Thinking about an AU where Jiang Yanli's "weak / mediocre cultivation" was caused by a horrific training accident when she was pretty young, in part to explore the tragedy and disability of it all and in part for the humorous "older relative casually drops wild personal lore that changes your entire perception of them" angle.
Like, Jiang Fengmian and Yu Ziyuan's firstborn child is a girl, which is not ideal in this deeply sexist world, but the sect motto is "attempt the impossible", right? It's not unheard of for female cultivators to lead sects and Yu Ziyuan wants her daughter to be the first female Jiang sect leader, to show up the cultivation world, and Jiang Fengmian isn't against the idea and wants the best for his daughter (although he probably doesn't want her to be a copy of his wife). So Jiang Yanli starts her cultivation training pretty early. There's a lot of intense pressure, a lot of expectation and projection and some arguments, and it all culminates in this poor child getting badly injured, with permanent damage to both her body and to her cultivation. It's a "no one's fault and everyone's fault" thing.
Jiang Fengmian and Yu Ziyuan quietly drop their plans for Yanli to become the sect leader and focus on a very young Jiang Cheng instead, which is easy in part because everyone expects the son to inherit anyway. A young Jiang Yanli is betrothed to the heir of the Jin Sect and this is basically never talked about ever again. General perception is that Jiang Yanli is a mediocre cultivator at best because she was born that way (she's a WOMAN, after all) and/or because her disposition is just too sweet and agreeable, and OF COURSE the son became the heir as soon as the Jiangs had a son. That's just how things work!
So, in an AU where Jiang Yanli (and Jin Zixuan?) lives and teenage Jin Ling is freaking out about some embarrassing and/or dangerous mistake on a night hunt...
Jiang Yanli, patting her son's shoulder: "It's going to be okay. You know, when I was a young child, I permanently injured myself in a training accident and could no longer become the Jiang sect leader, and it felt like the end of the world, letting everyone down, but it all worked out in the end!"
Jin Ling, whose entire 15-year-old worldview just got flipped upside-down: "...Mother?! What?!?!"
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imo reducing the jiang clan dynamics to "wei wuxian was only a servant, never family" undermines the tragic reality that he was both. his position was a dubious, unclear thing, complicated by his debts and the jiangs' varying intentions.
jiang yanli had called him her brother and treated him like one in direct defiance of their class differences and her mother's words. jiang fengmian had seen wwx as a replacement for his parents, not a son, as evident in his passive refusal to defend wwx and his prioritization of his actual son's life. yu ziyuan had seen him as an arrogant servant transgressing class norms and threatening her son's position, and she had consequently scapegoated him at every turn. jiang cheng, the youngest, inherited all of their sentiments in one way or another.
the love was there, it was not enough. so mdzs concludes the jiang clan sub-plots by having jc let wwx leave. that's important. he chose to let to go of the yunmeng shuangjie promise, the oath of fealty. because wwx's position with the jiangs — a brother, yet also a servant, an outsider, never an equal, certainly never a son, bound by duty — made a mockery of love. i think that's more tragic than him being solely a servant and nothing more.
and not to make this lan wangji (actually, everything is always about lan wangji), but that's why it's so important that wwx found a home in him, in a relationship that has no need for debts like "thank you" and "sorry."
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You know what's truly devastating?
Jiang Cheng raised Jin Ling. Jiang Cheng doted on him and helped him and punished him and taught him and loved him–
Jiang Cheng loved him. He loved him so much that the boy may as well have been his own son. He loved him with a ferocity that burned brighter than Zidian's spark. He hovered over him constantly, he showed up on the boy's nighthunts.
He knows, now, what a parent's love feels like, because he feels it for Jin Ling with every breath he takes.
Jiang Cheng now also knows, really knows, that his father never loved him at all.
It's a bit of a surprise, even considering everything, but it's the truth. You couldn't be that indifferent to your child if you loved them. Jiang Cheng would never even consider treating Jin Ling the same way.
I wonder when, during the years he spent raising Jin Ling, did Jiang Cheng have that "oh" moment of realization.
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delete it later
If Jiang Fengmian has a hundred haters, I'm one of them
if Jiang Fengmian has zero haters, I'm dead
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Hilarious thing that just occurred to me: The Jiangs wearing purple robes is honestly just as gaudy and ostentatious as the Jin putting gold on everything
Even if we assume that only the inner clan members wear robes dyed actual purple, and everybody else does robes that have been dyed red and then blue, that's still an insane amount of money and effort. Historically, true purple dye was so crazy rare and expensive that in most places it was reserved for actual royalty, and double-dyed fabrics had to be done with extreme care and skill or they would be splotchy and uneven -- more blue in some places, more red in others, the purple different shades.
It's funny to think about WWX and JC being like "ugh the peacock" as if their lowest disciples don't wear robes that only the most skilled master dyers could achieve. Like the inner members of the Jiang Clan aren't walking around in several layers of true purple silk. Jiang Cheng's underwear could feed a village through winter and Wei Wuxian has the gall to act like the Jin are too showy about their wealth.
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Honestly the most interesting thing about the Jiang interpersonal dynamics that is being totally slept on is how Jiang Fengmian's power as head of the family affects everyone, including him.
Yu Ziyuan knows Jiang Fengmian won't use his power against her unless he feels like he needs to, and that he doesn't fear her and isn't going to feel like he needs to act in self-defense unless she attempts significant physical harm, so short of that she can do whatever she likes against him, and he won't resist.
But if the collateral damage to the kids of her verbal attacks on him goes above a certain level, he says one word and she stops.
He just goes, 'wife.' ('My lady' but it's just a polite term for wife.) Sort of disapproving. Same kind of way he talks to Jiang Cheng when he acts like a shithead, but without the subsequent attempt at an ethics lesson.
And bam. Momentum halted. That line of attack is out of bounds. Nobody likes this, but good god it works.
And because they both know he ultimately has all the power, that Yu Ziyuan's lifestyle of privacy and doing exactly as she pleases at all times and so forth is all something that exists by Jiang Fengmian's generosity and sufferance, and she hates it, and he's not comfortable with it either, he sets that boundary really high, and she gets away with all kinds of cruelty because it's all stuff she's strictly allowed to do, entitled to do. So he'd be abusing his authority over her, by constraining her right to exercise her power within normative bounds over the people she outranks.
Even if she's using it harmfully and in a way directed by spite, these are her rights, she's not technically abusing her power, and her primary target in all the episodes he actually witnesses is him who outranks her; she's not being one of those mistresses.
So he'd be overstepping if he tried to constrain her, he'd be one of those husbands. Just like she always accuses him of.
(This is why she keeps insisting that she's also the master of jiang sect and he's 'forgetting' that in contexts where it doesn't make a huge amount of sense.)
Anyway, the fact that it's impossible to unpick where Jiang Fengmian's moral principles stop and his conflict-avoidance kicks in with this relationship is so much more interesting than the weirdly sexist readings I keep seeing, where it's all the conflict-avoidance and he's an unmanly loser who lets Yu Ziyuan bully him and his kids without ever standing up to her, for no good reason. When actually they have a really interesting and fantastically realistic toxic relationship.
He has a good reason! His reason is he's uncomfortable with the patriarchy! And guilty that his wife is miserable! And that he doesn't love her correctly! So he gives way as often as he can, trying to fix it!
But it doesn't fix it, because no amount of giving in to her gives her cause to trust him, and if she doesn't trust him and she knows that if he actually cares about an issue her ability to get her way will disappear, she can't feel secure about any of it. And therefore everything, especially Wei Wuxian the symbol of that fact, makes her angry and Want To Punish.
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