Another day, another episode, another rambling and incoherent post full of notes and spoilers.
And a very unpleasant episode at that. 😭
This is exactly the kind of episode I wish I could skip over, but it's also chock-full of stuff I need to note down in excruciating detail. In fact, the entire Yiling Supervisory Office sequence is so crucial to my fic that I probably ought to copy out extensive portions of the subtitles. (I probably won't, of course, but...)
When Zidian releases the three of them, Jiang Yanli quietly addresses them both, again in the order "a-Xian, a-Cheng." I get the feeling she really does address him first most of the time? This makes three to one at this point. Maybe it's an age thing, since Wei Wuxian is slightly older?
It's full night by the time the scene changes away from the river and back to the battle in Lotus Pier, which is still going strongly. There are plenty of dead Wen Clan troops as well as dead Jiang Clan disciples. But while most of the ordinary Jiang Clan members are being fought--and killed--by one Wen Clan soldier apiece, Yu-furen is fighting about half a dozen at once, and even though she's being horribly wounded, she keeps fighting.
Wen Zhuliu is fighting bare-handed. I think my earlier conclusion may have been right, that his core-melting technique is essentially a palm strike to a particular spot on the lower torso.
Ugh.
That same little boy Jiang Fengmian was teaching to shoot before is aiming an arrow at Wen Zhuliu from off on one side of the courtyard. This little boy, surrounded by the corpses of his fellow young disciples, is trying to save the day (or at least make the enemy's victory a Pyrrhic one) by taking out the enemy's most fearsome warrior. But Wang Lingjiao notices him and kills him.
It's a horrible moment. It's possibly a little out of character for her--especially considering she actually rather hates Wen Zhuliu, which is why he didn't enter Lotus Pier with her in the first place--but I think they felt they had to add it. Because she meets a horrible end as part of Wei Wuxian's revenge (though not nearly as horrible as in the book, so this version of her got off too lightly!), and I think they wanted to make sure to show that she deserved to die horribly. Hence they showed her murdering a child, in case it wasn't enough that she was shown attempting to maim Mianmian, then trying to force Yu-furen to maim Wei Wuxian, and then shouting orders at the Wen Clan soldiers fighting Yu-furen.
And then a few more injuries to Yu-furen later, Jiang Fengmian arrives, kills a good four or five peons, and goes down in one strike from Wen Zhuliu. 😰 If he's that much less skilled than his wife, maybe she should have been the one leading the clan...
...
I'm confused.
I remember seeing Yu-furen's death. I remember seeing her laugh triumphantly at the thought of robbing the Wen Clan of the only thing she can, then cutting her own throat and then, before the last of her life goes, slipping her fingers into her husband's hand.
But now it's not there?
As soon as Jiang Fengmian was stabbed, the scene changed to Jiang Yanli dropping some kind of ornament (or maybe it fell off her clothes?) and the jade of it shattering on a rock, as a sign that her parents had been killed. And then we go to Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng trying to sneak back into Lotus Pier.
So...
...what the...
...where is the footage I remember seeing?
Was it a flashback? Whose? When? Why?
..I'm confused. (I mean, I know I didn't make it up: her laughing is in the freaking end credits.)
Ugh, crying again. Actually watching the slaughter wasn't so bad, but seeing Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng looking over the wall and hearing the sad music as the Wen Clan troops are lining up the Jiang Clan corpses...that gets to me. Anyway, I need to fix up that bit in the fic where I had Wei Wuxian's POV recognize an enemy he had seen during this scene. The Jiang Clan dead are being laid out in a row, not piled in a heap, and none of the common Wen Clan troops are showing them any particular disrespect.
And when they're up there crying at the sight of Jiang Fengmian and Yu-furen's corpses, they're having to listen to Wang Lingjiao saying nasty things about Yu-furen and Wen Chao (who missed the whole battle!) saying insipid things back to her.
