Okay, so this is interesting. I just read one of the side stories in the final volume of Thousand Autmuns, and in that story, Yan Wushi paid for their tab at an inn by tossing the concierge a bag full of silver nuggets. So obviously the thing I've commented on and been perplexed by several times throughout this rewatch is an established thing. Now, whether it's actually the case that people sometimes paid for things with silver nuggets instead of coins or whether it's a genre convention, that I have no idea of. But at least I have now learned for certain that it isn't intended to mean that The Untamed is set in an alternate history where the empire just crumbled and went away. (Though I still think that would make for an interesting fanfic.) I suppose paying with silver nuggets was because with so many small kingdoms rising and falling, coinage was somewhat less than solid in value. Especially since ancient Chinese coinage (according to Wikipedia, anyway) was not usually made from precious metals, but instead things like bronze, so the coins don't have any inherent value for the metals they're made of. (Not that all coins in European countries did, either, but gold and silver were often used as well as more base metals.)
Nothing to say before notes today. Rambling and incoherent spoilers follow.
As much as I love the drunk Lan Wangji sequence here, it does make more sense in the novel, where Wei Wuxian's POV realizes that Lan Wangji is trying to use this one drunken night to live out all the stories Wei Wuxian told of his childhood, including stealing things like fruits from orchards. Of course, without that context, then stealing the two roosters become more blatantly a bridal gift, so there is that. 😊
Anyway, if I was keeping a tally for "Lan Wangji super-powers," he would definitely get one in this episode for being able to fight while blind drunk. 🤣 It's kind of weird that the "masked man" is already rifling through their room, though. They haven't done anything much to alert the baddies to the fact that they're onto them yet. Hmm. Then again, it's likely that Jin Guangyao was keeping tabs on Mo Manor on general principles (wouldn't want his half-brother regaining his mind and coming after his position!) and Lan Xichen may well have told him about the incident and its effect on Lan Qiren's health, plus surely they had some kind of guards on wherever it was they were keeping Wen Ning.
So, yeah, I guess it's not so surprising that he's already turned up. (Though I feel like he didn't show up in the novel until the end of the Yi City arc, when he took away Xue Yang's corpse to reclaim the partial Yin Tiger Talley hidden on him.) [EDIT: No, I'm an idiot! He first showed up in the graveyard outside the empty Chang Clan home in Yueyang, where he was digging up the grave with one of the pieces of Nie Mingjue's body in it. Duh. That was the whole reason they referred to him as "the gravedigger" throughout most of the novel. Ugh, my brain is so pitiful these days! So, anyway, that means this is actually exactly the right time and place for him to show up, it's just that in the novel they stumbled across him doing his master's evil bidding, whereas in the show he's actively trying to intervene with them. A difference that was largely necessitated, what with the fact that in the show they only decapitated the poor dead man, instead of fully dismembering him. (It appalls me that I am talking writing about something so grotesque so calmly.)]
Oh! Visual effects note: a standard teleportation talisman has them disappear in what looks like a burst of pale green flame rising from the ground around their feet. I'm pretty sure I described a puff of smoke in my fic, so I need to fix that. 😅 The subtitles also called it a "Portal Talisman" but I don't think I like that. That implies that it only goes to one set location. Though I suppose it might? We're not given very clear information on that even in the novel, since only the baddies use them.
Is it juvenile of me to get a little "aww, so sweet!" smile on my face to see that they're both using the same cup as they're drinking some water following the fight?
Uh.
😰
I don't.
How do I
What
Uh.
😰
Okay.
So.
This is also the episode with the "little kids playing Sunshot Campaign" incident. Which works much better in the novel, but.
The...um...the little kid dressed kind of like Jiang Yanli and playing peacemaker as if he was in fact portraying her, just identified himself as "Thrice Bane Master."
In other words, Sandu Shengshou, Jiang Cheng's sobriquet. (Sandu being the name of Jiang Cheng's sword, and also meaning "Three Poisons," which I think I read comes from Buddhist tradition originally.)
