And yet again, more likely incoherent rambling notes on The Untamed, episode by episode, largely so I can access my specific thoughts later on as I'm working on the next draft of my fic that uses drama canon. All thoughts beyond the read more tag will make very little sense without having seen the show (or at least read the novel).
As the episode starts, Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji are still in the midst of the conversation with Lan Yi. She says her "spiritual cognition" has been guarding the Yin Iron all this time. I'm not sure if that's actually what she says or if that's some kind of translation bugaboo where the translators went over and above the text to separate out any hint of ghosts and other undead. In other words, I have no idea if she's actually saying that her spirit/soul has been acting as a guard for all this time, making her in essence a ghost, or if "spiritual cognition" is really the best applicable translation. I've had trouble wrapping my mind around some of the concepts in what I've read about the actual traditional beliefs regarding things like the nature of the soul, so it may be that this is just something that doesn't have a clear Western and/or English-language equivalent. 🤷🏻♀️ (I do know that no amount of removing the undead from the story can remove them from the setting itself: after all, the big question in the lecture scene where Wei Wuxian suggests a certain amount of what would (in the book) become his demonic cultivation arts, that question is all about the undead. And that question and its answer are unchanged for the drama. (Probably in the original language, they're literally identical. Hard to tell for certain with the different translations, but the essence of it is so similar that I suspect the majority of the question and answer dialog is untouched from the novel.))
In the course of the discussion, Wei Wuxian asks about Baoshan-sanren, and mentions that his mother had been her disciple. Lan Yi is astonished, because when she last saw Baoshan-sanren, she had not yet taken any disciples. As Xiao Xingchen will later tell a-Qing the same story as in the novel, regarding Baoshan-sanren's earlier disciples, including the first one to leave the mountain, who met such a horrible fate, that suggests that Lan Yi is probably still Lan An's granddaughter, as in the novel, and has therefore been in that cave roughly 300 years. (I know there are some fanworks wherein that first disciple to leave the mountain, who had become the enemy of the world, had been the one who fought the battle that turned the Burial Mounds into the cursed place it was. Or is that standard fanon and it was a fanwork suggesting he had made Chenqing? Hmm. I can't remember...) However, she also repeatedly says she's been there for a hundred years, so... 🤷🏻♀️ Trying to get specifics that actually work may be impossible. Thankfully, I don't think that how many years have passed since Lan Yi went into seclusion to guard the Yin Iron shard came up in my fic.
When Lan Yi says that she was too ashamed to seek Baoshan-sanren out after she made her mistake regarding unsealing the Yin Iron, Lan Wangji somberly glances over at Wei Wuxian, as if he's already realized how their story will end. (Well, how it temporarily ended. Thankfully, Wei Wuxian gets revived so their story doesn't end in a tragic and permanent separation.)
The conversation gets more involved and also a bit more awkwardly translated (as if the translators didn't have the context of the previous episodes, even!), but Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji come to the conclusion that someone has one or more Yin Iron shard and is using it to experiment on cultivators, turning them into puppets.
Wei Wuxian asks about other methods of protecting the people from the Yin Iron, and Lan Yi claims that the Yin Iron is "the spirit of the heaven and the earth which cannot be eradicated" and that its "grievance" only came after it was broken into pieces. This is in direct contradiction to what she said in the previous episode, about it having been purposefully filled with grievance and resentment by Xue Chonghai, who was literally sacrificing people to pervert the Yin Iron thus. (Maybe Lan Yi's spirit is starting to go a little senile, but her Lan Clan poise is so great that it's masking that?) She also says that the only thing to be done is to gather all its pieces and suppress them together within that cave, but that she no longer has the strength to do so herself. Lan Wangji immediately kneels and promises to do it for her. (And he did seem again to refer to himself in the third person as "Wangji" but maybe I'm mishearing and it's something else that sounds a bit like his name? Chinese is so different linguistically from what I'm used to that I honestly have trouble parsing any of the words. Only the words I've learned from the novels come through to my ears clearly. (Which is largely a "me" thing, I think, and possibly one that's developed in the last five to ten years, because I used to be better able to parse individual words even without knowing the language. Though I would still probably do a lot better at it with a language more similar to English, like German.))
When Wei Wuxian also promises to help find the pieces of the Yin Iron to seal it away, Lan Wangji rebukes him with "It's a family matter of the Lan Clan. It's none of your business." I'm going to have to keep close watch on a later episode, because I'm pretty sure this is exactly a line Wei Wuxian will later use, only with Jiang Clan instead of Lan Clan. (A line straight out of the book, no less.) Turning that into a "spitting his own words back at him" moment is particularly heart-breaking, but also seems pretty in keeping with that scene. (Hmm...I need to look at that scene in my fic. I know I didn't use these exact words, but something pretty close...though I'm not actually sure if I had Wei Wuxian or Jiang Cheng say them. I may need to adjust that exchange a bit...)
