A to Z: Lan Wangji

    Given my post just a few days ago, I'm sure today's post subject comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with Mo Dao Zu Shi.  For those not familiar, a crash course in the character in the original work before I start talking about how I've handled him in my fanfic.  (Oh, and there is now a glossary page on the side bar if any of the terms in this post need explaining!  😁)

    Lan Wangji, birth name Lan Zhan, sobriquet Hanguang-jun, also known as the Second Jade of Gusu (with his elder brother Lan Xichen collectively referred to as the Twin Jades), heir to the repressively strict Lan Clan cultivation sect based in the isolated Cloud Recesses, twenty li from the city of Gusu.  (A li is a distance of measure which I believe I read somewhere is about equivalent to a kilometer.)  As the love interest of MDZS, Lan Wangji is over-powered, being good at absolutely everything, and his character flaws are somewhat hidden.  The only strictly obvious flaw in him--the only reason he ranked second on the eligible bachelors list rather than first--is that he's very serious, almost incapable of having facial expressions, and that he doesn't talk much, so he has an icy air to him, unlike his brother, who projects a friendly warmth.  His hidden character flaws include massive jealousy issues, and being surprisingly horny.

Lan Wangji in the comic adaptation of the novel

    As a character, he's something of a mystery.  The author of Mo Dao Zu Shi, Mo Xiang Tong Xiu, writes in a style that feels very unusual to me, though it may not be unusual for her genre.  (I haven't read enough danmei other than hers to be sure one way or the other.)  What strikes me as odd is that the narrator is omniscient except having little to no knowledge of what the love interest is thinking; this has been the case in all three of her novels.  (Maybe it's not that the narrator's omniscience fails there so much as that the narrator peevishly refuses to tell us.)  Combined with the fact that Lan Wangji does as little talking as he can and even when he has to speak he uses as few words as possible, it's sometimes hard to get a read on his personality beyond a few key aspects.  (It's slightly easier in the live-action drama, since the actor can't have a genuinely immobile face the way the character tends to be described in the novel, so he does have some expressions to read...also he manages to emote surprisingly well even without the broader expression changes available to his co-stars.)

The perpetually unamused Lan Wangji (played by Wang Yibo)

    Anyway, although we're never told directly what he's thinking the way we are with Wei Wuxian, the object of his affections, we do pretty quickly catch on to just how massively in love he is.  (Far more quickly than Wei Wuxian does, that's for sure!!)  And yet, we don't know quite when he fell in love, exactly, and since his love for Wei Wuxian seems to be his motivation for about half of what he does in the novel, it's sort of frustrating how hard it is to pin down exactly when and why he fell in love.  Was it a crazy-shallow "love at first sight?"  Did he not realize how he felt until Wei Wuxian was leaving Cloud Recesses again, or even later than that?  Did he have "lust at first sight" followed by months or even years of trying to deny his desires and the genuine feelings they were growing into?  There's really no way to be positive, and the few details we have that give us any insight into his thought processes are still vague up until a certain point in the story, by which time they had known each other for about three years in the novel. (Only about 7-9 months in the live-action version, because it compressed time a lot, partially because no way could those actors pass for being only 15 years old.  Even claiming they're 18/19 at the earliest point of the story is pushing it.)

    So, all that being the case, I have to admit that I don't feel like I have a very good grasp on the character so far as I've worked on my MDZS fanfic.  (Although possibly the biggest problem I have writing for him is that when there are large scenes of people talking, he tends to fade into the background and go unnoticed unless it's a rare case where he actually has something he wants to say.  Or unless someone seems like they might threaten and/or make advances on Wei Wuxian.  Then he leaps to life to intervene.  🤣)

    I think I actually did a pretty decent job trying to guess his inner reaction to seeing Wei Wuxian for the first time, though, when I tackled that meeting in the new short fic I wrote since finishing the super-long Jiang Cheng fic.  It won't go up on AO3 for probably a month or two (I like to let things sit a while before I edit them), but I want to talk about it here because I'm actually pretty proud of it.  It's probably going to be called "Last Loop" (that's its working title, anyway), because it's a time loop fic but told from the point of view of everyone except the person in the loop, and we're only seeing what is (hopefully) the final loop.  Specifically, in this particular time loop, Wei Wuxian is living his entire life over and over again (with full memories of every single loop), and he thinks it will finally stop if he ever manages to die with no regrets.  In this particular loop, he's certain he's hit on the way to make that happen, and one night when Lan Wangji is fourteen (and thus does not yet have his courtesy name, which in MDZS is granted to a young man when he's fifteen (in reality it was at twenty)) he's awoken by an intruder in his bedroom...

