pov ur about to become a victim of medical malpractice
The way Akutagawa gradually fades as they are separated by life and death. The way Akutagawa seems to be sending all his light--his life--to Atsushi. I am unwell.
This cat is so, so friendly and stoked to be there, though! Look at all the leaning and rubbing on people and things, the upright question mark tail; this is a very cuddly cat who wants attention, lmao. 💜
"Truthfully, I didn't realize how much I've missed working side by side with Dick. We have a shorthand I don't share with any of the others, save for maybe Alfred. He's always been the one keeping me centered. Grounded."
I genuinely don't think Bruce has a favorite among his sons, I don't think that's what this is about. He has a unique relationship with each of them and each of them are narratively a reflection of a different aspect of Bruce, each of them occupies their own space that's not about the others.
But, and admittedly I may well be biased because of who my favorite is, I do think Dick was the first and that means something. Because he was the one that broke down the wall first and because it had to be him that broke down that wall, the way his tragic loss mirrors Bruce's and the way Dick is a narrative counterweight to Bruce, that Dick amongst all of them, is the overall superhero that Bruce wants to see in the world. He's the light that Bruce wants to see, even while he works in the dark. He's the one who refuses to not be loved, time and again. Respected, yes. But also Dick demands to be loved.
That this is what keeps Bruce centered. That being poked and prodded to keep acknowledging that he loves people and that his presence in their lives helps them, that's what grounds him. That's reflected in Dick's big speech in this issue, that Thomas and Martha disapprove of Batman because they haven't yet seen what Bruce did for these kids he loves, what he did for Dick's life.
And, too, I think Dick was the youngest when he came to Bruce and the one Bruce raised the most, that Dick will always be his boy in a way the others were already halfway to adulthood, that Bruce loves all of them just as much as each other, but Dick will always be his kid. It's why he struggles over and over with respecting Dick's independence and autonomy, because that right there is his baby even more than the others, who came to him later and more independent.
Bruce has unique, complicated, and fascinating relationships with each of his sons, so much depends on who needs him the most, that's who gets the priority and the interaction and narrative weight at the moment. But when you ask which one of them does Bruce need the most--it's the one who understands him and centers him, the one who still looks at him, this complicated and flawed and often broken man of a father, and says, no, you're going to love me.
Because that's what Bruce needs more than anything, that's when Bruce is at his most interesting as a character, when he's interacting with those he loves and being forced to reckon with all his issues because he needs to be better for them.
that's when Bruce is at his most interesting as a character, when he's interacting with those he loves and being forced to reckon with all his issues because he needs to be better for them
This! Exactly!! This is exactly why I always hold that if you want to tell the story of Bruce-as-Batman as something that is sustainable, that is ultimately healing, it NEEDS to be accompanied by his kids.
I mean, putting him in a parental role also just really rounds out his arc and the complexity of his response to the ultimate catalyst to his vigilantism in the first place. It’s one thing to say he fights crime because crime killed his parents, and that’s great on a certain level, but as a whole person with multiple emotional needs, it addresses an entirely different and far more personal facet of that traumatic experience for him to turn around and say “no one else should face that, and I mean that in a general, citywide sense, and also in the case of these specific children”. Making Bruce see that journey in others, from the outside, now as the person with the reigns on the situation?? Whole other ballpark.
I love seeing characters really needing to figure out now to *be* or *give* what they didn’t *get*. It speaks to me of actual healing on an emotional level that achieving concrete progress against an antagonistic problem doesn’t.
Especially because, with Dick, this was the first time he saw the chance to personally step in and say “not again” in a manner that’s less about prevention and more about recovery, which is the thing that Bruce, personally, needs too. And as hard as the disagreements are for them both, they’re also so vital. Because Bruce’s goal raising his kid was to give Dick a chance to not be like him. And he succeeded.
So every time Dick turns that relatively high emotional awareness right around and inflicts it on the parent who he refuses to not let love him? He’s using the fruits of both their hard work to continue insisting on the dynamic that saved them both.
