I would really like to know why Blogger skipped over a number when it was assigning URLs to these posts. The URL for the first like 13 episodes matched the episode number, and then suddenly it skipped over a number, so all of them now have the number for the next episode. (Meaning, if nothing changes, the last one's URL will end in "episode-51"? 😅) It's so weird.
Anyway, incoherent rambling filled with spoilers follows the read more tag. But hopefully it's more incoherent than it was for many of the preceding episodes, because I really shouldn't need to take so many notes now that I'm well past my fic's AU point and everything is going differently.
So, the previous episode ended with a daytime clash between Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji, just a few blows traded back and forth, and some words that indicated their encounter was far from over...but whatever happened next we missed it, and now they're quietly sitting on an Unclean Realm rooftop and talking. Weird. 😅
Anyway, in their conversation, Wei Wuxian draws a distinction between the "wicked" techniques that were used by Xue Chonghai and the "crafty tricks" he's been using. I really ought to find a way to use that in my fic, even though there's much less possibility of his new techniques in the fic being considered wicked. (Well, okay, let's be honest: what he was doing in the novel outright was wicked in many respects. Hard to see necromancy as anything else.) After all, people in the fic still call his methods "wicked tricks" even though they aren't. Because that's the sort of thing people do.
Then he says "I have to thank you for the Lan Clan Temperament Technique." What...um...what is that? It has not been mentioned before by that name, and I recall nothing in the novel that had a name anything like that. But if it's something from the Lan Clan, then he learned it in the Cloud Recesses arc, which is way before my AU point, so it's something he should know in the fic. Hnnnnn... He goes on to say that his "crafty tricks require practicing temperament and studying talisman." I really have no idea what he's talking about, but I feel like I probably ought to. I kinda feel like it's maybe some heightened meditation technique, maybe? I dunno.
Anyway, then after showing off how well he can twirl his dizi between his fingers (I wonder if there had to be a lot of reshoots because he dropped it?) he says "With a bamboo flute, everything can be controlled." Again, that feels like a line I'd love to adapt into my fic. (Though in my fic he gets a jade flute rather than a bamboo one. And doesn't name it Chenqing...)
I get that holding three fingers up beside the head while making a promise is a show of sincerity or something along those lines, but I wonder what it actually means? I'm not even sure how to look it up. I'm hesitant to use it in my fic without fully understanding it, but it does seem to be pretty serious, since Meng Yao used it while he was swearing to Nie Mingjue that he...hmm...what was it that he was swearing when he did that? I should've written that down. It was either when he was swearing he wasn't the one to release Xue Yang or when he was swearing something more general? 😖 Given how much of my fic needs rewriting due to that not having gone quite the way I remembered, you'd think I would have taken better notes! I may have to rewatch that scene later. (I'll probably hold off until the Empathy session with NMJ's head, though. That may clear up enough of my uncertainties about what they're saying actually happened that I won't need to.)
Wei Wuxian just used a form of qinggong to get down off the roof, so I guess he doesn't need a core to do that.
Which I suppose is not actually relevant? No, wait, it kind of is, albeit only briefly.
Oh boy.
This is a particularly badly translated episode, isn't it?
In Nie Mingjue's big speech before they march out towards Qishan, he says that Wen Ruohan "is intended to annex the gentry greedily."
😖
I...I get the basic gist of what he's trying to say, but...yikes.
Setting aside that "is intended" is not the same thing as "intends" or "has the intention"
....nope, I can't set that aside.
That really bugs me.
What also bugs me is that "gentry" is definitely not a proper translation for whatever word or concept is actually being used. "Gentry" implies titled nobility, or at least the wealthy, land-owning class. It can mean a more general privileged group, but that's not really how it's typically used. It's typically used to mean the literal aristocracy. (Which is actually a really awful word when you look at etymologically? Because it technically means "rule by the best" in the way that democracy means "rule by the people," and yet most of the time aristocrats are anything but the best!)
