Today's episode is where the AU point in my fic is, so hopefully after I hit that point I'll stop taking quite so many notes, since for the last few episodes it's been more like an in depth and digression-filled summary of the episode rather than just notes. 😅
Anyway. Beyond the read more tag is rambling, incoherent nonsense filled with spoilers.
The episode starts out with on-screen text saying "7 days later" (in a different font from the episode title, interestingly). Out of curiosity, I actually did use my phone's Google Translate app to check, and that, too, said that it says "seven days later." (It also confirmed that the episodes do not in fact have titles, as the episode title card was translated by the app as just saying "Episode 19". So I guess that's one for Netflix? (As opposed to various anime I've watched on Netflix where it does the same thing of claiming the episode have no titles, just numbers, and yet there's a title card that very clearly has an episode name, not a number.))
So we open not on Jiang Cheng waking up, but on Wei Wuxian waiting for him in town. This is a crucial scene for me, because the notes I took last time said this was in Yiling itself, and I wrote the fic accordingly, despite that in the novel it was just a small town in the mountains. (Which accords with the dialog Wei Wuxian had at the end of the previous episode.)
Well, firstly. This is definitely not a small town. This is a city. Wei Wuxian has adopted a beggar's hat and cloak and is sitting near several merchant stalls. He's also coughing slightly, and his brow is sweaty, so he seems to be decidedly unwell, though that may only be the result of the golden core transfer, rather than that he's also taken ill.
The subtitles identify the building he heads into to get some food as "Yilin Teahouse". The Google Translate app on my phone identifies the banner hanging from the building as reading "Yifangting Restaurant" and claims the sign above the door is not in Chinese. 😰 Whether that's due to the angles of the shots or the lack of contrast between the lettering and the background, I don't know, but I do know that it's somewhere between unlikely and impossible that it isn't actually Chinese text.
I find it highly weird that the waiter rushes over and eagerly asks Wei Wuxian what he would like, considering that he's wearing a rough, torn brown outer robe over his clothes, and thus looks like he has less than no money. This moment is kind of a problem all around, actually? I don't remember exactly how it went in the book, but I think if it went like this, then we weren't given as many details.
Wei Wuxian glances from the delighted waiter over to the other customers, who are all wearing black hooded cloaks over their Wen Clan soldier uniforms. He turns to leave again (prompting the soldiers to leap to their feet and grab their swords), and is suddenly flung back inside by a blow from Wen Zhuliu.
Which, okay, that's fine in the cinematic sense. It's even fine in the basic sense of "had the bad luck to walk right into the very restaurant where his enemies were eating." It's not so fine in the sense that they seemed to be there waiting specifically for him, despite that he was sitting in the street right outside this establishment for who-knows-how-long. If they wanted to catch him, all they had to do was just walk up to him. It's not only illogical for them to do it this way, it's actually very out of character for both Wen Chao individually and the Wen Clan as a whole.
As he walks into the restaurant, Wen Zhuliu looks at his hand in confusion, before looking back at Wei Wuxian. I'm still not sure if this is "he shouldn't have flown that far from that blow" or "I tried to melt his core, but it's already gone?" I would feel much more sure about a lot of things if it was a tiny bit more clear what he's thinking at this moment.
Anyway, he just walks aside and then Wen Chao and Wang Lingjiao swagger in. Ugh.
But we leave Wei Wuxian to be tormented by Wen Chao in order to see Jiang Cheng's dream sequence, which now that I'm seeing it again I think I can safely say is his heart's fondest wish of how his childhood had been. Because his parents are both smiling and seem happy standing together, and they're being warm and loving to all three of their children. This is how he wishes it had been: everyone he loved all together and happy and loving both each other and him. It's...it's making me cry, is what it is. 😠He doesn't even get to take part, though, because his child version runs over to be fondly fussed over by both his parents. (Something he might have gotten to experience before Wei Ying arrived, but not necessarily, depending on just how bad his parents' marriage had already gotten by that point. Not that it was ever a good marriage, as far as we know, but...)
