#seriously though Nie bros + Twin Jades bonding content when

[hunxi-guilai]

ask lightning round 8

oh would you look at the time, here we go again --

!!!! I take it back, CQL does bless us with Lan Wangji and Nie Mingjue having interactions! 

rip this is what I get for running this blog having seen this show... mm... once...

when will I get a fic of Lan Wangji + Nie Mingjue interactions pre-Sunshot... Nie Mingjue babysitting baby Wangji and Huaisang while Lan Xichen has to go Do Important Lan Sect Things... Lan Xichen comes back and hulking teenager Nie Mingjue is mock-fencing with bb!Wangji and giving him swordwork pointers while lil Wangji nods along solemnly... Lan Xichen leaning against the gate, eyes soft smile warm, watching the two of them before they notice he’s back... Lan Xichen making eye contact with bb!Huaisang and holding a finger to his lips, and bb!Huaisang lighting up with the possibility of pranking da-ge... just... some soft Nie bros + Twin Jades content when...

I truly came into this fandom like “oh yeah I don’t even ship nielan” but it’s been a few months and can confirm that I fully ship nielan

man oh man I would go feral over it but the moment I read this ask I immediately thought about the time @baoshan-sanren​ went feral over Lan Wangji’s 世事无常 ‘life is unpredictable’ / ‘there are no constants in the world,’ (throws back a shot) which I feel like is the unspoken first line to the second line of 幸好 ‘fortunately’

gosh, I feel like I’ve been muttering about this in a few tags recently, but when I was watching CQL I kept a list of ‘missing moments (I might want to see in fic)’ taped to my wall and one of them was “Lan Wangji - Jiang Cheng roadtrip-of-revenge post-episode 19.” 

Honestly, I think they work really well together (that is, pre-Nightless City), because neither of them mince words, and are powerfully motivated in the same direction. When we see them storm the indoctrination camp together? Incredible. Their communication in investigating the various massacres left behind? Unparalleled (Lan Wangji talks!!! Jiang Cheng listens!!! Jiang Cheng talks!!! Lan Wangji listens!!! No one yells or deflects or issues ad hominem insults!!! They cozy up to each other to peer through a hole in the roof and Lan Wangji casts a protective spell to keep the Bad Vibes from affecting either of them!!! They’re completely in sync when it comes to protecting Wei Wuxian from Wen Zhuliu!!!).

If there’s a timeline where Lan Wangji and Jiang Cheng actually coordinated their ‘save-Wei Wuxian-from-himself’ efforts, I think things could have turned out very, very differently

hmmm... we can definitely wave it away with ‘production error,’ but what’s always fun is reading every choice as deliberate and seeing what that says subtextually about the story/character/worldbuilding

and what I’m getting is:

the Nie Sect are secretly loaded (to commission a custom sword for Nie Huaisang in addition to the saber he’s supposed to have in Fatal Journey? idk that sounds pretty pricey but if you don’t write a postcolonial novel about fantasy economics like Seth Dickinson in The Traitor Baru Cormorant, have you really come up with a fantastic economic system?)

Nie Mingjue was trying to push Nie Huaisang towards a non-fatal form of cultivation in hopes that Nie Huaisang could escape the family doom

Nie Huaisang has a spiritual sword all along, but only has so many hands and generally prefers to carry his fan instead

Nie Huaisang is secretly pioneering fan cultivation

Nie Huaisang is secretly proficient enough in cultivation to keep his sword in a convenient universe-pocket, only to be extracted in moments of necessity, and everyone has been underestimating him in more ways than one

Nie Huaisang’s sword just Really Wants to Get Along with its wielder, and has learned how to transform into a fan, Sylblade style

The possibilities are endless!

hm, I read the show as Jiang Cheng and Jin Guangyao co-parenting Jin Ling, because Jin Ling seems pretty fond of both of them (and will pit one of them against the other, if it’s in his interests)

Jin Ling and auntie Qin Su interactions when

I think part of Jiang Cheng’s involvement with Jin Ling’s childhood is related to the fact that Jin Ling is also the only potential heir to the Yunmeng Jiang Sect by blood. It’s definitely weaker than the Jin Sect’s claim on his future, but I also cannot imagine that Jiang Cheng would let the single child of the next generation in his family be raised exclusively by Lanling Jin (they might raise him into another Jin Zixuan and he cannot let that happen, he endured over a decade of peacock!Zixuan and he is not. going. through that. again.).