One thing that this entire sequence does not do, is answer Lan Wangji's question about who or what brought them to that cave. Lan Yi says that she did not do so, but there's no answer about what did drag them down there. Considering that Wei Wuxian was dragged down first, I wonder if the Yin Iron itself did it, recognizing that Wei Wuxian was of a mindset similar to Lan Yi's, one that might try to use the Yin Iron in an attempt to do good.
There's a reason I often say that the Yin Iron is trying to be the One Ring. 😅 (Just wait until we get to The Untamed's version of the urukhai!)
Anyway, I'm not sure I like the idea of the Yin Iron having enough of a will of its own to be responsible for dragging Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji into that cave, but I guess since that never comes up in my fic, I don't have to worry about it?
Lan Yi's spirit finally disappearing from the world actually destroys the barrier around the back hills of Cloud Recesses, and Wen Qing senses that immediately, turning to look in the direction of the hills. Wen Ning, too, is struck by it, suddenly stopping, seeming frozen in place. (Perhaps the Yin Iron is trying to take hold of him? Maybe they were sucked down because the Yin Iron could tell they had been in contact with Wen Ning?)
In any case, then we get a light moment that's back to our favorite tally, Things They Added to Highlight the Romance They Weren't Allowed to Mention!
8) On leaving the area within the barrier (which seems to still be partially in place?), Wei Wuxian trips and falls on top of Lan Wangji, their hands now being much more tightly bound, so they're lying on top of each other in a particularly suggestive way when Jiang Cheng and Wen Qing find them.
I know it's silly, but I can't help loving that moment. 😁
Anyway, somehow a full day and night have passed, despite that for them it was like at most half an hour. Which would explain why Lan Yi thought it had only been a hundred years when it's been more like three hundred! That would also suggest that her assessment that the Yin Iron outside the barrier has been active for the last ten years may well be wrong. In which case...
...it's too soon to make any decisions. I need to hear what Wen Qing has to say in Fojiao before I can be sure. I'm trying to figure out some timelines for some stuff that needs to be fixed up late in my fic, and the timeline of when the various pieces of the Yin Iron were unsealed is important to it. I want my fic to be as internally consistent as possible, and as accurate as possible to the drama...
...which isn't all that possible, considering that--as translated on Netflix--it's internally inconsistent with itself regarding the Yin Iron.
After the scene with Jiang Cheng and Wen Qing is over, we get a new scene inside some building or other, where Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji are watching as Lan Xichen is working some kind of magic on the Yin Iron piece with his xiao, and Lan Qiren puts the Yin Iron shard in an evil-sealing pouch (without touching it, as it had been floating in the air the whole scene), and says that dealing with it is unavoidable. It's not clear exactly what Lan Xichen was trying to do, probably to neutralize it or seal it away? Lan Wangji realizes that both his uncle and his brother already knew about the Yin Iron and its presence in the back hills. Lan Xichen confirms this is the case, and claims that among the Five Great Clans only the masters of the Lan Clan still remember the Yin Iron and pass along that knowledge to future generations.
This...uh...
...this is just wrong.
I'll have to remember that this was said in episode 7 and keep track of how many episodes it takes to establish that nope, they all still know about it, even if they don't talk about it.
Wei Wuxian concludes that Lan Xichen had already known/guessed that the Yin Iron had something to do with the spirit-snatching and the Waterborne Abyss. While they're still talking about that, they hear one of the Wen Clan's shadow birds overhead, and conclude that the Wen Clan came to Cloud Recesses looking for the Yin Iron (true) and that Wen Ruohan must already have a piece of the Yin Iron (also true), though the latter seems like it might be a slight leap in logic for what the characters already know.
Lan Qiren concludes that Wen Ruohan must have had help from someone in order to obtain a shard of the Yin Iron. He wants to just seal it up again straight away, but Lan Wangji insists that won't do any good since the shards can detect each other and Wen Ruohan already has one, plus he knows there's one there. But Lan Qiren isn't allowing any further discussion right now.
OMG, is Jiang Cheng jealous that Wei Wuxian is getting along so well with Lan Wangji? He's practically suggesting that Wei Wuxian should marry him! He really is adorably tsundere in the drama. (I mean, he's kind of tusndere about Wei Wuxian in the novel, too, but it's much more pronounced in the drama.) Ah, but Lan Wangji heard the whole thing, and it hurt his feelings that Wei Wuxian prefers to go back to Lotus Pier instead of staying in Cloud Recesses! 😭 (Not that I can blame Wei Wuxian for wanting to get away from more than three thousand rules of conduct...)
