A-Li Best Girl

Mu Qing, grinning: Before you were what? 

Feng Xin: Before I was- 

Mu Qing: What? 

Feng Xin: Before I was inter-

Mu Qing: Before you were interrupted? 

Feng Xin: Cut me off one more time and I swear I'll- 

Mu Qing: What? 

Feng Xin: *makes frustrated sound* 

Xie Lian, nervously: Stop that. Before he hurts you.

always got more 'jiang cheng believes he's entitled to wei ying and his loyalty' and 'wei ying feels like he owes the jiangs' vibes than the two having a brotherly bond

I think a lot of characters in mdzs are written to be foils of wei wuxian, you know, lan wangji, xue yang, jin guangyao, wen chao, jiang cheng, the list could keep going. BUT in contrast to these contrasts, wen ning is wei wuxian's parallel.

They're both a talented child who, under the prejudices of society, become corpses of themselves, yet despite it all are able to persist because of love and understanding. Of course, the corpse thing is more figurative in the case of wei wuxian if we look at him the moments before during and after nightless city. Where he is entirely the yiling patriarch society lauds him to be. Which is just a superficial inauthentic shell of who we know wei ying is. And then he actually dies, so boom, there's your corpse (except 404 corpse not found, my point still stands).

And idk, I think one of the best parts of mdzs is that any of the characters could be the main character. Any of these characters could be the main pov.

But overall, while wei wuxian's foils illuminate his bright sides, his parallels, like wen ning, just make his tragedies that much darker. It's like, wei wuxian, isn't just solely persecuted, this persecution of hope and brightness is an epidemic. And that's so fucked to recognize and so hot of mxtx's brain to deliver as a theme.

the sounds of flute in the night

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One of the things I love most about Lan Zhan is that he didn't make Wei Yings death about himself. About his anger or his loneliness or his regret. It was all about keeping Wei Ying alive in any way he could. In the way he worked to change his sect. In how he went out of his way to help people who needed it most. In making sure Sizhui grew up healthy and surrounded by people who cared for him. I think the only 'selfish' thing he did do was allow himself to be freely angry and annoyed with Jiang Cheng. To be the little menace he always holds himself back from truly being.

Lan Zhan had every right to bring down his fury onto the cultivation world for what they did to Wei Ying and the Wen Remnants but he didn't because that was never what Wei Ying truly wanted. I think there's more nuance to that kind of love then the kind that demands one side to burn the world for the other.

I was thinking about the bodies of supremes.

Hua Cheng has perfect skins. Xie Lian was able to find no faults with his appearance, which was relevant to proving his ghosthood because at the very least typically ghosts aren't able to perfectly recreate the amount of hair on a normal human head or the insides of a body, because they need to be able to visualize it and typically a person can't visualize the full components of a person's insides or just how much hair is on a human scalp.

I assumed and I think others do too, that Hua Cheng is purely so perfect because he's a supreme.

But Xie Lian hasn't ever inspected He Xuan well enough to know how perfect his skin is, and his Ming Yi skin was imperfect and had unusually pale hands, though Xie Lian did not clock that as suspicious at the time he noticed.

Meanwhile Hua Cheng has a full, perfect head of hair, he can eat and drink and breathe, and he has a heartbeat.

Hua Cheng was part of the nursing staff during the Xianle face disease plague. And he for sure has photographic memory; outside of the butterflies, he is and had been able to perfectly recall full conversations from when he was only 10 and recite them back to an oblivious Xie Lian, and perfectly recreate Xie Lian's every outfit down to the finest details to the point Mu Qing finds it disturbing.

I wonder if his skins are so perfect not because he's a supreme, but because his photographic memory and anatomical, medicinal knowledge from his time as a human has allowed him to create the skins with such perfect accuracy.

I feel like that'd be nice if that were the case. Like proof that the little things he tried as a human were not worthless and did help him become who he did. Proof he was always special, and not just in the cursed way he thought.

Dadji how I love you

merji and foxxian with a-yuan for @mdzs-rabbithole !!

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