It's kind of funny that I'm finishing up the final volume of Thousand Autumns (which I mistakenly took to be "Xue Yang/Xiao Xingchen: the novel" and thus had resisted reading for quite a while) right as I'm watching the Yi City arc of The Untamed. At least, that's funny to me, anyhow.
Rambling incoherence and spoilers follow.
I wonder how many helpers the kitten who hides his claws had working with him to be able to lure so many juniors to Yi City at the same time. He couldn't have been in so many places at the same time, after all. He was probably the one going after Jin Ling personally, as he's the only one who wouldn't end up killed if he got caught. (Between Jin Ling's two uncles, anyone else would end up quite dead. Well, mostly due to Jiang Cheng, honestly. Jin Guangyao would be more likely to make them wish they were dead.) For the most part, both show and novel imply that he was working alone behind the scenes to pull the strings, but this one part necessitated people helping him. And they probably wouldn't have been people from his clan, either, because that would have both been too conspicuous and pointed the blame squarely at him if any of them were caught.
I'm thinking about this partially due to the fact that one of the most ambitious works on my "fanfics I want to write eventually" for MDZS is a canon-compliant piece that follows his plot for revenge from shortly before his brother's death all the way up until after the end of the novel. Not that it would be heavily focused on that, though; it would more be focused on his home life, and the wife he has to keep secret because almost everyone else in the entire cultivation world would kill her if they knew she wasn't really dead. (If anyone reads this who knows the story, they can probably guess her identity just from that... 😅) So if I ever do get myself centered enough (and conversant enough in the most serious aspects of the setting) to actually write that, I'm going to have to come up with a firm explanation of how many helpers he has, who they are, and how he obtained their aid.
Keeping in tone with some of what I said yesterday, Lan Sizhui's comment that the terrible taste of the spicy congee gives him deja vu...would only work properly if they had filmed the scene where Wei Wuxian cooked for the Wen remnants and it was so spicy that none of them could eat it and a-Yuan was set to crying horribly after he tasted it. As it stands, this is the first time we've seen Wei Wuxian cook (not counting the fish he roasted in Cloud Recesses) so this is payoff without planting, on top of a broken attempt at foreshadowing Lan Sizhui's actual identity. (Though considering they re-identified him as Lan Yuan on screen as soon as he showed up at the end of the flashback, that's not quite as much of a thing. I don't think the novel even called him anything other than Lan Sizhui until we got to the point where Wen Ning was starting to realize who he was and was asking Lan Wangji about him.)
Not that I should be taking notes on any of this, since the only way this can be said to connect to my fic is that I want to make sure to avoid making this kind of mistake. 😅 (Though I probably shouldn't necessarily call it a "mistake," as such, since it's novel-accurate and still an entertaining moment. It's just that it doesn't hit right because they didn't show us the incident it's referring back to.)
... 😰
I get that using CG to show the paper figures coming to life and then having them fight off fierce corpses (well, puppets in this version) would have been prohibitively expensive.
But couldn't they have dressed up a stunt person or two as a paper figure? That would have at least made sense. What they show is like...like they were going to do a CG sequence and then changed their minds and just cut straight to the next scene.
Very...not good, from a purely cinematic sense. It's fine if you know what's supposed to go in between the shots 'cause you've read the book, but as is...
*sigh*
Sort of makes one wish one was a master CG animator and could make a new scene to insert in there.
Hmm. That shot seemed to have a puppet with a mix of the black lines and bloody cracks style markings.
I wonder just what the difference is supposed to be, anyway? Since they've decided to make the sword that the Yin Tiger Tally was made from also be a piece of the Yin Iron (somehow) wouldn't they produce the same marks?
It doesn't technically matter to my fic since the Yin Tiger Tally never comes to exist in the fic, but I would like to have a better understanding of what the actual process of someone becoming a puppet actually is, so I could represent it more accurately.
Though I would settle for feeling more sure if "spiritual cognition" is them not translating "soul" correctly or if it's actually supposed to mean something else entirely. Because sometimes it feels like something totally different, and other times it feels like absolutely it means "soul" and nothing else. (Though even then it's a problem, because if it did then how could Wen Ning regain his mind? (And Song Lan, for that matter.))
