Blah blah blah, incoherent notes and spoiler-filled rambling follows.
I'm already finding myself doubting what I wrote in my version of this confrontation. And I reread it yesterday.
I think my brain is fried.
Though looking over the scene again, I should probably retouch Jin Guangshan's reaction to being told that it should be Jiang Yanli's decision. He's enough of a politician to keep his frustration off his face.
Meng Yao Jin Guangyao is like the only one in the room who's actually glad to see the marriage foiled. 😅 (I mean, okay, Wei Wuxian was happy about it, but in a very different way. Also, he's left the room by the time we see Jin Guangyao's self-satisfied little smile...which was very much the same smile he showed on seeing Wei Wuxian arrive to interfere in the first place.)
Hmm. The subtitles are calling it the Mount Baifeng Crowd Hunt instead of Siege Hunt. I wonder if I should change to use that, or just stick with Siege Hunt. 🤔 It's hard to know how far I want to go in following the Netflix subtitles and how far I want to go with following the official translation of the novel. (Especially since in places I'm ignoring both and using transliterated honorifics and titles that they prefer to translate...) They do at least mention that it's an autumn thing, still. (Not that it looks like autumn in the footage, but oh well.)
I wonder why some characters choose to hide their mouths/faces when they drink and others don't? I notice it seems particularly common with women, but some of the men do it, too; I noticed Lan Xichen doing it in an earlier scene, and Jin Zixuan just did it. Like so many things that leave me a bit perplexed, I'm sure there's a specific meaning to it, one which I'm just not conversant enough in the culture to understand. 😰 These kinds of details are not easy to look up, though; I feel like the easiest way to learn about them would be to find someone who is actually a part of the culture and just ask them to explain, and yet I know I for one am utterly incapable of doing so. (It would probably be pretty dang rude in most contexts, too...)
OMG, I cannot believe I forgot there was a scene where Jin Guangshan is actually sitting on Wen Ruohan's throne. (Though I think my previous rewatch ended partway through the banquet, and then I skipped ahead to the Siege Hunt...)
...and this scene has Jin Guangshan concluding that Chenqing is made from Xue Yang's piece of the Yin Iron. 😅 Or so it appears from the particular image of Wei Wuxian they chose to insert into the scene as Jin Guangshan is contemplating the idea that Wei Wuxian took that piece of Yin Iron.
It does feel unnatural for Jin Guangshan to be using "a-Yao," though. I feel like in the novel Jin Guangshan was always thoroughly resentful that he had to claim to accept one of his bastards--particularly one fathered on a courtesan--even as he depended more and more on all the grunt work Jin Guangyao was willing to do for him.
Huh. They're getting back to Lotus Pier and finding the main courtyard covered in bloodstains and discarded weapons. Were the Wen Clan driven out by force in a scene we neither saw nor heard about? Because we know they had cleaned up the blood from the slaughter of the Jiang Clan, because we saw the courtyard being perfectly bloodless (aside from the blood on the dangling corpses 😭), so...so...I'm confused.
*sigh*
Well, everything went differently in my fic after the golden core transfer, so I can probably just ignore this? I hope? (I mean, technically, of course I can; no one is going to want to waste their time reading a 500k fanfic where the lead of the show isn't even the lead of the fic, and the "central" romance of the fic is a straight one. Not that there's much romance to it, ofc. Wen Qing was fighting the romance the whole way. 😅)
Now we're at Cloud Recesses, and they're labeling a building as "Silence Room." I guess that's their translation of what Seven Seas translated as "Tranquility Room"? IE, Lan Wangji's house? I don't like "Silence Room" at all. That's...not good. I'm definitely sticking with the Seven Seas translation if that's the case. (I do need to pay close attention, though, to see if the art book was right when it said that in their version, Lan Wangji is now living in his mother's house. Because if so, that's gonna change the one reference I made to it in my fic...)
...and this is another episode that decided to translate "xiongzhang" as "Zewu-jun." 😰
The scene with Lan Qiren is problematic in a lot of respects. The subtext of it is that this is him being like "I know how you feel about Wei Wuxian, and I refuse to allow you to do anything to assist him heal or return to the proper path." Which is not exactly loving uncle behavior. Admittedly, "loving" is not usually a word one would apply to Lan Qiren in any context, but he comes closer to "loving" as Lan Wangji's devoted uncle than he does in any other context, and that just makes this feel all the more out of character for him. Though, tbh, just him being able to see that Lan Wangji has any special feelings for Wei Wuxian is already out of character; he doesn't seem to be aware of that in the novel until after the Nightless City Massacre, because he assumes that his precious nephew is and always will be perfect, and a perfect person does not have attachments to others beyond those of familial duty.