This was, as I think I mentioned before, pretty much the only time I recall anyone using his sobriquet in the novel. But um...it's also never been mentioned before in the show, so having this kid just suddenly use it with no explanation of any kind... 😰 (And indeed, it is never explained that by that he means he's playing Jiang Cheng; Wei Wuxian has no reaction to the title, doesn't think Jiang Cheng's name, nothing. And all the kid says to justify his own claim that he ought to be in charge is that "I'm the best," which is hardly going to establish anything. Then he asks "Hanguang-jun" to agree with him, which also would lead the uninformed viewer to think he's anyone but Jiang Cheng, since the real Jiang Cheng and Lan Wangji don't get along and kind of never did even before Lan Wangji sided with Wei Wuxian at Nightless City. (Though there was never any particular animosity between them before that.))
The bigger problem is that they've removed two of the kids from this game. In the novel, when the kids start arguing about which of them is the boss of the game, they--as here--are arguing based on the importance and strength of the person they're pretending to be. So at this point in the novel, the kid who's playing Wei Wuxian says that he should be the boss of the game, since he's the strongest. (And about now is when the kid playing Wen Ning reminds them that he's not dead yet.)
At this moment in the rewatch, though, the part that's bothering me isn't (yet) the lack of a kid playing Wei Wuxian, it's the fact that the one playing Jiang Cheng is trying to be peacemaker. He, uh, was never the peacemaker type. Ever. In any form of canon.
And then I advanced the scene a little and return to my original irritation with the scene. In that now, instead of Wei Wuxian stepping over to give the kids advice on how better to play the game--directing the kids playing himself and Lan Wangji to stand back to back and describing the scene of a battle in which the two of them were fighting alone against ten thousand enemies--he asks them why there isn't a Yiling Laozu...and then a woman comes out to scold them for playing around instead of coming to eat, and they run off, shouting that it's the Yiling Laozu. So instead of a kid playing him as a powerful war hero who would eventually turn against his allies, they're just foisting his name onto the maternal figure trying to make them stop goofing off.
That's really...not good.
Especially since this version of Wei Wuxian didn't even really do much of anything wrong. I mean, at this time everyone thinks he did, but since one of the changes from the novel canon is that this time others hijacked his own techniques to literally frame him (despite that there's actually no reason for them to have caused the Nightless City Massacre, unless Jin Guangyao was hoping it would eliminate his father for him?) so it's like...he's got an even worse reputation than in canon, where he actually was fully responsible for the things he's been blamed for, despite that he didn't actually intend to kill Jin Zixuan. (Technically he didn't necessarily intend to kill three thousand people at Nightless City, either, but...it's not like he showed up to their ceremony just to talk. I doubt he had any specific plans at all, being half-crazed with anger at that point.)
Though now that I think about it, this is as good a place as any to address his lack of war hero status in the drama. In the dialog at Nightless City, just before the massacre, Wei Wuxian mentions the times he fought single-handed against thousands of Wen Clan troops during the war. Despite that we never saw anything even remotely like that. I mean, obviously we didn't, having thousands of troops on one side of a battle requires either thousands of extras or a whole lot of very expensive CG, and while the show obviously had a pretty impressive budget, that would still have been a waste of money considering the scene likely wouldn't have even been very long. So the fact that we never saw him fight thousands of enemies doesn't bother me so much as the fact that we never saw him fight at all, except during the final battle in the streets of Nightless City. (Which is kind of funny in and of itself, considering in the novel the armies never even got to Nightless City!) If they were going to maintain novel dialog about how many thousands of troops he fought single-handed--and dialog from others about how all of the Jiang Clan's accomplishments in the war were his doing alone--then they really should have shown us a few scenes of him actually on the battlefield. Just telling us, long after the fact, that it happened doesn't cut it. Even if they didn't want to actually show it, they could have at least told us about it at the time. Like right before the soup incident, they could have had people talking about "hey did you see how many of the enemy that Wei-gongzi just took out in the battle?" and stuff. So that even though we didn't see it, it would have been established that it had happened.
*sigh*
I'm not sure how much of this is nit-picking and how much of this is viewing the show through a lens intended for other things. Maybe this is normal in these kinds of dramas? I have so little experience watching them that it's impossible for me to tell.