            The hour was very late, but the room was brightly lit by the moon when Lan Zhan was awoken by a noise in his chamber.  He sat up and saw a figure approaching his bed.  Before he could rise to take his sword in hand and slay the intruder, the mysterious figure stepped out into the light, and Lan Zhan’s pulse quickened.
            The intruder appeared to be about his own age, and was dressed in unremarkable black robes, with a sword on his back and a dizi stuck through his belt.  The boy’s face was more beautiful than any Lan Zhan had seen before, and when he suddenly smiled Lan Zhan was filled with awful, earthly thoughts that he knew he should not have and yet that he could not drive away.  “Who are you?” he demanded.
            Unfazed, the boy sat down on the edge of the bed as though it was natural for him to be there.  The scent of lotus blossoms and mischief accompanied him.  “You don’t know me yet--and maybe you never will--but I’m your Wei Ying,” he said.
            Ten thousand thoughts and questions collided in Lan Zhan’s mind, shattering each other into irreparable fragments as tiny as grains of sand.  But this Wei Ying sat there patiently, just smiling as brightly as the sun and watching him until Lan Zhan finally found a few undamaged thoughts.  “How did you get in here?” he asked.

    However, there's not actually much of Lan Wangji in that fic (or of Wei Wuxian, for that matter, since we mostly just see the results of things he's done off-screen) so I'll move on to other fics.

    Probably the best one to start with is "A Hidden Road," the fic that I have posted on pages on this blog instead of on AO3 because of reasons that are actually fairly stupid.  😅 Anyway, in that one...you  know, I suddenly realized that I have not actually summed up the plot in this post for those who don't know the source material.  But I feel like that process actually made the Jiang Cheng post even longer and more convoluted than it needed to be, so...I think from here on out I'm going to mostly assume that no one will be reading the posts about MDZS characters who doesn't know the original story.  (If anyone is reading it who doesn't know the story...honestly, Wikipedia probably has a summary of the basic story of the novel.)

    Okay, so, as I was saying.  In "A Hidden Road," Lan Wangji wants to protect Wei Wuxian from the rage the Jin Clan feels over his rescue of the Wen remnants and the four lives that Wen Ning took upon being revived as a fierce corpse.  But the only way Lan Wangji can think of to protect him is to hide him away at Cloud Recesses...and after stumbling across a shrine to "the scrap-collecting god" (a very small cross-over with Heaven Official's Blessing) he finds a way to do that without having to sacrifice the lives that Wei Wuxian had been trying to save.  But that still means that he's literally holding Wei Wuxian prisoner for his own protection (in much the same way that Lan Wangji's father had held his mother in confinement to protect her from the repercussions of her own actions) and of course Wei Wuxian is not happy about that, to say the least.  For the first third of the fic, we're almost exclusively in Wei Wuxian's point of view (which is a close enough POV that it's basically "unreliable narrator" territory, especially at first), so Lan Wangji becomes even more incomprehensible than he normally would be, and yet I had to try to make it so his behavior did at least make some sense to the reader.  Or rather, the reader (already knowing that Lan Wangji is head-over-heels in love) had to be able to see his actual reasoning behind his actions even though Wei Wuxian was seeing radically different motivations.  Though now that I think about it, mostly that sequence is better left for...uh...whatever day is assigned to the letter W.  🤣  But I do want to share one moment from the early portion of "A Hidden Road," the moment when Wei Wuxian wakes up at Cloud Recesses (having been rendered unconscious via acupuncture).  He wakes up earlier than he should, taking Lan Wangji by surprise...

            Finally, he was fully conscious and entirely aware of his body’s surroundings, hearing the birds outside, smelling the mingling scents of sandalwood and that bitter herbal soup, and feeling every nerve in his body.

            What those nerves were telling him, though, was confusing—no, alarming!  He was still lying in bed, but his torso had been raised slightly.  An arm held his torso in place, and a hand held the back of his head.  That much wouldn’t have been upsetting, especially since it was clearly time for another disgusting meal.

            The fact that a pair of lips were pressed up against his and a tongue was curling around his own, though…that was enough to make him panic.

