"why do you like jiang cheng?"
is such a weird question. what is there NOT to like?
sweet, insecure, covers up his embarrassment with fake anger, youngest baby sibling, heir to the sect, tries his hardest and is truly powerful and smart but doesnt look like it next to his beloved shixiong who is a genius and can do anything with barely any effort
desperate for his fathers approval, is aggressively mothered, pretends his shixiong is embarrassing and he wants nothing to do with him but is constantly letting himself get dragged into shenanigans
loses his entire sect and both his parents in one night, sacrifices himself in a potentially SI way to save his shixiong, becomes chronically disabled (for a cultivator), loses said brother he sacrificed himself for. gets plunged into a war as a teenager while trying to build up his sect from essentially nothing using his dead mother's weapon of choice.
goes through the sunshot campaign, wwx's demonic cultivation and defection, all while building up his sect again. loses yanli to the jin, loses wwx to the dafan wen. loses them both permanently. has no family remaining in the world, alone and vulnerable, except for infant jin ling.
3zun have essentially tied 3 of the 4 great sects together, leaving ymj out. vulnerable. so jiang cheng channels his mother and protects them by cultivating - successfully! - the reputation of the feared sandu shengshou who nobody wants to cross. forces himself to become angry and bitter to hide any remaining vulnerabilities, fragility, emotion.
threatens to break jin ling's legs but jin ling knows he is loved and is never scared of being physically harmed. raises the ymj out of the ashes to the point they can afford to lose 400 spirit nets without even worrying about it
jiang cheng is so broken and fragile and when he needs support, when he has lost everything and everyone, he has nothing. so he is forced to put himself back together, to harden his edges, to ensure that nobody will ever hurt him again. he is untouchable. he is respected. he is feared. he is powerful.
and despite all this, he still kept chenqing in pristine condition for over 10 years. he still trusts in wwx to do the right thing despite all the wrongs he has done. he cries, he rages, he threatens.
but in the end, jiang wanyin is the only one to come out of guanyin temple better than they went in. he wins. and he does it all by his fucking self.
even if all he wants now is jin ling to be safe and for wei wuxian to come home.
oh, and he looks like THIS:
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she kick it on my sticker till i cherry bomb
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