A day off was probably good for me (or maybe not, considering I spent the entire day playing Shin Megami Tensei V Vengeance, and was starting to get pretty frustrated in several places (bad enough being jumpscared by four Kudlaks, but then sticking them into battles led by much lower level, easier-to-deal-with opponents?!)) but today I'm going to try and get through at least two episodes. (There's a total of seven episodes before returning to the present in episode 33, so...there's a lot of rough times ahead...)
I should be able to do so, on account of due to insomnia I'm starting this episode about two hours before I would normally even get up. 😰
Anyway, incoherent and spoiler-filled rambling follows the read more tag.
Interesting. They added a bit to the early portion of the Flower Banquet about Su Minshan having already started his own clan in Moling. It's partially building on the brief dialog we get in the novel between Jin Guangyao and Su Minshan--which was...uh...when was that? At the sworn brothers oath in the Empathy session, maybe? I can't remember. Anyway, they did a good job of using it to set up stuff that's going to factor later: we encounter Su Minshan being bullied by Jin Zixun, we see the Twin Jades react to his presence (with concern and perhaps even alarm in Lan Xichen's case, and although we can't tell what Lan Wangji is thinking, considering he was the first one to identify Su Minshan by name, he must have something pretty hefty going on inside) and we see him react negatively to their presence, and throughout all of this we're getting ominous music to let the viewer know that something unpleasant is building. The viewer just isn't warned how long it will take for that unpleasantness to rear its very ugly head, or just how many precious lives will be lost to it...
The floor looks like marble to me. I can't remember anymore why I mentioned the floor in the Golden Carp Tower audience hall or what scene it was in, but I know I wanted to make sure I got it right. It's white, and highly polished, and there's some visible gray seams running through the stone, so it totally looks like marble to me. But I have no idea if that's actually a building material that would have been used? Hmm. I may have to get vague in whatever scene that was. 😅
Okay, so I was right that Jin Guangshan also used the "teenage hero" line specifically just about Jiang Cheng. There's no reaction to it, though, so I suspect that's actually a translation problem. Or rather, one of the reference works on AO3 mentioned terms that mean "young hero" and one that means an older "hero," of which I can only remember the latter, because I was using it for some wandering cultivators in my fic, who are in their thirties. Maybe he's using the "young hero" term...? I think I copied that into some notes...maybe I can find them and check. (Also, maybe my space bar could start working properly again, please?) Looked up the word, listened to the line again, and...I can't tell. 😰 That was actually kind of a waste of time, wasn't it?
But it did establish that whatever the original term is, there's none of the dismissiveness to it that "teenage hero" would suggest in English: if Jiang Cheng felt the term was belittling him, that would absolutely show on his face, and he only looks pleased. So I should probably remove the part where his POV is irked at being addressed that way in the wake of the Sunshot Campaign.
Okay.
Problem.
Having Jin Zixuan there during this scene is a problem. He should be mortified by the way his cousin is harassing the Twin Jades, not giving a half-amused, half-scoffing mini-smirk. By this scene in the novel, he's off courting Jiang Yanli, and safely not around to get involved in anything that follows. But here he's right at the banquet.
As is Jiang Cheng, which is even more of a problem, but Wei Wuxian is still only climbing the stairs, so that issue hasn't arrived yet.
And why am I writing any of this? It's totally irrelevant to my fic, since none of this happens in it.
I'll try to blame it on insomnia instead of just accepting that I'm a bloody fool who can't shut off this bizarre new thing in my brain.
All right, so actually some notes I needed for my fic.
There is literally nothing to see of the work camp in Qiongqi Path in this sequence, because it's nighttime and pouring rain. So all we can see are a few wooden ramparts. Also, the Jins are totally acting like Wei Wuxian spent the entire Sunshot Campaign slaughtering thousands with his necromancy, rather than spending four months doing almost nothing. 😰
When Wen Ning's fierce corpse(?) version makes the scene to avenge himself, Wen-popo absolutely says "Ning-gongzi," so I was right in extrapolating from her earlier "Qing-guniang" that that's how she would address him. Not sure about the other Wen remnants yet, though.
Hmm. I think this counts as a Crazy Wei Wuxian Power (first one in quite a while!):
10) He just held his hand up, claw-like, towards a smoky wisp of resentful energy and then sucked it in through his hand, like he's Vampire Hunter D. 😅
Not actually relevant to my fic, since this is a type of power he never develops in the fic, but...
One of the other Wen remnants also just called her "Qing-guniang." And she is for some reason unconscious in Wei Wuxian's arms. 😅 In the book, she fainted on seeing her brother's re-animated corpse. Here...the last we saw of her she was still awake and pleading with Wei Wuxian to stop her brother from killing anyone else. But now she's out cold so they could just film the scene from the novel, despite that there's a logical gap between this one and the previous scene she was in.
Ugh, I have dried tear splatters all over my glasses.
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