Thankfully, this is long after my AU point and Wei Wuxian never even starts practicing demonic cultivation in this fic, so it really doesn't matter and yet here I am wasting time writing about it anyway. 😱
Even in the succession ceremony scene, they still are only using Jiang Cheng instead of Jiang Wanyin! Surely that's a time when he's going to use his courtesy name, not his birth name! But I don't think it's been used again since the introductions at Cloud Recesses. It's like he decided to give up on it because his self-introduction got interrupted. 😭
Hmm. In the scene where someone from the clan in Ezhou comes looking to talk to Jiang Cheng (ooh, boy, did I screw that clan over... 😅) he tells the man who delivered the letter asking for entry (omg, a level of formalism I had nothing even approaching 😰) to take it to Wei Wuxian instead. But Wei Wuxian is not currently in Lotus Pier, and the way the other guy referred to him...I can't figure out which words in his reply refer to Wei Wuxian at all. 😭 The subtitles act as if he called him "Wei-gongzi," but he absolutely didn't. From what little I know, I would think this guy, as a disciple of Jiang Cheng, should refer to Wei Wuxian as "shibo," but if that's in his reply then it's not pronounced anywhere near what I expected. 😅
I guess it probably doesn't matter? I don't actually have a lot of scenes of Jiang Cheng's disciples interacting with Wei Wuxian. In fact, I don't have much with his disciples at all, except for the eldest of the OC orphans that Jiang Cheng ended up being forced to take into the clan and accept as his disciples.
And yet it frustrates me that I'm probably getting what little I have wrong. 😰
I need a babel fish. Or to be in the matrix and have something plugged into my brain so I can understand Mandarin. (Probably prefer the babel fish, so I could understand every language? But I guess if I was in the matrix I could still understand every language by just having more languages plugged into my brain...? (Hmm. Should the M be capitalized so it's "Matrix" not "matrix"?))
...and in this frustrating scene with Lan Xichen, he says that Lan Wangji is "learning" the song "Absterge" lately. Which is exactly the song the earlier episode said he was playing in Nightless City. So, which is it, show? Does he not know "Cleansing" yet or does he already know it?
It's very frustrating to have the subtitles be like this. I don't know if it's the original script that's inconsistent on this point or if it's just badly translated. I mean, it could be that what Lan Xichen is saying is that Lan Wangji is studying ways to intensify "Cleansing" or variations on it that have different effects, or just that he's been practicing it to deepen his mastery of the piece. Or it could be that one of the two episodes listed a completely different song, and the translators just decided to "simplify" by using the same name. 😰
Given the way the scene in Nightless City is translated, I'm hoping it's okay that I had Lan Wangji already know "Cleansing" in my fic. (During the war, but probably actually later than when the drama set the fall of Nightless City in terms of number of months that have passed since the start of the war. 😅 I at least doubled the length it was in the show. Which is still shorter than it was in the novel. I also let Wei Wuxian actually do things in the war, so he gets to be a war hero again. Just not quite as much of one as in the novel.)
😭 Please, someone inform the translators of this episode that talking about "scrubbing" a sword is really, really not normal. 😭
"Cleaning" or "polishing," sure, but not "scrubbing!"
How am I supposed to take the scene seriously when I'm snickering at the bad translation?
This is the episode with the flashback to Jiang Fengmian finding Wei Ying in the streets of Yiling. He's got a little satchel tied around one shoulder. I wonder what's in it?
That's the sort of thing I should have Wei Wuxian think of in my fic in the scenes dealing with the homeless orphans from Kuizhou. Likewise, some of those orphans should maybe have something similar.
....ah...oh man....that scene does not work in this form.
It looks like "predator kidnapping random child by giving him food," instead of desperate, bereaved man finally finding the orphan of his beloved friends.
We could at least have had some voice-over from adult Wei Wuxian about how all he could remember of his own identity was that his name had a "Ying" in it! That's the most touching part about that flashback in the novel, that he's been alone so long his own understanding of who he is was fading.
On the return to the present, Jiang Yanli comments that "You were born with a smiling face." That's a good line. I might want to find a place to use it--or a variant on it--in my fic. (Pretty sure it comes from the book, ofc...)
I remembered the flashback and the bit of him saying "Xianxian is turning three this year." I did not remember the exchange that's just starting, and I'm almost afraid of where it's going, since it starts with him asking her "Why would a person like another person?"
She asks him if he has a person "in your heart" and he of course denies it, but in a way that makes it sound like maybe he's already aware of his feelings for Lan Wangji and actively looking for reasons to suppress them. Given how badly that scene with Lan Xichen played out (and this is the same day) and how he was basically told not to show his face in Cloud Recesses unless he's willing to take up his sword again (or that was how it definitely would have sounded to him, anyway), I can see why he would be looking for excuses to shove down and eradicate his feelings. 😭
And then this scene leads into warm ribbing between the Twin Prides. 😊 Although I still feel like it's a bizarre thing for Wei Wuxian's promise to help Jiang Cheng to be couched in the terms of being just like their fathers, when Wei Wuxian's father ran out on his duties to elope with the woman that Jiang Cheng's father was in love with (or with whom we're told he was in love, anyway). It's like...that's not actually what they want to emulate? At all? (Though I guess it's pretty close to what ends up happening in canon, in that Wei Wuxian does run out on his duties. And in the case of this version of canon, the woman Jiang Cheng loves is the one who provides the spark that causes Wei Wuxian to run off, though there's no romance between them.)
Stop putting broken sentences in Wei Wuxian's mouth, Netflix! 😭 I'm begging you! 😭
Aw, Lan Wangji went into the forbidden room at the Lan Library Pavilion despite being ordered not to by his uncle! 💕 He's breaking rules for the man he loves! 💕 That's so sweet!
But then he got locked in by some random Lans. 😅 Have to wonder how that ended up playing out, but I'm quite sure they never follow up on it.
The lock for the door was nifty, though. Part of me is like "I should take a screenshot of it in case I need to describe it in my fic!" And the rest of me is like "I never describe anything anyway, so who cares?"
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