So then we're in Nightless City and Wen Ruohan is having a conversation with Wen Chao and Xue Yang wherein Wen Ruohan is sitting on his throne in the audience hall and the other two are standing outside the closed door. And none of them are having to shout to be heard or anything.
It's very odd.
I tried to address this in my fic as some kind of blood-based communication skill, but I'd forgotten he used it to talk to Xue Yang, too. Now I'm not sure what it is. Hmm...it seems like when the lights outside the windows of the room that Wen Chao and Xue Yang are in are lit, then they can speak to Wen Ruohan and when they're not, they can't. Maybe they're not directly outside the hall where he is, but in some other chamber elsewhere, and there's a communication spell on the room itself...
And we move on to the lantern lighting sequence, and earlier dialog indicates that this is the same day that Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji emerged from the cave. This scene specifies that it's summer, as they're releasing these lanterns for the Qixi Festival, which is the 7th day of the 7th lunar months, so it may actually be late summer by our calendar. (Not relevant to the show, per se, but I need to keep track of things like that for my fic!) It's also the first time Lan Wangji smiles. Not that it's much of a smile, but Wei Wuxian is excited to see it until him calling attention to it makes Lan Wangji get defensive...hmm, yeah, this needs to go into the tally...
Things They Added to Highlight the Romance:
9) The lantern-making/lighting sequence, Wei Wuxian suggesting they release their lantern together since they've been through so much together, and making his lantern just for Lan Wangji and decorating it with a bunny, which makes Lan Wangji smile and then get self-conscious about it when he's called on it...
The students all fold their hands to make wishes on their lanterns, and we hear three of them:
Nie Huaisang: I wish I can graduate successfully, so I won't come back here again. [Considering he'd been there studying for three years in the novel, it's no wonder he needs to make a wish for it!]
Wen Qing: I wish my little brother will be safe and sound for his whole life. May he face no danger. [The look on Jiang Cheng's face when he hears her wish is heart-breaking. Actually, so is her wish, considering how things turn out! 😭]
Wei Wuxian: I, Wei Wuxian, wish that I can always stand with justice and live with no regrets. [Lan Wangji looks sufficiently impressed with the surprisingly selfless nature of Wei Wuxian's wish.]
Of course, the lanterns lead into discussions of Jiang Yanli's engagement to Jin Zixuan, which leads directly into the fight between Wei Wuxian and Jin Zixuan. (Oh, and this was where Jin Zixuan called her Mianmian! Okay, that's fine. As long as he doesn't also address her that way during the soup incident, though I feel like he does, even though at that particular time he ought to call her Luo-guniang, given the setting and the tense situation...) What's weird to me is that they completely skip over most of the lead-up to the brawl. That they didn't want to show Wei Wuxian punching Jin Zixuan in the face is fine--they were working hard to keep Wei Wuxian's hands far too clean, after all--but why did they skip over all the things Jin Zixuan said to provoke him? It's very odd to me.
I kind of feel like they purposefully left out the whole argument exclusively to avoid the one that most enraged Wei Wuxian, the one where Jin Zixuan basically said "if you love her so much, why don't you marry her?" Which obviously pissed him off especially because to Wei Wuxian, Jiang Yanli is his sister, despite that they share no blood. But I feel like in a lot of media [particularly in anime], boys in his situation do end up marrying the girls they ought to think of as their sisters, so they worried that if they put that line in there, people might misinterpret. (How they could misinterpret that way, I have no idea, as the romantic feelings Lan Wangji has for Wei Wuxian are actually more highlighted at this point in the story in the drama than in the novel, but...) But without showing the fight, it sort of feels like maybe Wei Wuxian decked him as soon as we cut away, in which case Jin Zixuan had barely said anything to tick him off, which would make Wei Wuxian more in the wrong than he was in the novel. (I'm not even sure if he was in the wrong in the novel, considering how far across the line Jin Zixuan went in that argument.)
Admittedly, I used that to my advantage in my fic, putting a similar line in Jin Zixuan's mouth to prompt a new fist-fight with Wei Wuxian, but...
Interesting. Nie Huaisang is prominently in the middle of the clump of people, trying to play peacemaker...but it's one of the other Nie Clan disciples there who explains what the fight was about after Lan Wangji and Jiang Yanli have finally managed to calm Wei Wuxian down a bit. Nie Huaisang was very clearly not pleased by that...
