#mdzs rambles

[deathbyoctopi]

“Righteous, powerful and dignified cultivator, accomplished beyond his peers, who dresses always in white is <---> paired with a black-clad, wise-cracking demonic cultivator who may have commited a few massacres, but is pretty much a child at heart and capable of reigning in his worse impulses for the sake of a nice snuggle.”

...

...and you say xuexiao isn’t a foil to wangxian?

[marshmallowwitharubberband]

The Guanyin temple confession is maybe my favorite scene of any piece of media I've ever consumed because it's so unpredictable.

You got the villain just halting his evil plot, full stop, in the middle of his gloating speech, no less, because "What do you MEAN you guys aren't even together?! What?! No, no, no, there won't be any romantic misunderstanding in my hostage situation! Honey, tell him!"

And then the calmest, most polite character alive procceeds to go his version of apeshit on this punk like "my brother like-likes you, you fucking pinecone! You useless twink! We all thought you were a hoe but you are just an imbecile!" (Which is a nice parallel to the Jiang brothers' hatred for the peacock, but I digress)

And THEN, when it's the perfect moment for a climatic love confession, homeboy goes and screams for everyone to hear that he... really wanted that dick, Hanguang-jun! Where's love? Who cares? WWX wants to ride you like a carnival ride: sticky and filthy and multiple times.

It's a wonder that Xichen didn't yank that string from Jing GuangYao to strangle WWX himself.

This has been my favorite addition, I cackled like a seal irl lol

[unreliable-narratoe]

Something about Liu Qingge and Jiang Cheng both carrying around physical objects of their loved ones so they can return it, but the Receiving never quite has the same impact as the Returning. LQG carrying around Shen Qingqiu's fans until he can take it back, except SQQ's already forgotten about it/gotten a new one and no longer has the same use for it. JC carrying suiban around on his back until he finds Wei Wuxian, except WWX can no longer use it. There is no real relevance for the object on the receiving end. Not anymore, at least. And it's very. Hmm.

[ghostlycollectorchaos]

i think there's something to be said for how in almost every piece of queer media you'll have a scene where character A asks character B to run away with them. i'm talking alpha century, i'm talking sailing to fucking china, i'm talking jonathan sims considering gouging out his eyes with martin blackwood and just walking away, i'm talking peter nureyev and juno steel in season 1, i'm TALKING about LAN WANGJI and "come back to Cloud Recesses with me".

there's just something so inherently bittersweet about the idea of running away with your loved one that's deeply ingrained in the queer experience and i think that's lovely.

And there's also something to be said for the fact the answer is almost always "no"

[imreallyonthishellsite]

mxtx main characters as drivers

wwx: would be a good driver if he didn't get distracted every 5 minutes and constantly forget where he's supposed to be going (jc swears he does the latter on purpose but doesn't have any proof yet). when he's not distracted hes usually going 5 above the speed limit. has a random playlist for all driving occasions ("why do you have a 'just brunt down walmart and now I'm on the run' playlist?" "why shouldn't i?")

lwj: the example of the perfect driver. will drive the exact speed limit and will refuse to go a single mile over ("lan zhan please we dont have to drive so slow" "its a school zone.the speed limit is 15" "lan zhan the school has been closed for 10 years pls go faster im begging" "no."). mostly plays classical music, podcasts or the rare romance song while driving

xl: decent driver when he gets the opportunity to drive. goes hard on the brakes bc he scared of hitting someone. will let people cut in front of him bc "they might have somewhere important to be". mostly listens to random radio stations for variety

hc: speed demon unless he's with xl. even then he's still a pretty safe driver. carries sticky notes to rate other drivers skills and put them on their car with notes (no one has gotten over a 7). extremely picky about music while driving, if he hates the song you play your banned from ever playing music in his car again. will always listen to music selections from xl

sy/sqq: hates driving with every fiber of being but still got his license. has extreme road rage and has pulled up next to someone to rage abt their driving to their face (spolier he made them cry). will only drive if he actually needs too, this man is a passenger princess. not too picky abt music surprisingly but doesn't like the volume to be too loud

lbh: very good driver. if you piss him off while driving he will either ride way too close to your bumper and follow you for a short time to freak you out or start driving purposefully slow and refuse to let you pass. Music depends on his mood or the events he has going in that day. date nights will be romance and happy songs, dropping sqq off to hangout out with lqg will be heartbreak/when will my love return songs, returning from a business meeting is loud ass rage music