            Unfortunately, his body was still paralyzed by the needle in his neck.

            All he could do at the moment was open his eyes, though when he did he was nearly blinded by the brightness of the room.  Even as his sight began to recover, he couldn’t tell the identity of his molester, only that they were a Lan:  about all he could see was a forehead and the Lan Clan ribbon resting upon it, and even that much was out of focus, being too close to his face.

            The kiss seemed excruciatingly long, much longer than the one that mysterious girl back at Mount Baifeng had stolen from him, yet it still wasn’t long enough for him to regain any control over his body.

            When the kiss was finally over, Wei Wuxian saw the other man’s eyes flit up to his as he was pulling his face away.  He gasped even as Wei Wuxian found that his mouth at least worked.

            “Lan Zhan!?”

            Lan Zhan let go of him and practically leapt away from the bed, wide-eyed.  Wei Wuxian fell backwards onto the bed, hitting his head in the process, jarring the needle in his neck a bit loose, giving him some slight hope of regaining control over his body.  “You’re awake,” Lan Zhan said, his voice trembling slightly, even as Wei Wuxian let out an exclamation of pain.

    That "mysterious girl on Mount Baifeng" was also Lan Wangji, I hasten to point out, just in case anyone's reading this who doesn't know the original story.  (Though why Wei Wuxian thought a girl would have hands big enough to wrap one hand around both his wrists at once is an unanswerable mystery.)  Basically, what Lan Wangji was thinking in this scene is that since he'll be waking Wei Wuxian later that day, he'll lose any chance for intimate moments, since he knows Wei Wuxian is going to be pissed at him for kidnapping and imprisoning him.  (No matter how much he protests that it's for Wei Wuxian's own good, he knows that his words will be largely ignored, after all.)  And since he knows that his desire to shelter Wei Wuxian may have sunk all hope of eventually having a proper romance with him (though it's not totally clear if he actually thought there was any such hope in canon at this point in the story), he can't stand the idea of passing up what might be his last opportunity for a kiss, even if it's a kiss with an unconscious partner.

    Oh, one other moment from this sequence.  After Wei Wuxian is getting used to his new life in involuntary confinement, and has started realizing that his feelings for Lan Wangji are maybe more romantic than he had originally thought, there's an incident (that would take too long to explain) that causes him to fall backwards onto a table, shattering it.  When Lan Wangji next enters the room and sees the mess, he's alarmed, and when he finds out how the table was broken, he gets worried that Wei Wuxian might be injured.

            Lan Zhan knelt by his side and took hold of his wrist to check his pulse, which immediately spiked.

            Wei Wuxian yanked his hand back.  “I’m fine!” he repeated.

            “Let me see.”

            “See?  See what?!”  His whole face—his whole body—felt hot at the request.

            “The injury.”

            “It’s not an injury!  It’s just a—”

            “Disrobe.”

            “Lan Zhan!  How can you say that so casually?!  You need to strip yourself first, like I did!”  He really hadn’t meant to say that.  He really shouldn’t have said it.  He didn’t even know why he said it!

            Lan Zhan clearly didn’t know why, either.  He had frozen stiff, as if he’d turned into a statue.  His face had gone even more pale than usual, as if he had died days ago, yet his ears and his neck seemed to be darkening, and his eyes had become bloodshot in an instant.

            “Ha ha…don’t listen to me, I’m crazy from not sleeping!”  Wei Wuxian’s voice shook as he spoke.  “And I’m hungry!  I’m gonna eat now!”

            He hastened over to where the tray of food rested on the bed and promptly stuffed as much food as he could into his mouth to ensure he couldn’t say anything else for some time to come.  When he glanced back over, he saw that Lan Zhan still hadn’t moved.  Was it really that awful a memory for him?  Or had he actually forgotten about it because he’d been so badly injured?  But Wei Wuxian was the one who had ended up with a fever; surely if he remembered then Lan Zhan had to remember…

    Cluelessness.  It's fun.  🤣

    In that fic, we don't get Lan Wangji's POV again (after a very brief scene in the prologue) until pretty late in the captivity arc, after Wei Wuxian has made his feelings known and had a bit of a nervous breakdown (not related to confessing his feelings, btw).  In the wake of that breakdown, we finally get to see what Lan Wangji is thinking again.  This particular moment of that scene is, I think, one of the better ones for me trying to get a grip on how this character's mind works.

