s eyes, this may be viewed as his mother standing up for him; however, looking at this as a whole, the situation isn’t so straight-forward. Quite honestly, it is hard to even tell whether Madame Yu loved Jiang Cheng, or whether she just wanted a reason to argue with Jiang Fengmian. There are points in the story that say Madame Yu ‘forced’ (I use this term loosely, but this is the term the rumors seemed to hover around) Jiang Fengmian into a marriage, and this may be her way of consistently reminding him that “You can’t leave, you have a child to raise.” If anyone has the inferiority complex, I think it can be argued that Madame Yu likely has a slight case of it. BUT! The point is that Jiang Cheng viewed his mother as “the only one on his side,” in a sense, even his own sister fought tooth and nail to be able to see Wei Wuxian even when he was shunned by the cultivational world.

Now, Wei Wuxian doesn’t exactly help his case when he turns down the path of demonic cultivation.

We all know the reason he did it, and many may argue that Jiang Cheng is a fool for thinking for even a moment that BaoShan Sanran could return his golden core, let me remind you of this:

BaoShan Sanran is very mysterious, no one really knows anything about her other than that she has reached “Enlightenment” (a term derived from Buddhism to describe someone who has found the truth of life and no longer is reborn). She is described in the book to be viewed as “immortal” and once a disciple leaves her mountain, they are forbidden from returning. The only people who know anything about BaoShan Sanran are the disciples, and even the ones that have left the mountain don’t spread much information on her. So, in essence, everyone just knows she is powerful and not to mess with her. So, please, excuse Jiang Cheng for having even a shrivel of hope. I am positive that, in his mind, being able to ‘re-grow’ your golden core was just as possible as being able to ‘trade’ you golden core (both of which he believed to be outside the realm of possibility, so yeah, both sounded insane, but he had hope, and no one suggested that ‘trading’ was even an option, so ‘re-growing’ was already mind-boggling).  So, Jiang Cheng is happy because he has his golden core back, but when he goes searching for his brother, the man is gone and no where to be found for three full months, and when he does reappear, he is using demonic cultivation and is more closed-off.

Jiang Cheng has gone through the literal worst whiplash of emotions in his life: his parents and entire sect were all brutally slaughtered; he lost his golden core; he got his golden core back, but his brother was no where to be found; his brother is back, but he is using demonic cultivation and won’t discuss the reason with him.

Now, this is where the past ‘abuse’ catches up with Jiang Cheng. He has now been forced into a leadership position in the middle of a war, and now the war is over, but his brother is still…yeah. But now, the other clans are talking and saying that he should be reprimanding Wei Wuxian, but no matter how he tries, the man doesn’t listen to him. This is, no doubt, HUMILIATING for Jiang Cheng, especially when all the other clans are constantly saying he needs to take action against Wei Wuxian because the man was becoming ‘too arrogant’ and etc. When Wei Wuxian finally stands up for the remaining Wens, Jiang Cheng is so humiliated that he didn’t want to stand up for his brother because he knew he would be shunned the same if he stood by Wei Wuxian’s side, especially since it would be as an ally and not the leader in this movement. This is the ‘herd mentality,’ in which the few vocal people in the room speak up for an argument, creating a big fuss, and even though the majority actually agrees for the other side of the argument, everyone remains quiet against this front, making it seem (and, in term, making them believe) that they are the minority and should just stay quiet. It was obvious that the Lans, Nies, and Jiangs all didn’t agree with how the Wens were being treated, but with how loud the Jin clan and co. were, they didn’t want to say anything, especially when they were all still weak and rebuilding after the war. Then, the clans started encouraging Jiang Cheng to go and act against Wei Wuxian and, fueled by the humiliation of not being able to control his subordinate, that’s exactly what he did.

I would also like to point out that Jiang Cheng only ever listened to the information the other clans were feeding him in regards to Wei Wuxian, he never actually knew what was true like we, the readers, do.

AND NOW, this is why I say Madame Yu has ruined Jiang Cheng. Let’s say that she had died a year prior to the entire war. Jiang Cheng wouldn’t have her final words in his head blaming Wei Wuxian for everything; he likely would have been able to reconnect with his father and speak for himself; he would have grown closer to Wei Wuxian without his mother breathing down his neck and would go a full year without hearing an argument about why he was inferior to Wei Wuxian.

In every story, there is a ‘climax.’ In a long story like this, there can be many ‘climaxes’ especially when it comes to different characters. A climax is defined as ‘the point in the story where one decision can change the course of the rest of the book,’ or ‘the decision that alters the ending,’ as my AP English Literature teacher defines it. For Jiang Cheng, the point in the book that alters his ending is the moment he decides to trust the clans over his brother, something that makes him so clearly different from Jiang Yanli.

Yanli never stops believing in Wei Wuxian, even to her dying breath she cared for him and believed he was good. This is from the perspective of someone who literally only knew what was going on based on hearsay, never seeing Wei Wuxian and speaking with him about this. She just knew nothing was as it was told.

