wangxianyizhan

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Wei Wuxian + let me undress

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hhhhmmm???.mp4

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Senpai, notice me!

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I think that Jiang Cheng truly expected Wei Wuxian to stay by his side forever. He expected him to stay single or find a woman within the Jiang sect, to always live with him in the Lotus Cove and to never have a life outside of that. 

And then Wei Wuxian met Lan Wangji and pretty much from their first meeting and their first back-n-forth, you could see Jiang Cheng’s spidey senses tingling. Because suddenly, there was someone else taking up a lot of if not most of Wei Wuxian’s attention…

… and the worst thing? That someone was Wei Wuxian’s equal. Jiang Cheng’s always felt second best next to Wei Wuxian but Lan Wangji never did because a) he really wasn’t - there has ever been only one person in the cultivation world who could keep up with Wei Wuxian: Lan Zhan - and b) inferiority complex was never Lan Wangji’s thing.

How threatened Jiang Cheng must’ve felt by Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji’s relationship! And the more threatened he felt, the angrier and more spiteful he became which in turn kept pushing Wei Wuxian even more towards Lan Wangji. Truly a vicious circle that Jiang Cheng was never able to break.

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i only serve my microexpression king!!

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Life imitating art? 😂😂

I found this gif and now I'm dyinggggg asfjlk

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Who do I think fell in love first? it was definitely lan wangji, and it was right here:

[id: screenshot of lan wangji watching wei wuxian making a wish to “protect the weak and curb the strong, with a clear conscience for all my life” from episode 7 of the untamed drama. wei wuxian’s eyes are closed, his hands clasped. lan wangji looks on with a surprised tenderness. /end id]

I think it’s safe to say that he already finds wei wuxian attractive/intriguing (see: his reaction to wei wuxian drawing his portrait, tying the lan ribbon around their wrists, the PEAK gay panic in his voice when wei wuxian trips and falls on top of him), but this is the first moment he’s really moved by him. up until this point, wei wuxian has been teasing, immature, A Nuisance™, too clever for his own good, troublemaker energy personified etc but he hasn’t ever revealed his deeper moral values in front of lan wangji—and he does it like this, without pretension, without irony. He doesn’t spend his wish on something frivolous or material: he wishes to be able to do good for all his life, to be righteous, to be kind. it’s the wish he makes for both of them. “the promise we made together all those years ago,” as he says, half a lifetime later.

like just. imagine, for a moment, being lan wangji, whose whole world is being constantly challenged and needled by this unfairly attractive, chaotic bastard and then he just comes out of left field with this. I think this is where lan wangji first recognizes himself in wei wuxian—that at their core, they share their most important values.

look what i’m saying is this is where I fell in love with wei wuxian.

(sidenote: I really think a lot of the tragedy of mdzs/the untamed is stems from this moment. wei wuxian fails, over and over and over, even when his wish never changes, even when all he ever wanted was to do good without fear.)

i had to think for a really long time to try and decide which moments i wanted to talk about on wei wuxian’s part, because i don’t think he’s nearly as easy to pinpoint. lan wangji falls in love like a lightning strike, but wei wuxian’s love is something that grows so slowly, i don’t think he realizes what it is until pretty late in the game.

so let’s begin with this moment on phoenix mountain:

[id: screenshot of lan wangji and wei wuxian facing each other on phoenix mountain from episode 25 of the untamed drama. lan wangji is waiting expectantly for an answer, having just asked, “what am i to you?”, hand behind his back. wei wuxian is holding his flute, expression complicated and uncertain. /end id]

this is the first time i think wei wuxian is asked directly to label his feelings about lan wangji, and he says, “i once thought of you as a lifelong, intimate friend.” and when lan wangji presses, “and now?”, he doesn’t respond.

two episodes later, when wei wuxian is taking the wen refugees out of their prison camp and lan wangji appears before him, I think he has some kind of answer to lan wangji’s question:

[id: screenshot from episode 27 of the untamed drama. wei wuxian holds out chenqing before him in challenge to lan wangji, who is offscreen. he is smiling, just slightly, resigned and fond and terribly sad. /end id]

“if there really must be a battle between me and them, then I would rather fight to the death with you. if i must die, then at least i would like to die by hanguang-jun’s hand. it wouldn’t be an injustice.”

if that isn’t some kind of confession, I don’t really know what is.

but it’s too late—he’s now a defector in the eyes of the four sects. lan wangji lets him go and wei wuxian rides away. the remainder of his first life, that’s how things stand. even through everything with a’yuan, the final massacre at the nightless city—even though there’s something really meaningful there between them, it’s all tinged with a sense of impossibility, you know? there’s no outcome where they can resolve it happily. wei wuxian has gone too far down that single-plank bridge.

the first moment i think wei wuxian has to confront the unresolved and unsaid things between him and lan wangji comes when lan wangji gets drunk that one night and tells him, “i have regret.”

“what regret?”

“that at the nightless city, I did not stand beside you.”

[id: screenshot of wei wuxian looking at lan wangji (offscreen) with tears in his eyes as the full realization of what lan wangji just drunkenly confessed hits him from episode 36 of the untamed drama. /end id]

“so all this time, you’ve been searching for me?”

earlier i said can you imagine being lan wangji for a sec, and i’m gonna say it again except god. can you. IMAGINE being wei wuxian in this moment. finding out that this person that you maybe suspected you had deeper feelings for but never acted on has spent the entire sixteen years of your death searching for you, regretting that he didn’t stand with you before you died? a regret that he’s been carrying in secret, alone, for sixteen years?? that’s A Lot to unpack.

however, I don’t think wei wuxian really, fully understands and accepts how he feels and how lan wangji feels in return, how far they’re both willing to go until episode 42, at the confrontation at jinlingtai.