Are there problems? Sure, but I have a lot of feelings about how central Dick Grayson generally is to a story of vigilantism that doesn’t eat Bruce’s humanity alive.
I mean, putting him in a parental role also just really rounds out his arc and the complexity of his response to the ultimate catalyst to his vigilantism in the first place.
Yes, this is it!! The entire reason that Bruce became Batman in the first place is because of the deaths of his parents, that this little boy lost his entire world and that he is still that scared, angry little boy in so many ways--so how do you complete that narrative arc? How do you show the character growth from that point?
You give Bruce a child who mirrors that loss and have Bruce stepping into the role of being that kid’s father. You have Bruce willingly make another connection that means just as much as the one he had to his parents, but this time in the other direction.
Dick is the clearest reflection of Bruce’s loss in that their parents died to random violence in front of them, Dick is a reflection of Bruce’s desire to see a superhero in the world who is capable of making hard decisions and leading teams but is also light and hope, Dick is the version of Batman that Batman wishes he could be, and to have Bruce be the one that raised him, loved him, and claimed him as son, that is the rounding out of his character arc.
A little boy loses his parents and breaks because of it. A man takes in another little boy and he finally starts to heal because he becomes the parent that the little boy needs him to be, the little boy that refused to not be loved. A man takes in three more kids and says, these are my sons, he embraces being family to these kids in a way that starts to heal the wounds of that little eight year old’s loss. There will always be a scar from it, he’ll always be driven to be Batman because of it, it’ll never be smooth, they’ll always fight about it because Bruce does tend to backslide (progress on these things should never be smooth, it’s always a zig-zag and progress/regress, that’s just how people work), but if you want to get at the core themes of Batman, you have to get into his relationships with other people.
It was his relationship with his parents that created Batman, of course it has to be his relationship with his kids that round out Bruce Wayne’s character on a thematic level. And that growth starts with Dick Grayson, the clearest mirror of Bruce’s loss, the one who understands him the best, the one that came to him the youngest and is the most my boy of them all, not a favorite, but the one that fulfills the role of Bruce’s child, the one that is most like Batman in being an all-rounder kind of superhero.
(In contrast, looking at this from Dick’s side of things, what creates his character arc is the mirror inverse of this, that he has to struggle with being in Batman’s shadow, that he can’t just be Bruce’s mirror, he has to be his own man, but he also cannot ever truly leave Batman behind, he’s a Bat, that’s the path he’s chosen in his life, that he starts as a little boy full of rage and sunshine both, and he grows up to be both a son of two families, the Graysons and the Waynes, he grows up to be angry but choosing to lead and fight with hope and love, to live his own life away from being Bruce’s emotional crutch, but also this is his father, he’ll never not be Bruce Wayne’s son, that his character is rounded out with being defined by Batman and then shaping that definition into what he wants to be.
Dick Grayson is shaped by the events of his life, he’ll never not be a Bat, he’ll never not be the one that understands Bruce the most, but he’ll also be Nightwing, not Batman Lite, he’ll struggle with isolating when he’s upset, but he loves so deeply that he comes out of it on his own, he struggles with wanting to control all the situations like Bruce does, but he deliberately chooses to back off and trust, he will grow into the kind of leader that the entire superhero world will look to.
Dick Grayson is so often killed off in so many major event stories because he’s kind of the representation of hope in the DC universe, you kill Dick Grayson, you know that world is fucked. That’s who Dick Grayson has always been, his arc is rounded out by him seeing Batman and going, “I’m taking all the best of the things you taught me, as Batman and as my father, and I’m going to be the light of this world, instead of the dark. I refuse to not be loved.”)
HELP WHILE Ao3 IS DOWN SOME PEOPLE ARE POSTING FICS IN THE DOWNDETECTOR COMMENTS 😭😭😭
I’M SCREAMING
Anonymous asked:
Post-post-post cannon Wangxian being completely in love in the cloud recessess as teenagers who time travelled back to their own 16-17 year old bodies on accident.
