Rambling and incoherent spoilers follow.
Ah, every time. Every time they skip over a few points of logic to save some runtime. And although it makes sense to the viewer when you're watching it and caught up in the show, as soon as you're doing what I'm doing, stepping back and trying to watch critically so as not to miss anything, then it sticks out like a sore thumb.
In this case, we went from Wei Wuxian asking Bicao why she waited until now to make the truth known and then mentioning her expensive jade bracelet straight into people discussing who paid off the two women and sent them to Lotus Pier. Without, you know, first mentioning that someone must have done that. (Okay, technically they didn't pay off Sisi, they rescued her from permanent house arrest, but...)
I'm quite sure that didn't bother me the first time around because I was caught up in what was going on, but...dang is it bothering me now. (Though I love that the first one who asks about the person behind the two women is, in fact, that very person. Because how else can he seem utterly uninvolved than by being the one who sounds most perplexed?)
This scene, though.
Oh man.
This whole sequence is just so good. It's a testament to the careful way that MXTX crafted the novel, you know? Because you've got these freaking sheep who are just throwing around blame and resentment at anyone and everyone, and they're sitting here casting all this shade at Jin Guangyao over these accusations that are completely without proof (admittedly, the accusations made by Sisi and Bicao are all true, but there are only three people in the room who genuinely know that that is the case) and the only person who's really speaking up against leaping to conclusions about Jin Guangyao's villainy is the one person whose life most depends on Jin Guangyao's evil being exposed and stopped: Wei Wuxian. Because he's obviously put it together that the person who rescued Sisi and bribed Bicao is also the same one who arranged for the events at Mo Manor and lured the juniors to Yi City, meaning that this person caused deaths at Mo Manor and put a bunch of teenagers at risk, so Wei Wuxian is naturally very suspicious of this individual, and doesn't want everyone just playing right into their hand like that, just in case they're every bit as bad as Jin Guangyao.
But I feel like something else that must be going on in his head is that he has to feel a bit sorry for Jin Guangyao on hearing everyone suddenly rushing to denounce him. Wei Wuxian has to be feeling a sort of bitter not-quite-deja-vu: it can't elude him that what's going on here is not so different to what went on in Golden Carp Tower when everyone was rushing to damn him for what happened when he went to rescue Wen Ning from that work camp. And that had to be intentional. Especially since (in this version at least (I think in the novel there were a lot of anonymous voices in these scenes)) one of the loudest voices denouncing Jin Guangyao was also one of the loudest voices denouncing Wei Wuxian sixteen years earlier.
And my train of thought has been derailed by a vulture calling wanting to buy my house for bottom dollar so they can slap a coat of paint on it and sell it for top dollar. There ought to be laws against those monsters. They're the reason the real estate market is so effed up now.
Ugh.
I'm going back to the show. At least the brand of evil on display there is more honest.
Whoa. They performed all three bows, instead of just two!
Wow.
That's massive.
They're fully married! 😍
Um.
Why would there be a memorial tablet there to Jiang Yanli? Her tablet should be in Lanling with Jin Zixuan's.
There wasn't one there in the novel. It was just Jiang Fengmian and Yu Ziyuan. (Because marriage bows are to the parents, not the parents and elder sibling.)
Ugh, translators, please. "Sworn brothers" is a very specific thing. It's what the bond was between Nie Mingjue, Lan Xichen and Jin Guangyao. Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng are sect siblings. It's very different. They're also basically adopted siblings, given the way Wei Wuxian was raised by his father and in his house. I think I heard the word "shidi" in the line, so I suspect what Lan Wangji actually said was along the lines of "he is your shidi," so what the translators probably should have done is just take a few more liberties and have the line say something about them being "practically brothers," which is at least an accurate assessment of the actual situation, even if it's a bit ooc as a line coming from Lan Wangji.
... 😰
Jiang Cheng's outburst at the Ancestral Hall doesn't work as well in this version as in the novel. In the novel, there's this sense that maybe he actually wanted to talk things out with Wei Wuxian, maybe find a way to get over all the trauma between them, only when he went to find him, he got there just in time to see the thing under the tree where they're just standing there, holding each other and gazing into each others' eyes. So when he finds them later in the Ancestral Hall, a large part of his fury is about that, and he even has this outburst about them flirting with each other. But they couldn't do anything in this version that acknowledged the gay love story with words, so they had to find something else for him to be angry about.