I truly believe that if Madame Yu had fucked off a cliff or something before the war, Jiang Cheng could’ve been just like Yanli and would have sat down and given Wei Wuxian a chance to explain his side of the story. He may have even fought alongside Wei Wuxian, because now he wouldn’t be worried about “glory” like his mother egged him to believe, but rather, he would believe more in his father’s belief that they should stand for “justice” for all people. Wei Wuxian likely would have still died, but maybe seeing the Jiang Clan fight alongside Wei Wuxian could have inspired the Lan Clan or Nie Clan to also stand with them. Imagine THAT ending, an ending in which Wei Wuxian stood alongside his brother to fight for the innocent, allying with the Lan Clan and Nie Clan against the Jin Clan, and then they win and Wei Wuxian wouldn’t have even had to die and he could’ve just gotten married to Lan Wangji right then and there and save us all the angst 200k fanfiction. LMAO, I actually think Jiang Cheng might’ve still kept his mouth shut in front of the clans, but lowkey stood up for him, and then maybe Wei Wuxian would die a different way, not by Jiang Cheng’s hand. Then he would return and everything would go as usual, but this time :((((((( Jiang Cheng is happy to see him :((((((((( and he raised Jin Ling :(((((((( like Lan Wangji raised Lan Sizhui (yeah, I think the Wens would encourage him to train him under GusuLan) :((((((((( and Jin Ling would be happy to see Wei Wuxian :((((((( and so would Lan Sizhui because he would already know he is a Wen and was raised a bit by Wei Wuxian :(((((((((( and happily ever after ;-;

You can argue that this is a reach, but I don’t think it is at all. Mo Xiang Tong Xiu (novel author) created a character that was so terrible, she single-handedly ruined the ending for her own son.

[liberty1776]

Melisende, Queen of Jerusalem: Melisende (1105 – 11 September 1161) was Queen of Jerusalem from 1131 to 1153, and regent for her son between 1153 and 1161 while he was on campaign. She was the eldest daughter of King Baldwin II of Jerusalem, and the Armenian princess Morphia of Melitene. Her father Baldwin was a crusader leader who, In the First Crusade, carved out the Crusader State of Edessa and married Morphia, daughter of the Armenian prince Gabriel of Melitene, in a diplomatic marriage to fortify alliances in Melisende grew up in Edessa until she was 13, when her father was elected King of Jerusalem as successor of his cousin Baldwin I. By the time of his election as king, Baldwin II and Morphia already had three daughters:[1] Melisende, Alice, and Hodierna.  As the new king, Baldwin II had been encouraged to put away Morphia in favor of a new younger wife with better political connections, one that could yet bear him a male heir, But Baldwin was thoroughly devoted to his wife, and refused to consider divorcing her.[1] As a mark of his love for his wife, Baldwin postponed his coronation until Christmas Day 1119 so that Morphia and his daughters could travel to Jerusalem and so that the queen could be crowned alongside him. Morphia did not interfere in the day to day politics of Jerusalem, but demonstrated her ability to take charge when events warranted it. When Melisende's father was captured during a campaign in 1123, Morphia hired a band of Armenian mercenaries to discover where her husband was being held prisoner, and in 1124 Morphia took a leading part in the negotiations with Baldwin's captors to have him released, including traveling to Syria and handing over her youngest daughter Yveta as hostage and as surety for the payment of the king's ransom.Both parents stood as role models for the young Melisende, half Frankish and half Armenian, growing up in the Frankish East in a state of constant warfare. As the eldest child, Melisende was raised as heir presumptive. Frankish women in the Outremer had a higher life expectancy than men, in part due to the constant state of war, and as a result Frankish women exerted a wide degree of influence in the region and provided a strong sense of continuity to Eastern Frankish society. Women who inherited territory usually did so because war and violence brought many men to premature death, and women who were recognized as queen regnant rarely exercised their authority directly, with their spouse exercising authority jure uxoris, through the medium of their wife. So Baldwin thought he would have to marry Melisende to a powerful ally, one who would protect and safeguard her inheritance and her future heirs. Baldwin deferred to King Louis VI of France to recommend a Frankish vassal for his daughter's hand. The Frankish connection remained an important consideration for Crusader Jerusalem, as the new kingdom depended heavily on manpower and connections from France, Germany, and Italy. By deferring to France, Baldwin II was not submitting Jerusalem to the control of France; but was placing the moral guardianship of the Outremer with the West for its survival, reminding Louis VI that the Outremer was, to some extent, Frankish lands. Louis chose Fulk V, Count of Anjou and Main, a renown military commander, and to some extent a growing threat to Louis VI himself. Fulk's son from a previous marriage, Geoffrey,  was married to Empress Matilda, Henry I of England's designated heir as England's next queen regnant. Fulk V could be a potential grandfather to a future ruler of England. Fulk's wealth, connections, and influence made him as powerful as the King of France.. Throughout the negotiations Fulk insisted on being sole ruler of Jerusalem. Hesitant, Baldwin II initially acquiesced to these demands though he would come to reconsider.[1][5] Baldwin II perceived that Fulk, an ambitious man with grown sons to spare, was also a threat to Baldwin II's family and interest, and specifically a threat to his daughter Melisende. Baldwin II suspected that once he had died, Fulk would repudiate Melisende, set her and her children aside in favor of Elias, Fulk's younger but full grown son from his first marriage as an heir to Jerusalem. When Melisende bore a son and heir in 1130, the future Baldwin III, her father took steps to ensure Melisende would rule after him as reigning Queen of Jerusalem. Baldwin II held a coronation ceremony investing the kingship of Jerusalem jointly between his daughter, his grandson Baldwin III, and Fulk. Strengthening her position, Baldwin designated Melisende as sole guardian for the young Baldwin, excluding Fulk. 