In love. Wangxian are in love. In love. Just smooph and fluff.
Like they're effortlessly in love. (No matter how much Jiang Cheng yells and ties to control Wei Wuxian, Wei Wuxian casually refuses to hear any of it, as he'd been ignoring Jiang Cheng's homophobia and hate forever by the time they both came back by accident. )
Also wwx doesn't hide his genius and every one around him is like senpai *heart eyes* (honestly he's almost forgotten how to hide his effortless genius.)
(Just FYI, don't have to include this: this Wei Wuxian has long since come to terms with all his war and Sunshot and Shiji related trauma— just FYI.)
I just want to read as much of the smooph, smushy fluff and love you can stomach writing please.
Extra points if you can show them both just effortlessly and absentmindedly flirting.
(You don't have to incude this, but: They just take like a weekend off and go raze the main Wen family to the ground casually— back late with Starbucks— "We were night hunting. What do you mean the Wen family died? So sad. We feel so bad. Don't we feel bad?" " Mm. Feel bad.")
Thank you so much for existing in this fandom. I love your fics. I love you. 💖
vrishchikawrites answered:
Xichen is proud of his brother but he can’t deny that he is sometimes concerned for him as well. Wangji is a dedicated and accomplished disciple but he is isolated from his peers. Xichen has friends and confidants but Wangji is simply content to be by himself.
That is concerning, even for a Lan.
He had hopes that incoming disciples would manage to shake him up a little but that hope didn’t last long. Year after year, Wangji continued to remain aloof, not expressing any interest in the disciples.
But something has changed this year. Xichen didn’t even know what was going on until a few weeks into the introduction of the guest disciples.
藍湛
字 忘機
Lan Zhan
Courtesy name WangJi
Why do Wei Ying and Lan Zhan call each other by their formal names, while most everyone else calls them Wei WuXian and Lan WangJi?
I see some people getting confused about why a guy has so many names, and it’s not exactly obscure knowledge but not everyone knows this, even if you’re a native speaker. But the connotations are so delicious, so I’m gonna paraphrase some stuff from a Lofter post here: http://cherrywolfling.lofter.com/post/1e533604_1c65417ff
Lan
藍
is the family name. Zhan
湛
is his formal name (名) and WangJi
忘機
is his courtesy name (字).
Wei Ying 魏嬰 is the formal name, and Wei WuXian 魏無羨 is the courtesy name.
HanGuang Jun 含光君 is a title (號 or 号) that other folks address him as to show respect, same goes for the YiLing Patriarch 夷陵老祖, which I’ll talk about in another post.
Lan Zhan, the formal name, is his birthname that his parents gave him when the baby is 3 months old. Lan WangJi, the courtesy name, is given to him by elders in the family or some VIP when he’s about 20.
You’re not supposed to call someone by their formal name if you’re about the same age, because it’s rude, and can be taken as picking a fight, so you almost always use their courtesy name, unless you’re their elders in the family, or you’re *close*.
When you talk about yourself, though, you should always use your formal name. It’s silly and awkward to refer to yourself with your courtesy name, kinda like talking about oneself in the third person.
You can still use the courtesy name to address someone even if you’re their elder, perhaps to show courtesy, or perhaps because you don’t want to assume familiarity.
Here come the interesting parts:
A. Wei Ying only started calling Lan Zhan by his formal name because Lan Zhan ignored him all the previous times when Wei Ying addressed him courteously.
B. Lan Zhan only started calling Wei Ying by his formal name because Wei Ying added *adult content* into his reading material and Lan Zhan got quite upset.
C. The elder Jiang clan leader calls Wei Ying / Wei WuXian by several forms of both of his names, sometimes A-Xian but more often A-Ying; Jiang’s wife Madam Yu calls him Wei Ying, which sounds exactly like when your grade school teacher calls you up by your full name.
