an au where cangse sanren and wei changze survive but the canon events still happen would honestly be so funny?
imagine sending your son off to the lan lectures w/ jc bc jfm is worried jc wont make friends there and wwx comes back and instead of complaining about the food or whatever, he is absolutely enamoured with lqr’s nephew. cangse sanren stares at her husband in despair and carefully decides to travel away from gusu for a few months hoping wwx will develop better taste in men.
imagine letting wwx go to hang out with jc only to find out that he voluntarily went to the indoctrination camp with him to keep him safe even though he’s just a rogue cultivator and then he shows up later, having broken out, even more enamoured w/ lwj and he’s killed the xuanwu while he’s at it.
then, you turn away from him for like two minutes and he’s gone back to lotus pier to make sure jc got back safely and then lotus pier burns down, your son disappears for three months and comes out using demonic cultivation. what do you say?? cangse sanren just goes hey kid what the ever-loving fuck and wwx is like check this out in the same way he did when he wanted to show off a cool sword trick and makes a corpse wave at her. she waves back and wwx just immediately starts discussing his theories w/ his dad about how to do cool stuff to revolutionise the world and she’s just like ????? oh that’s a good idea but ????.
after the sunshot campaign would be the first sign of canon divergence bc there is no way cangse sanren would not stand up for her son, sect leaders or not, but while that’s happening wwx rescues the wens so when they go back to their camp they see the wen remnants and wei changze is like somehow he’s even more of a handful than you are and cangse sanren is caught between like swooning bc her husband is such a smoothtalker and yelling at wwx because honestly what the fuck. it only gets worse when lwj shows up and it turns out that he’s even more enamoured with wwx than wwx is with him,, somehow.