When Baldwin II died the next year in 1131, Melisende and Fulk ascended to the throne as joint rulers. Later, William of Tyre wrote of Melisende's right to rule following the death of her father that the rule of the kingdom remained in the power of the lady queen Melisende, a queen beloved by God, to whom it passed by hereditary right. However, with the aid of his knights, Fulk excluded Melisende from granting titles, offering patronage, and of issuing grants, diplomas, and charters. Fulk openly and publicly dismissed her hereditary authority. The fears of Baldwin II seemed to be justified, and the continued mistreatment of their queen irritated the members of the Haute Cour, whose own positions would be eroded if Fulk continued to dominate the realm. Fulk's behavior was in keeping with his ruling philosophy, as in Anjou Fulk had squashed any attempts by local towns to administer themselves and strong-armed his vassals into submission. Fulk's autocratic style contrasted with the somewhat collegial association with their monarch that native Eastern Franks had come to enjoy. 

The estrangement between husband and wife was a convenient political tool that Fulk used in 1134 when he accused Hugh II of Le Puiset, Count of Jaffa, of having an affair with Melisende. Hugh was the most powerful baron in the kingdom, and devotedly loyal to the memory of his cousin Baldwin II. This loyalty now extended to Melisende. Contemporary sources, such as William of Tyre, discount the alleged infidelity of Melisende and instead point out that Fulk overly favoured newly arrived Frankish crusaders from Anjou over the native nobility of the kingdom. Had Melisende been guilty, the Church and nobility likely would not have later rallied to her cause.

Hugh allied himself with the Muslim city of Ascalon, and was able to hold off the army set against him. He could not maintain his position indefinitely, however. His alliance with Ascalon cost him support at court. The Patriarch negotiated lenient terms for peace, and Hugh was exiled for three years. Soon thereafter an unsuccessful assassination attempt against Hugh was attributed to Fulk or his supporters. This was reason enough for the queen's party to openly challenge Fulk, as Fulk's unfounded assertions of infidelity were a public affront that would damage Melisende's position entirely.

Through what amounted to a palace coup, the queen's supporters overcame Fulk, and from 1135 onwards Fulk's influence rapidly deteriorated. One historian wrote that Fulk's supporters "went in terror of their lives" in the palace. William of Tyre wrote that Fulk "did not attempt to take the initiative, even in trivial matters, without [Melisende's] knowledge". Husband and wife reconciled by 1136 and a second son, Amalric, was born. When Fulk was killed in a hunting accident in 1143, Melisende publicly and privately mourned for him.

Melisende's victory was complete. Again she is seen in the historical record granting titles of nobility, fiefdoms, appointments and offices, granting royal favours and pardons and holding court. Of Melisende, William of Tyre wrote "reseditque reginam regni potestas penes dominam Melisendem, Deo amabilem reginam, cui jure hereditario competebat." Melisende was no mere regent-queen for her son Baldwin III, but a queen regnant, reigning by right of hereditary and civil law. 

Melisende's relationship with her son was complex. As a mother she would know her son and his capabilities, and she is known to have been particularly close to her children. As a ruler she may have been reluctant to entrust decision-making powers to an untried youth. Either way there was no political or social pressure to grant Baldwin any authority before 1152, even though Baldwin reached majority in 1145. Baldwin III and Melisende were jointly crowned as co-rulers on Christmas Day, 1143. This joint crowning was similar to Melisende's own crowning with her father in 1128, and may have reflected a growing trend to crown one's heir in the present monarch's lifetime, as demonstrated in other realms of this period.

Baldwin grew up to be a capable, if not brilliant, military commander. By age 22 however, Baldwin felt he could take some responsibility in governance. Melisende had hitherto only partially associated Baldwin in her rule. Tension between mother and son mounted between 1150 and 1152, with Baldwin blaming Manasses for alienating his mother from him. The crisis reached a boiling point early 1152 when Baldwin demanded that the patriarch Fulcher crown him in the Holy Sepulchre, without Melisende present. The Patriarch refused. Baldwin, in protest, staged a procession in the city streets wearing laurel wreaths, a kind of self-crowning. 

Though later historians criticized Melisende for not abdicating in favor of her son, there was little impetus for her to do so. She was universally recognized as an exceptional steward for her kingdom, and her rule had been characterized as a wise one by church leaders and other contemporaries. Baldwin had not shown any interest in governance prior to 1152, and had resisted responsibility in this arena. The Church clearly supported Melisende, as did the barons of Judea and Samaria.