Um.
Right.
This is why it takes me two and a half hours to get through a 45 minute episode.
I should never have opened these floodgates.
Oh god. He followed that up with saying that Wen Ruohan "killed the innocent crucially."
😅
Their proofreading team just plain skipped this episode, evidently. (Assuming they have such a team.) There's a massive difference between "cruelly" and "crucially." Massive difference.
Yup.
Need to not take the actual subtitles too seriously here.
(Which is a problem, because this is actually a pretty important episode...)
Weird positions for the people watching this speech.
Some of it makes sense: to one side of him is his brother, and to his other is his best friend and fellow clan leader, Lan Xichen. Standing next to Nie Huaisang is fellow clan heir Jin Zixuan, and next to him is Jin Zixun. All that makes sense. (Well, except Jin Zixun even being there, considering he wasn't introduced until the Mount Baifeng Siege Hunt in the novel.)
But instead of Lan Wangji standing next to Lan Xichen, it's Jiang Yanli (who probably doesn't even have a reason to be there?), and beside her is of course her brother. Then Wei Wuxian is both beside him and also a bit behind him, which makes sense in that he's not of a similar rank to the others. And then Lan Wangji is standing next to him, so he's also standing further back from the way everyone else is lined up, as well as having three people in between him and his brother.
I mean, of course they want to have the romantic leads standing together, but this arrangement doesn't make much sense. (But I suppose it makes about as much sense as the way the subtitles translate Nie Mingjue's speech. 😅)
Uh. What is Lan Wangji looking at in this freeze frame? He's like looking over at the line of Lan Clan disciples where they're standing in that gateway? It's very strange; he ought to be looking at the man giving the passionate speech, ya know? In the close-ups on them, he's more or less looking straight at the camera.
Also, what is with the people in weird locations who call my cell phone and then hang up halfway through the first ring? Is that just auto-dialing scammers whose connection got dropped?
I should remember the army chanting "Sunshot!" in response to the big speech. That seems like the sort of thing that probably would happen a lot before big pushes in the war. Though I'm not sure I ever ended up with a big speech scene like this. What with the fact that I can't write big speeches like that. 😅 Realistically, there really ought to be at least two such speeches in there somewhere, since there are actually two wars in my fic... (Hmm, I kinda have a motivational speech at one point, but it's a more tense emergency situation, so there's no chanting of any kind after it, because everyone's scrambling to go deal with the unfolding catastrophe before it can claim any more innocent lives.)
...when they ride out of the gates of the Unclean Realm, suddenly Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian are the ones riding right behind Nie Mingjue. Not his own men, not the other two clan leaders present, but our romantic leads, who are just a clan heir and a...uh...what even is Wei Wuxian at this point? Just the shixiong of a clan leader, I guess. Not who should be riding in second place in the march out.
Oh. I see. Jiang Cheng and Jin Zixuan went ahead with some of their men to clear a path for the army. Nie Mingjue is leading the main force. I'm not sure where Lan Xichen is.
Why am I writing this down?
It doesn't happen this way in my fic, so who cares?
Why are they bringing Jiang Yanli with them to the battlefront?! It makes no sense in this context!!!!!
Seriously, in this context, they'd just leave her behind at the Unclean Realm with Nie Huaisang, and send for her once the war was over. It's...ugh.
I mean, yes, I know why they're bringing her: they're bringing her because the soup incident hasn't happened yet, and it still needs to. But...I really feel like if they wanted to do the whole flashback in one giant flashback instead of in bits and pieces as the story progressed in the present, then they should have found a better way to deal with the Sunshot Campaign. 😰 This is not only kind of pitiful, but it takes away Wei Wuxian's status as a war hero. He does basically nothing in the Sunshot Campaign in this version, aside from having taken out Wen Chao's men.
Ah. Yes. This.
This is.
Oh my. How do I even try to describe this thing?
Aside from calling it an urukhai?
