#5zun

[allmydokkuns]

Hello I'm back on my bullshit about 3zunchengning poly AU, don't mind if I do scuse me I've been having some feelings about them all interacting so I'm just gonna get em down for posterity

A lot of the feelings I have about MingChengYao interaction boil down to my overthinking about Nie braids and Jiang braids + colors... Like in a world where Nie braids (CQL) and Jiang braids (donghua) exist, I feel like Nie braids are characterized more by symmetry and intricacy of arrangement whereas Jiang braids... not so much. Both evolved from the practical need to keep hair up, tidy and clean longer (Nie because butchers, Jiang because out on the water and at the mercy of the elements). But where Qinghe took them braids and really ran with it to distinguish between different roles, etc and also part of their sect identity (bc canonically the reason MY was treated like shit was because his mother was a prostitute and not formally part of Lanling Jin, so too I bet other clans also looked down on Qinghe for being founded by a butcher) as a "fuck you" to the snobs, Jiang braids developed in a different direction. Yunmeng braids could be intricate in certain contexts (maybe earlier in the sect history especially for significant life events?), they have for the most part kept more to the root of their origin (to keep the face clear of hair and out of the way in windy/stormy weather conditions, so navigating on the water is never hindered). In Yunmeng, hair is sectioned and braided to follow more curving lines around the head; those who are particularly skilled at it are said to have hands from which rivers flow, or you might say of someone whose hair is beautifully done that their hair runs like sweet water. Wrapping braids with (silken) cord or ribbons is also a favored style, and these kinds of accessories are a common gift from parents whose children are of marriageable age, or from a suitor with the means to impress. While intricate braids are beautiful, doing them up like that all the time takes time and energy best used for other things, so quality of hair ornaments/clothing counts just as much when you're looking at a person, perhaps arguably even more in a sect who can afford to clothe disciples in purple/black and issue them metal bells as tokens of their status as said disciples. Jiang Cheng as we see him in CQL (as jiujiu) wears sumptuous clothing, but doesn't have an equally intricate hairstyle, and arguably he doesn't need one in order to express how powerful of a man he is.

On the other hand, the relative intricacy found in Qinghe braids is also due in part to the martial aspect of the sect -- in CQL and the donghua their associated colors aren't quite as flashy as Lanling gold or Yunmeng purples, but dark grays or muted greens suit a martially inclined sect very well; different grades of fabric for clothing and different details in disciples' braids also help differentiate between those of different rank/roles in the sect. You can really see this in Meng Yao's rise in Qinghe -- from when he first meets Mingjue personally with his single braid fetching water to him personally escorting the heir apparent to Qinghe to the guest lectures in Gusu with those smaller, delicately wrought braids.

Hair and its arrangement is really important to how Mingjue, Jiang Cheng and Meng Yao show closeness in the polycule. Not only did Mingjue bestow braids (and status, and influence) on A-Yao with those braids, he also was the first person to disregard Meng Yao's background in favor of his own capability! The fact that we see young Huaisang in Fatal Journey with the same guan as Meng Yao years later in Gusu implies that Huaisang gifted it to him. To my knowledge the only three people we see with the coiled braids in CQL are Mingjue, Huaisang and Meng Yao -- also implying a level of regard (or closeness) not bestowed to the majority of the sect's disciples...

In the donghua we see Jiang Cheng adopting the same side braids that his father wore after the fall of Lotus Pier; Jiang Yanli wears a braided hairstyle as well! This implies the same kind of exclusivity as to who can wear their hair like that, at least in the donghua. Arguably in CQL you get more of that style mirroring with JYL and WWX with wrapped braids but I digress because in my 5-way sworn brother poly fixit all three siblings work that shit out and become even closer after the fall of Lotus Pier. Anyway the point I'm trying to make here is that once Yanli marries into Lanling Jin she'd be expected to take on the dress, style, colors of her husband's birth clan; same goes for Wei Wuxian who would presumably kind of tone his whole protagonist thing down to respect Gusu Lan's history of ascetic aesthetic :^) So obviously Jiang Cheng would have to look to his partners for that kind of style sharing and intimacy because let's be real, the man was absolutely robbed of people to lavish soft domestic attention on to in canon timeline. Mingjue has only Huaisang's hair to do until he gets himself some partners and a bunch of nieces/nephews through sworn brotherhood so give the man some hair to play with. Meng Yao had even less than both Jiang Cheng and Mingjue so he also needs somebody's hair to do and do hair for!!