D. Jiang Cheng calls Wei Ying by his courtesy name Wei WuXian all the time, even though they’re close like brothers, because while he might not be polite to Wei Ying, he certainly adheres to the established social norms. Meanwhile, Wei WuXian always calls him and Wen Ning by their formal names, because he is *~untamed~*.
E. Jiang Cheng’s courtesy name is Jiang WanYin; Wen Ning’s courtesy name is Wen QiongLin. The only two times I saw these used in the TV series were:
(i) Lan Zhan addressing Jiang Cheng. Lan Zhan is a polite boy. Also, you almost never hear him directly addressing someone who’s not his elder or Wei Ying. The only time he called out Jiang WanYin’s name was to stop him from you-know-what; that’s why it sounded so abrupt.
(ii) Wei Ying addressing Wen Ning. The only time Wei Ying called him Wen QiongLin was in a panic and to wake him up from possession. Otherwise the audience would’ve forgotten that Wen Ning wasn’t his courtesy name.
Calling someone by their courtesy name doesn’t always mean respect, though. It’s just a way to show you’re spotless in terms of social customs. Examples are the minor villains Wen Chao and Jin ZiXun, who are very happy to torture Wei WuXian while addressing him with his courtesy name.
How is a courtesy name usually picked?
1. Pick words that have the same meaning as the formal name.
2. Pick words that are similar or adjacent in meaning to the formal name.
3. Pick words that are the antonyms to the formal name.
4. Pick words that explain or expand on the formal name.
Okay so WWX actually calls everyone he is close to by formal name then? Huh, so it’s not that special that he calls LWJ by formal name.
Actually the point about you should always refer yourself by your formal name is not correct, wen ning has referred himself by his courtesy name. Also they’re given their courtesy name by the time they start schools, because they will start interacting with their peers, that’s quite a few years before 20. All of the characters have courtesy names when they’re 15 when they’re introduced in the cloud recesses flashback.
I don’t think it’s always about politeness, it’s sometimes just a habit. rando in the cultivation world refer wwx as yiling laozu wei wuxian, he’s rarely called wei ying by ppl in the cultivation world (wen chao called him wei ying sometimes in the anime, but not in the novels). I think this is mainly because wei wuxian sounds way more badass than his birth name which just means baby. Wei wuxian does tend to call everyone by their formal names, i think he just finds it more bloke-ish? Lan xichen is sorta the opposite, he tends to address people in the most polite, gentle and affectionate ways e.g. Wei gongzi, Ah Yao.
I’m glad you noticed the part about Wen Ning, and actually the Lofter OP had pointed out the same about Lan Zhan referring to himself as “WangJi” when he said “This is WangJi’s fault.” So the show is pretty good at attention to details in many places, but maybe not so much classical grammar.
An example was in episode 15 right after Madam Yu first slapped Wang LingJiao in the face: she said 賤婢爾敢 - “Lowborn slave, you dare?” which is jarring in a way a modern speaker tries to talk like someone from a thousand years ago. Half a dozen Youtube comments pointed it out, and Tencent had the voice actor redo the part, so now it is corrected to 賤婢敢爾 - “Lowborn slave, [you] dare [behave] thus!”
I last read the novel more than 3 years ago when it was still pre-revision, so I don’t remember how far MXTX took her artistic license and ran with this cultivator universe, but the Lofter OP is correct about historical usage of the names and ages. If you consider the fact that these fictional characters look the same whether they’re 170 or 30, you might could say they’re functionally adults at the young age of 15.
I agree with you on Wei Ying sounding less badass than Wei WuXian, but the reason everyone on the street calls him by his courtesy name might be more complicated. An analogy would be if you google the famous Su Shi rather than his art name Su DongPo, you get 1000 times more results, but if you talk to less well-educated kids about him, you might find that a lot of them know Su DongPo but not Su Shi.
