Dang. Once again, yesterday I thought of stuff I wanted to say here that I forgot to say before. Stuff I should have taken notes on at the time and got too caught up in watching to note down. (Despite how much other stuff I stopped the video to note down...)
Oh well.
Hopefully next time I'll think of it when I can get at my phone to take notes. 😅
Anyway, randomness and incoherence, as well as spoilers, follow.
Frustratingly, I keep thinking of things I should have said in earlier posts, but I only think of them at times when I can't immediately write them down--in the bath, for example 😅--and then by the time I'm sitting down the next day to take notes on the next episode, I've forgotten them again. 😰 I think one of them was to make a few general observations:
One, that the show likes to imply magical abilities it doesn't show. Rather than showing a lot of scenes of people flying on their swords (which does look kinda silly, tbh), they show their feet landing on the ground after they've hopped off their flying sword, and so the flying is merely implied. Or like in the Mount Baifeng section, all we see is Lan Wangji's sword blocking a blow from Jin Zixuan's sword (which I feel like it wasn't Jin Zixuan who actually attacked him in the novel, but Jin Zixun? or am I crazy?) but later on we hear dialog about people seeing the sword glare flying off into the sky; there was no on-screen effect for the sword glare, but since it was mentioned in the novel we're just supposed to assume it was there. I think this is mostly a budgetary thing, since whatever their budget was, it would still have needed to be much higher if they had shown the effects in all those cases.
Two, that they like to draw so closely on the novel in important scenes that they don't mind contradicting what's been present in the show as a whole. Sometimes this could be due to the translation screwing up details, but sometimes not. Wen Ning's speech is a case in point here: he definitely doesn't stammer in this version, though his dialog is haltingly and hesitatingly delivered, and yet when Wei Wuxian is confronting Jin Zixun to find out where he took Wen Ning, he specifically mentions Wen Ning's stutter. So...yeah. Actually, maybe I basically mentioned these things already, just not in such a concrete fashion?
I don't know. The problem with forgetting things is that you forget them.
(OMG, what does that even mean? Am I even conscious enough to do this right now?)
Uh.
Anyway.
Rambling incoherence (and perhaps more incoherent than usual today?) and spoilers follow.
After I complained last time about the way Blogger assigns URLs to the posts...it assigned the URL "episode 51" to that very post. 😭 So now I'm using "part" instead of "episode" in the hopes that it will stop doing that.
Anyway.
Rambling, incoherence and spoilers follow
I would really like Blogger to explain to me how the [expletive deleted] it decides on URLs for our posts. It was weird enough when it spontaneously skipped a number on these, so that episode 14's URL ended in the number 15. But then I--silly goose that I am--tried to restore the balance between the episode numbers and the URL numbers by misspelling episode on the post title for episode 25's notes. Result?
Now the URL for episode 26 ends in "28."
How?
Why?
HOW how how HHHHHHOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWW??????
Okay, sorry about that.
I just had to get it out of my system somehow. (Also, it is currently 6 in the morning, when I would normally be asleep, and I just watched a very harrowing episode, and yet am going back for more because I'm a day behind if I want to finish on August 20th.)
Rambling, incoherence and spoilers follow the read more tag.
A day off was probably good for me (or maybe not, considering I spent the entire day playing Shin Megami Tensei V Vengeance, and was starting to get pretty frustrated in several places (bad enough being jumpscared by four Kudlaks, but then sticking them into battles led by much lower level, easier-to-deal-with opponents?!)) but today I'm going to try and get through at least two episodes. (There's a total of seven episodes before returning to the present in episode 33, so...there's a lot of rough times ahead...)
I should be able to do so, on account of due to insomnia I'm starting this episode about two hours before I would normally even get up. 😰
Anyway, incoherent and spoiler-filled rambling follows the read more tag.
I had a thought yesterday that I somehow didn't write down. Among the randomly added words from entirely different cultures in the subtitles is the word "myrmidon." (Which should actually be capitalized, but...🤷🏻♀️) It's been used on two occasions: it's the word that Yu-furen used to describe Wei Changze, and and it was used in the episode I watched yesterday (or was it the previous episode?) to describe one of the other types of people who are in a clan. (Specifically, I think it was used to describe one of the types of people who could be among the Wen Clan survivors other than defenseless civilians.) I think they specifically used it to avoid the confusion that would arise if they simply used "servant," the way the official translation of the novel does. Because in the novel, during the indoctrination camp arc, it specifically has Wei Wuxian reflect that Mianmian is likely not a proper disciple of whatever clan sent her there, but a servant. And, during the soup incident, the girl who took credit for Jiang Yanli's soup was given a promotion from servant to guest cultivator because of the false esteem she had gained in Jin Zixuan's eyes when he thought she was the one bringing him that soup. Meaning that although she was a servant, she was also training in cultivation. Because of that, I had already come to the conclusion that there are two types of people referred to as "servants": household servants, who are "normal" people, and servant-class cultivators, who can never achieve parity with the other cultivators in a clan due to their lower social station. I think the translation for the subtitles of The Untamed decided to use "myrmidon" for those servant-class cultivators to make it clear that they're not the same as the household servants. (Most likely, this means there are actually two different words in the original language, and Seven Seas didn't draw any distinction between them, perhaps due to a lack of appropriate English equivalents.) Now, why they picked "myrmidon," the special Phthian soldiers who followed Achilles into battle in the Iliad (and in some versions of the myth started out as ants transformed into men by Zeus), that's another question entirely. But considering their use of inappropriate words like "Stygian" and "Resquiescat," I cannot be too surprised by the decision.
I don't have a lot of point in saying that, I just thought of it and therefore wanted to jot it down.
Because that's the kind of person I am, and that's the kind of posts these are.
Rambling, incoherent, spoiler-filled notes follow the read more tag.
Blah blah blah, incoherent notes and spoiler-filled rambling follows.
