Surprise Youre Friends With A Hug, Maybe A Kiss.

surprise you’re friends with a hug, maybe a kiss. 

me with xie lian hua cheng lan wangji and wei wuxian. EVERY SINGLE TIME. THIS HAPPENS EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TIME. cries and sobs

I may look fine but every time I think of the love fictional men have for their lovers I combust

THIS !!!!! OH MY GOD THIS THIS THIS !!!

jiang cheng did not kill wei wuxian. like that is a pretty significant thing that did not happen but for some reason people keep stating as fact. and also quite significantly the reason he did not kill him is because he loves him.

jiang cheng's hatred towards wei wuxian is a defense mechanism born from his trauma and anger and fear of abandonment. his hatred is a construct designed to minimise emotional pain. his hatred only exists because it's trying to cancel out the love in order to protect him from rejection and abandonment and the extreme emotional pain that comes with them. there's actually a psychological term for this coping mechanism: it's called splitting. it's a distorted way of thinking that is black and white in nature and often caused by trauma. it means you are unable to hold opposing thoughts and feelings and you see people as either all good or all bad. jiang cheng is incapable of seeing any grey area so he does a very extreme swing from love to hate because he simply cannot process the complexity of his own polarising emotions. he cannot reconcile his love for wei wuxian with the pain wei wuxian has (unintentionally) caused him. he does all of this unconsciously too because splitting is not a conscious decision you make. he does not even realise it's happening.

for years it keeps all those messy and complex and painful feelings jiang cheng has for wei wuxian at bay. splitting is inherently self-destructive but it is considered a coping mechanism for a reason. for a long time it's the only thing that allows jiang cheng to keep going. it isn't until guanyin temple that all those complex emotions that the hastily put together hatred has been trying so hard to cover up come spilling out and jiang cheng starts to acknowledge them. the love and the loss and those gutwrenching feelings of abandonment and rejection and not being good enough. and he says desperately "shouldn't i hate you? can't i hate you?" because he wants so very much to hate him but he's now realising that he never has. because the hate was always just a mask for love and all its painful and contradictory complexities. the fact that acknowledging all of those feelings has him emotionally ruined and sobbing on the temple floor is exactly why the splitting happened in the first place. this is the pain and loss that he was unconsciously trying to protect himself from.

HOLY SHIT THIS IS SO GOOD ????

I am forever your most devoted believer

It is lovely in MDZS how Wei WuXian essentially has the “male” role, in that he is the one pulling on Lan WangJi’s figurative pigtails, the one to give him flowers repeatedly, the one to say he’s pretty out loud and in his head all the time, and the one trying to get him to pay attention to him.

Lan WangJi, meanwhile, gets teased, looks pretty, receives flowers, gets embarassed, defaults to ignoring his crush to appear aloof and keep control, his chaste modesty is being scandalously transgressed via super-meaningful Lan ribbon and cold pond shenanigans, and he secretly keeps all the tokens of Wei WuXian’s affections

And also kisses him forcefully against a tree (but even then in the text and Wei WuXian’s view, he’s a “shy maiden”) and fantasizes about shutting him up in a very specific way

Socially also, Lan WangJi is the pure and treasured daughter niece/sister, thematically, while Wei WuXian is the handsome devilish rake who “corrupts him”

And I find it hilarious how they both subvert everything I’ve mentioned above (by virtue of being extremely well-written characters who aren’t confined to one stereotype but feel like real, complex, subtle people instead), especially after Wei WuXian’s resurrection when their dynamic changes to become extremely funny more balanced

no thoughts, just hualian