Despite putting the matter before the Haute Cour, Baldwin was not happy with the partition any more than Melisende. But instead of reaching further compromise, within weeks of the decision he launched an invasion of his mother's realms. Baldwin showed that he was Fulk's son by quickly taking the field; Nablus and Jerusalem fell swiftly. Melisende with her younger son Amalric and others sought refuge in the Tower of David. Church mediation between mother and son resulted in the grant of the city of Nablus and adjacent lands to Melisende to rule for life, and a solemn oath by Baldwin III not to disturb her peace. This peace settlement demonstrated that though Melisende lost the "civil war" to her son, she still maintained great influence and avoided total obscurity in a convent. 

By 1153, son and mother had been reconciled. Since the civil war, Baldwin had shown his mother great respect. Melisende's connections, especially to her sister Hodierna, and to her niece Constance of Antioch, meant that she had direct influence in northern Syria, a priceless connection since Baldwin had himself broken the treaty with Damascus in 1147.

As Baldwin III was often on military campaigns, he realized he had few reliable advisers. From 1154 onwards, Melisende is again associated with her son in many of his official public acts. In 1156, she concluded a treaty with the merchants of Pisa. In 1157, with Baldwin on campaign in Antioch, Melisende saw an opportunity to take el-Hablis,[dubious  – discuss][citation needed] which controlled the lands of Gilead beyond the Jordan. Also in 1157, on the death of patriarch Fulcher, Melisende, her sister Ioveta the Abbess of Bethany, and Sibylla of Flanders had Amalric of Nesle appointed as patriarch of Jerusalem. Additionally, Melisende was witness to her son Amalric's marriage to Agnes of Courtenay in 1157. In 1160, she gave her assent to a grant made by her son Amalric to the Holy Sepulchre, perhaps on the occasion of the birth of her granddaughter Sibylla to Agnes and Amalric.

In 1161, Melisende had what appears to be a stroke. Her memory was severely impaired and she could no longer take part in state affairs. Her sisters, the countess of Tripoli and abbess of Bethany, came to nurse her before she died on 11 September 1161. Melisende was buried next to her mother Morphia in the shrine of Our Lady of Josaphat. Melisende, like her mother, bequeathed property to the Orthodox monastery of Saint Sabbas. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melisende,_Queen_of_Jerusalem

[vampirekriztian-gotha-blog]

Hiya folks!<3 so here’s a bio on Kriztian down under the “read more” and y’knw the drill, u can either hmu or like this intro post if you wanna plot connections or anything with him! <33 (pls do as i would love lots of connections for him as well!:)) )

ok so he’s from the old Gotha royal family in germany as u can digest from his url, and he’s the oldest sibling i think (for now ).  Despite him being older than Victoria (the current queen) he never ever wanted the throne/ become king and his stubborn refusal to become the heir for the throne was very strong when he was young due to his younger personality who didnt want the vry heavy and very difficult responsiblities of a king.

ok so back when he was younger, before he turned 500 XD, he was actually a very care-free, v happy, very playful,  vry  active, a bit of fun-loving,  full of life, and def couldn't care less about his royal duties/responsibilities kind of guy.  He loved to gallivant about hvaing fun and seeking adventures and often would shirk his royal duties/responsibilities, and never took his royal lessons seriously except for the lessons/subjects he was interested in. He was also at that time, very flirtatious, pretty romantic and a very charming playboy. He also didnt really care much about his attire at that time, preferring simple and easy to wear clothing instead of elegant and finely -made garments and stuff.  He was very skilled at sports hence  he naturally took to his fighting as a vampire lessons very well and easily, thus paving the way to become one of the most top skilled vampire fighters around. (but all he’s fighting is mostly to defend himself or people as he hates the thought of murdering people for fun) And so, bcos he wanted to get out of ever inheriting the throne and instead would rather his next sibling have it, he rebelled against his heir duties a few times, tried his dammnest to prove he  wasn't worthy of the crown to his parents and openly refused his parents to become heir to the throne whenever they tried to talk or convince him. So his exasperated parents eventually gave up and let Victoria, their 2nd child be the crown princess instead, to which Kriztian happily & quickly stepped down as heir when they finally made that decision.

When he was 500 yrs old, he met a  human girl and soon fell deeply and madly in love with her. They got married and he was blissfully happy with his wife and it was actually her who got him to change his ways and become a more serious, matured, and responsible person thus he began to take his royal duties properly and seriously since then. He settled down and eventually became less of an adventure& thrill-seeker, content with his current life. And when his wife eventually became pregnant, he was beyond ecstatic and both of them became very excited and so eager to meet their child.

However his whole world came crashing down when his wife became deathly ill due to a fatal disease during the last trimester of her pregnancy and desperate Kriztian searched the whole country for a way to cure her, any way, even magical ways.

he finally met a witch who claimed she could magically save his wife and baby from death if he paid her an extravagant sum of gold in return. HIghly desperate and not thinking clearly, he agreed and paid her instantly and she chanted some sort of spell and did some magical ritual. however, was actually very sadly conned by a selfish and greedy witch, as poor Kriztian then watched the whole terrible process of his beloved human wife dying because of the disease and also due to a very difficult childbirth process. His baby also eventually came out as a stillborn.