[randomness-is-my-order]

thinking about the “single-plank bridge” and how wei wuxian’s circumstance becomes all the more heartbreaking when we contexualise the kind of person he is. wei wuxian is never shown to be an isolated entity from the very start of his story. even when he lived on the streets, he had a way of connecting with those around him and wheedling shopkeepers into maintaining his daily sustenance. quickly after he came to lotus pier, he formed bonds with jc and yanli. wei wuxian was genuinely interested in people and forging friendships with those he liked. his junior disciples loved him. he was canonically one of the most popular young guys in the cultivation society. he frequently interacted with the common folk in yunmeng or anywhere else he happened to visit. at the guest lectures in the lan sect, wei wuxian was able to inspire multiple disciples (not just nie huaisang) into following his shenanigans. he is also able to befriend some of the wens, prime among them are ofc wen qing and wen ning. for a story as heavy in interpersonal conflicts as mdzs is, it is a given that people and their relationships will be centre stage and wei wuxian isn’t in the least lacking in these relationships. we see this even after his reincarnation that wei wuxian, even when he tries to stay disconnected, forms new bonds with ease. the juniors that are first wary of him soon come to deeply admire him and wei wuxian in turn becomes protective over them.

in short, wei wuxian is defined by his relationships as much as he is by his actions and convictions and thoughts. never once are we made to believe that wei wuxian’s ideal choice would be the “single plank bridge”, that he would be completely at ease with his isolation, that he would ever want to pick that option as a preference. in fact, the single plank bridge ideology has never been one that wei wuxian is shown to inherently gravitate towards or recommend/preach to other people. but that ideology is a last resort.

it is a choice made when his hand is forced, when no other comfortable option is allowed to him, when every door is shut in his face and isolating himself from the people he has known is the only avenue left with him. the single plank bridge is about sticking to his beliefs and not giving up, about doing the right thing no matter what because someone needs to take that stand and wei wuxian has never not been that someone.

i think that it is so crucial that the single plank bridge wasn’t so much a choice that wei wuxian made than a choice that was made for him simply because he refused to give up on the wens.

he was denied alternatives. he was denied help. sometimes, the anti-culture discourse overcorrects itself into painting every heroic act that happens to be sacrificial as a default ‘hero complex’ and self-sacrifical tendencies, ignoring the build-up of those difficult decisions and how, in this story, in mdzs, wei wuxian wasn’t foregoing the crowded broad road but that the crowd on the broad road had foregone him.

[almonddirge]

You are the upright young master of a very conservative clan. Against their wishes, and your own, you have fallen for a rowdy boy your age who causes nothing but trouble. Regardless of your feelings on your own homosexuality, you seethe to yourself over why it had to be him in particular.

One day, he brings you rabbits to keep as pets. They start fucking in front of you. To your horror, that they are both male. Your name is Lan Wangji, and you might be beginning to think the gods are out to get you.

[renshengs]

hmm i do think that danmei and dangai (censored danmei cdrama adaptations) being many non-chinese fandom people's first impression of chinese media has given them some misconceptions about mainstream chinese media, and it shows in a way that i find very frustrating when seeing discussions about cdramas on here. dangai dramas aside, even if government censorship didn't exist, the chances of your favorite cdrama gay ship becoming canon is about as high as the chances of any of those iconic homoerotic male friendships in a western TV show becoming canon. which is to say: extremely low.

what i think is that internationally huge danmei fandoms like mdzs and tgcf and drama adaptations like cql and shl have really fucked with people's conceptualization of danmei, in that they're using it as this reference point when analyzing relationships in all other forms of cn media, including cdramas and chinese games, which then manifests into people making very bold, very dubious claims about "queercoding" because 2 characters from a random cdrama reminds them of the one or two danmeis they'd encountered that shaped their entire perception of chinese media. basically it's this meme:

many people here need to understand that cdramas and chinese films are obviously mainstream forms of fictional media in china, just like how the mcu or the doctor who franchise is mainstream in the US and UK, or like shonen is mainstream in japan. not to burst your bubble of happy ignorance, but homoromantic relationships such as qingming/boya from the ying yang master are—for lack of a better term—fujobait. they are fujobait. bromances, because those sell well and everyone knows it. popular ships like bakudeku were not actually made canon in mha because shonen is mainstream, and in most industries geared toward maximizing capital, having full-on gay people front and center is considered a monetarily risky move. which sucks, of course, but china is absolutely no different. i promise you that if the govt removed their censorship laws for TV broadcasts, your favorite gay ship from mysterious lotus casebook or the blood of youth or fangs of fortune still wouldn't be canon. they might be allowed a bit more intimacy due to the lack of restrictive filtering, but they are not going to be sucking face for the same reason that gojo and geto from jjk didn't suck face.

danmei is still widely considered niche and risky in china, and if you haven't seen the recent news, authors are still getting arrested for writing it. assuming that chinese fiction, mainstream chinese fiction in particular, operate like dangais where the two guys with the most gay tension would be made explicitly canon were the censors to be lifted, is frankly pretty ridiculous. dangai dramas are adapted from danmeis, which are stories centered on a gay romance and narratively depend on the two guys falling in love. non-dangai dramas are very much... not that, hence why people shouldn't watch them expecting a censored danmei and then forcing assumptions of "my ship would be canon if only it weren't for censorship" on them.