Hmmmm....I wonder how much I have to change my plans for revising information about Xue Yang's past and connection to the Yin Iron based on what he says here. He says "I just happened to discover some secrets of the Yin Iron," as well as specifying that he had hidden his piece of the Yin Iron prior to going to Nightless City.
So, my thinking had been to make it that he had been learning from someone who had a piece of the Yin Iron, only then they died and he went to Nightless City, knowing that Wen Ruohan was looking for information on the Yin Iron. But his words here are definitely not encouraging the "I trained under someone" theory.
In the current draft of the fic, I had it speculated that he had found some four hundred year old documents left by one of the then-powerful clans that had suppressed Xue Chonghai, and that in those documents, that clan's research into what the Yin Iron was and how it worked was spelled out, and it was thanks to reading those documents that Xue Yang was able to figure out as much as he did about using the Yin Iron. That might actually fit what's in this scene better, but I'm still not quite satisfied with it.
Or rather, in both cases it feels like "why did he even need the Wen Clan, then?"
Maybe he had stolen the documents and the Yin Iron from an old man who had been working with the Yin Iron, but he didn't entirely understand what he was reading, and needed the Wen Clan's resources to figure it out? Hmm...
That doesn't quite...well, for one thing, if that was the case, there wouldn't even need to be someone else. He could have found both in some old ruins or whatever. Him having studied from someone else was mostly intended as "the Wen Clan came looking for that someone else, only to find them already dead, and Xue Yang decided to go to the Wen Clan because of that incident," so if that's no longer the case then the other person doesn't even need to have existed in the first place.
Tch. I am trying to apply a logical backstory to something that was never really intended to hold up to close scrutiny. Or rather something that was never expected to receive close scrutiny in the first place.
This may need to go on my list of "I need to talk to someone else to figure out what I want to do about this" issues. 😰
Also, for the record, Xue Yang addressing Wei Wuxian as "qianbei" doesn't really make any sense now that they're the same age. (Heck, even in the novel it was a little odd, considering the age difference between them was only about five years. And by that point Wei Wuxian was in the body of Mo Xuanyu, who was several years younger than Xue Yang.)
Hmm. When the on-screen text identifying the puppet(?) version of a-Qing comes up, according to the Google Translate app on my phone, it really does say a-Jing rather than a-Qing. Does that mean they changed her name from Qing to Jing not in the subtitles but in filming? (I mean, given the importance of Wen Qing to the story, I can understand why they would do that, since it's very confusing to have two women with the same given name (especially when one of them doesn't even have a family name!) but it's also kind of odd to change a character's name like that.) I'll have to listen closely when her name is spoken in the next episode to see if that's actually the case.
Anyway.
I think one of my big take-aways from this episode (aside from realizing I will (again) have to rethink how I want to handle explaining Xue Yang's pre-Wen Clan past, is that now I know what the Ouyang Clan uniform looks like: it's wine red, with a circular pattern near the belt. Which all around looks awkwardly like it would belong to the Wen Clan. 😅 One of the OCs in my fic is the father of the Ouyang Clan junior who's a major player in this sequence. (Technically, he's not totally an OC since he's a character in the novel as "Ouyang-zongzhu," only the character in my fic is based on the impression I got of him from the novel's present (in which he is kind of stubborn but also verbally bullied very efficiently by Jiang Cheng), not however he's portrayed when he shows up later on in the show. So he's basically a complete OC. 😅 I'm just going to have to admit that when he first shows up, 'cause I don't feel like changing him. But I should at least make sure to describe his clothes correctly.) I'm not sure how to describe that shade of red, though. I can't call it "wine red" since the wine we see in this show is entirely clear. (Makes sense that it's not the color we think of wine being, since it's not made from grapes!) I'll have to consult a thesaurus to get some good, non-associative terms for that color. 😅
...next episode, I should take a screenshot of the kid from the Ouyang Clan so I don't forget what his uniform looks like.
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