  Kriztian then almost grew mad with grief and was completely wrecked, suffering hard in the aftermath of their deaths. He made a complete wreckage of their large home , destroying almost everything in the house , and firing all his staff. he isolated himself in the house, refused to come out for weeks on end, and only a few of his closest family members were permitted to enter to see him. he then even tried to starve himself whenever his family tried to send bags of blood for him to eat in hopes that he could wile away to death to join his late wife and child. It wasn;t till one day, one of his siblings found him in the early process of standing at the wide open sunny windows of his hallway with his daylight ring thrown away, trying to burn himself to death. Thankfully due to his age and strength of his powers he would take about 25-30 mins to eventually be fully incinerated and die , so his sibling was only about 10 mins into kriztian’s suicide  process and managed to save that stupid fool.

Enough was enough. His whole family grouped together on him with his closest friends and determinedly had an intervention with him. After days of endless ways to get thru to him, they finally made a breakthrough, knock some sense into him and made him see the light a little bit, thanks to (1 or 2 siblings and his best friend) he was then strongly told & encourages to   travel far away to help get over his grief and hopefully his late wife. He then did so and travelled far and wide around the world for about a 150 years or so. And slowly he did manage to overcome his grief and heal from the loss but he could never let go for his  love of his late wife so till this day his still holding back a small piece of her in his heart, thus blocking him frm ever wanting to pursue any romantic relationships at all till now. To him, she was his only one and true love for his whole lifetime (tho im hoping that his eventual new bride will eventually change all of that XD)

It was thru his travels that he accumulated more years of combative experience that further  helped shaped him to one of the strongest, extremely quick-thinking and highly skilled fighter vampires around. And like i said earlier, he never killed or seriously wounded any being for pleasure. He only fought or killed when it was absolutely necessary, in which most cases were situations where he had to defend himself or protect others, or save humans or even to help his few closest friends defend their home.

he also met another witch who used him to get her revenge on his family for some accidental wrong they did to a relative of hers in the past. She’s the one who caused the many fading scars on his body u can see now. Thus, it was due to his 2 very bad experiences with witches, which stemmed his current distrust and dislike for most of their kind.

He finally returned home about 100 plus years ago and came back wiser and less troubled. he then resumed his princely duties very seriously in honor of his late wife who he knew would have wanted him to live his life responsibly. And his current great attention to being elegantly and finely dressed as well as being super neat and organized is also of her influence somewhat when she was living XD

Thus his current personality now is of he’s very responsible, serious for most of the time, distant & aloof with many people except for a few trusted longtime friends and his family ofc (due to him having a few experiences of his trust being broken during his travels  and a lil disillusioned of there being many actually honest pure beings  left). He’s  a man of a few words half the time, and when he does converse, he tries to get quickly and clearly to the point most of the time unless ur talking about something he’s interested in or like in my starter he’s irritated abt the current situation and annoyed about his precious suit getting damaged XD. he’s also pretty stoic and doesn’t really like showing much expressions or feelings. The only times you can catch him giving warm, genuine smiles & have great convos with is when he’s with family members or very close friends or with his beloved citizens and when his around kids (as they’re his weakest & softest spot currently)

he can a be a teensy bit  selfish at certain/particular times and he will only help people in distress if they genuinely need help and can’t solve the problem at all or if they’re 100 not capable of saving themselves, he cares for humans as he sees them as being quite the weaker beings in comparison to the supernaturals so those are the ones he would instantly and readily save if they r in danger. Other supernaturals it depends on various few factos hehe XD However, he’s loyal, v protective over he people he cares about, quite good-hearted and has pretty smart and quite cultured brains. and as mentioned, earlier he’s somewhat well-mannered, very neat and organized. He also can be a bit grumpy and moody sometimes.

he was initially very reluctant and refused to go thru the arranged marriage plan. However, he eventually relented for the sake of peace and political alliance. He’s still not really looking forward to it tho tho he has finally readied himself to treat his fiancee with respect and be cordial towards her and try to get along with her cos he has no time for conflicts. Oh and also protect her from harm as he currently sees her as vulnerable being. he was actually relieved to find out that he was being matched with a human cos witches (big no-no), vampires and hybrids(they would live forever and he would be stuck in this “marriage” for his whole long lifetime) and werewolves ok but he found that female werewolves which he encountered in the past, tend to get possessive due to their carnal  wolf side and he had no intention of being with a werewolf wife when they were in heat XD. That’s cos he secretly has  NO INTENTION AT ALL OF BEDDING HIS WIFE PERIOD. he doesn’t want to risk the chance of getting her pregnant as he is still afraid of her potentially dying at a gruesome childbirth. So his plans for his marriage is for them to be if possible, distant, agreeable partners as he isn’t planning on opening his heart & falling in love ever again  or to get too attached by becoming vry caring and super best friends, they can be friends if she wishes but only to a certain degree. So he’s planning on keeping her at arm’s length till she dies of old age or unfortunate sickness.  (BUT OFC WICKED OLD ME, HAS LOTSA PLANS FOR HIS CHARA DEVELOPMENT, SO MOST OF HIS NEGATIVE VIEWS, TRAITS AND PLANS WILL HOPEFULLY CHANGE DOWN THE ROAD, hehe)