Then the already heartbreaking dream of happier times turns horrific as his brightly smiling mother looks away from dream child Jiang Cheng to adult Jiang Cheng, her eyes rimmed with blood, which soon begins to spill down as bloody tears. She fades away, and Lotus Pier begins burning all around Jiang Cheng. He turns and finds himself face to face with Wen Zhuliu, who gives a slight smile (the only one we've ever seen on his face) before reaching his now-glowing hand into Jiang Cheng's belly. So if that's accurate and his hand actually penetrates the flesh when he's destroying someone's core, then the look of confusion in the earlier scene was just because Wei Wuxian flew too far? Hmm...
Anyway, then he wakes with a shout on the mountainside.
Hmm. Did I take this nightmare into consideration when I wrote the opening of my fic? Or maybe I eliminated the nightmare altogether by shifting the timing of when he woke up? Hmm....I'll have to think about that for draft two. (Opened the file to check, and it turns out that I skipped the initial waking up, and started with him already on his way down the mountain. Maybe that's for the best, really; regardless of the timing of it, the way he wakes up would probably be the same as on the show, so why bother trying to write it out?)
In any case, my rewatch has finally hit the divergence point for my AU, but there are still lots more details I need to glean here and there.
He seems disorientated on first waking, and maybe isn't sure where he is, or even where he's supposed to be. I'm pretty sure that wasn't reflected in my fic, even though it really should have been. Luckily, screenshots are working today, so I was able to grab a screenshot of what the location looks like, because I'm pretty sure that, too, is wrong in my fic. 😰 Well, okay, actually, I probably don't describe a darn thing about it, but whatever was in my head when I wrote it was probably wrong.
What he does to test that he has a core again seems to be some kind of deep breathing exercise, focusing by raising and lowering his hands, which is creating a glowing purple spot on his chest. Not sure quite what that is, exactly. Hopefully doesn't matter.
Anyway, then we see him shout out his thanks to "Baoshan-sanren" (almost accidentally using his own name instead of claiming to be Wei Wuxian), and him smiling as he descends the mountain again. Then....in my memory, the person we see witnessing him going down the mountain is specifically Wen Qing, in the same outfit she wore when she met him as "Baoshan-sanren." Only....this is not that outfit, so...I'm no longer sure it's actually her, even though it 100% should be.
I'll have to check carefully what she's wearing when we next see her. (Which I think should be in this episode.) If it doesn't match this outfit, then I'm suddenly very confused. (If this is supposed to actually be Baoshan-sanren, then wtf? But she wasn't wearing black in the flashback to her, was she?)
After that, we go back to Wen Chao's men beating the crap out of Wei Wuxian. The juxtaposition of these scenes strongly implies that they're taking place concurrently, which is why my AU was changing the timing of Jiang Cheng's awakening.
Okay, one thing this scene absolutely confirms is that Wen Zhuliu had not attempted to destroy Wei Wuxian's core with that blow that sent him flying. So his confusion presumably really was just because a cultivator would not normally be sent that far from that blow.
And one of the rare scenes of people flying on their swords. Technically, I probably have them doing that too often in my fic, considering that they almost never do it in the show (other than this scene and the end of the fight with the Waterborne Abyss, I can't recall any other specific instances in the drama, though I do feel like there's at least one in the present day portion), but I'm leaving that anyway because.
Hmm.
Either that absolutely was not Yiling after all, or the Burial Mounds on the show are much further from the city than was implied in the novel. (But that can't be the case, or Wei Wuxian wouldn't be able to go into the city for supplies during the period of living at the Burial Mounds with the Wen remnants.)
Anyway, now we're with Jiang Cheng in town, and he hears two people talking, wondering why the Wen Clan came to Yiling. And I did hear the name Yiling in their dialog, I think. (And, as translated, they think the entire city of Yunmeng was destroyed, rather than the cultivation clan in Yunmeng being crushed. Which is a massive difference.)
