Welcome to my thoughts

I really like imagining Nie Huaisang’s response to Jiang Cheng’s whole shtick post-WWX-death, because, you CANNOT tell me that he wouldn’t immediately draw parallels, true or not, to his own shit with Nie Mingjue.

Like I can just imagine him thinking while talking to Jiang Cheng like “You were so unwilling to accept the notion of a world where your brother was dead that you were willing to spend your entire life chasing a ghost. That’s admirable. I admire that. Maybe if I had done that, Da-ge wouldn’t have…”

And meanwhile Jiang Cheng is just seething, fully convinced that he was chasing after Wei Wuxian’s ghost because he just hated him so gosh-darn much. Like, not to stir up any debate or piss off any of the more opinionated people on this site, but I genuinely don’t think JC hated WWX as much as he, or the jianghu, thought he did.

Hate can drive a person to do many things, but I genuinely don’t think it’s possible for hate to drive a person to chase a dead man for thirteen years. Five ? Maybe. Seven is pushing it. But thirteen ? The only kind of hate powerful enough to do that is hate adulterated with at least a sprinkling of love

And I think that creates a really interesting contrast, one Nie Huaisang, who disguises his hate and grief behind walls of obliviousness, all the while drowning in regret and despair, and one Jiang Cheng, who disguises his grief and regret behind walls of hate so solid that he’s managed to fool even himself

Both of them wearing masks. Both of them pretending to be whole after the death of their sibling(s). Neither of them actually okay

On the other hand, maybe Jiang Cheng does just fully despise Wei Wuxian, which just makes the whole thing hilarious instead of melancholic. Like here Huaisang is, drawing up elaborate manuscripts of the tragic story of the Yunmeng Shuangjie, and meanwhile Jiang Cheng is just the living representation of that one neighbour who’s been pissed off at you for a full decade because you accidentally insulted her apple cobbler at a meet one time

And once again, that’s a really interesting contrast, because, Huaisang holds grudges too, but unlike Jiang Cheng, who goes around announcing his hate, Huaisang hides it behind faked incompetence and obliviousness

Either way, it’s an enjoyable experience

Thinking about the Yunmeng Shuangjie because like the world made their relationship so complicated - adding in propriety and status and birth and whatnot - but at its core, at least at the very beginning, they were simply two idiots willing to let go of the world for each other

I love Jiang Cheng not because he’s good or evil, but because this man has all the Emotions, and, without fail, finds the worst ways to cope with them

Like seriously, this gets discounted in fandom discussion a lot, but I would like to point out that Wei Wuxian was, for over a decade, dead !! Not “stuck in a limbo”, not “imprisoned”. Dead. Plain old dead

Had it not been for a revenge scheme that started years after his death, Wei Wuxian would have stayed that way too

Jiang Cheng’s insistence that Wei Wuxian is alive makes sense to us because we KNOW he is, but that was predicated on like a hundred different things going right or wrong for various characters across the jianghu. After his actual death. Maybe not a million-to-one chance, but definitely a hundred-to-one

Had the ritual failed, or if Nie Mingjue hadn’t died, or if Huaisang had found a better way to deal with his brother’s death ? Boom. He’s dead. And Jiang Cheng would have spent the rest of his life scanning the world for a dead man

Respectfully, my man. Sect Leader Jiang. Jiang Wanyin. A-Cheng. What THE FUCK