#wen ning got pressganged by jin zixun in the company of his subordinates

[whetstonefires]

You know, judging by how fast Wen Qing caved on Wen Ning's showing up in Yiling with wwx and jc, even though she was real mad about it, I bet he has been doing this to her for years.

Probably started by bringing her injured animals to doctor on as a kid. Later on, not necessarily a lot later, he started dragging in bullied disciples to patch up and hide from Wen Xu or somebody, and then probably he'd just kind of...fold a lot of them into his canonical personal retinue of loyal subordinates, however that worked exactly.

Wet kitten Wen Ning constantly dragging smaller wetter kittens back to his big sister to protect. She has tried all the arguments already. She knows there's no budging him.

Also lmaoooo hang on, Wen Ning had Wen Qing outnumbered a lot of the time, didn't he. She didn't have personal minions she could trust like that. These people just extracted a high-status prisoner from the custody of an erratic and violent superior pursuing a personal grudge without blinking, for their Wen-gongzi.

Wen Ning's ability to get up to shenanigans due to all the pathetic life-forms she'd allowed him to accumulate must have dawned on her with belated horror.

[whetstonefires]

On my list of things it would be fun to see expanded on in fic is also: Wen Ning's subordinates.

They followed him to Lotus Pier when he went running of his own volition in hopes of helping Wei Wuxian; helped him get Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian out and smuggle them into Yiling despite this being highly treasonous. (Cql decided to remove this and replace it with Wen Ning poisoning everybody, which was very funny and probably the right choice for the adaptation. But still.)

Were still with him, presumably less some fatalities, after the war, when Jin Zixun pressganged the lot and they wound up at Qiongqi Pass.

We can fairly confidently presume the survivors of that made up a solid fraction of the escapees who followed Wei Wuxian out, when the Jiang's nightmare necromancer took their gongzi's corpse and unconscious sister and the baby, and rode hell for leather.

All Wen Qing says about this group is that they're all yes-men like Wen Ning, and if Wei Wuxian got to know any of them at all during the Burial Mounds period, it doesn't make it into the book.

So we have the information that Wen Ning, who was after all fairly high-ranking by heredity being the child of the sect leader's first cousin, even if his personal rank was relatively low due to lack of accomplishments, had surrounded himself with nice people who were personally loyal to him.

He was not a loner! He had very possibly the most access to the company of people who liked him of anybody in the book! He was anxious and bullied by his higher-ranking cousins and insecure but he wasn't alone.

Idk I'm personally curious about these people and how they interpreted everything that happened, and what kind of relationship Wen Ning had with them, and if in another storyline any of them might have done anything interesting.

Wen Ning, too, is one of the cast members who could absolutely have held up a whole novel on his own. Well. With a lot of backup from Wen Qing, anyway. He'd be a perfectly serviceable protagonist, and I appreciate that.