            When he entered the cottage, he found Wei Ying sitting curled up on the bed, looking miserable.  A tightly rolled paper rested on the table, tied with a red ribbon.  Lan Wangji set the tray down beside the paper.

            “That’s my letter,” Wei Ying said.  “You’re sure Jiang Cheng will get it?”

            “I will give it to him personally,” Lan Wangji assured him, taking the letter.  Sealed with nothing but a ribbon?  Too trusting.

            Wei Ying nodded, smiling in such a vulnerable manner that it was painful to witness.  “Thanks, Lan Zhan.  You’re the best.”

            The best.  How hollow.  He was hopeless, so weak that he had been able to think of no other solution but to hide Wei Ying away from the world, where no one could harm him.  And yet without his own constant presence as a wall between that world and Wei Ying, that protection was no more than rice paper against driving rain.

    For most of his life, people have been acting like Lan Wangji is the greatest person in the world (and he really is much too good at everything), but he's always striving to be better somehow, and I think that's because he doesn't believe their words, seeing it as empty flattery, and he genuinely thinks he isn't good enough and can never be good enough, possibly due to the trauma caused by his mother's death.  (The idea of him wanting to hide Wei Wuxian away for his own protection is actually in canon, btw:  he mentions wanting to hide "someone" away at Cloud Recesses at the beginning of volume four of the novel.  And that was before the incident wherein Wei Wuxian earned the wrath of the Jin Clan.)

    Anyway, during the conversation when he delivers the letter, this happens:

            Jiang Wanyin went on speaking.  “He never said anything specifically, but I think in those first few years [after bringing Wei Wuxian to Lotus Pier], my father wanted to see jiejie’s engagement to Jin Zixuan dissolved, allowing him to engage her to Wei Wuxian instead—so that he would have the same grandchildren as Cangse-sanren despite that she’d run off with another man.”

            An intense horror at the very idea struck Lan Wangji to his core.  If Wei Ying’s intense feelings for Jiang Yanli had developed as romantic rather than fraternal…Lan Wangji would never have had any chance of breaking through such a powerful bond.  His love would have been forced to remain eternally unrequited.

            “I’m glad that never happened,” Jiang Wanyin laughed.  “Wei Wuxian would make a horrible husband.”

            Lan Wangji strongly disagreed:  he hoped to make Wei Ying into the very best of husbands.  But Jiang Wanyin was still running his mouth off about all of Wei Ying’s eccentricities, as if they were unsurmountable flaws.  Lan Wangji did not wish to hear another word of that.

    (On the subject of Wei Wuxian's (completely fraternal) feelings for Jiang Yanli, in the live-action drama, at the start of the Mount Baifeng Night Hunt (which naturally had to omit the forced kiss), after Wei Wuxian has waved eagerly at Jiang Yanli as she's walking past him in the formal entrance to the testing ground, I had paused to make some notes (I was watching the sequence to help with writing the massive Jiang Cheng fanfic) and realized I had paused perfectly on Lan Wangji giving her a jealous side-eye.  It was hilarious.)

    Anyway, moving on somewhat randomly and haphazardly to the AU fic set in New York's Chinatown in the 1980s.  This scene is pretty self-indulgent, but I love it anyway.  They're freshmen in college in this scene, and as extra credit for their English lit class, they're going to be filming scenes from Romeo and Juliet, and because more boys than girls signed up for the project, there are two scenes being shot, one in the modern manner and one in the Elizabethan manner, with guys playing the female roles, too.  Of course, Wei Wuxian was given the role of Juliet to Lan Wangji's Romeo.  (This was not, strictly speaking, as arbitrary as Wei Wuxian interpreted it to be, because Nie Huaisang was one of the people running the project, and he being preternaturally observant would of course have been aware of Lan Wangji's long-unrequited feelings.  (At a different point in the story, he tricks Wei Wuxian into attending a Halloween party dressed as a bunny girl...))  Anyway, this particular moment in the filming of their scene is one of my favorites.  (They still use Chinese name order and some of them have the equivalent of birth and courtesy names just...well...just because.  I made some excuses in-fic, but they're pretty flimsy.)

