Really iconic of Meng Yao to have two henchmen, each one perfectly designed to piss off one of his sworn brothers
Clan Leader Lan, you met Lianfang-zun when you were young too, didn’t you?
hate to say it, but one trend i don't really like among MDZS canon divergence and/or fix-it fics is the more simplistic morality. i know many people disagree with every part of the following statement here, but MDZS is genuinely interesting to me because of it's grey morality: almost none of the characters are purely good or purely evil, the moral characters of each person don't stay unchanging over time either, and the moral dilemmas that characters are placed into are genuinely distressing and therefore interesting.
but quite a lot of MDZS canon divergence fics seem to strip that away? instead of preserving the moral ambiguity of the source work, they instead wholeheartedly choose some characters to be "good guys" and other characters to be "bad guys," therefore allowing the story to have a straightforwards good-beats-evil resolution. ahhhhh, i can't bring myself to enjoy fics where jiggy is a mere mustache-twirling villain, so whoever the writer stans can just kill him and thus fully save the day (whether lan xichen is an evil enabler or a tragically deceived victim is up to the writer's discretion). ahhhhh, i can't bring myself to enjoy fics where the entire jiang family are evil abusers to poor uwu xianderella, just so lan wangji can swoop in as his prince charming and save him (whether jiang yanli is an evil enabler or also the victim of [yu ziyuan/jiang cheng/etc]'s abuse is up to the writer's discretion). ahhhhhh, i can't bring myself to enjoy fics where wen qing and the other wens are just straightforwardly evil, so everything jiang cheng does against them is justified. fics that somehow maneuver every named character onto the same side, against Evil Big Baddie wen ruohan / wen chao / wang lingjiao / jin guangshan / morally-acceptable-to-torture ensemble / etc., are more fun and pleasant to read, but even they seem to fall into the same pitfall of simplistic morality: there are good guys and there are bad guys, and happy endings are when the good guys kill the bad guys.
or maybe the preponderance of this trope suggests a broader, more depressing reality: in order for there to be happy endings in stories involving violent interpersonal conflict, morality must be black and white. when morality is allowed to be ambiguous instead, the happy ending dissipates, because the reader finds that in some sense all violence is tragic. thus, no - there must be a clear hero and there must be a clear villain, such that when violence is enacted upon the person designated the villain, it is a triumph instead of a tragedy.
Every. Time.
So 3zun, huh?
Wei Wuxian: Me and Lan Zhan are dating
Lan Xichen: We have known for ages
Wei Wuxian: ? We started dating 2 days ago
Jin Guangyao: tf were you doing before that
the transcript btw. It was hard to make it out on the video because of the blowhards yelling and me feeling incandescently blind and deaf with rage
oh, to have a leader with the moral fiber and strong backbone that Zelenskyy has
I saw this and I can't stop laughing.
so yeah, upon further consideration, my Type of favorite character is 100% “person with a horribly misplaced sense of duty that ruins their life and ultimately kills them”
Nie huaisang: what's your body count?
Jin Guangyao: oh me ? Like 30 now
Nie huaisang: oh my god, you're a hoe
Jin Guangyao: how does it make me a -
Wait are we talking about people we have slept with?
Nie huaisang: yeah
Jin Guangyao: oh well I have never done that yet
Nie huaisang: then why have you say 30 ?
Jin Guangyao:
* pre qin su accident
This!