I mean, it's not, it's obviously not, but I really do feel like that's what they were going for with these guys. (Aside from the magma-like glowing on their chests.)
The art book called them like "burly" puppets or something, but...
*sigh*
Thankfully, Sword and Fairy 6 actually had something similar to this that gave me a way to explain it (and given that it came out some four years before The Untamed, it's theoretically possible that it influenced this, but probably both are drawing on some older genre convention that I'm unaware of, being so new to the genre) but...this is their big scene, and it's kind of pathetic. The battle is very sparse, just a few dozen men on either side, and then those cairns produce fireballs that turn normal puppets into the urukhai versions, and...
*sigh*
Trying to deal with what those are and everything in my fic was not fun.
It is amusing to me that in this tense and bloody battle, we follow two major players, Jiang Cheng and Jin Zixuan, and both of them are fighting heroically and powerfully against the enemy...and only one of them has any sign of that fact on their body. Jiang Cheng has blood on his face and his sleeves are damaged and blood-spattered. Jin Zixuan is still pristine, despite his pale yellow robes which ought to show all sorts of damage and grime. 😅
Strange to me, though, is the fact that Jiang Cheng's men seem to be addressing him as "gongzi" rather than "zongzhu" here. That's what the subtitles say, and it does seem to be what they're actually saying, as well. Considering those men should have been ones he recruited after becoming the clan leader, that seems particularly odd to me. Unless maybe they're men from the Yunmeng area who already knew him as the young master of the Jiang Clan and so they still think of him that way?
It doesn't matter, of course, but it's weird none the less.
Huh. I thought this battle was when one of the urukhai puppets turned someone into a puppet just by grabbing their neck, but that didn't happen. (Crap, if my mind invented that entirely, I'm gonna have even more rewriting to do...)
Evidently, the exploding cairn trap was entirely Meng Yao's idea. I think I implied that in my fic, but never went into any details.
Okay, the cage full of men who were turned into puppets due to the battle does include someone from the Lan Clan. So there goes my line about the protections on their clothes preventing them from turning into puppets. 😰 Yet more rewriting I have to do. (OMG, am I glad I decided to rewatch the show before editing! (And let's not even address how glad I am that I don't post as I write!))
I'm not clear where this meeting is being held. It looks like they're in an actual building, but surely they didn't go all the way back to the Unclean Realm? I mean, it doesn't matter, because I'm handling the Sunshot Campaign totally differently, but it's still weird. (Also, why does the meeting start with only Nie Mingjue, Jiang Cheng and Jin Zixuan? Why is Lan Xichen not there at all? Unless it's because Nie Mingjue assumes Lan Xichen will try to stop him from acting on his plan to sneak into Nightless City to assassinate Wen Ruohan.)
I think I described it correctly, but just in case I didn't, the symbol for the exploding herm traps is a rock with flames on it.
Ugh. I hate this version of the soup incident. Not only do we miss most of what actually happens, so we're just seeing aftermath, there's also the fact that Mianmian's explanation makes it sound like she knew this was going on all this time and did nothing to clear things up.
But one thing I just noticed. In talking about the three extra bowls of soup that Jiang Yanli made, she says "didi" and then goes on to say "Wei-gongzi" and "Jiang-gongzi," which to me means she first called both of them Jiang Yanli's brothers, and then decided to clarify since Wei Wuxian is not technically her brother, even though she will later literally describe him as her "didi" rather than "shidi." For Mianmian to also describe him that way is surprising, but potentially pleasant. I mean, if she means it as "I know she loves you like a real brother" that's one thing, but if she's been fooled into believing the rumors that he actually is her half-brother, then that's something else entirely, and not good. But probably it meant the former. (Since Mianmian is in this case playing mouthpiece for the omniscient narrator from the novel...)