...actually, this is never resolved, and by the end of the show, Jin Ling is still positioned to inherit both Lanling Jin and Yunmeng Jiang if Jiang Cheng doesn’t get a move on and appoint an alternate successor

no idea! If I had to guess, a year or two younger than Wei Wuxian & co (I think it’s mentioned that he’s too young to participate in Cloud Recesses summer camp? but again I have seen this show, mm, once, so I could be totally making that up) 

why stop at twice? obviously the solution to the question of who-gets-together with the juniors is just juniors OT4

Lan Jingyi is the one unafraid to call Jin Ling on his bullshit, Jin Ling will aggressively mother everyone else and bankroll all operations, Lan Sizhui is the only one with the patience to endlessly peacekeep among the four of them, and Ouyang Zizhen possesses the only braincell in the bunch

...I am slowly becoming inured to the what-the-fuckery of the subtitles, but also, what the fuck

oof... I mean, partially yes, it does feel like Jiang Cheng is being a little thoughtless here (because Wei Wuxian and Jin Guangyao continue to be narrative foils occupy similar spaces in their relative sect hierarchies), but Wei Wuxian, in classic form, moves straight past the insult and onwards to the more pressing part of the discussion, which is whether or not Jiang Cheng plans to let Jiang Yanli’s re-betrothal to Jin Zixuan proceed. I think there’s definitely a moment where Wei Wuxian could have taken Jiang Cheng’s words very, very personally, but Wei Wuxian is also used to Jiang Cheng’s harsher language, knows that Jiang Cheng is just talking about Jin Guangyao, not making implications about Wei Wuxian “knowing his place’ or anything, so any possible friction there gets smoothed over as the conversation proceeds

y’all, I know next to nothing about the timeline of the show except that the flashbacks last thirty episodes, which is approximately twenty-nine episodes too many --

I jest. I love giving CQL shit for a 30-episode straight flashback. but also I believe the MDZS/CQL timeline is notoriously difficult to untangle -- I feel like I’ve seen posts going around/an AO3 link with a year-by-year breakdown of when things happened? but alas I do not have it on hand

I don’t think 湛 is gendered at all, so I think that’s relatively safe to use for genderbending purposes!

he does not, that is exclusively an invention of the YouTube subs, I am affronted

linguistic meta > [scroll down] > ‘Naming, Names, and Courtesy Names’

um... you’re going to have to be more specific about which epithets. I talk about the gendered nature of 君 in this post (tl;dr it’s technically gender-neutral but is overwhelmingly used for men), and 尊, which I touch on in this post, is also technically gender-neutral.

宗主 zongzhu is gender-neutral, 兄 xiong is gendered male, ‘Lady X’ is the translation for the honorific -姑娘 guniang, which literally means ‘young woman’ and could conceivably also be translated as ‘Miss’

I also encourage you to check out these posts by @bingleycharles, which are wonderful and much more intelligible than anything I produce

I mean, considering that Lan Wangji probably didn’t know what character A-Yuan’s name was (have I mentioned, ridiculously homophonous language), he likely just chose another character that sounded the same and didn’t have horrible horrible connotations at first blush

a lot of folks do read into the change in character, though, since A-Yuan goes from 苑, ‘emperor’s garden,’ to 愿, ‘to long for, to wish’ / ‘to be willing’

oooh, so generally, you don’t name things after people in Chinese. It’s actually incredibly disrespectful and all sorts of Bad Vibes to use the exact characters of a living person’s name to name someone/something else

but especially do not use Ji-ji, because that is slang for dick

I’d suggest going for adjectives associated with Lan Wangji that aren’t in any of his names, and then doubling them for cuteness factor!