Then they--and Jiang Cheng--are distracted by something in the sky, and we switch to a shot of the Wens flying along with Wei Wuxian as their prisoner, but the earlier shot of them flying they were miles away from anywhere, clearly, so this doesn't really make any sense. Maybe the looking up part was something else that got cut? Because then we go to a shot of Jiang Cheng looking at the Wen Clan guards standing at the same teahouse where Wei Wuxian was beaten so badly. It feels like this was an editing thing, like they worried people would be confused what he was looking at, so they decided to imply that he was seeing the Wens flying away with Wei Wuxian. (Or maybe I'm too used to American movie and tv execs, who assume the viewing public are even less intelligent than they are. Despite that you don't get to be a movie or tv executive unless you're bone-stupid; they actually have the intellect trained out of them, and are taught how to avoid using logic at any time.)
Anyway, back to Wei Wuxian. Given the airplane-height levels those swords were flying at, if the sword in the evil-suppressing qiankun pouch on Wei Wuxian's belt hadn't summoned up that cloud of resentful energy to catch him, he'd have died of heart failure before hitting the ground. 😰 I feel like if they were actually flying at those heights, they would have no air to breathe. Also would probably freeze to death.
Oh well. Artistic license, I suppose.
I like the confused expression on his face as he suddenly stops falling while still insanely high off the ground:
The resentful energy is a loudly whispering, very visible smoke just holding him there for some time, until finally--with what sounds like a child's shriek--it yanks him down to the ground super-fast.
And after he lands we arrive at the scene of a chained Wen Qing being brought into...a dungeon? Of some sort? Somewhere? What she's wearing does not match that black outfit above, so I have zero clue who that was supposed to be if it wasn't her.
This is a massive dungeon with Wen Clan symbols everywhere. Where the heck is it?!
Well, I guess I'll find out tomorrow. Which will tell me just how badly screwed my fic is... 😰
Anyway, Wen Ning is already in the cell, badly beaten. He has a black eye and blood on his cheek, forehead and neck, and is bleeding from one side of his mouth and nose. 😠Only a monster could hurt someone so sweet and innocent! 😠When she asks him if he's all right, instead of answering that, he says he didn't tell them anything.
His line to her doesn't entirely make sense. Or rather, as translated, he starts out by asking how Wei-gongzi is, then asks if Jiang-gongzi got his core back. Which implies he wasn't there for the transfer, but had stayed behind to make sure things were okay at the Supervisory Office, but this is confirmed not to be the case very late in the show, when he tells Jiang Cheng about the golden core transfer, and we see a flashback to Wen Ning's role in the transfer, as in the novel. So...what...is he asking, then? Or rather, how badly translated are those lines?
I guess it doesn't 100% matter, since this is after my AU point, but...it bothers me that I can't make sense of it. My assumption has been that he was captured ahead of her because after the transfer was over, he helped Wei Wuxian back down the mountain, while Wen Qing stayed behind to watch over Jiang Cheng while he slept off the surgery. In which case, Wen Ning would have no reason to ask her about Wei Wuxian's current state, because he saw Wei Wuxian more recently than she did. Now, asking about whether or not the surgery was actually successful, that's fine; the core could have been rejected post-surgery, after all. (Assuming it works like an organ transplant in that regard.)
It might make more sense if she answered him, but of course she doesn't, she just hugs him closer to her, her eyes brimming with tears that don't quite fall.
And then we're back to Wei Wuxian in the Burial Mounds, in a sequence that I have decided to treat as a dream, because in my fic he gets rescued after a few hours, and the rescue scene I wanted to write only works if he's unconscious. 😅
I do like the fact that he's hearing all these voices calling his name, which I think are mostly sampled out of earlier dialog from the show, as we get a wide assortment of ways in which he's addressed, including Wei-gongzi and Wei-xiong (the latter being used almost exclusively by Nie Huaisang in the drama), but the last one, the only one that's strongly distinct, the one that makes him sit up, is Lan Wangji's voice saying "Wei Ying." 💕 (Also, can we please reflect on how long it's been since there has been a line of dialog from the show's love interest? He showed up on screen briefly in the previous episode, but otherwise he's been absent since episode 14.)