Ah, I wanted to pay close attention to how people address each other, and this is a key scene. Upon arrival, Jin Guangshan addresses Jiang Fengmian as Jiang-xiong. (I think.) Oh, this is a place that calls them teenagers: Lan Qiren refers to Wei Wuxian and Jin Zixuan as teenagers. Hmm, so there goes my idea to make Jin Zixuan the same age as Jiang Yanli. Rats. 😡
Oh. My. God. How can Jin Guangshan have the sheer unmitigated gall to say "Marriage is serious business" when the only thing he takes seriously about his marriage is avoiding his wife to sneak around with other women? Ugh!
Okay, Jiang Fengmian also seemed to use Jin-xiong. (Funny, I had it in my head that one of them used the other's courtesy name with -xiong in this scene. That's weird...)
Another line about the Jiang Clan's general approach towards life: "We, the Jiang Clan of Yunmeng, claim the following of one's nature. We don't force our children into doing something they don't like." Yeah, that definitely only goes so far. 😅
Another place my memory has messed with me: I thought Jin Guangshan was all for cancelling the engagement, but he put up a resistance, although it might be a token one. Or it might be that he's afraid of catching hell from his wife when she finds out.
Hm! When Jiang Cheng goes to report to Wei Wuxian that the engagement is bring broken (translated terribly, as if it was Jiang Yanli's decision to break the engagement), and Wei Wuxian assumes that Jin Zixuan is responsible for the split and he plans to go beat him up again, Jiang Cheng stops him and explains that it was his father who suggested it. But he seems to address Wei Wuxian as just "Wuxian" in that moment. I absolutely didn't hear a "Wei" in front of it. These moments where he drops his guard are few and far between, but very telling. He's deeply upset because he knows how much his sister loves Jin Zixuan (though for the life of me I cannot understand how or why she would love him at this point in the story), and now she's being robbed of her chance to marry the man she loves, and so as a doting brother, Jiang Cheng can't hold himself back, and addresses his closest companion--his all-but-brother--in the manner you would actually expect someone so close to use. (His mother would be furious if she heard him, though...)
Huh. I wonder just how late in the process they decided to make Lan Wangji and Lan Xichen into orphans. Because Jiang Fengmian just addressed Lan Xichen as "Lan-gongzi" instead of "Lan-zongzhu," as if his father was still alive and still the leader of the clan. That suggests that they originally planned to have the father of the Twin Jades killed off during the burning of Cloud Recesses, like in the novel, and it was very last minute to make him already dead. (Which accords with the scene where Wei Wuxian accidentally poked the dead-mother-trauma spot, as he didn't seem to be aware of the fact that Lan Wangji's father was already dead in this version of canon.)
So, there were also spirits being snatched in Yunmeng. And in asking to know the cause, Jiang Fengmian also referred to himself in the third person by his courtesy name. I guess that's just how certain types of requests are typically made, either due to linguistics or conventions of the era (or conventions of fictional depictions of the era). I think...it would sound too weird to try to incorporate it, so I'd better just consider removing the whole "referring to oneself in the third person in making a request" to be a part of translation into English, and that therefore my fic being already a work "in translation" has already made the change. As it were.😅
The scene cut away before we could see Jiang Fengmian's reaction to the name Yin Iron, so we don't know (at the moment) if he had already heard of it. (It is telling that they only wanted to tell Jiang Fengmian about it, and not Jin Guangshan!) But the subtitles in this scene said it was made a hundred years ago, which we know to be all kinds of wrong. I think that's a problem caused by the way the two different languages handle numbers and especially how they express concepts of vague large numbers.
In other words, I feel that translation issues give me license to assume that all the numbers Lan Yi assigned to the time she spent in that cave were completely wrong. 😅
Hmm. I wonder where that pouch came from that Jiang Yanli is gazing at in such a despondent way. I mean, okay, obviously it came from Lanling, given that it's made of cloth exactly the same shade of yellow as Jin Clan uniforms, but its exact provenance is what I'm wondering about. I can't imagine that Jin Zixuan personally gave it to her, given the way he's behaved towards her up until now (despite the moments when he gazes at her as if he's already in love with her), but maybe it was part of some kind of engagement gift exchanged when by their mothers when they were still little? Hopefully it'll come back up again later so I can be sure about it, because it feels like the kind of thing I really ought to have brought up at some point in my fic. 😰
A picture of the pouch so I can find it again later. 😅 It makes me think of the pouch in The Husky and His White Cat Shizun that the locks of hair were placed in after the ghost wedding (or whatever they called it) in the first volume. (Or was it in the second volume? The thing in Butterfly Town, whichever volume it was in.) I wonder if there's something similar for engagements, and so there's two locks of hair in there, one from baby Jin Zixuan and one from baby Jiang Yanli. That would both make sense and also be kinda creepy at the same time...