Ah, okay, I forgot that she goes on to say that Jiang Yanli had actually asked her to deliver the soup, and Mianmian had demurred, fearing it was inappropriate. Of course, in the novel she had delivered it herself when he was out, and it was the other girl who had simply pretended to be responsible, until one day Jin Zixuan found Jiang Yanli delivering the soup and assumed she was copying and had a fit at her. It does make more sense for Mianmian to know about it if she was asked to help out, but it's also...it still begs the question of why she didn't step in to clear things up sooner.
....and after punching Jin Zixuan, Wei Wuxian actually pulls out his dizi and sends out a blast of resentful energy to attack all his men who drew their swords on seeing the punch? Um...yeah. That...that does not...that's...is that to take the place of the one time in the novel when he used the Yin Tiger Tally, in which accidentally killed a lot of Jin Clan men as well as the enemy? Because knocking a few men down does not really compare to accidentally killing them in friendly fire.
Ugh, why am I writing all this down?
This is past my AU point, and in my version of the soup incident Wen Ning was delivering the soup because he thought it would upset her brothers if Jiang Yanli delivered it, so Jin Zixuan had been thinking the soup was poisoned or something since his men had seen Wen Ning going into his tent with it, and Jiang Yanli actually missed the whole incident, because it was just the Jins picking on poor, innocent Wen Ning. (And then Mianmian speaking up on his behalf, because Mianmian is a lovely person who is nice to nice people. And also to Jin Zixuan for some reason.)
That must have been quite a punch, if the wind of it coming near Jin Zixuan's face knocked him away. 😅
The one thing I do like about this scene is that Wei Wuxian's rage doesn't subside in the least on Jiang Yanli grabbing his arm with both hands and calling his name, nor at Mianmian physically planting herself in front of Jin Zixuan, but as soon as Lan Wangji grabs his wrist and tells him to calm down, then he does. 💕
Meanwhile, Lan Xichen and Nie Mingjue are discussing the map and how Lan Xichen got it, and it does at least confirm that the drama did not remove Lan Xichen being helped by Meng Yao following the burning of Cloud Recesses. Thank goodness! If I had to change that in my fic, too, I'd be really freaking out. In my fic, I had Lan Xichen unsure that Meng Yao was the one who sent him the map, but here he seems quite certain of it. In fact, it sounds like maybe Meng Yao infiltrating Nightless City was a plan they had discussed together beforehand? Hmmm...if so, that might be why they removed the line from the climax where Meng Yao made it sound like he had only done all that and assassinated Wen Ruohan on his father's orders. I don't care even if they are trying to say that Jin Guangshan never gave him that order; I am not removing the confrontation I wrote between them where Meng Yao reminded his father of the promise to accept him if he dealt with the Wen Clan, only to be told it was never a promise, just a statement that he wouldn't acknowledge Meng Yao as his son "unless you killed Wen Ruohan with your own hands!" (Which, in my fic, he didn't...primarily because as soon as he becomes Jin Guangyao, it becomes that much harder to prevent all the canon tragedies. So long as he remains Meng Yao and has minimal access to power, he's not going to cause problems. And won't be as tempted to turn evil.)
....um.
So, just like that, seven days later they're already fighting in Nightless City?
...
😅
I just have no words.
Ah, this was the scene where we saw an urukhai puppet convert someone into a regular puppet just by grabbing their neck. That's probably fine, then.
But then they retreated again because of the puppets? (And Lan Wangji is totally just marching as part of the Jiang Clan...)
I don't quite get the purpose of doing it this way.
Oh, no, it was a different force that marched straight to Nightless City, and the Lan and Jiang forces were going the other...but there were Jiang men in the earlier scene...
I am super confused by this. I definitely am not supposed to be putting this much thought into it. (Also, I kind of feel like I actually made my version of the Sunshot Campaign make way too much sense compared to what's in the drama...)
Okay, so the throne room scene where Nie Mingjue is a prisoner...and he's not bound at all.
Why is he not bound at all?
That's...that seems reckless, even for someone who believes himself as invincible as Wen Ruohan does.
