Before I get to today's episode notes...I am by now in the many Epilogue chapters of the final volume of Thousand Autumns. In the particular chapter I just read this morning, Shen Qiao is summoned to visit the Emperor of Chen, and the meeting is being held in Wangxian Hall. Given that this is in a concrete historical setting and according to the "about the author" blurb, the author is known for her meticulous research, I'm assuming that's genuinely the name of a particular hall at that palace, but... 🤣 My mind obviously went to a particular fictional duo who I happen to be quite obsessed with! 🤣 (That being said, "Forgetting Envies" does seem like a fitting name for such a space. Though I'm sure there are also a lot of other things that could mean, come to think of it.)
Anyway. Back to my notes about the journey of that particular fictional couple, as told in live-action. Rambling, incoherence and spoilers follow.
Before I get to the proper notes, I just want to say something. On a fanfic I was reading that was using the animated canon, I made the mistake of reading the comments and saw people complaining about the live-action version and how "badly" it represented Jiang Cheng. These people had not seen The Untamed and were just bad-mouthing it based on things they had heard, which made them think that he was treated worse in the live-action version than in the animated version. (Despite that said fic made it very clear that whoever was in charge of the animated version had an actual hate-on for Jiang Cheng, and was treating him like a villain. Heck, the promotional illustration for the show made that clear: he was the only person in the group cast who was scowling and looking away from the camera!) One of the things they claimed was that in the live-action version, it was implied that Jiang Cheng would actually beat Jin Ling. The opening of this episode is Jin Ling waking up after Wei Wuxian knocked him out at the end of the previous episode to remove the curse from his leg. (Since the boy would obviously never allow him to do that when he was awake!) The first thing Jin Ling says on waking is to be enraged at Wei Wuxian for having hit him, when even his uncle had never hit him before! I just wanted to draw attention to that, as proof that it was not my fondness for the character that made me outraged at them claiming that, but that they were genuinely, 100% wrong. Now, yes, Jin Ling cowers and gets flustered and upset when Jiang Cheng threatens to break his legs, but what teenager doesn't get upset when one of their (surrogate) parental figures is yelling at them? The look of anguish on Jiang Cheng's face in episode two when he realized that Jin Ling had actually been in danger was already full proof that he would never suffer any harm to come to that child, and anyone who hurt him would be torn to literal shreds. Jin Ling is all the family he has left, and Jiang Cheng cherishes him above everyone else living, he just doesn't know how to express that, because his father never showed him any affection (despite that his last words to his three children made it very clear that he really did love him) and his mother's affection was typically expressed in a very toxic fashion. With that example to learn from, how could Jiang Cheng have any idea what the right way is to rear a child? As far as he's concerned, his mother was the one who loved him, and she was always yelling at him and criticizing him, so he thinks that's what a loving parent is supposed to do. Also he's a whirling maelstrom of pain inside because the sister he loved to distraction sacrificed herself for their not-quite-brother, even after he had cost her the husband she loved so much. For more than ten years, Jiang Cheng had felt like he was always having to compete with Wei Wuxian, and was always losing, especially where his father's affection was concerned (or so it seemed), and for his sister to die in such a way that it seemed like she, too, preferred Wei Wuxian to him...of course that's left him broken inside and lashing out at everyone and everything. Ugh, this is making me cry. I'm gonna stop and get on with watching the episode.
So...not particularly relevant to anything, but Lan Wangji did just use "Jiang Wanyin" again. I would say that this could represent the script trying to follow the historical convention of courtesy names being for those over the age of twenty, only they're not applying it to anyone else in that manner. (In fact, they couldn't even if they wanted to: we don't even know the birth names of a great many characters who are definitely under twenty when we first meet them!) I keep starting to come up with theories that make this make sense, but they all fall apart before I can finish putting them into words, because they don't actually work, even in the most basic sense. The closest I can come up with is that the writers felt that the way he turned on Wei Wuxian at Nightless City was going to turn the audience against Jiang Cheng, and so they decided to stop using his birth name (except that Wei Wuxian keeps using it, obv) after moving to the present, in order to reflect that. Only...even that doesn't make a ton of sense.
Okay, after some cute moments of Lan Wangji's concern for Wei Wuxian's newly cursed leg and insisting on carrying him through town, we finally get to that scene with Nie Huaisang. I'm going to transcribe his speech into my other notes file, so as not to clutter this (and potentially get into copyright violation 😅) but I'll put any further notes here.
... 😰
Translators, please note that "possessed by the devil" is not an appropriate translation for basically anything when you're dealing with a setting that has no presence of or connection with the Judeo-Christian-Islamic faiths.
I'm assuming that what he actually said was something about a qi deviation or being seized by negative qi or something else, you know, culturally appropriate like that.