oof... probably still by the honorific 先生 -xiansheng, because if Wei Wuxian used a family term, that would be even more intimate than their current relationship of ‘mutually avoidant and frostily aloof,’ and Lan Qiren would probably throw his shoe at Wei Wuxian if nothing else were close at hand

oh! 一问三不知 is an established phrase in Mandarin, and not something invented for MDZS/CQL. It’s used to describe when someone truly does not know anything about a subject, regardless of how you rephrase the question.

Literally, it translates to “one-ask, three-don’t-knows,” and baidu-baike is telling me that the ‘three-don’t-knows” specifically refer to not knowing:

the origin 

the process

the conclusion

of whatever subject you’re asking about. It’s a phrase that can also be used to describe someone’s defense in court -- just saying ‘I don’t know’ to every question to protect themselves, which specifically casts the ‘three-don’t-know’s as not knowing:

the origin/inciting incident 

the process of the crime

the conclusion of the crime

uh... yikes?

but to be fair, my thoughts on the relationships of most characters to Jin Guangyao is ‘yikes’

do I think that the two of them genuinely loved and appreciated aspects of each other? yes. do I think that they made each other happy for a time? yes. did Jin Guangyao really jettison Qin Su the moment she started to become a liability rather than an asset? also yes.  

I think the scene implied that Lan Xichen figures it out, because we see a shot of him looking away at the sudden realization the moment before Jin Guangyao says 是不是吃了什么金丹妙药 / was it perhaps because you ate some excellent golden core medicine? which I feel really spells it out for everyone 

Jin Guangyao really lays it out for everyone to deduce in that scene by monologuing about:

Jiang Cheng apparently running around Lotus Pier the night before, asking people to unsheathe Suibian

a sword that only Wei Wuxian could unsheathe

a sword that Jiang Cheng had unsheathed

sixteen years ago, Wei Wuxian began refusing to carry Suibian around, coming up with a different excuse every time

Jiang Cheng had his core melted, then restored, during the Sunshot Campaign

It’s certainly enough for Lan Xichen to put together, but I don’t think Jin Ling figures it out (he is, after all, of a younger, kinder generation)

um... gotta say I’m not sure what the line is, but I don’t think the word ‘physiological’ appears in the Chinese? 

hm, I gotta say that I don’t think I’ve really run across this problem? I probably just...don’t read enough fics to get bothered by this, but honestly, if a fic has OC names that don’t make sense, then that indicates a lack of basic research that would probably put me off the rest of the fic, too... it’s like, pretty hard to make a name that doesn’t make sense, because then I feel like you’d have to choose a name composed of phonemes that don’t exist in Mandarin Chinese, which takes some doing.

like, most of the time when I read an OC name I idly think ‘oh hm I wonder what the characters are used to write their name’ but aside from that I don’t usually give OC names much more thought

oof... I don’t think I know about martial sibling dynamics or adopted sibling dynamics to make a nuanced comment on this? I am afraid I have had experience with neither, but I also get the sense that this is probably very, very subjective on a case-by-case basis

gotta say... no idea... but given Wei Wuxian’s history with texts... probably something to do with pornography...

HAH, well, the interpretation I’ve seen floating around is that Nie Huaisang writes the rankings, which means him putting Nie Mingjue at #7 is either 1) him throwing a bone to da-ge or 2) him artificially deflating Nie Mingjue’s scores so as to not be accused of favoritism

(also I am obliged to link this iconic post, because I laughed out loud when I saw it the first time)

I’m willing to bet that both Nie bros are in agreement that Lan Xichen deserves first in all things, but especially in this ranking