Admittedly, Nie Mingjue has had the crap beaten out of him, clearly, but still!
*sigh*
Well, I guess that at least removes the awkward necessity I had in the fic to find a way to have Jiang Cheng free his arms. Since Wen Ruohan would obviously be even less worried about him being a threat than he is about Nie Mingjue.
Um...why did they feel the need to write Meng Yao's name on the screen like that? He's not a new character. And anyone who had already read the novel knows he's there and what's coming, so... 😅
LOL, Jiang Cheng just headbutted an enemy! And it worked, too! OMG, that's epic. I need to find a way to put that in the fic somewhere. I love how he's just a notch below most of the others in terms of sheer dignity. He's just so much more human than the others of his station.
And then of course Lan Wangji leaps across the battlefield to save Wei Wuxian from an enemy. 💕 Though really, why is Wei Wuxian fighting using his dizi as if it was a sword? Why isn't he, ya know, playing it and attacking the enemy with his smoke clouds--I mean with his resentful energy attacks? 😅 That's crazy tough bamboo Chenqing is made of, though, gotta say.
The fighting comes to a lull (or rather they defeat all the enemies around them) and the rando asks Wei Wuxian what they should do now? Not Lan Xichen, not Jiang Cheng, but Wei Wuxian? That makes no sense! Can't tell who's supposed to be talking, so I'm not sure which clan they're from, but they should ask their associated clan leader, surely. (Also, if they're from the Jiang Clan, they shouldn't be calling him Wei-gongzi, surely. If they're newly recruited by Jiang Cheng, then they would technically be his disciples, which means Wei Wuxian would be "shibo" to them. But if they're from the Lan Clan, it's even weirder that they'd ask Wei Wuxian instead of either of the Twin Jades.)
And then four people--two each in the uniforms of the Lan and Jiang Clans--are struck by fireballs coming out of Scorching Sun Palace, cracks start appearing on their necks and faces, and they briefly turn to stone before exploding.
...
...if I hadn't played Sword and Fairy 6 I would have literally no way to process that other than "omg wtf." Which I'm pretty sure was my reaction originally.
Thankfully, that can't happen in my fic because of how I handled things, but...man, that was a weird choice. I get that they're trying to build up how powerful and scary Wen Ruohan and the Yin Iron are, but it's kinda late in the game to do that now.
Why is Jiang Cheng not using Zidian in this fight?
They're so badly outnumbered, and he's just fighting with his sword like anyone else. (Though at least he's one of the ones also using the sheath to block enemy attacks. If you gotta be holding it in your hand anyway, may as well use it for something!) They're not even any of them sending sword glare flying out to attack enemies further away. Nor are any of the Lans using guqin attacks.
I get that all of those methods are more expensive to film, but it's...this kind of battle is really underwhelming when you know that the heroes have so much more powerful methods available to them, so there's no reason for them to be allowing so many of their allies to be slaughtered like that.
What does that look on Lan Wangji's face mean when Wei Wuxian leaps out of combat to land wherever the heck he is (top of the stairs, I think?)? Is he worried about what Wei Wuxian is planning to do up there, or does he feel betrayed because he thinks Wei Wuxian is abandoning them all to escape alone? Or is it a little of both?
Okay, he's standing on a statue. But what is it a statue of, exactly? I don't think anything I've come across in that bestiary looks like that. 🤔 I should double-check my notes, but I don't think so. Which is sort of a problem, because I might need to know that for the fic...
...
Using his power to hijack control of the puppets just isn't as impressive as sending hordes of fierce corpses in to fight the living enemies, and then turning those living enemies into fierce corpses as soon as they die, so that he has a never-ending supply of formerly-human weapons against the enemy. It's certainly more palatable, as necromancy is a pretty skeevy thing, but...
Oh well.
Some very iconic shots of Wei Wuxian playing his dizi at the end there. (And the sky is really pretty in that last screenshot.)
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