LOL, the look of panic on Lan Wangji's face when Wei Wuxian is telling him about what he said the night before while he was drunk, and he's teasingly lingering on "I like..." Poor man is being tortured with the thought that he might have confessed his feelings while drunk. (Though one thing about him talking drunkenly the night before bothers me. When Wei Wuxian asked him if he'd ever tasted Emperor's Smile, he said no. If that's the case, then how did he get the Wen Clan brand on his chest? In the novel, that happened after he had brought a-Yuan to Cloud Recesses. He had also bought a bottle of Emperor's Smile, and although they don't go fully into detail about why, it's obviously both to try to understand why Wei Wuxian loved it so much, and also as a kind of offering to him. (Much like the bottles of the stuff he had stashed under the floor of his house, either as an offering to Wei Wuxian or so it would be there just in case he ever returned from death. Or, more likely, both.) Then in his drunken stupor, he came across one of the Wen Clan branding irons that had been taken as a war trophy, and turned it on himself, putting the brand just where Wei Wuxian's had been. But so if that didn't happen in this version, then where did the brand come from? I can't remember if Lan Xichen gives that a new explanation when he's explaining the whip scars. I feel like he still says Lan Wangji did that to himself, but never goes into any further detail. Enh, I'll find out in due time. And I shouldn't be wasting time taking notes on this stuff that's 1000% irrelevant to my fic.)
And the translators just changed their minds about whether Fairy is a male or female dog. 😅 Apparently it's not clear in the original language, so the novel's translation just used "it." Like somehow Jin Ling is himself unclear on the dog's sex. (Which presumably means Fairy must be female, because male dogs are fairly obviously male for fairly obvious reasons.) I don't mind that the translators assigned the dog a gender, since it's awkward to use "it" about a living being, especially something like a dog, where we expect to use either "he" or "she," but the fact that they've switched from one to the other is kind of frustrating. (Then again, the inconsistencies from episode to episode already proved that multiple translators worked on the subtitles without proper communication between them, so...)
Ooh! A return of the very first Crazy Wei Wuxian Power, that of snapping his fingers to paralyze someone. Only this time he's paralyzed a whole bunch of fierce corpses. Er, puppets? 🤷
Didn't last long, though. He seems shocked that they broke free so quickly. 😅
I think I spotted some of the "bloody cracks" style markings on the faces of some of them before they were disintegrated(?) by Lan Wangji's guqin attack. (At which time Wei Wuxian says something about how his own puppets would be defeated so easily. Even though he hasn't made any "puppets" in the drama other than Wen Ning. But he said it like he'd done it hundreds or thousands of times. Because of course in the novel he had raised thousands of fierce corpses to fight the Sunshot Campaign, and Xue Yang's fierce corpse servants were but a pale imitation.)
The old woman has the same black cracks on her neck that Wen Ning does, though.
I probably don't have to worry about any of that in my fic, since the black cracks seem to be exclusively a Yin Tiger Tally thing (even though they've decided to say that it's made from literally the same stuff, so you'd think it would work the same way).
However, as Wei Wuxian is setting off to find the old woman's kitchen, I am suddenly struck with a question that somehow never struck me before:
What the heck was Xue Yang eating all this time he's been living in the entirely deceased Yi City???
Seriously, in either version, he's wiped out the entire population of the town years before the present of the story. The rice they find in the old woman's kitchen in the novel is specified to have maggots in it, so clearly it's not that this one woman is a living corpse rather than a fierce corpse because Xue Yang kept her around to feed him. But what is he eating? Even if he's mastered inedia, it's not like he could depend on it alone for a full decade, and that's about how long it's been since he slaughtered the whole town!
I'm definitely asking too many questions here and focusing on insignificant details, but...that's gonna bug me for a while now that I've thought of it...
The very ending of this episode is bizarrely abrupt. Wei Wuxian is just like "I need some help making the antidote, any volunteers?" and that's the end of the episode. It's odd, because for the most part this show's episodes have had more natural ending places. It's like they wrote the Yi City arc to be a movie and then had to chop it up unnaturally after the fact. I'm sure that's not the case, it just...I don't know. It's weird.
On the other hand, it's one of the most easily rewatched sequences, as it's not as firmly tied into the other events as most of the other arcs, and it has a very satisfying...well...okay, it's not super satisfying, what with the tragic fates of Xiao Xingchen, Song Lan and a-Qing, but it does at least have a very satisfying villain death.
So, yeah, tomorrow and the next day should be lighter on notes. In part because I've rewatched the Yi City arc more than the other episodes, just because it is so easily viewed out of context.
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