Okay, so it was a flashback. Though I remembered it a little wrong; she stabbed herself in the chest not cut her throat, and it was less laughing at the Wens for being robbing them of the pleasure of killing her as it was just crying (because for some reason when we cry our mouths make the same shape as when we laugh, which can make for some very misleading images). It's not clear whose flashback it is, though. Wen Zhuliu's? The universe's? I don't know. I guess the idea was to hold the viewer in suspense as to whether or not either of them survived and/or how they died, but considering their dead bodies surrounded by Wen Clan soldiers are in the credits, it's hard to have any actual suspense on the subject, surely. (Also surely their target audience had mostly already read the book anyway? (Where, admittedly, we didn't see their deaths, and were told that Wen Zhuliu had melted both their cores before killing them, which definitely didn't happen here.))
....and we get to the part where Jiang Cheng is freaking out at Wei Wuxian for this all being his fault for saving Lan Wangji and Jin Zixuan. Which wasn't what happened in this version.
It's a powerful moment, and it's very much Jiang Cheng's character to lash out at anyone around him when he's hurting, but I wish they'd tweaked his lines a bit so he wouldn't be using dialog that refers to a different version of events.
There's something powerfully weird and I'm not sure if it's a kind of irony or what, but right as Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng return to where Jiang Yanli has been waiting for them all night, my phone rings, and it's my mother wanting to talk to me for ten minutes. It's...it's definitely...a thing.
Anyway.
I'm not sure how I feel about what we see at this juncture, as Wei Wuxian is out to get medicine for Jiang Yanli and food for all three of them. We don't actually see Jiang Cheng using himself as bait to prevent the Wen Clan patrol from catching Wei Wuxian, but as they're all behind him and in the process of drawing their swords, then they're distracted by someone shouting "I got him!" and similar things, so they run off to help. When Wei Wuxian returns to the inn and finds that Jiang Cheng is gone, it's not hard to put two and two together that the "him" they had gotten was in fact Jiang Cheng.
In the novel, it obscures that fact, so that we don't learn it until the very end, after the final confrontation is over, and the fact that Jiang Cheng is reflecting on that--even telling Jin Ling about it, possibly? I'm not sure about that, though--is a strong implication that he's come to a point where he might, someday, be able to fully forgive Wei Wuxian and that maybe someday they'll get back to having a relationship closer to the one they had when they were young. Admittedly, you still get something of the sort in the drama, too, with finally seeing the full flashback then, but...I don't know. As with the golden core transfer, the drama gives too many hints at this time for the reveal at the end to have as much punch. (Okay, actually, in the case of the golden core, they all but spell it out right at the time, so it's like...there's no surprise to anyone except Jiang Cheng himself? Well, there's some surprise for Lan Wangji as well, but not to the same extent.)
...as I said, I'm not sure how I feel about it.
And I probably shouldn't be wasting my time on this particular note because this does not really come up in my fic? (Except I think I do have a moment where Wei Wuxian is kinda getting on Jiang Cheng's case for trying to sneak back into Lotus Pier to rescue his parents' bodies (I can't remember why the subject got brought up, but they were having some sort of argument about impetuous behavior or something?) and Jiang Cheng is somewhat appalled that Wei Wuxian could think he would do something that stupid, but he doesn't explain what had actually happened. However, as it remains vague....wait, was that in this fic or another fic? Ugh, my brain.)
Wei Wuxian arrives back at Lotus Pier for the rescue in daylight, but doesn't try sneaking inside until it's night...so where does he spend the intervening time?
It's very telling that even after Wei Wuxian sees that the first person he came across happened to be Wen Ning, his first reaction is still just unfettered rage, furious that someone he helped, someone he thought was his friend, had taken part in the massacre. But he--perhaps reluctantly--accepts Wen Ning's word that he didn't take part, and had only just arrived, having heard what happened. And after Wen Ning tells him that Jiang Cheng is indeed inside, Wei Wuxian even contemplates using him as a hostage to save Jiang Cheng, until he notices that Wen Ning is wearing the talisman Wei Wuxian made for him on his belt. Then he's overcome by guilt and gives up on that plan. Despite all they did to try to clean away a lot of Wei Wuxian's flaws, at least they still didn't try to make him perfect.