I APOLOGIZE IF ANY OF U HAD TO SUFFER READING THRU THIS LONG-ASS BIO AS I GOT CARRIED AWAY AND I TEND TO BE A LITTLE BIT FLOWERY, VERY DESCRIPTIVE, AND KINDA DETAILED & LONG-WINDED IN MY WRITING. KUDOS AND ALL MY ETERNAL LOVE TO ALL WHO READ THIS TILL THE END<3 < 3 ;D

[topmixtrends]

OF HOW MANY literary journalists can we say that one of the defining intellectual publications of the second half of the 20th century grew out of a piece of that journalist’s occasional criticism? Probably not many, and yet that’s exactly what Elizabeth Hardwick achieved with her 1959 Harper’s Magazine essay “The Decline of Book Reviewing.” Four years after the essay appeared, the editor who had commissioned it — Robert B. Silvers, who died earlier this year — went on to found, with Barbara Epstein, The New York Review of Books, enlisting the support of A. Whitney Ellsworth, Jason Epstein, Robert Lowell — and Elizabeth Hardwick, whose essay Silvers always pointed to as the earliest source of inspiration. “That essay is crucial,” he told New York magazine on the occasion of the Review’s 50th anniversary in 2013.

“The Decline of Book Reviewing,” included here in a long-overdue collection of Hardwick’s essays (selected by the novelist and critic Darryl Pinckney and published by NYRB Classics), is a powerful and persuasive broadside against the “sweet, bland commendations” that were all too common in the book pages of daily newspapers in Hardwick’s time — and, one is a little embarrassed to admit, are still too common in the twittering society of mutual admiration that is our literary culture today. In a famous passage, Hardwick berated The New York Times for the “flat praise and the faint dissension, the minimal style and the light little article, the absence of involvement, passion, character, eccentricity — the lack, at last, of the literary tone itself,” that too often characterized its literary coverage. She viewed the Times as a kind of bloated provincial rag — a judgment that surely must have ruffled a few metropolitan furs over at the Gray Lady. Yet Hardwick, despite her polemical tone, was being more than just polemical: she was being hostile in the defense of a value. (She did not generally traffic in gratuitous hatchet jobs or cultural postmortems.) She took books — literature — seriously, and could not suffer the sight of alleged newspapers of record treating something so important so blandly:

[T]he drama of the book world is being slowly, painlessly killed. Everything is somehow alike, whether it be a routine work of history by a respectable academic, a group of platitudes from the Pentagon, a volume of verse, a work of radical ideas, a work of conservative ideas. Simple “coverage” seems to have won out over the drama of opinion; “readability,” a cozy little word, has taken the place of the old-fashioned requirement of a good, clear prose style, which is something else. All differences of excellence, of position, of form are blurred by the slumberous acceptance. The blur eases good and bad alike, the conventional and the odd, so that it finally appears that the author like the reviewer really does not have a position.

Hardwick was in her early 40s when she wrote “The Decline of Book Reviewing.” The last essay included here in The Collected Essays, an appreciation of Nathanael West, appeared in The New York Review of Books in 2003, when Hardwick was 87. In the intervening four decades she not only managed to live up to her own exacting standards (the dull thought, the tired phrase, may knock but never enter), but she also grew to become one of the 20th century’s towering writer-critics, deserving of a seat at the table of Virginia Woolf and V. S. Pritchett. Like them, she approached criticism artistically, metaphorically. George Eliot, she writes in one of the essays collected here, was “melancholy, headachey, with a slow, disciplined, hard-won, aching genius that bore down upon her with a wondrous and exhausting force, like a great love affair in middle age”; William James and his siblings, in their childhood, were “packed and unpacked, settled and unsettled, like a band of high livers fleeing creditors”; the Jewish businessman Simon Rosedale, in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905), is “weighted down, as if by an overcoat in summer, with a thickness of objectionable moral and physical attributes.”

On every page of this book you will be reminded that Elizabeth Hardwick was not simply a great critic but a great writer. This distinction matters. Hardwick’s essays are always sticking their neck out; their aphoristic grace and easy impressionism are a way of speaking to their subjects in their own language, without deafening them with comprehension and analysis. For instance, in the great essay on Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853) — is there, indeed, a greater essay on this story? — Hardwick is not, in the scholarly or theoretical manner, trying to solve the enigma of Bartleby’s resignation; she eschews this temptation, and even gently reprimands Melville for, in the story’s final sentence, inviting it. Instead, she follows Bartleby’s language — his style — and offers up her own in comparison:

Bartleby’s language reveals the all of him, but what is revealed? Character? Bartleby is not a character in the manner of the usual, imaginative, fictional construction. And he is not a character as we know them in life, with their bundling bustle of details, their suits and ties and felt hats, their love affairs surreptitious or binding, family albums, psychological justifications dragging like a little wagon along the highway of experience. We might say he is a destiny, without interruptions, revisions, second chances. But what is a destiny that is not endured by a “character”? Bartleby has no plot in his present existence, and we would not wish to imagine subplots for his already lived years. He is indeed only words, wonderful words, and very few of them. One might for a moment sink into the abyss and imagine that instead of prefer not he had said, “I don’t want to” or “I don’t feel like it.” No, it is unthinkable, a vulgarization, adding truculence, idleness, foolishness, adding indeed “character” and altering a sublimity of definition.

