jiang cheng is a funny character because i fully support either liking him or not liking him, but i see so many takes (especially when he shows up in a supporting role in fic) that seem completely unhinged until i pin down which of what i consider the fundamental facts of his character are just not being applied at all.
it’s like:
1) this is not a mentally well guy, especially after Plot starts happening, and he spends the entire story getting less okay. the only time we ever see any improvement happen in jiang cheng is when wei wuxian piths himself getting the guy out of his suicidal phase, causing many more problems going forward but fixing that one. jiang cheng is not okay and it’s all downhill.
2) he cares so fucking much. like you can write a jiang cheng who is a deeply selfish bastard and you have an excellent textual basis, but it’s not because he doesn’t care about other people, at least the ones that are his; that’s a different kind of problem than the one he has.
he would in fact be less of a problem a lot of the time if he cared less, because he does not have the emotional management tools to be useful about it. also the narrative is conspiring against him but like.
(there are a lot of ways to be selfish and jiang cheng and lan wangji are actually remarkably similar in the basic type of selfish impulses they have. they just have very different childhoods and values shaping how they act about it. and then lan wangji manages to become a mostly functional adult, while jiang cheng is generously an electrified pile of bad coping mechanisms. he’s functioning! but like. at what cost.)
3) jiang cheng is dutiful. even the most selfish jiang cheng is someone who perceives and values himself in terms of his function and obligation; he and wei wuxian have different personalities and worldviews, and for that matter expectations placed on them, but they both learned that lesson, presumably together.
4) sort of an extension of 1 and to a lesser extent 2, Jiang Cheng is emotionally insecure as a base state. his parents made some major errors, at least half of which should have been avoidable except they would have had to deal with their own shit first.
it’s not out of the question, in a different lifetime where he didn’t get several years of compounded irresolvable traumas as his coming-of-age present and then left alone to stew in pain and denial for over a decade, for him to have learned to handle it better and even mostly get over it! that could have happened! it just didn’t.
to an extent he’s insecure about different things as a grown man than he was as a boy, life experience makes a difference. he’s built confidence about some things and become absolutely shattered about others. but he’s a person who is easy to wound, in all kinds of complicated identity-related ways, especially by Wei Wuxian specifically, and his kneejerk response to that is to lash out in reply, whether the wounding was intentional or not.
the fact that Wei Wuxian spent most of their lives giving every evidence of being completely immune to being harmed by this reaction masked its toxicity until things got real ugly real fast.
jiang cheng absolutely has the capacity to not do this! it’s a deeply rooted bad habit, not actually a fundamental of his character. but it requires self-awareness, will, and (if he’s going to keep it up) a lot of practice. it’s not the kind of thing that just goes away on its own, even with a bunch of alterations in context.
i don’t have like a closing argument here i just keep finding that takes on jiang cheng that don’t work for me, whether generous or condemnatory, always seem to disagree with me on one of these main points.
well then you’re doing a lot better than his actual parents 😂 draw up the paperwork
#his coping mechanisms are destructive all round #but i don’t want to fix him #i want to live with the problems #and help him learn to cope with them #let him be a mess #ill love that mess (via @chickie-empress-kie)
i’ve been thinking about these tags for days.
because like, my initial reaction was somewhere between ‘i think helping someone learn to cope better is the healthy version of fixing them?’ and ‘so you…you want wei wuxian’s old job? 😆 okay.’
well to be fair, definitely was a shared responsibility between him and Jiang Yanli. and it was easier then.
but like. he’d have to let you.
and it’s that fact that’s had me chewing on this.
realistically, jiang cheng’s best chance of getting his shit sorted and suffering less is acquiring a competent wife who can manage his feelings for him enough to get him the space and grace to get some of the knots out and be less self-destructive.
he’s rich and handsome and respectable, being his wife is a fantastic career move; for all his fearsome reputation there’s no indication he beats his servants or otherwise is especially unsafe to marry, as violent men with anger issues go. he has a much better chance of acquiring someone who’s up to the work than most guys in his position.
but that’s the thing. jokes aside, if jiang cheng wanted to be married he would be. if he were even willing to be married, he would be–he is actively shirking an important duty by refusing, as the last of his house.
jiang cheng is very deliberately single, to the point of going against his own principles.
which leads me to the conclusion that he’s not just doing this because of his natural anxieties about marriage from watching his parents. or even due to his generally not liking people and wanting his space and so forth. though those are undoubtedly factors.
but i think it’s specifically because his best chance of healing is finding the right wife. he knows that. it’s common sense; everyone knows that.
and he doesn’t want to get better.
he’s doing this to himself, not in the sense that he sat down and made a conscious decision to be as miserable as possible. but in the sense that it’s a willed act.
now, part of that was about wwx. jiang cheng needed to stay torn up so he could keep his rage at peak, because he couldn’t risk it fading and forcing him to deal with everything lurking behind it.
this is a very common psychological self-sabotage pattern, and the main reason that letting grudges go can be a necessary part of healing–it’s not the anger that’s the problem so much as the compulsion to keep your own wounds open, in order to validate it.
(you can stop using anger as a shield to avoid having to process trauma etc without actually letting go of it, but if the way you’re holding on is by ongoing self-harm then that’s just not. good for you. obviously. by definition lol.)
but even more–i think, to jiang cheng, letting himself heal is intolerable because the trauma is all he’s got left of his family.
he’s got legacies to uphold. he’s got jin ling, on a provisional basis. but of his family as people, of the relationships they had, the ways they mattered to him? all he’s got to hold onto is the scars.
to love someone new, to start a new family, to move on and recover and grow into a different person than the one they knew–that would be a betrayal, for him, more surely than forgiving wei wuxian.
the good news is that even if they don’t make up at all ever, wei wuxian existing in the world again helps jiang cheng out. because a living person isn’t static, so the compulsion to remain static in relation to him isn’t there, the way it was with his memory. and the revelations make it much easier for jc to give himself permission to suffer about wwx in a complex way, even if he doesn’t forgive him.
and also even if they never remember them together wwx is someone else who remembers the other jiangs; it’s not all on jiang cheng to carry that, anymore.
wwx existing will make it easier for jiang cheng to treat himself like a person again. unless he spirals so hard into self-blame he starts to tear himself apart. that could definitely happen also. that is definitely one of the outcomes he’s been staving off with his targeted self-sabotage.
anyway someone managing to get jiang cheng to let them help is marginally more likely post-canon because it will feel less like a betrayal of his dead loved ones. and he’s less in a position now to pretend everything is completely fine aide from the hateful legacy of the Yiling Patriarch.
i am not particularly interested in seeing someone’s OC do this, but if the characterization was good enough i would definitely read it. 😂
