ExtraPenguin

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Unpopular opinion, but I wouldn't call Shen Qingqiu or Wei Wuxian "dense" – they're both quick on the uptake and smart, but they're both limited by the fact that they never reassessed their starting assumptions of the love interest. They both thought "ok love interest is Like That and hates me" and it might've been valid at the start, even if not now, so they try to fit all the love interest's behavior into the "love interest hates me" mental model they have of him. They're oblivious to the love interest's advances because of that, but they're not dumb, and they have reasons for being oblivious. Basically people going "aww wifi so dense" makes me go "??? are you skipping all the scenes that aren't about the main couple being cute at each other?" since no, he's not dense about human interaction or power dynamics or whatnot at all, unlike how a bunch of people characterize him.

Alas, I can't ignore it, due to the above showing up in eg fics as an opinion the author genuinely holds, and people really widening it so that Fanon Wei Wuxian is kinda dense and dumb, whereas Canon Wei Wuxian isn't really dense: he just doesn't see himself as a valid life partner to Lan Wangji due to eg class stuff and genders, so he can't even begin to consider Lan Wangji's actions from a potentially romantic perspective. Ergo, I try to push back against it, since the "wifi so dense" thing isn't the most accurate way to phrase it, doesn't imo capture the background, and tends to engulf actual canon characterization and make for OOC fic.

xiyoumiyu

When Wei Wuxian was 13, Jiang Fengmian invited him to his rooms to ‘help him on his journey to adulthood’. At the age of 15, he was sent to the Cloud Recesses to learn from the esteemed teacher Lan Qiren. When Lan Qiren found out how the Jiang sect treated its head disciple, he arranged to keep him at the Cloud Recesses for longer – and Wei Wuxian is left with the hard part of trying to fix himself and grow up at the same time.

notdexterousatall

I was unsure about this, because very often rape-recovery fics turn out to be rape-porn in deceitful packaging. I was also very wrong, because this is one of the most deeply-moving fics about recovery, healing, and personal growth that I've ever read. The characters are removed from their canon-selves, but in a way that stays true to themselves and adds another level of depth to their personalities. Wei Wuxian isn't shipped with Lan Wangji here, which is unusual for this fandom and was a turn-off for me at the start, but here it is done so in a way that feels very true to the circumstances the characters are presented in, and truthfully, having read up to chapter 4, I don't see any other way Wuxian's relationship with Wangji could have been presented. The OC's are also well developed and add to the story rather than subtract from it, and I yearn for every new insight into the characters that I am granted.

Bittersweet, but the bitterness comes at the beginning so that Wei Wuxian's personal growth can bring the sweetness at the end. I very much recommend, and I also suggest that at the end of each chapter you read the author's comments as well.

Gerifalte

ahhh, this was gold. I couldn't stop reading until the very end, and the setting is /well/ fleshed-out -very believable, consistent and real. Don't even get me started on the OCs, for all intents and purposes /people/ you could connect to and take an interest in. I was very invested in their development and context, to the point I honestly wanted to make them happy. Also LQR characterizarion is the very best, and the foreshadowing was spot-on (I had my suspicions from the first time LYH talked about her backstory, so I didn't feel like it came from the blue.

All in all, 12/10 would read again.

PS: gdi I just realized this isn't the comment section. I hope the author gets to read this -or that I remember to drop a comment when I have more time. Fingers crossed.

Our main character, Wei Wuxian, is a smart and shameless guy driven to necromancy by circumstances (think self-sacrificing kind mad scientist with class issues), and is hated by the entire cultivational world. He was killed when his powers backfired on him while besieged. 13 years later, a gay lunatic performs a demonic sacrifice ritual to get revenge on his asshole family, and suddenly Wei Wuxian has an all-new body, an all-new mystery to solve relating to a disembodied hand, and this super righteous iceberg guy Lan Wangji has suddenly started protecting him. Oh, and while he's at it, he wants to keep his true identity secret, because if he doesn't, people will come to murder him and he'd rather not die again.

The novel is super gripping, and it's told in the present and flashbacks to the past that shed light on how this kind-hearted guy could come to be hated by the entire cultivational world. It's really dark, but the darkness is only really blatant when one thinks about it a bit more. Wei Wuxian is shameless and hilarious as a protagonist and narrator, and he has a lot of good interactions with both his eventual love interest and a bunch of other people that are ripe material for fic, and the secondary characters have their own interactions with each other.