I find this passage astonishing. Notice how quickly Hardwick is tempted into literary detail (“suits and ties and felt hats” [my emphasis]) and metaphor (“a little wagon along the highway of experience”), and then, tellingly, how she encourages us to view Bartleby from the perspective of his creator, Melville, by entertaining poor alternatives to his famous utterance. She is writing as a creator herself, sharing in the language of literary creation, and all the while still managing to perform the task of the critic. No comprehensive analysis of “Bartleby” that I’ve ever read is as suggestive — perhaps because Hardwick, in the end, dares to be just that: suggestive, as opposed to conclusive; aphoristic, as opposed to comprehensive; metaphorical, as opposed to merely critical.

Born in 1916 in Lexington, Kentucky — a place she wasn’t sorry to be from, she said, “so long as I didn’t have to stay there forever” — Elizabeth Hardwick moved to New York City in 1939 to study English at Columbia University. She published her first novel, The Ghostly Lover, in 1945 and shortly afterward was enlisted by Philip Rahv to pen book reviews for Partisan Review, where she quickly gained a reputation for her acerbic, cutting style. (When Rahv asked Hardwick what she thought of Diana Trilling, The Nation’s book critic, Hardwick quipped: “Not much.”)

In 1949 she married the poet Robert Lowell, a decision that would shape her life for decades to come. They were engaged while Lowell, who suffered from bipolar disorder, was recuperating from electric shock treatment in a hospital north of Boston. Hardwick was warned against the union by the poet-critic Allen Tate, who described Lowell’s mental state at the time as being “very nearly psychotic.” Shortly before the engagement he even went so far as to call Lowell “dangerous,” claiming there were “definite homicidal implications in his world, particularly toward women and children.” Lowell’s Boston Brahmin father was no fan of the engagement either. “I do feel,” he wrote to his afflicted son, “that both you and she, should clearly understand, that if she does marry you, that she is responsible for you.”

But even these warnings could not have prepared Hardwick for the mental breakdowns and momentary break-ups, the impulsive infidelities and public indiscretions she would suffer through for the next 20-odd years. “I have sat and listened to too many / words of the collaborating muse,” Lowell self-incriminatingly wrote, “and plotted perhaps too freely with my life, / not avoiding injury to others, / not avoiding injury to myself.” Their turbulent marriage finally ended in 1970 when Lowell left the United States for England to live with Lady Caroline Blackwood, whom he married in 1972. For Hardwick, however, worse was yet to come: Lowell famously made public art of their marital difficulties and divorce; in the poetry collections For Lizzie and Harriet and The Dolphin, both of them published in 1973, he quoted from Hardwick’s personal letters to him, a trespass his friend Elizabeth Bishop scolded him for in a stinging letter: “It is not being ‘gentle’ to use personal, tragic, anguished letters that way,” she wrote, “it’s cruel.”

Though she suffered greatly, Hardwick maintained that marrying Lowell was one of the best things that had ever happened to her. She called him an “extraordinarily original and brilliant and amazing presence, quite beyond any other I have known.” Speaking to Darryl Pinckney in 1985, she said that Lowell, for all his flaws, was at least encouraging of his wife’s intellectual pursuits:

He liked women writers and I don’t think he ever had a true interest in a woman who wasn’t a writer — an odd turn-on indeed and one I’ve noticed not greatly shared. Women writers don’t tend to be passive vessels or wives, saying, “Oh, that’s good, dear.”

Women writers — and women in literature more generally — were the focus of Hardwick’s most influential collection of essays, Seduction and Betrayal, published in 1974. (Regrettably, and a little ill-advisedly, it is not included in The Collected Essays; it was reissued separately, in 2001, also by NYRB Classics.) These stirring, evocative portraits — of the Brontë sisters, Zelda Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Wordsworth, and others — have sometimes been viewed as a veiled response to Lowell’s betrayal, though this notion seems reductive, as if Hardwick needed Lowell to betray her in order to challenge perceived truths about literary history. Seduction and Betrayal was a challenge to precisely such notions: the romantic view that women writers are either victims or heroines (or both). “Toward the achievements of women,” Hardwick had written in an earlier essay, “I find my own attitudes extremely complicated by all sorts of vague emotions.” These attitudes and emotions were to the benefit of her readers, for if they were not complicated they would not interest us, at least not from a literary perspective. As Hilton Als has beautifully put it, the human impulse in Hardwick’s writing always outweighed the abstract.