And then after that scene that largely made no sense (how did the sword get out of the qiankun pouch again?) we get a "Three months later" title card. (So, really, they could have cut the scene at him being yanked down by the resentful energy, and we wouldn't have lost anything except the impact Lan Wangji's voice had among all the others.)
Most improbably for three months later, the drunk guards at the site of the indoctrination camp are sitting there gossiping about how pitiful the fall of the Jiang Clan and especially of Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian was. One of them specifically says he was there with Wen Chao defeating the Jiang Clan (despite that Wen Chao missed the whole battle) and that he was one of the ones beating the crap out of Wei Wuxian in a Yiling teahouse.
Stupidly, he is saying all this stuff while Lan Wangji is climbing the stairs towards him. And I see that I actually underestimated the complexity of this attack when I tried to recreate it (in a slightly altered form) in my fic, having changed the timing and to a certain extent the participants as well. (And eliminating the gossiping idiots...)
I should probably rework the scene a bit to be closer to what's in the show. Lan Wangji is just calmly walking up the steps, totally unarmed. When he approaches the top, some other Lan Clan cultivator offscreen is sending guqin chord attacks to knock the Wen guards around. (At least, I assume that's someone else and not Lan Wangji just sort of magically doing that without any sign he's taken out and put away his guqin.) The panicking drunk idiots start worrying that this is Wei Wuxian's ghost attacking them, until one of them spots Lan Wangji, and then they start panicking for real, calling for someone to come take down the "rebel." Someone else snags the one who's shouting with a guqin string around his throat, pulling him off the side, clutching at the chord to keep himself from being choked to death. The chord attacks continue, and at least one of the guards was almost certainly killed by them, judging by the red streak left across his throat.
Once Lan Wangji reaches the top, that's when Jiang Cheng arrives by qinggong. Then a small host of Lan Clan cultivators with drawn swords run up onto the platform, moving past Lan Wangji to surround the Wen Clan guards. Lan Wangji orders the Wen Clan guards to kneel--just with a single word, mind you!--and they do so almost instantly, dropping their swords. And then he asks where Wei Ying is. 😅 Even for him, that's almost too laser-focused. Particularly for three months later. I feel like maybe this scene was written with the intention of it only being weeks later, and minds were changed later without any adjustment to the scene itself. (If for no other reason than that all those young masters would be hampered in the war without their swords! And the actual point of this raid was to get their swords back, not to learn where Wei Wuxian is.)
Huh. Actually, the scene ends there, not with them getting the swords back? That's...was retrieving the swords mentioned later, when they reach Qinghe? Hummmm.
Well, anyway. The episode then moves on into part one of Wei Wuxian's elaborate revenge on Wen Chao and Wang Lingjiao, so I don't need to take notes on that, because it's totally different in my fic. (But still there, because those two deserve all the punishment.) Although I do have that moment when he tries to convince them he's become a ghost, so I should remember that Netflix's translation has "ferocious ghost" for talking about the idea, so I should make sure that's the term I use. I think I had "vengeful" instead of "ferocious."
Ah, okay, now we switch back to the indoctrination camp location (which is still daytime, even though the scene with Wen Chao and Wang Lingjiao was at night) and Jiang Cheng and Lan Wangji are discussing what the Wens told them about Wei Wuxian (well, Jiang Cheng is discussing it and Lan Wangji is looking pensive) and then the other Lans come over with the swords they recovered....
...and it's Lan Wangji who takes Wei Wuxian's sword from the others, not Jiang Cheng. Who is all but his brother.
Lan Wangji then tries to draw the sword, but it's already sealed. Which makes zero sense. Suibian sealed itself after Wei Wuxian's death in the novel, not after he lost his golden core. That wouldn't...were they trying to make us think Wei Wuxian was dead after all? Because if they wanted us to think that, then they shouldn't have shown him surviving his landing in the Burial Mounds. And also, you know, not have already shown us how he was actually going to die. (Which I gather is how it worked in the "Special Edition" version that's only twenty episodes long; apparently there everything is in chronological order. And the entire Yin Iron subplot was removed, which would either mean losing most of the little amount of the Sunshot Campaign as we got or making it completely incomprehensible.)
