Notes on my rewatch of The Untamed, part 38

     One thought before I start today's episode.  Regarding my confusion about Jin Zixun addressing Jin Guangshan as "shufu," which would mean his father was older than Jin Guangshan, perhaps it actually means that he's not Jin Zixuan's first cousin, but a second cousin.  I think I read that uncle/nephew style-terms are used in place of things like cousins once removed.  So if Jin Zixun's father is Jin Guangshan's first cousin, then Jin Zixun would still call him some variation on "uncle" rather than some form of cousin.  So that may be what was going on there.  In which case I might want to change the line I had about Jin Zixun's father being Jin Guangshan's younger brother.  Given that Jin Zixun is kind of the less-entertaining prototype for Qi Rong, it feels sort of wrong for him to be a more distant cousin, but....well, I guess I can add that to my list of things I need to ask an expert about.  😅

    Anyway.  Random incoherent spoilers follow.

    (Oh, and if you're looking for my IWSG post, it's here.)

    So, watching the Empathy session, and it does sound like she's introduced herself as a-Jing rather than a-Qing, so I guess that wasn't Netflix changing her name, but the adaptation team.  (Either that or the official translation of the novel got her name wrong, but that seems improbable.  Seems more likely that the adaptation team decided to change it so that they wouldn't be dragging us through any additional pain about the horrifically tragic and unnecessary death of Wen Qing.  (After all, in the novel, the story of a-Qing is over and done with before Wen Qing is even introduced as a character!)) 

    ... *sigh*

    In the sequence where Wei Wuxian and Wen Qing are arguing over whether it's better to grow turnips or "potatoes" we see the "potatoes" in question, and they're definitely sweet potatoes, which are in fact native to...oh.  Actually, those are also native to the Americas.  I thought sweet potatoes and yams were the same thing, but they're actually different.  (Thank you, Wikipedia.)  It's yams that are natively found in Asia.  Presumably that's what they're supposed to be, but the ones in the Yiling sequence looked like sweet potatoes, and the thing that Xue Yang just stabbed with his fairly vicious-looking knife is definitely an ordinary potato.  So, you know, something that would not have been in China over a thousand years ago.  😰  (And rolling back a little, those looked a lot like tomatoes sitting next to the potatoes on the vegetable seller's cart.  Another plant native to the Americas.  (Though that's nothing; in an episode of Word of Honor someone was selling corn on the cob.  So not only native to the Americas, but about two to three times bigger than actual corn was at the time, even in the Americas.))  Yeah, those are definitely tomatoes.  😰  (Maybe I'm the only one who's bothered by things like that?)

    Hmm, well, according to the subtitle translation of the on-screen text, I was wrong yesterday when I said that in this version Xue Yang was already the only living person in Yi City by ten years prior to the present events:  according to this, Song Lan arrived in Yi City seven years prior to the present, so Yi City still had at least Xiao Xingchen and a-Qing (should I be calling her a-Jing, since they changed her name in the adaptation process?) until seven years prior.  Seven years is still a crazy long time for him to live there alone with the fierce corpses (uh, puppets) and still begs the question of "what was he eating?" though.

    Gotta love how Wei Wuxian sums up the Empathy vision for the juniors:  "Xue Yang must die."  Succinct, accurate but also 100% uninformative.  🤣

    This episode, too, ends very abruptly, in the middle of the confrontation with Xue Yang.  Unlike the show up to this point, the Yi City arc absolutely feels like it was written to be one big viewing experience, and the episode ends were inflicted upon it based purely on episode length.  Very odd.  (Or perhaps it's just because now that we're in the present, it's based more firmly on the book, and therefore the writers had less ability to adjust the time spent on events to make episodes end more properly?  If that's the case, it'll probably keep being this way for most of the rest of the show.  I'll have to keep an eye on that.  Not that it matters, but I'm curious.)