Wei Wuxian and Orientation

This is going to be a lit crit conversation about orientation. If this topic is very loaded for you or you're very personally invested in a given reading, you might want to skip this one. 

Why does almost all fic that mentions sexuality qua orientation read Wei Wuxian as bi? Is it just a ‘get the full queer spectrum in the modern AU’ affair?* Authorial extensions of empathy? To me, ‘gay’ seems more likely as a reading for the character. I feel like if Wei Wuxian had a fully developed sense of normative attraction in a comp-het environment (which CQL and MDZS seem to be, even if queer marriages are relatively common), he wouldn’t simultaneously be in such weird denial about what he was feeling for and doing with Lan Wangji. To me, the nature and degree of his drive and confusion on the subject aren’t very compatible with an entirely discrete, psychologically reconciled heterosexual system of attraction. Wei Wuxian is never very comfortable with his own desires, or with envisioning futurity (and per MDZS, hasn’t had sexual experience pre Phoenix Mountain). I suppose he could be fairly divorced from any relationship with his sexuality outside of the realisations canon guides him through, but nonetheless have ‘bi potential’. 

 

I think a lot of people are reading the fact that Wei Wuxian ‘flirts with women’, i.e. is conversationally charming, as a sure-fire indication of sexual attraction to the women he speaks to. This, to me, indicates those people have forgotten their last several conversations with gay men of a certain age. More generally, people flirt for a lot of reasons: validation, for fun, to disarm people, to ease tension and to build friendships. As a delivery girl, when I needed money I wore a very low-cut top because I wanted tips. This was not an act of attraction or any form of evident interest on my part. We all move through a society comprised of people by asking for their good will; we are all of us dependent on the kindness of strangers. Though their core Freudian mechanisms might be predicated on sexual logics, amae and sa jiao are not always sexual. Wei Wuxian has command of a lot of verbal and behavioural registers and moves through them with calculation, as benefits him. He plays with formality and class to similar ends. 

 

More generally, ‘to flirt is to fuck’ is not quite how ‘charm’ as a tool plays out in the world. It’s more complicated than that. Charm is a system people without power, or who perceive themselves as being without it, can use to ask for what they need but can’t claim by entitlement or take. Charm turns begging into seduction. It is a method of winning what you want which Wei Wuxian, a former street child who then lands in a somewhat-insecure home in his new sect, would have learned to survive, and then kept up to negotiate the threat level he presents to the world. He must perform sufficient bravado macho-posturing to ensure he has a place, is not able to be walked over and represents the interests of his masters, but must cut this with strategic, constant emotional labour to support Jiang Wanyin’s power and soothe hostilities. Wei Wuxian regularly adjusts the burner knob to keep the gas level right, the flame under control and the simmer constant.

 

I don’t have anything against a Bi Wei Wuxian reading. I’d certainly see attraction as possible and compelling between a male Wei Wuxian and female Lan Wangji, because core elements of their personalities would still interact in compelling ways. But while CQL eases up enormously on this theme, I think, almost as much as Scum Villain, MDZS is supposed to be about sexual repression, specifically related to queerness (and it’s weird to see such full-bore ‘and Lan Wangji is absolutely gay’ from the same people bringing ‘and Wei Wuxian must of course be bi’: as far as I know, Lan Wangji is Wei Wuxian sexual). It’s particularly interesting because in the 90s, Western mlm Fandom was churning out so many stories About Gayness. Blake’s 7 and Star Trek zinefic examples come readily to mind. It sort of feels like danmei is in that work space now, while also having very familiar conversations about consent (via fictional praxis, more than as surface-level content). 

 

* Though the same circle of fics is often, though not always, keen to read him as A Bottom rather than engaging with versatility. While you can be a Pure Bottom man in an m/f relationship, it’s not socially expected. But perhaps, actually, I’m conflating two quite big, sometimes overlapping but not connected fic trends: the No Vers Curse and Baby Bi Bi Bi.