This Is Just So Them

s1 viktor + s2 jayce, a developing modern classic

Look, I love Wei Wuxian and think he had very good reasons for doing the things he did, but I do think if you’re looking at the contrast between how Lan Wangji and Jiang Cheng feel about him post-resurrection their very different personalities and moral outlooks account for maybe half of the gulf and the rest is just that Lan Wangji isn’t really one of the people Wei Wuxian fucked over. He hurt his feelings and killed members of his clan, but he’s not the one he flaked on, or left, or broke promises to. Lying to a guy you’re in love with but are not pursuing a relationship with is different from lying to your coworker/roommate/platonic life partner you’re supposed to be doing post genocide reconstruction with. Being mean to your crush is not the same thing as refusing to explain to your little brother what you’re dealing with in terms of physical capability and ongoing trauma and how that relates to why you keep ditching him and your shared responsibilities to daydrink. Xichen and Lan Qiren made it out of Nevernight alive and well. Wei Wuxian (probably) didn’t contribute to Sizhui being orphaned, although if his parents were cultivators I suppose it’s possible that he did kill them during the war. Even if that’s the case, they were not people who Lan Wangji considered part of a family he shared with Wei Wuxian. He doesn’t look at his child and think about what a better life his kid would be leading if he’d had the strength to cut Wei Wuxian off for real.  Even when it comes to things that are superficially equivalent, like Wei Wuxian playing a role in both Lan and Jiang cultivators being possessed and killed, the fact that Wei Wuxian was himself a member of the Jiang clan and they’re being fucked over by someone who used to be one of them is a pretty big contextual difference. Again, this is not me coming for a teenager with PTSD who was doing his best and trying to both look after his family and avert a genocide! I’m just saying that Jiang Cheng has a lot of reasons that Lan Wangji does not to be experiencing some ambivalence on the topic of everybody’s favourite necromancer.

The lack of a meaningful relationship in the past for wangxian, has made me a chengxian shipper (imo that's why so much vitriol against jc)

oh my god anon. anon.

this genuinely never occurred to me before, because I am highly indifferent to shipping and forget that it is a life-or-death situation in other corners of fandom, and so I have been sitting here figuring that oh, they just hate JC because they have no reading or viewing comprehension and think he hates WWX

BUT I THINK YOU'RE RIGHT

BECAUSE JC IS A REMINDER OF WWX'S LIFE BEYOND LWJ

and the enmeshment and shared history the two of them have going on is something that LWJ does not and cannot share, because it happened already! it is written! it's done! whereas Wangxian's current shared story theoretically could include JC unless pains are taken to keep him out.

source: nottheworstmom on IG

Yeah, these would do numbers at the ren faire. I'm giggling about how her boobs come in like the nose of the star destroyer in A New Hope

Hehe, I am thinking that JC got tangled in some shenanigans that keep following Wei Wuxian, and in effect got sent to some other dimension where everything is the same but isn't.

And now WWX has to go and retrieve him - and for that ends up going through quite a few realities in a "Where isy my shidi?" adventure that places him face to face with a variety of Jiang Chengs and his own feelings of shame, guilt, love and anger towards his shidi.

He sees a Jiang Cheng who have lost their core and a one that didn't, ones that reclaimed his sect and one that was enslaved by Wen Zhuliu as some sick standin for his mom. One that saved Yanli and sacrificed his sect and one that never forgave Wei Wuxian (ohz so that's how his actual hate feels) and one that got over WWX's death and forgot (and that's how indifference feels, Wei Wuxian hates it!). There is a reality where JC didn't get a replacement core and Wei Wuxian was the Jiang Sect Leader who kept him under lock and key (and that Jiang Cheng was miserable, but didn't want to run away, as long as his Wei Wuxian loved him still...).

There is one where Jiang Cheng is married to Lan Xichen and they have kids??? (Wei Wuxian hates it! Hates it! Hates it!!! ....just can't explain why... His shidi would never...right? And what does it mean Jiang Cheng gave birth to the kids?? Oh gods, he never wants to have Lan Xichen sit him down for a sex talk ever again>_<!!! The alpha/omega sex sure is something!) That world unsettled him the most. How is it that Jiang Cheng is happily married here? How is it that Lan Xichen chose him to marry??? Doesn't he mind the awful personality and constant anger? His shidi is very pretty and great, and strong, but he is just like his mom and... Lan Xichen almost slaps him in the head in that universe. Which is scary, because Lan Xichen never gets angry to Wei Wuxian's memory. And on account of a joke? Wei Wuxian doesn't get it.

