also smth i think about a lot is how... what we can enjoy in fantasies & assure our partners is okay is often Not the case in action? like. specifically in the context of wangxian's canonical cnc kink

wwx finds out lwj struggled w/sexually aggressive thoughts toward him & tells him that it'd have been ok, if he'd gone through with them. that he'd have liked it.

but what i keep coming back to is that wwx can say that /now/, when he's head over heels with lwj & loves him more than life, but if you run the numbers... well, in /my/ mind, anyway, there's no way that things would have gone well if lwj had gone through with it.

like. wwx is /very/ good at laughing off his trauma, but if you try and tell me that lwj had gone through with the fantasies that so clearly bothered him in the incense burner dreams during their youth, then he'd have lost wwx. his trust, his affection—all of it.

part of why wwx feels safe with lwj is that he trusts lwj not to abuse that trust; he would do whatever lwj tells him for no reason beyond that he knows that lwj won't. won't take that trust and twist it, abuse it, use it to his gratification and wwx's destruction.

wwx's had time to build this trust. time enough that they can engage in cnc safely. but during their youth?

it would've destroyed them. that trust they were building, that was so often tested before wwx died, would have been absolutely fucked.

in their youth, wwx would have responded to lwj living out those fantasies by wondering if that's what all of this has been about: if lwj was just another person who saw him as a means to an end and nothing else.

maybe he'd try to stick it out, but i can't help but think that fear would stick with him. that, without the years of love and trust and experience between them, wwx would find "proof" that this is the case. after all, he wasn't receiving a lot of love and affection at that point

you can point at the non-con kiss on phoenix mountain, but to that i'd argue that a) wwx's reaction is influenced by lwj's facelessness & b) even if he /had/ found out then, they've already had time to build trust. enough that when lwj asks wwx to come to jinlintai, he goes.

in a word, they've had more time & shared experience to form that trust by the time we get to phoenix mountain. in gusu, where wwx was still half-convinced lwj hated him, that's just... not the case.

to be clear, this isn't a condemnation of anything—it's certainly fun to imagine possibilities, and i'm sure many people interpret their relationship differently than i do!

it's just that wwx's tendency to tell lwj that he could've raped him back then & that it would've been fine is... idk. looking through rose-colored lenses, or something like that.