Also, I love what you said about Lan XiChen – by all rights, he should address Wei Ying by his courtesy name, but he doesn’t, because it’s both distant sounding and less polite (compared to Wei gongzi), yet at the same time he doesn’t call him by his formal name either, even though he is elder to Wei Ying. There is debate among the readers though, about what he now calls Wei Ying after the show ends, because by then Wei Ying is practically his brother-in-law.
Related meta posts
Courtesy names | Courtesy names 2 | Honorific titles |
Name meanings | Genealogy register | Sanren
caladria asked:
Hello! I have a names-related question. So if adding "A" to a name makes it like a pet name/familiar, like A-Xien and A-Li, could one add it to Lan WanJi like A-Zhan or A-Wanji? Would that ramp up the cute factor or just be incredibly rude? I'm only asking because Wei WuXien giving Lan WanJi pet names and addresses gives me life.
bigbadredpanda answered:
Hello there! I’ll answer to the best of my ability but again I’m no expert on the matter of naming convention and classical Chinese is quite different from contemporary Chinese (just look at the sheer complexity of the Chinese honourifics wiki page). Feel free to correct me if I get something wrong.
Following the previous discussion on the use of courtesy names, @bridges-you-cross made a good point that it would be highly unusual to call someone just by their given name if it’s comprised of a single character. (That’s true within Chinese-speaking communities but many of my Chinese friends just tell people who don’t speak the language to call them by their given name even if’s a single character for simplicity’s sake.)
One way to call someone you know well whose given name has one character is to add either a diminutive prefix or suffix.
A possibility is -er (儿) as a suffix as said above. Wen Ruohan calls his son ‘Chao-Er’ in the donghua (ep.10). As Er means individually ‘child’, that’s a suffix that is used on a younger person. Also, that’s a phoneme that is more prevalent in the varieties of northern dialects (like Mandarin Chinese) than in southern ones (in modern times, the Beijing variety of Mandarin often slips -er/-r at the end of some words).
In Mo Dao Zu Shi, it’s mainly the prefix A- (阿) that is used as a form of endearment. It’s more common in southern dialects and it’s generally associated with either the second character of a name or with a one-character name but it seems that it can be employed in front of a two-character name though I haven’t really seen such use. Jiang Yanli calls her younger brothers ‘A-Xian’ and ‘A-Cheng’. Lan Xichen calls Jin Guangyao ‘A-Yao’. Jin Guangyao calls his wife ‘A-Su’. In one of the audio drama extra, Lan Qiren calls Lan Wangji ‘A-Zhan’ when he was a small child. Jin Ling is called ‘A-Ling’ by his parents and uncles.
Where my family is from, an alternative that is used the same way as A- is the prefix Xiao- (小) which means individually ‘little’ but I’m not sure how widespread it is. It’s more common to use in front of a surname as a familiar form of address with someone younger in modern China.
An affectionate and cutesy nickname can also be coined by doubling the second character of a name. At one point, Jiang Yanli calls Wei Wuxian ‘Xianxian’ when he was acting childishly (ch.71).
As to whether a form of address is cute or rude, it depends on the relationship between the two persons and how close they are. It’s fine with a child but using a diminutive unprompted can be deemed overly familiar.
The fact that it's actually harder to gaslight Lan Xichen after Lan Wangji has told him something. I think it's a pretty cool fact. Like how Lan Xichen didn't believe for a second that Wei Wuxian was evil. Even if he couldn't save his life, he didn't condemn him or the love that his brother had for him. Like "Other people might play those games but my brother is not one of those people. Wangji would never lie to me."
As soon as Lan Wangji tells Lan Xichen what he believes is the truth about Jin Guangyao, Lan Xichen does not want to believe it, but the way he looks at Jin Guangyao has already changed and Jin Guangyao knows it. The way he smiles and pulls away, turning down Lan Xichen's invitation to say the night. Jin Guangyao already knows, he's messed up by letting Lan Wangji live. He's lost a quarter of Lan Xichen's trust. Pretty awesome that their brotherhood is so formidable that not even 13 years of gaslighting can come between them.
