The wedding! [ending spoilers]

Rojaseb said:
I was very surprised to see that the final episode began with Wei Wuxian's and Lan Wangji's wedding. I didn't expect the donghua to keep that. In the novel, Wei Wuxian and Wangji canonically got married through a rite known as "Worshiping (Heaven & Earth) in the Ancestral Hall". Traditional Chinese weddings didn't have to take place in an Ancestral Hall, and they had a series of rigid steps that both families had to follow. However, Worshiping in the Ancestral Hall is a historically "uncommon" type of wedding that is not very rigid (it doesn't even have a dress-code).

The steps for this ceremony are to first visit the Ancestral Hall of the wife's family, and perform two kowtows (this is a form of a kneeling vow in which you move your forehead towards the ground), one kowtow to worship the Heaven and Earth and one kowtow to worship the ancestors that are in front of you, as shown below.



The ceremony continues 3 months later, when the wife performs the same two kowtows in the Ancestral Hall of the husband's family. At either Ancestral Hall visit, the couple also have to worship their parents once, and worship each other (the spouses) once. For this part, there are no rules to follow; the way in which you worship the parents and the spouse are flexible (it can be any type of kowtow or vow or reverence, and they can say whatever they want to each other, or say nothing at all).

In the novel, before the final confrontation against Jin Guangyao in the Guanyin Temple, Wei Wuxian takes Wangji to the Ancestral Hall of Lotus Pier and makes him perform the first two kowtows without Wangji knowing what was actually going on, then Wei Wuxian greets the Jiang couple in his mind, introducing Wangji to them, and says that he will "owe" them the final kowtow (the one he will perform face to face with Wangji), because he had not confirmed Wangji's feelings yet. In the donghua, Wei Wuxian already knew how Wangji felt about him when they entered the Ancestral Hall in the final episode. They performed 2 kowtows in silence, then Wei Wuxian spoke to address the Jiang couple, and presented Wangji to them. Him and Wangji performed a vow towards the Jiang couple, to worship them. Although Jiang Cheng interrupts them here, there was nothing else for them to do. To continue the ceremony, they had to worship Wangji's parents in Gusu, so the next day they departed to Gusu, and the story ends. Normally, the parents would all be in the same Ancestral Hall as witnesses, but because Wei Wuxian and Wangji are orphans, they only had the option to worship the spirit tablets of their parents (and you cannot move those from one Hall to another).

As you might know, the romance in the story was toned down for the donghua because there are laws against showing obviously LGBT+ content in Chinese TV and movies. So the author (MXTX) was quite brilliant to chose this type of wedding because it can fly under the radar of censorship. Wei Wuxian had no living relatives nor ties to anyone, so he could no longer participate in a traditional wedding, he could only get married this way, but because this is not the traditional way to get married, the donghua could get away with showing it, even when this ceremony is only used in the context of marriage. For example, it was perfectly normal to kowtow to your ancestors or parents in Ancient China, but if you wanted to show respect to anyone (alive or otherwise) through the act of vowing, there was a scale of 8 ascending levels to measure the respect that your vows had. Performing 1 kneeling vow with your hands in front of your chest was considered the 2nd level of respect you could show to someone (low). Performing 1 kowtow was the 5th level of respect (high). Then the 6th level of respect were 3 kowtows, so even if you wanted to worship your ancestors through kowtows, you would never do 2 kowtows (you would do either 1 or 3). Performing two kowtows in an Ancestral Hall, accompanied by your loved one, followed by the worship of the parents, and presenting your boyfriend to them, was always a wedding ceremony. That was step-by-step what the donghua showed.

The cool thing about using this wedding is that it has two parts, so if you did not worship your spouse in the first Ancestral Hall (of the wife's family), you could still do so in the second (of the husband's family), and the marriage would still be valid, that's why in the novel they consider each other to be married even though they did not worship each other in the Ancestral Hall of Lotus Pier. At the end of the donghua, Wei Wuxian and Wangji agree to go back to Gusu, which is exactly what they had to do for this type of wedding, because now they had to visit the Ancestral Hall of Gusu. In the novel, too, there was a 3 months timeskip between chapters 111 and 112, alluding the fact that they had to wait the mandatory 3 months before their next Ancestral Hall visit, where they could finally worship each other after they had worshiped Wangji's parents. Wangji in fact calls Wei Wuxian his "wife" in chapter 112 of the novel because, in this type of wedding, the wife would technically be the spouse whose Ancestral Hall was visited first lol

Finally, they can only be considered "husband and wife" after they worship each other (through another kowtow, for example), but they can only worship each other after worshiping both sets of parents, to thank them. So in the donghua they only initiated the marriage process, kinda like becoming fiancés, having decided to become spouses in 3 months. None of this was explained in the donghua, so a lot of people must have missed it. I only know about it because this type of wedding made me curious after reading it in the novel and finally seeing it in the donghua (it's a very different wedding from ours, it's more about the body language than words, you can basically perform the whole thing in silence). I bet Chinese viewers were a lot more likely to realize what was happening in the donghua simply by looking at it, though.