Uhh in case anyone's wondering why I'm waxing so poetical about hair and domesticity, it's because way back in the day if you were seen in public with your hair down or improperly styled then you were either insane or embarrassed about it. The only people in your life that would see you with your hair completely unstyled are the person who's putting your hair up for you/attending you in the bath, if any, or your family that you live with (your spouse and children, maybe, and maybe not even that if you're posh enough). Like a lot of fanon tends to gloss over the need for servants and attendants in a more historically based setting but like. It's a thing y'all. Not shading anyone that doesn't go that deep in but it's an interesting level of detail to have. Sending away any attendants to be alone with your partner(s) carries a whole other layer when you're not married yet and supposed to be chaperoned, or when you're a busy sect leader 9 days out of 7 and your partner's just decided you need to rest and be pampered, or when you're married to like four other men and that fact is classified info, you know?

#MingChengYao #Nie Mingjue #Jin Guangyao (Meng Yao) #jiang wanyin (jiang cheng) #5-way sworn brother poly fixit #nie braids and jiang braids #5zun #3zunchengning #maybe the real found family was the sworn brothers jiang cheng picked up along the way #of course they do xichen and wen ning's hair too theyre not ones to miss out on golden opportunities #of the five of them a-yao and wen ning have the most conglomerated hairstyles bc nie-jiang braids bleed into the style they had before #also bc wn got robbed of ties with peple that weren't dafan wen adjacent so! let him have partners clamoring to comb his hair! #also let wn write letters home and pop up after his travels as a person with agency and send back or bring back little things for them #like the potential for him to grow into a person who knows his own worth and hqve ppl see him for who he is and not his clan name??? sign #me tf up for real man #penny for my thoughts but a dollar for my insights #long post

[allmydokkuns]

I had too many things going on today so y'all get some 3zunchengning downtime interaction ideas that have been kicking around my head to decompress. Might split it up into more than one post probably this is 3zun centric and already taking approximately forever to type

Da-ge and A-Yao play an almost neverending game of chess when they're both in a good place mentally and also in the same place and the same time. Chess happens to be one of the few activities da-ge and Huaisang both enjoy and do together and Meng Yao kind of got absorbed into that dynamic. Huaisang has two boards set up in his rooms in the Unclean Realm: one for his current game with da-ge and the other for san-ge. Meng Yao, on the other hand, keeps one board only and sets it up manually from memory every single time he plays with someone else. (It's a holdover habit of keeping what little space he was allotted clear and hating things taking up space that don't need to be out.)

Incidentally, once da-ge steps down so Huaisang can get a taste for holding the reins of Qinghe, he has the most time on his hands for teaching san-di and Wen Ning (and Xuanyu, once he's old enough) things that they never had the opportunity to learn. Riding, tracking, how to reduce almost any kind of game into nicely portioned edible bits, etc. He's also very insistent on any and all of his didi learning self-defense thoroughly, but avoids any mention of just why Huaisang's first act as sect leader was to make Mingjue take a vacation like the plague until Wen Ning, of all people, loses his patience with their da-ge and his blasé attitude about his impending death.

When da-ge, er-di and san-di are spending rare time free together, the outcome is never quite the same twice in a row. Once Xichen adopts Gusu Lan's orphans and they're acclimated to the sheer amount of extended family via sworn brotherhood they now have, 3zun often spends time with Xichen's kids, their collective nieces/nephews, etc. since Xichen is a Single Dad who worries he's messing up without knowing it, A-Yao's social meter isn't overextended with just the kids around, and they both really get a special kick out of seeing Mingjue allowing himself to relax and be drowning in children ranging from one-half to one-third his height. The kids love spending time with a-die, baba and bobo and feel very safe knowing three of the jianghu's most powerful men are in the same room.

When the kids are with someone else, what 3zun does with their time together depends. The closer it is in the year to the not-anniversary of Guanyin Temple/Mingjue's death, the more likely they are to quietly shut themselves in someone's rooms or private pavilion and spend the time entangled in each other in some way. (A-Yao asked at some point before they established this routine whether he should make himself scarce around that time. Xichen and Mingjue both shoot him down unequivocally. They all cry a little. No one mentions it after that.)