Anyway, we don't actually see that the other Lans let those Wen Clan guards live, so...hmm. One the one hand, it's war, and on the other hand it's not like the Lan Clan to kill people who have already surrendered. In the current draft, they just lock up the guards so they can't raise the alarm, but...hmm. I'm not sure about which way I should have that go in the final draft.
I'm more perplexed by the implied sequence of events in the missing three months. Because Jiang Cheng's dialog in this scene almost implies that he spent the entire three months waiting for Wei Wuxian. (And he does, according to the subtitles, say that was in a Yiling teahouse, so I guess they really did change it to be Yiling instead of a small village.) In the novel, he spent about a week waiting for him, then gave up and left, because he had a clan to rebuild and a war to fight. Admittedly, the sequence of events doesn't matter since my AU point is earlier than this, and Jiang Cheng never had to wait for him at all in my fic, but...it's still frustrating that I can't pin it down any better than this. (Though again, that's partially due to the whole "not a very good translation" thing. Partially. I suspect it's vague and unclear even to a native speaker. Since the point is the drama, not the details. But I am the type who gets hung up on the details. (In things others have written. I lose sight of the details in my own work, I'm ashamed to report.))
OMG, I can't stop laughing.
Okay, okay, so the next scene, the next scene is a group of Jins arriving at Qinghe.
There's dead bodies everywhere outside the fortress walls. And a head is hanging from the gate. Jin Zixuan looks at it with shock and exclaims "Wen Xu is dead?" and the person standing with him starts talking about how valiantly Nie Mingjue killed him. There's on-screen text to identify this new character, but it's not translated, so I paused the show and used the app on my phone again. There's two lines of it, right?
The first, larger line, said it was Jin Zixun. (Which it doesn't look or sound like I remember him looking or sounding, but that's probably just my faulty memory. Also he seems too old and too competent, but whatever.)
The second line of smaller text, according to the phone app, says "original dumplings."
I have no idea what it's actually trying to say.
But "original dumplings"!!!!
OMG, so funny!
I need to add a line somewhere in my fic where someone calls him a dumpling or compares him to dumplings. 🤣 (He does, after all, have about as much intellect as a dumpling.)
Presumably that line of text was identifying him as a nephew of Jin Guangshan (since we don't know his birth name or the names of his parents, and he's way too incompetent to have a sobriquet) but...."original dumplings"!!!! 🤣🤣🤣 [EDIT: having thought over it a bit while less in the throes of uproarious laughter, I realized that it almost certainly said "Jin Clan of Lanling." Given that "Wen Clan of Qishan" was used for the second line of text for people like Wang Lingjiao. How that got translated as "original dumplings," I have no idea. But it's hilarious. I want, somehow, to tell Wei Wuxian about it so he can proceed to mock Jin Zixun for it with considerably more wit than I possess.]
*ahem*
Okay. I will put a sock in it.
Jin Zixuan uses a flare of golden magic shooting out of his fingers (I guess I oughta add that to the cultivator powers list, but I think it's about the same as the earlier one with the sword glare out of the fingers stuff) to chase some crows (or maybe they're some variety of raven, since they have white ruffs and chests, which is not very crow-like to me) off some of the enemy corpses, and Jin Zixun asks him why he would bother, especially since they don't get to eat such meat often. (Actually, he calls it wasting a talisman, so I guess there was a talisman somewhere in there and it was just subsumed in his magic so I couldn't see it?) The subtitles have him saying "Zixuan" but it sounded like "hanbi" or something? Looking at the relationship chart on one of the AO3 guides...it could have been "tangdi"? But that would make Jin Zixun the elder of the two, and that wouldn't make any sense. The novel specified that Jin Zixun was a couple of years younger than Jin Zixuan.
Nothing makes any sense if they reversed that and made Jin Zixuan the younger of the two.
