#like jgy has WAY more horrible and nuanced avenues through which to neg jc into a mutual trainwreck of an affair if he so chooses

[psqqa]

i loooooooooooove listening to madonna's 'frozen' and thinking about jiang cheng, because first it's like "you waste your time with hate and regret you're broken when your heart's not open" and "love is a bird she needs to fly let all the hurt inside of you die" and oh yeah, that's that Good Jiang Cheng Shit, but then the song's "you" is complemented by an "i" and now suddenly this narrative is interpersonal and the mind turns to the logistics of it all. how would this situation arise? who would even be saying this to jiang cheng? what on earth could possibly have happened that jiang cheng finds himself being told by someone that "if i could melt your heart we'd never be apart"? and all of the options are so so so so good:

first up, the obvious: demon-siren-ghost lady. i'm not up on my chinese mythology enough to know what the appropriate option would be, but there definitely is one. cultures love coming up with evil monster women who lure innocent, horny men to their untimely demise. and jiang cheng's one of the guys in this world who deals with that kind of shit. and now he's done fucked up and gotten himself ensnared or whatever. perhaps he needs to be rescued. perhaps he just rolls his eyes and goes "yeah tell me something i don't know" and zidians his way out of it no sweat. like i said, the obvious option. but still. You Love To Ponder It.

second option, and perhaps the most in keeping with the tone of the song: some poor, unfortunate woman who's been sent by some guy somewhere to Seduce sandu shengshou for nefarious political purposes of some kind. she's being paid a lot of money. she's very good at this. she's.........pretty desperate at this point. like, seducing jiang wanyin, the proud, fearsome, ambitious, and super repressed head of the yunmeng jiang feels like it should be totally doable if you come at it with the right mindset and tools, and she definitely has the right mindset and tools, but here she is, in jiang cheng's bedroom, throwing everything she's got at this guy and he's giving her nothing. it is deeply painful for everyone involved and i am having a great time.

and then there's my favourite option: jiang cheng's recurring psychosexual nightmare. every night jiang cheng lies down, closes his eyes, and, baby, it is all happening here. we've got wen qing and jiang yanli. we've got wei wuxian and his mom. we've got every auntie and matchmaker who's ever sniffed contemptuously at him and declared him unmarriable. we've got qin su. we've got jin zixuan. hell, we've got jin guangyao, lan xichen, and nie mingjue along for the ride as well, i mean, who hasn't felt some kind of way about those three, amirite? like the gang is all here (jiang fengmian excepted, of course), all rolled into a dazzlingly horrible chimera flashing from facet to facet to facet pleading with him to bend even as it tells him he's broken. and then every day he wakes up, drenched in sweat, and has to get up and receive fantasy ancient china emails. truly the kind of soul-crushingly horrendous but delicious bullshit that makes jiang cheng one of the all-time blorbo greats.

what a song. what a guy. yeah i'll put that baby on repeat for hours and rotate between these three scenarios in hideous glee. god i love being alive.