Er-ge and A-Yao on their own are much more likely to spend the time on a variety of pursuits. Sometimes it's poetry. Depending on the season and location, sometimes it's flower-viewing. Other times A-Yao quietly accompanies Xichen while he's painting or playing music, taking the time to read for pleasure or copy over works he likes/is interested in. They essentially use the time to indulge the more scholarly/artistic sides of themselves. Alternatively, A-Yao plans small outings to night markets or festivals and whisks Xichen away from his worries for a few hours, or if they've had a particularly bad time of it lately, they curl up together in a peaceful spot. Tea and snacks are mandatory, observations about their mutual acquaintances delivered in A-Yao's signature barbed pleasantries an occasional guest. ("A-Yao, have you perhaps been spending a lot of time with da-ge and Wanyin lately? It's almost as if they're here speaking to me..." / "Forgive me er-ge, I never realized how much it burdened you to be reminded of da-ge and our husband. Perhaps this san-di should endeavor to emulate Yao-zongzhu instead?")

Da-ge and er-di rarely get a chance to spend time purely by themselves, but when they do it's more likely because somebody somewhere found cause for a nighthunt requiring their Sects' special skillsets than it is due to coincidence, at least right after Sunshot. Da-ge conceded to training with Baxia less but refuses to abandon her altogether, so it's not uncommon to find the two sparring when they get the chance at all, blades optional. After Wen Ning lost his temper with Mingjue, he took his Didi's collective concerns to heart and started devoting time to research his family's history and qi deviation. This puts him in Gusu more often than not to take advantage of the Library there, and has the happy side effect of Xichen's kids getting to see their bobo more often. Jingyi is especially ecstatic about this, since Mingjue usually has cool stories or hidden snacks, and is almost always down to be covered in tiny Lan children.

#3zun #3zun centric #3zunchengning #for lack of a better ship name #maybe the real found family was the sworn brothers jiang cheng picked up along the way #5 way sworn brother time travel poly fixit #ain't a fix-it unless it includes found family and soft domestic settings amirite #Nie Mingjue #Lan Xichen (Lan Huan) #Jin Guangyao (Meng Yao) #not a lot of jiang cheng in one of my posts for once color me surprised #ah well he'll get a post just for him in the same spirit later #Wen Qionglin (Wen Ning) #Mo Xuanyu #those are more like just mentions though #typed this instead of sleeping and resting my wrists so eh #implied xichengyao #kinda sorta even the 5zun is implied tho

[allmydokkuns]

Ok da-ge drunk HC time GO

Def not an excited drunk the world isn't ready for 2/3rds of the original Triad to be excited drunks if u know what I mean but how bout like either

Acts almost like Sober but will expound on some kind of Very Niche interest in the form of lectures so structured it's like you're a guest disciple at the Cloud Recesses again but like. Older. (They're not structured as such because da-ge has an overly academic mind, it's just what he has playing in his head during intersect conferences when somebody is taking a shichen to talk about something that can be resolved in a moment.)

For some reason brain says da-ge's niche interest is probably things that can kill a man, so probably weaponry. I imagine in a modern AU where Xue Yang isn't a murder gremlin da-ge will be having a night out with the bois extrapolating on the nuances of jian (canon double-edged straight "sword") versus uhhh. polearms or smth idk and Xue Yang pops in out of nowhere and inserts himself into the conversation and keeps showing up when they're at their regular spot until Mingjue gains another Murder Didi™ by accident

Or maybe Mingjue is more of a gloomy drunk that hovers on the edge of drunk logic existential crises and must always be distracted in the form of being handed a drunk/tipsy didi or real good food so he doesn't do the mental equivalent of Panic! At the Disco's One of the Drunks

Anyway uhh I feel the need to append a friendly reminder to drink responsibly y'all (keep hydrated, don't drink on an empty stomach, etc) after my last post about drunk er-ge and also it's Friday now so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ happy Friday?

#nie Mingjue #mdzs hc #Nie Mingjue #Xue Chengmei (Xue Yang) #xue yang #like can you imagine a modern au in which da-ge gets All the Murder Didi in this series like #thats about as dramatic of a fixit of canon that you really could get inthink #if there are any typos i am not sorry my joints are just. meh today #clutches non-existent pearls #i kinda wanna write a thing with drunk 5zun (3zunchengning) bc i feel like it could be either Very Serious or complete crack #5 way sworn brother time travel poly fixit