Okay, I misremembered this. I thought Wen Ning came by himself, but he says that he and his sister still have "a bunch of obedient disciples." (That's probably a translation goof, because whatever they are, they wouldn't be the disciples of the siblings as such. I seem to recall the translation of the novel calling them a troop of men under Wen Ning's command or something.) Huh, I wonder if the men working under them are part of their subclan? Hmm...if that's the case...well, no, that would contradict what Wen Qing said in the graveyard. They're probably just troops assigned to work for Wen Qing and loyal to her. Or loyal to her up to a point, anyway. 😰
Ooh, interesting detail: there's a mini-dock right off the kitchen, so food supplies can be brought straight there by boat! Aaaaand naturally today is a day when Netflix isn't letting me take screenshots again. 😭 Guess I'll take a phone photo to remind me what it looks like. (Not gonna post it, though, 'cause phone photos always end up looking like garbage.)
Okay. This is one of the things I specifically wanted to check on. The special wine is called Hefeng Liquor, according to the subtitles. Ah, the common soldiers address him as Wen Ning-gongzi. That makes sense; it's not as familiar as Ning-gongzi, but showing suitable deference to him as a relation of Wen Ruohan. Though it's also not deferential enough considering they surely ought to be using his courtesy name? (On the other hand, the Wen Clan seems to have different customs about courtesy names than the other clans, considering that neither of Wen Ruohan's sons even seems to have a courtesy name. Maybe in the Wen Clan they don't typically start using them until they're older than either of Wen Ruohan's sons lived to be?) And not actually deferential anyway, since they mock him after he's walked off and ask if he really thinks of himself as a young master. Ugh. They have even less reason to mock him in the drama than in the novel, since he doesn't have the stammer that made them think he was a half-wit in the novel. (Not that he was ever a half-wit! They just refused to see that he was intelligent and kind and wonderful. Because they were evil jerks.)
They sure got those bloodstains cleaned up fast. I thought bloodstains were actually really hard to get rid of, even on stone. (Certainly, I've seen things in various media where someone is struggling to get a bloodstain off a sidewalk and can't. But maybe concrete in its various forms holds the stain more than stone does?) Holding a banquet with dancers in the same place where a brutal battle was just fought, slaughtering innocents...yikes. Also, I'm noticing in the paused screen that Wen Zhuliu is the only one sitting there with perfect, upright posture. There are so many great little details like that.
Ugh. I did not misremember that Wen Chao had Jiang Fengmian's and Yu Ziyuan's corpses hung from the gateway by their wrists. That is so ghastly. And of course Wen Zhuliu is the only one who seems bothered by that. He doesn't even want to drink until Wen Chao goads him into it, with the obvious implication that if Wen Zhuliu doesn't drink then Wen Chao will get him in trouble with Wen Ruohan. (And the immature git actually applauds himself for getting Wen Zhuliu to drink. Wen Chao, too, does not suffer enough when Wei Wuxian takes his revenge in the drama.)
How can those dancers be dancing and looking happy with bloodied corpses on display so nearby? I cannot begin to understand it.
And then the episode ends with Wei Wuxian sitting in a small boat half-hidden under a walkway, internally panicking about the safety of his not-quite-siblings, and if Wen Ning lies to him or not.
I'm beginning to think that I didn't do a very good job of reflecting Wei Wuxian's mental state at the beginning of my fic. He should be more of a mess, shouldn't he? Hmm...it's after the golden core transfer, though, so...I'll have to see how he's behaving by that point.
Ugh. This fic I spent a year writing is much more of a mess than I thought.
Part of me wants to say "oh well, forget about it" and just leave it accumulating electronic dust on my hard drive, but part of me is also like "but there's at least some decent bits in there!" and also "I already wasted nearly a year writing this thing, so I can't just give up on it, can I?"
The nasty comment I found on one of my fics a few days ago is not helping matters on that score, of course.
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