But considering that this scene, too, brings up the events in the cave under Mount Muxi and how Wei Wuxian had taken Wen Chao prisoner to protect Lan Wangji...they really shouldn't have changed those events so that by the time he took Wen Chao hostage everyone had already snatched swords and a full-on battle was already being waged, so Lan Wangji was no longer in any more danger than anyone else in the cave. Because they made that change, every time anyone brings it up, they become unreasonable and their logic becomes strained and broken. And that's very frustrating to watch.
Naturally, the golden core reveal scene is making me cry buckets again.
It's extra painful for Jiang Cheng in this version since he had such a crush on Wen Qing when they were at Cloud Recesses. But he's not allowing himself to cry, though tears are welling up a bit.
A tear does slide down Lan Wangji's cheek, though. Was I keeping track of times when he cries? I think this makes three? Or was it just two? Hm. There was the Nightless City Massacre, and...I do feel like there was one other, but now I'm not remembering. Oh well. I need to go back through all these notes to make a list of points I need to figure out, so...
Oop, no, now Jiang Cheng is outright crying, too. (I love how the men in this show are actually allowed to cry. That may be the most obvious proof of the fact that this show is aimed at a female audience. (Even more obvious than the gorgeousness of the cast.))
Ah, okay, a-Yuan's father was older than Wen Ning. Uh. Wait, why am I taking note of that? Of course he was an older cousin. In this version, a-Yuan was already born at the time of the Cloud Recesses study arc, at which time Wen Ning was specified to be "too young" for the lectures, so it must have been like he was seventeen and the minimum age (the age at which Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng were) was eighteen. But so obviously a-Yuan's father was older than that. Duh.
As to the flashback of Lan Wangji rescuing a-Yuan from the Burial Mounds...it sounds like maybe what they're saying is that he heard about the Wens all turning themselves in, he went to the Burial Mounds to stop Wei Wuxian from doing anything stupid, and arrived too late, having missed him in transit. Still doesn't explain why a-Yuan was left behind alone with someone who was in a state of temporary paralysis, but...
Ugh. Wei Wuxian has a momentary hallucination of Jiang Yanli, and I start crying. 😭
OMG, the "is he drunk right now?" face! (His reaction to being given the lotus pod was very much the same reaction he had to being given the two roosters, too. 🤣 Wei Wuxian is something of a know-it-all character, so seeing him confused is extra endearing.)
Huh. Apparently "puppet" Wen Ning can eat, even though fierce corpse Wen Ning can't. That's kind of weird, but I suppose it doesn't matter. (Since he remains a fully healthy alive human in my fic, ofc!)
So...this just happened:
Glowing spectral butterfly just flew over and landed on Lan Wangji's hand. As if Hua Cheng just dropped by for a visit. (Though his butterflies are described as being silver.)
Wei Wuxian's line on seeing it is "The paper butterfly messenger from the Jin Clan?" So...I guess every clan has some kind of talisman-into-spiritual-messenger technique? There was a mention at the end of the Yin Iron trip, right before the indoctrination camp, of Wei Wuxian sending Lan Wangji messages that weren't being responded to, so I guess this is a visual representation of such a technique? I'd expect it to look more like paper and less like an actual butterfly, though. (Like in Sword and Fairy 7. Though I think that was a paper crane, not a butterfly, but it's the same basic idea.)
Okay, so...based on the further dialog, I think that's a butterfly that Lan Wangji sent to his brother (who was last seen going to Lanling), but which couldn't find him and so it came back? And reported that Jin Guangyao was in Yunmeng. As translated, it's kinda unclear, tbh. But I like the idea of the "paper butterfly messenger," so I'll run with it.
Anyway, at the end of the episode, they've just arrived in Yunping City, so I guess the final confrontation takes up about three and a half episodes. I wonder if I should take tomorrow off and binge the episodes later? Gnnnnh...but there will likely be a lot of notes I'll want to take, since there are still a lot of question marks about things that happened before Meng Yao became Jin Guangyao. (Though they will not all necessarily be answered, because that's the kind of show this is...but some of them might be answered...)
Oh well. I'll decide tomorrow. 😅
No comments:
Post a Comment