LOL, one of the freeze frames as I'm copying the subtitles to my notes is on Lan Wangji's face, and he just looks totally bored. I don't think that's at all what we're supposed to be taking away from that expression, and yet... 🤣
See? Doesn't he look bored? 🤣
Hmm. Nie Huaisang's story mentions grave robbers thinking the tomb was "from the previous dynasty" (which would either mean the Han Dynasty or the Jin Dynasty, I suppose) so...hmm. I'm not sure if that supports or denies my "maybe this is set in an alternate world where the empire entirely collapsed." Also I'm not clear if the grave robbers are supposed to be the same ones from the opening of the spin-off movie Fatal Journey (which takes place within the ~year between Wei Wuxian's death and Nie Mingjue's deaath) or if these are grave robbers generations back.
Anyway.
Got through that long explanation, and wrote it all down in my transcript file, and....even without comparing it to the official translation of the novel, I'm pretty sure that in the original language it was largely the exact speech from the book. With a few modifications like deleting the more detailed explanation of using corpses that were about to turn fierce, and how the clan leaders spent years stockpiling such corpses for use in the tombs for their own sabers. Since they don't like having the undead on this show that's adapting a novel about a necromancer. 😅
So...bottom line, that means I can double-check the text in the novel to get a fuller (and better translated) picture of how the Nie Clan cultivation differs from the others, and whether or not it will work the way I said it did in my fic. (Pretty sure it doesn't. But since part of the reason I needed to address that at all was due to something that I can't really do without contradicting the way things work on the show, it may be a moot point, because I may not even need to go there at all? I haven't quite figured out how I want to approach the whole thing. I think I need to use the "rubber duck" strategy to figure it out.)
...
Okay.
So.
This is not relevant to my fic, since this is all stuff that doesn't happen due to the AU, but for the drama they're saying that Nie Mingjue didn't just die right then and there, but stumbled away while dying and was never seen again, not even his body?
Um.
If that was the case, wouldn't the Nie Clan still be insisting he was alive somewhere so they wouldn't have to have Nie Huaisang as their clan leader?
😰
The show-runners not only didn't want their hero committing grave robbery (which at least makes sense) but they also didn't want their villain robbing a single grave in order to continue tormenting the man he had murdered?
Considering how hard they were pushing the "Jin Guangyao = evil" formula, why would they go to that extent? Unless there are some rules against grave-robbing in these programs? (And yet if there were, then why would they have those grave-robbers? Though they were looking for valuable funeral goods, not trying to steal the corpses. Which is a pretty big distinction, gotta admit.)
Huh. At some point off-screen, they've evidently shared the story of what happened at Mo Manor (while claiming that Wei Wuxian is Mo Xuanyu) because Nie Huaisang is now talking about that, and addressing him as Mo-gongzi. (Obviously, Nie Huaisang has a fuller picture of what happened at Mo Manor than they do, but the audience isn't supposed to know that yet. 🤣)
At the end, when they're discussing Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan's fate (speaking of another character where the absolute refusal to use his courtesy name makes absolutely no sense), it's immediately after Wei Wuxian says he admires and envies them that Lan Wangji snatches the cup of wine out of his hands and drinks it himself. 😭 Because he can't even bring himself to admit just why he envies them--because he can't just admit how much he loves Wei Wuxian, and how much he wished, when they were in Yueyang before, that he could have just stayed on an aimless journey with the man he loved (as Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan were) instead of having to go back to his duties! 😭
I'm trying to remember the exact reasons he drank on those occasions in the novel (they've condensed all the drunk Lan Wangji scenes into a single one for the live-action version (well, obviously they had to skip over most of them, since they tended to lead into kissing and in the final case considerably more than that)) but I don't think any of them were quite this blatantly because of his long-suffering and seemingly-unrequited passion.
Though, honestly, one of the things I most love about this adaptation is the fact that said passion is not nearly so unrequited as he thinks it is. Since in the novel Wei Wuxian either has no such feelings until fairly late in the present story or at least has never consciously realized that he has those feelings. (Given the spontaneous kiss during the first(?) of the drunk Lan Wangji sequences, I think it's safe to say he fell in love long before his mind realized it, but it's not totally clear if he ever felt that way before his death in the novel. It's possible his feelings changed as a result of Lan Wangji's actions at the end of the Nightless City Massacre, even though Wei Wuxian couldn't remember said actions after his revival. Or maybe he was always in love and he just needed that wake-up call to make him understand it. Only without remembering that, he couldn't remember the change in his feelings, either? I don't know. I don't know how he forgot something like that in the first place. It's never explained.) But from the performances and the meaningful pauses and the long, lingering stares, in The Untamed it's very clear that Wei Wuxian fell in love well before his death, but there was never any way for him to act on it, just as there was never a way for Lan Wangji to act on it. (Well, okay, for him there were ways, only he's too repressed by the way he was raised, so he was literally incapable of it.)
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