            “Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?”
            Wei Wuxian hesitated before speaking his next line, hoping the director would put a stop to the scene early.  But she didn’t, so what could he do but press on?  His grade was depending on this.  “Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.”
            “O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do:  they pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.”  How could Lan Zhan sound so earnest while speaking such utter nonsense?
            “Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.”  In Wei Wuxian’s opinions, saints should be statues, or at least he really wished he was a statue right now…
            “Then move not while my prayer’s effect I take,” Lan Zhan quoted, moving his head closer to Wei Wuxian’s.  “Thus from my lips, by thine my sin is purg’d.”
            Going into this project, Wei Wuxian had assumed that the kiss mentioned in the stage directions would be mimed from two inches away.  Or maybe there would be a brief, awkward contact that would be hastily pulled away from, red-faced.
            To his astonishment, Lan Zhan’s lips pressed firmly against his own, and after only a moment’s pause, he felt his lips being parted, and a tongue gently, almost tentatively finding its way between them.
            The kiss, which seemed to last forever and yet also be over instantly, quickly grew so intense that everything else in the room ceased to exist, and there was nothing but the fierce warmth against his lips, the strong arm gripping his torso, and the confused feelings swirling in his chest.
            Once it was over, it took him some time to realize that the director had yelled “Cut!” and was approaching them.
            What had just happened?  Why would Lan Zhan have…?  No one kissed like that in a stage play, not even when they were kissing a girl!
            “Wangji, that was very…um…”  The director paused, biting her lip.  As usual, she didn’t seem to notice the frown that crossed Lan Zhan’s still-moist lips at the overly casual and familiar way she was addressing him.  (Because he for some reason viewed the world through a very oddly colored lens in which he honestly seemed to expect people to behave as if it was several hundred years ago.  Which was one of the many things that often made him inadvertently hilarious.)  “I mean, really, it’s…”  She stopped again, and sighed deeply before continuing.  “While it would be an interesting twist for Romeo to be disemboweled by the Capulets at the end of Act I for trying to mate with Juliet’s tonsils on the dance floor, let’s try and stick with the original script, okay?”
            “I’m sorry.  I thought it was what Romeo would do.”  As long as they had known each other, and Lan Zhan could still surprise him!  Wei Wuxian would never have guessed he would take acting so seriously.  Then again, he did sort of take everything as seriously as possible, so it was probably silly to be surprised…
            “Well…maybe, but you’re not playing Romeo.  You’re playing a 16th century actor who’s playing Romeo.”
            A tiny frown turned down the corners of Lan Zhan’s lips, but he didn’t say anything to voice his concerns at that nonsensical direction.  The director must have seen that he didn’t get it, though, because she turned to Huaisang.  “Hugh, can you explain it to him?”  The worst part of the way their white classmates addressed them all was that Huaisang was the only one who came out of it with a nickname that sounded like a typical American name, the sort of thing that could be shouted in a crowded subway station without making everyone stare.
            “Well, it’s like she said, isn’t it?” Huaisang said, as he hurried over.  “We’re trying to show the class how the play would have looked in Shakespeare’s time, right?”
            “Shouldn’t we have cast nothing but white dudes, then?” the guy playing Tybalt asked.
            “If only white guys had shown up, yeah,” the director said, “but they didn’t, so shut your piehole!”  She shook her head, and looked back at Lan Zhan.  “Try and think of it this way:  he’s not Juliet, and he’s not Wuxian, either.  He’s a sixteen-year-old boy with bad skin, a squeaky voice, awful breath, and a general pong like he hasn’t bathed in years.”

    I love two things about that scene.  First, the contrast of Lan Wangji's obvious thought process of "this will make Wei Ying understand my feelings for him" with Wei Wuxian's reaction of "gee, who would have guessed Lan Zhan is a method actor?"  And second, the director's description of the kiss being "Romeo attempting to mate with Juliet's tonsils on the dance floor."

    And moving on again, to one of the shorter and stranger fics, there is a trend of doing AUs where Lan Wangji is a dragon and/or Wei Wuxian is a fox spirit.  There's even English-specific terminology for them (Dragonji and Foxian), though I've seen (fan?) art actually from China showing them that way, so it's definitely not exclusively an English-language thing.  Anyway, I wrote a fic where Lan Wangji as a dragon was all that existed of the Lan Clan, and I enjoyed the air of mystery I gave him at the start of that one.  (There are various other differences from canon, but that's the big one.)