it's very clear when someone who knows absolutely nothing about the actual situation with danmei and queer existence and mainstream TV censorship in china is trying to push their, if i put it crudely, "boss baby meme" perspective onto cmedia. fandom is all about poking at interactions between your favorite characters and giggling and speculating, but i think lots of fandom people (many of them safe in the pockets of their more progressive areas) view govt censorship as this big abstract dam that, if broken, would result in the canonization of all their favorite ships, which is not only an incredibly naive belief but also one that shows how much they view TV censorship as more of a personal inconvenience that's preventing their favorite ships from kissing on screen instead of the looming, deep-rooted issue depriving mainland chinese people of creative freedom it actually is. with cmedia fandoms there's a specific widely popularized "they're so gay omg how did censorship not notice" gag when there's any perceived homoromantic undertones in a story that's both rather insensitive and also ignorant, and many dangai and cdrama fandoms in particular (donghua fans too, link click shippers i'm looking directly at you) could really use some more education and sensitivity regarding this.

i've been in danmei & cdrama fandom spaces for years and post-pandemic this kind of nonsense has definitely gotten worse, especially when you compare shipping discussions here to shipping discussions in cn fandoms. here every 2 seconds someone makes an off-color censorship joke about tgcf donghua and over on douyin they are straight up commenting under the nezha sequel announcement post if there's going to be an oubing kissing scene. granted i obviously cannot see or know everything going on in cn fandom spaces because they are incomprehensibly enormous, but in all the spaces i've been in i've never seen a single censorship joke from anyone. why do people here absolutely insist on making them?

anyway. fandom be normal about chinese media challenge!

[chirpycloudyrobin]

oh when THEY start getting crankier, angrier and bitchier, it's wartime trauma and PTSD. but when I start getting crankier, angrier and bitchier, it's suddenly "the result of demonic cultivation" 🙄

alternative path cultivators cant get PTSD apparently 🤕

[travalerray]

honestly I did mention it in the tags before but I cannot help but think of Jin Guangyao who struggled monetarily for most of his life showering his nephew in gifts and Jiang "never knowing what to say to his father" Cheng being the one the nephew always knowing to run to whenever there is a problem

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Get Souped!

[marshmallowwitharubberband]

Interesting to note that the Lan rule states "Lying is forbidden" (more or less) but not "Be honest always" because the rest of the rules already make it impossible. Actually every Lan is technically lying all the time.

It is forbidden to show excessive emotion, to be rude to others, to let yourself get carried away by hedonism, to make noise... but those rules get overenforced so much that Lan Zhan the "perfect" Lan is regarded as an unfeeling human statue.

And the Lan disciples are not statues, they're humans who feel, who love, hate, envy, grieve, get excited, get disappointed and make mistakes. Yet the rules pretty much prevent them from ever expressing their opinions or emotions freely.

So every Lan is lying by omission most of the time, because they can never say what they truly think.

And I honestly believe that Lan An would be thumping his head into the nearest wall if he saw how his principles have been added to, twisted and reshaped into the self-contradictory and opressing mess that governs the sect.

Which just now ocurred to me would make a nice parallel with another ascetic dude who got their teachings twisted and fanoned as a tool for opression.

Lan An in the afterlife: No, no, that is NOT what I meant with that precept, that is the exact opposite from what I taught you!

Jesus, handing him a cup of wine: Just wait until they make their first Inquisition.

Lan An: Their what?!

[unreliable-narratoe]

Headcanon that MDZS (from his sister's BL rack) was one of the BLs Shen Yuan read for Plot reasons and Genre Diversification (sure, buddy) . Around volume 2 he even thinks it isnt BL, and meimei must have surely gotten her genres mixed up. He only realises when wangxian have sex and at that point it's too late to go back - he needs to know what's going down with wen ning.

He reads all the extras (including incense burner) for the Plot ("I need to know what happens to wei wuxian!!"), is an ardent wen ning fan (he can't escape strong puppy coded characters) and gets that one specific YLLZ figurine.

Binghe comes to know of this and promptly figures out necromancy.

[bookwyrm-art-stuff]

Just about finished scum villain, which means I'm letting myself take a look at the fandom. I thought I was prepared for this- "I've already experienced TGCF and MDZS, how much worse could this be?"

You fool.

[lemonycranberries]

currently wondering how different mdzs characters would react if they suddenly gained awareness that they’re in a fictional story and then learned that the pov from which the story is being told to the entire world is WEI WUXIAN’S

[thisonelikesaliens]

有的人天生就有其他路給他兜底, 而有的人就是在走獨木橋

Some people are born with backup options, but some have to walk the single-plank bridge.

Thank you for putting me in my WWX feels again.