[id: two screenshots from episode 42 of the untamed drama, right after lan wangji takes a stand beside wei wuxian against the four sects. image 1 is lan wangji smiling at wei wuxian: he is gentle and sure. image 2 is wei wuxian smiling back at him, eyes red-rimmed and wet. /end id]

even though lan wangji has been walking with him since dafan shan, he’s been doing it with a plausible deniability. and here, when wei wuxian is trying to give him an out, lan wangji puts everything he has on the line so that he can clearly stand with wei wuxian, without dissembling, without hesitation. “the feeling of of walking on a single-plank bridge into the dark truly is no worse.”

lan wangji is finished with regrets.

“it’s just funny, that’s all,” wei wuxian says, “back when the whole world flattered me with praise, you were the only one who would scold me. but now that everyone is calling for my death, all hating and condemning me, you’re nevertheless the only one standing by my side.”

i think after that, for all the remaining episodes, there’s an unspoken commitment between the two of them that underpins the rest of their interactions, which I think I can say without reservation that I like more than how it played out in the novel. there’s something really profound about it, the trust in their unlabelled relationship. it really feels like the inexorable culmination of two adults in their mid-thirties coming together after falling in love for almost twenty years. there’s a maturity to it that isn’t present in the way the novel does the confession (which does have its own disaster energy™ charm) that I think highlights the fact that they love each other, not just because they admire each other, not just because they’re attracted to one another, but because they understand each other—because when they look at each other, they also see themselves.

Credit

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Who else walks with me on the single-plank bridge, lighting our way together? 

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On YiZhan

Relax. It's not really a shipping post, but I do need to get my feelings out for this ship.

I am cackling and giddy about BJYX/YiZhan/BoZhan/WangXiao/etc. taking social media by storm this weekend. I noticed that the Xiao Zhan/Wang Yibo shipping has steadily been rising after The Untamed ended. (I'm not sure why, is this like the next level for us now that there are no more WangXian content?) I think the fanmeet in Thailand is even the last straw for some people, because my Twitter feed is filled with so many memes that are basically variations of: "I, an intellectual, make it a policy to not ship RPF for many reasons (Xiao Zhan and Wang Yibo appear together) YIZHAN OMFGAHHSJDKW"

Now, I have spent some years in this Earth, I have had my share of disappointments, and hell, I even work in statistics. I understand therefore that shipping is most likely just shipping. The real thing is unlikely, especially given the country they live in.

At the very least though, what I do believe is that Wang Yibo genuinely likes Xiao Zhan, admires him and looks up to him, not necessarily in a romantic sense but definitely in a "holy shit this person is amazing I really really like him maybe we can be friends" sense. Anyone who has ever been through high school (or idk childhood) must have felt or been on the receiving end or at the very least been witness to (can the Jiang Cheng's of the world say "hey" or roll their eyes altogether now lmao) something like it. Anyone who has ever had an amazing elder sibling or some similar figure must have felt it, too.

It's a pretty amazing feeling, and I am actually happy for Wang Yibo for having a figure like this in his young life right now. It especially tickles my heart given the fact that Wang Yibo, between the two of them, is actually the more tenured celebrity. Wang Yibo is an actor, an idol (even one seasoned enough to be a talent mentor), a model, a variety show MC—he's been everywhere, and he is growing better at the things he knows and learning more that he does not know at an alarming rate. This kid is an absolute monster. It's like he was born to be a celebrity, and it is no surprise he debuted early. I just love how someone like this does still fanboy like every one of us, finds someone he looks up to and tails them and is an absolute dork around them, just like everyone else. I love the idea of him having fun and sending dorky texts to the gege he is very, very biased about, who then teases him about it because Wang Yibo is apparently the kind of thick-faced celebrity who uses his own memes in chats. I just love this, okay? You can take my "shiny idol finds pockets of ordinary life things with someone they like" trope from my cold, dead fingers.

And Xiao Zhan, who seems so genuinely nice that he makes everybody around him fall in love with him, who has seen the world, been "ordinary", been part of the workforce, has basically been an Every Man™ just walking the streets and making a living, who now recognizes his own limits and works hard to bridge those gaps—him rising to fame like this just warms my heart. Xiao Zhan is the kind of guy who makes you root for him because he is oddly so approachable and relatable. Despite him being likeable though, I know he still has a lot of critics, even though his fans know he works so hard. For him to have someone like Wang Yibo liking and supporting him, validating him as a celebrity despite being a relative late-comer, is somehow so important and comforting to me and gives me the strength to want to stab those critics omg how about you say something useful and let a new generation learn and be good artists eh???

I wish there would be more opportunities for them to be friends and work together. Seeing them supporting and respecting each other is water, sunshine, fertilizer to my crops, I just can't with them, wtf am I going to do with this ginormous farm that is my love and well-wishes for them I don't really even know anymore

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Wang Yibo being obvious Wang Yibo

(or Xiao Zhan on "get you a co-star who is also your #1 fan")

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How hard do you think Lan WangJi prayed to all the gods and ancestors he knows that Wei WuXian never finds out that Lan WangJi basically married them in the ancestor cave?

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WWX called "Lan Zhan" 102 times in ten episodes 😁

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What is the scene that left the biggest impression on Wang Yibo?