            No one went to Cloud Recesses unless they were desperate.  That was common knowledge.  But how could they not be desperate?  Three teenage orphans, the sole survivors of their clan, alone in a merciless world, cut off from their grandmother’s home, the only possible hope of safety they had.
            When the Wen Clan’s lines had closed before them and prevented them from fleeing to Meishan, what other option had laid before them but to turn and run in the opposite direction, fleeing as far and as fast as their weary legs would take them?  By the time they were within a hundred li of the coast, rumors had hit their ears.  That there was still a dragon living in the isolated Cloud Recesses.  That if one brought sufficient gifts, the dragon might repay them with a gift in turn.  Some claimed to have gained wealth.  Others were rumored to have found their destined partner.  And there were those, it was whispered, who were able to bring destruction down on their enemies.
            They hadn’t needed to discuss it.
             As one, the three survivors of Lotus Pier had turned their steps towards Gusu, towards Cloud Recesses.  Towards the dragon.  Their only hope of avenging their family.
            It had been a long walk to get there—Cloud Recesses was twenty li away from Gusu itself—and the place was not welcoming.  Though there were fine, elegant buildings half hidden among the bamboo forests along the mountain’s further slopes, only a single, stern pavilion was open to guests.  The guide who had brought them there from town had told them what to expect as the three of them walked inside.
            There, as described, sat a lone man on a stone bench with a guqin laid across his lap.  Hanguang-jun was everything that the guide had said he would be:  tall, serene, as elegant and pale as if he had been carved from jade, and plainly without interest in anything he saw before him.  The guide hadn’t been clear as to whether this Hanguang-jun was the dragon’s attendant or whether he himself was the dragon, but Jiang Cheng would have believed it either way; he looked too perfectly emotionless to be human.
             The three of them bowed low before him, then kneeled and set out the gifts they had brought.  “We are the only survivors of the Jiang Clan,” Jiang Cheng explained.  “The Wen Clan attacked our home without warning or provocation and killed our family and friends.  We beg you, let the dragon visit the same devastation on the Wen Clan and avenge Lotus Pier!”
            Hanguang-jun regarded them all with a cold, blank face, his eyes slipping from jiejie and the homemade soup she had brought to Jiang Cheng and the fine swords he had rescued from the ruins of Lotus Pier, to Wei Wuxian and the spiritual tools he had made.  Hanguang-jun’s gaze seemed to linger for a moment, then he gestured Wei Wuxian forward with one hooked finger.
            Nervously, Wei Wuxian rose and picked up his gifts, approaching the bench.  “Um, these are still prototypes, but they’re really very effective if—”
             Hanguang-jun shook his head, causing Wei Wuxian to stop both his words and his forward movement.  But then the strange man in his white and pale blue robes gestured him closer again.
            Wei Wuxian started walking again.  “If...if you’re not interested in the tools…”  He looked down at himself uncertainly.  “Did you...want my sword…?”
            Again, Hanguang-jun shook his head.
             “Then...my clothes…?”  By now, Wei Wuxian had nearly reached the bench, and the slightest gust of wind could have set their robes to brushing against one another.
            Once more, Hanguang-jun shook his head, but this time he also raised his hand, pointing one long, slender finger at Wei Wuxian’s face, so close that his finger almost brushed the tip of Wei Wuxian’s nose.
            Wei Wuxian took half a step backwards.  “Me?!  What—what—I don’t understand!  What could you want with me?!  I’m just a nameless orphan that Jiang-shushu took in!  What could I ever be that—”
            “Mine.”

    That was another self-indulgent moment on my part:  there's a fan-favorite moment early in MDZS when Wei Wuxian has gotten Lan Wangji drunk (all drunk LWJ moments are fan-favorites, of course!) and is asking what he thinks of various people, prompting derisive noises.  But when he asks what Lan Wangji thinks of "this one" and points to himself, the answer is simply "Mine."  And of course Wei Wuxian deludes himself into thinking he doesn't mean the obvious.  Because clueless males will be clueless.

    ....at this point, I feel like I'm just giddily going "ooh, look, this scene is fun!" and no longer even attempting to talk about how I characterize him.  So I should probably just drop a few links and call this a post.

    Most of my MDZS fanfics can be found here on AO3.  (Except, you know, the ones I haven't edited and posted yet.  😅)

Lan Wangji's version of a smile...

    With that, let me just share one last line, spoken to and about Lan Wangji.  No context needed, because it speaks for itself.

            “If you had any more self-control, you’d be an inanimate object!” Wei Ying wailed.