"If you stopped looking at him and trying to see his mother instead of the boy you grew up with." The big alpha tells him. "Then you'd understand."

And uh, yeah, that one kinda....stung a bit. Maybe that reality wasn't that bad - for Jiang chengttonhave someone who cared for him and understood him. For his shidi to have family again, one that loved him as he should be loved even if it didn't include Wei Wuxian. Even if his shidi had to birth babies and take that monstrous Lan pillar...(he hated it, hated it, heated it!!!)

It's still better, however, than the one reality Wei Wuxian stepped into that just... Didn't have Jiang Cheng of its own. One where he died at the hands of Wen Chao, where the Sunshot Campaign never even got off the ground, because their Wei Wuxian burned the Wen to the ground and salted the ashes. There's no Lan Sizhui there, no Wen Ning. Wen Quing died under his hands like all the others. There's no Yunmeng Jiang. Just Wei Wuxian full of rage and the world that lives in fear of him. What a miserable existence.

He left that world as fast as he could, sick to his stomach.

On the quest to reclaim his precious shidi.

Ohhhhh and the possessiveness of it all. Only feed on my blood. No one else’s. I’m the most delicious you’ll ever have by the sheer fact that it’s me

yes. YES. E X A C T L Y

Jaytim to me is always about a kind of dark edge of possessive mutual obsession. Like it doesn't have to be the focus, but there's this underlying quality to both of them as people that feeds well into that feeling, that trope.

The mutual stalking, the intensity they both have, the history of violence tangled up in messy, complicated feelings about Batman and being Robin...like obvi fandom exaggerates some of these things, but it's so fun to linger in it.

Just. Wanting, desperately, darkly, for him to turn his absolute focus, his total attention on me and only me... don't bother looking elsewhere, babybird, once you get a taste of me you'll never want anything or anyone else ever again OvO

Jayce is a real homie, doing some massage to Viktor to ease his pain

Full pic on ❌and 🦋

"In all timelines.. in all possibilities... only you"

Everything between Jayce and Viktor can really be traced back to their childhood inciting incidents and it’s killing me.

Jayce: a miracle saves him and his mom, forever imprinting him with the certainty that miracles do exist, they can be controlled, he can save his loved ones no matter how awful things get, if he can just be smart and bold and quick enough.

Viktor: he saw the horror of what Singed had done—of forcing a creature to live against its will, of the degradation and terror of being fundamentally changed. For a while he thought he understood Singed, when he decided that he was willing to throw away all his principles to survive his own body. But he didn’t, really. He didn’t understand. There was still a line he would not cross. He wanted to die human.

It’s fitting, then, and unspeakably tragic, that Jayce is the one who played Singed’s role in the end. Because you can’t ask Jayce to let a loved one go, when he knows there’s a miracle that can save him, the solution is right there, it will work if you will just let him try—and so he forces a change onto Viktor against his will. He traps him into the Arcane, takes apart and reassembles his body, strips him of his selfhood and humanity. All so that Viktor will live. Singed wasn’t talking about the desperation not to die—he was talking about the desperation not to lose someone you love.

And so Viktor is…changed. He lives, whether he wants to or not.

And so Jayce loses him anyway.

ok i've never read the novel but your tags on that post about jc and matchmaker requirements...mxtx girl i don't think you wrote what you thought you wrote lmao (jc noticing beauty? doesn't seem like he does sorry that's whats on the page)

Exactly!! The only time that novel Jiang Cheng is even hinted at having sexual thoughts is when (after loudly decrying NHS and WWX for looking at spring books) he wakes up with a book next to his head.

I do kind of sort of enjoy the idea that MXTX shared, that while that's his list for the matchmakers, that's not actually what he wants in a wife. Emotional vulnerability? 0%, he can't be targeted. Tactical evasion: A+++. No one will ever know he wants to be held!!!