Though Hardwick achieved her greatest success in 1979 with Sleepless Nights, a much-admired collage-like quasi-novel, the compressed density of her style was always more suited to literary essay, which may be why it was the genre she remained most faithful to. In sheer size alone, The Collected Essays, which spans six decades and 600 pages, is a testament to the happy union between author and form. Hardwick could quite simply squeeze more into a sentence than most writers could an entire paragraph. Reviewing a new biography of Ernest Hemingway, she writes of the literary biographical genre that “in a hoarding spirit it has an awesome regard for the penny as well as the dollar.” William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), was guilty of “running on both teams — here he is the cleverest skeptic and there the wildest man in a state of religious enthusiasm.” And, in an essay on Simone Weil, we are told: “the present fashion of biography, with the scrupulous accounting of time, makes a long life of a short one.”

There is a danger for the reviewer, when describing Hardwick’s essays, of becoming a mere anthologizer, a dazed and dazzled collector of writerly gems. This is partly because Hardwick herself was a serial jeweler: “I like the offhand flashes, the absence of the lumber in the usual prose,” she once said. But now and again, the writing becomes all flash and no lumber — her style, so hypnotically idiosyncratic, can veer off into eccentricity and become difficult to follow, as demonstrated by her tendency to write sentences that are hardly sentences at all but dashed-off story outlines. From a single essay: “The overwhelming scene, the tremendous importance of the union and its dismaying, squalid complications of feeling, Yasnaya Polyana, the children, the novels, the opinions”; “Every quarrel, every remorse, moments of calm and hope and memory. Diaries, rightly called voluminous, letters, great in number, sent back and forth”; “Lady Byron’s industry produced only one genuine product: the hoard of dissension, the swollen archives, the blurred messages of the letters, the unbalancing record of meetings, the confidences, the statements drawn up”; and so on. It’s like reading literary criticism written by Augie March.

Still, these are minor complaints — the unavoidable thumbprints of such playful, busy hands. For whether she is reporting from the front lines of the Civil Rights movement or tracing the contours of Robert Frost’s reputation, Hardwick revels in her subject matter. Everything in these essays, be it real or fictional, comes alive to Hardwick’s touch. And how funny she is! In Marge Piercy’s novel Dance the Eagle to Sleep (1970), “the girls are constantly available and practical — I’m afraid rather like a jar of peanut butter waiting for a thumb.” William James (again) was guilty at times of being “a sort of Californian; he loves the new and unhistorical and cannot resist the shadiest of claims.” And Peter Conrad’s Imagining America (1980) is described as “a text that bristles like the quills on a pestered porcupine.”

¤

If Hardwick’s achievement as an essayist has been left to cool somewhat in the collective shadow of her more illustrious contemporaries, The Collected Essays is a much-needed bringer of heat. For Hardwick was mercilessly free of the many occasional sins of her time: she had none of Susan Sontag’s modish, Francophile theorizing, none of Norman Mailer’s wounded egoism, but neither did she succumb to the breezy generalities of Alfred Kazin. She was, on the contrary, George Orwell–like in her good judgment and common sense, admirably demonstrated in this collection by the moral beauty of her essays on the Civil Rights movement and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

Because she outlived them all, the last third or so of The Collected Essays revisits many of those fellow writers who belonged, like Hardwick, to the intellectually gilded age in American letters that spanned the second half of the 20th century (an age that might be said to have ended, earlier this year, with the death of Bob Silvers). Hardwick knew and befriended the likes of Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald, and Philip Rahv, not to mention European exiles like Hannah Arendt and Nicola Chiaromonte. In the last half of this collection, then, we learn that an “evening at the Rahvs’ was to enter a ring of bullies, each one bullying the other”; that Edmund Wilson gave the impression of “a cheerful, corpulent, chuckling gentleman, well-dressed in brown suits and double martinis”; that Hannah Arendt, in her apartment on Riverside Drive, served “cakes and chocolates and nuts bought in abundance at the bakeries on Broadway.”

Yet such anecdotes are kept mostly in the margins; Hardwick always stopped short of outright memoirism. Despite her strong voice and presence on the page, the impression she leaves is one of humility. She was not a romantic of the self; living with Robert Lowell and witnessing the self-destruction of so many of her contemporaries (Randall Jarrell, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman) probably inoculated her against the myths of the mad genius. Thus what she admired in the Brontë sisters was not the romantic notion of them having managed to write any novels at all but rather “the practical, industrious, ambitious cast of mind too little stressed. Necessity, dependence, discipline drove them hard; being a writer was a way of living, surviving, literally keeping alive.” Similarly, she was impressed by Zelda Fitzgerald’s “fantastic energy — not energy of a frantic, chaotic, sick sort, but that of steady application, formed and sustained by a belief in the worth of work and the value of each solitary self.”

In Sleepless Nights, the narrator writes of her mother’s child-rearing (she gave birth to nine children): “It was what she was always doing, and in the end what she had done.” In a similar vein, The Collected Essays are a tribute to Hardwick’s ceaseless activity as a literary essayist, as a critic and a reader — proof, indeed, that being a writer is a way of living.

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Morten Høi Jensen is the author of A Difficult Death: The Life and Work of Jens Peter Jacobsen (Yale University Press, 2017).

The post Flash and Lumber: Elizabeth Hardwick’s Essays appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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