Anyway, after ordering his men to help clean up the bodies, Jin Zixuan goes to help Jiang Yanli out of the carriage only to suddenly pull back his hand at the last second, awkward around her. Ugh, his behavior around her prior to the soup incident clearing the fog out of his brain is so inconsistent! (At least in the novel it was consistent. Awful, but consistent.) Important thing is that she is indeed wearing mourning white, which is what I had mentioned in my fic. I'm not sure why the decapitated head hanging from the gate alarms her so much more than the sea of corpses, but...well...I'd probably have the same reaction if I was there, so I guess I've no room to say anything about that.
What's weird to me is that when Jiang Yanli is about to just sort of go on her way now that they're on Qinghe (where would she even go, exactly?), in trying to prevent her from just walking off, Jin Zixuan hurriedly tells her that Wei Wuxian entrusted her to him, so he needs to keep watch over her until Jiang Cheng arrives. (He's also calling him Jiang Cheng instead of Jiang Wanyin.)
Um.
Why would he put it that way?
Why would anyone put it that way?
I mean, are we seriously supposed to think that Song Lan reported that Wei Wuxian had been acting alone and that Jiang Cheng took no part in any of it? Even though Jiang Cheng was the one who had the long speech to Song Lan thanking him for taking on the dangerous road of protecting Jiang Yanli on the voyage to Lanling? It's such a strange line. I mean, maybe it's supposed to represent Jin Zixuan's flustered mind as he's not sure what to think or do around her (despite that she's been in Lanling for three months now, so you'd think he'd have gotten used to her by now in one way or another) and so his mind produced Wei Wuxian's name faster because their weird "not sure if we're enemies or rivals or what but I know I hate him" relationship just brings him more easily to mind, or...or...I don't even know what. Except that the writers wanted to put the name of their lead character in the scene. 😅
I feel like the more logical line would be to say something along the lines of "your brothers entrusted you to the Jin Clan's care, so I must watch over you until I can see you safely reunited with them" or something. I mean, I guess it would be more awkward than that since one is her actual brother and one her "sect brother" but...
Well, maybe it is just supposed to represent his inability to think straight around her, considering he starts out saying she was entrusted to him, and then amends that to that she was entrusted to the Jin Clan.
The weird part is that she's astonished--and greatly pleased, of course--to learn he's had news of Jiang Cheng. It's like...um...did no one tell you that was why they were bringing you hundreds of miles to Qinghe, which has so recently been a battlefield, instead of leaving you at Lanling with Jin-furen, where you'd be safe?
I notice that every time there's lines like these where I'm like "wait, that makes no sense," it's always due to scenes that weren't in the novel.
And, of course, cinematic timing: while they're in that conversation, Jiang Cheng and Lan Wangji arrive. Possibly having flown there, given that they seem to have jumped down from something on the first shot of their feet hitting the ground.
And another scene of Jiang Yanli crying in public. I'd say this fills the same slot as the one in the novel where she cries on being reunited with both her brothers, but I'm pretty sure she cries at the trio reunion scene too.
Lan Wangji is still carrying Suibian. Jin Zixuan notices that, and doesn't seem to know quite how to ask what it means that Lan Wangji is carrying Wei Wuxian's sword. Lan Wangji simply tells him that the Qishan Indoctrination Bureau has been burned. Then one of the other Jins presents Jin Zixuan with his sword.
Jin Zixuan goes on talking to the silent and even-stonier-than-usual Lan Wangji, and eventually again says that it was Wei Wuxian who entrusted him with Jiang Yanli (seriously, did Song Lan get his story that screwed up, or does everyone naturally ignore Jiang Cheng in favor of Wei Wuxian?) and asks where he is. I definitely need to amend Jin Zixuan's attitude towards Wei Wuxian at this point in my fic; in the wake of the indoctrination camp, he's positively on Wei Wuxian's side. Might even honestly think of him as a type of friend, even. Not one he'd ever admit to feeling friendly about, but...