In the following scene, as Wei Wuxian is trying to cheer her up, her assertion that her destiny is not up to her is crushing. Because in reality it really wouldn't have been. And that's so horrible.
Her following assertion that Wei Wuxian will have a "beautiful lady to marry" is both hilarious and sad. It's hilarious in the sense of "nope, he's gonna marry a beautiful man," but it's also sad because if this was a realistic setting, no father would allow his daughter to marry Wei Wuxian, because his father was a servant. Or rather, no father of any woman of the class that Wei Wuxian has been raised to interact with would let his daughter marry him, but given the way he was raised, Wei Wuxian would lose too much in the eyes of his peers if he married anyone of a class appropriate to his father's station.
OMG, then he replies he doesn't want one. 🤣
Back to the meeting between Jiang Fengmian, Lan Xichen and Lan Qiren, and it sounds like Jiang Fengmian genuinely had never heard of the Yin Iron before. Also that Xue Yang has already slaughtered several clans in the Yueyang area, despite that he was only sent there by Wen Ruohan on the same day as the lantern-lighting scene. Um. How long did it take Jiang Fengmian to get to Cloud Recesses, exactly? In the novel, he got there the day after the fight, having flown there in response to a messenger who had flown to Lotus Pier to fetch him.
Ugh. The timeline on this show is completely borked.
Wait, what? Let me quote his exact speech on this subject (as translated by Netflix), and see if there is any way for it to make sense.
Jiang Fengmian: Recently in Yueyang, several small clans were slaughtered. No one survived. I don't know who's behind this. But the murderer is a young guest of the Wen Clan.
Uh...if you know who the murderer is, then you know who's behind it!
I...what did he actually say? Why...what...I don't even know how to express the depth of my confusion! But this is presumably a translation problem, because surely no one would actually write a script that said something that logically broken.
As they're leaving, Wei Wuxian says they've been there half a year. I'm not sure if that's meant to be literal or if it's more of an approximation. But given that the entire Lotus Pier trio is leaving instead of just Wei Wuxian, I think it's safe to assume that the lectures were intended to end with the Qixi Festival, and therefore...well, no, that doesn't really sum up anything about the potential amount of time they actually spent there. The fact that everything was clearly filmed at the same time doesn't help: there's no change in foliage to indicate the passing of the seasons or anything. (Though the art book does have a map in it, which is radically different from the map on the wiki, and places Gusu considerably further south, so it's possible the foliage there wouldn't change so much? No, duh, of course that's not it--there are scenes later in the show where it snows at Cloud Recesses!) On the other hand, if that particular year's Qixi Festival is held in our August, then they could have gotten there in early March, and if it was an early spring, then...that actually would be half a year, so...it could in theory be literal. In fact, maybe that makes the most sense: the lunar calendar begins at the start of the lunar year, so then if the lectures start a month after that to give the students plenty of time to celebrate the new year and to make the trip to Gusu, then they could have six months to study and have it end at the Qixi Festival. That actually makes a lot of sense, and that extra month would give winter time to end (since the lunar new year is typically in February), so...yeah, I think they meant it literally.
Again, not a huge issue, but I want to know the whole timespan for the part of the show's canon that's before my AU point so I have the best possible idea of how old the characters are. Not that we know how old they are in the drama at all, but...
And the episode concludes with part one of the supremely adorable "Wei Wuxian playing with the little white bunnies" sequence! 😍🐇
I am definitely taking too many notes on these episodes. It took me like three and a half hours to get through a single 45-minute episode.
Admittedly, there was that large chunk I was completely transcribing, but still!
Well, at least the post-Sunshot Campaign episodes will have a lot less note-taking going on, since my AU point is at the start of the Sunshot Campaign, and pretty much everything post-Sunshot Campaign (other than a few aspects of the CQL-invented matters in Nightless City at the end of the war, and one aspect of the Mount Baifeng Siege Hunt) is completely different in my fic. (I mean, how could it not be? In my fic, Wei Wuxian never takes up demonic cultivation!)
Anyway, feels like it's been a while since I posted the full tallies. So here are the current tally counts:
Things Added to Highlight the Romance: 9
Crazy Wei Wuxian Powers: 7
Cultivator Powers: 9
Mistranslations of "shufu": "Grand Master"
Cast Members with Obviously Pierced Ears: Meng Yao, Lan Wangji
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