Anyway, in the next scene we get the rundown on the current state of the Sunshot Campaign, and...I am just gonna hafta put an author's note on the fic that I've tossed almost everything about the drama's version of the Sunshot Campaign because there way too much "we accomplished almost everything in the three months that got skipped over" and way too little of our leads actually getting to do anything!
...and Nie Mingjue just claimed that Yiling was in the "southwest hinterland next to Qishan's fortress" and that it's "impregnable." Um. According to their own map in the art book, Yiling is located very close to Yunmeng--and thus very far away from the northerly Qishan--and also, um, hello? They literally walked right into the indoctrination camp, which is actually on the outskirts of Nightless City itself! How could Yiling be a problem?
Yeah, I am 100% just leaving an author's note about how I've reverted the inconsistent geography from the drama to the geography I got from the wiki, which is (probably) based on reality.
Oh! This was the episode where I noticed it before!
New entry on the Cast Members with Obviously Pierced Ears tally: Nie Mingjue!
See?
Anyway, he tells them to take off tomorrow...wait, why do I care? This is after my AU point, so it's irrelevant.
Ah, what isn't irrelevant is the bit of dialog after Jiang Cheng and Lan Wangji leave, wherein Nie Mingjue asks Jin Zixuan if Meng Yao has been behaving himself with the Jin Clan, but Jin Zixuan is confused, because he thought Meng Yao was with the Nie Clan. He clarifies that he hasn't seen Meng Yao since Cloud Recesses. He starts to say that there's no way his father would allow one of his bastards into the clan, but he can't bring himself to say anything so indelicate, and just says that "My father would not..."
And on that subject, when Wen Chao is being ordered back to Qishan, he's snarling about how his father has gotten another "right-hand man" and how if there's some problem, that other man can go and fix everything, and essentially being very pissy about it.
But I guess that doesn't really tell me anything I didn't already know, since Meng Yao had to be established already by this point if he was going to send Lan Xichen any information, what with the fact that the Sunshot Campaign is only about four months long in this version.
Though I guess it does help to prove that the drama isn't trying to claim Meng Yao was already working for the Wen Clan while he was also with the Nie Clan? I do feel like my fic's chronology of Meng Yao's life between his dismissal from the Nie Clan and the end of the Sunshot Campaign is a bit iffy, so that's one of the things I was hoping to find answers about, but I fear that most of the answers I'm going to get will either be in dialog in the present, or so directly from the book that they may not even be consistent with various earlier changes to his timeline, or quite possibly both at once. 😰
I feel like my biggest take-away from this episode (aside from "original dumplings," which will keep me laughing for weeks, at least) is that figure watching Jiang Cheng going down the mountain. Because my mind had that firmly as being Wen Qing, and I wrote my fic accordingly, but that super is not Wen Qing. I'm not even sure that's a woman; the waist doesn't seem quite as cinched as it would be on a woman. There's a small hint of red on the otherwise black clothes, so it's like...the character who feels most likely to wear what we can see of that outfit is, in fact, Wei Wuxian. Which is impossible unless they were trying to set up a time-traveling sequel series.
O. M. F. G.
I wish that was what was going on. I would love to see a sequel series where Wei Wuxian traveled back in time to prevent the tragedies of his past.
Second most likely character to wear what we can see of that outfit is Xue Yang. Whose location at this time, admittedly, is entirely unknown. (His location won't be known again until he becomes a Jin Clan guest cultivator, which is in itself absurdity with the new timing on the Chang Clan massacre, but...) This is absolutely not what he was wearing when he slaughtered Baixue Temple, though, as the belt he was wearing at that time had silver studs on it, and this belt is two layers of plain leather.
Though actually both of them tend to wear bracers for combat-readiness, and the person watching Jiang Cheng go down the mountain is wearing a more loose sleeve, so it's probably not intended to be either of them. (Though I would still very much love for it to be a time-traveling Wei Wuxian.)
...I just went to the Youtube page for this episode to see if anyone in the comments had anything to say about the mysterious figure, and of course they didn't. (I'm not sure why I bothered, tbh, but I'm not sure where else to look for info.)
And I see it is now past dinner time, so I think I should probably just stop for the day.
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