The Untamed, wow I am confuse.
Jun. 21st, 2023 08:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickLet me start with I am NOT GOOD AT FACES. I'm not good at faces in real life with people I know in person. I'm not good at faces of people who more or less look like me ethnically. I am NOT GOOD at faces in any way, shape, or form. I generally take a while to be able to recognize real, in-person people when they are not in the correct location and sometimes I have an entire conversations with people who clearly know me while I'm there racking my brain and having absolutely no idea to whom I am speaking or in what context I might know them. Do they play horse? Are they my dental hygienist? Bank teller? Tenant? Person I went to high school with who is now unrecognizable due to the ravages of the intervening thirty-five years since graduation?
I put this out in public so that I do not get slammed for being relatively unable to differentiate all the little disciple/novice/initiate fuckitall beginner level cultivators running around with our man Wei Wuxian in the second half. They all dress in white and while two of them have names and speaking parts and personalities, the rest might as well all be one for as far as I can tell them apart. *sigh*
I do know that the snobby little shit with a dot on his head is the more-or-less nephew of our man Wei Wuxian. He's the one with the dead parents, one killed by Wen Ning and one skewered in the Rooftop Flute Battle Against The Clans Following The Slaughter Of The Remaining Wens (episodes 32, 33). He carries an axe he grinds constantly on the WW is super evil stone, frequently throwing sparks on WW-as-reincarnated-dude. I expect he got that from his OTHER uncle, the one running around with WW's golden core inside him. Jiang Cheng? Him.
There's another helpful/thrifty/reverent/brave/kind boyscout of a Beginner Cultivator and he gets a name and defining character traits sufficient for me to pick him from the herd on an ongoing basis. I expect it'll be clarified later who he actually is, but he's not just fleshed out just "so that the snobby little shit has someone to talk to". There's more to it than that. He's somebody we are supposed to know.
Hopefully differentiating the other Beginner Cultivators won't be on the final exam because lolnope.
Happily for me, when Wei Wuxian comes back, he looks JUST LIKE he did before. This is awesome for me because he's damn pretty but it also means I can recognize him on screen. It's not ... great in explaining how other people don't know it's him, though. A lot of these people were there in person for the first round of Wei Wuxian and I think if he ... showed up again looking exactly the same PLUS ALSO played a flute in melee combat situations plus also could summon Wen Ning at will, plus also has the particular, very attentive company of Lan Wangji, disguising himself with a mask that he doesn't always remember to wear would be about as effective as using a tissue-paper umbrella in a downpour.
HOWEVER, there are people who don't know it's him. Tracking who knows it's WW and who does not is a bit... much for my ability-to-follow. I'm going to have to do a rewatch to get all of this straight.
After WW gets back to the land of the living, we're back to the beginning and following the... clues (pointy left arm, ghost sword, whatever) to find out what all caused the weirdness at Chez Mo. En route, we wind up in the coffin town rabbithole, which ... again I am confuse. Do we know these people? (We may be SUPPOSED to know these people but I got fuck-all.)
Who is blind guy? (Blind Guy is Xiao Xingchen. He wasn't blind before, tho, and I had no idea who the hell he was on my own because I CANNOT SEE FACES and also foreign names are hard for me and it's BEEN A WHILE. I had to wiki.)
Who is angry ghost? (Angry Ghost is Song Lan. He was blinded by Xue Yang with powder, we saw that on screen, but he got new eyes from donor Xiao Xingchen, see above, so he was blind sometimes and sighted sometimes and yeah. I also didn't know who the hell this was.)
Who the flying fuck is blind girl with stick? (This thing has like six named female characters with speaking parts. I would have NOTICED if we had blind-girl-with-stick before this. She must be new.)
Wait, what, blind guy isn't the guy he says he is, he's just taken off his face and he's the PSYCHO SCENERY CHEWING BAD GUY FROM LIKE A BAZILLION EPISODES AGO, the smug bastard one, Xue Yang, the guy who blinded Song Lan. Didn't recognize him until he started with the gloating smirk. (It turns out that I didn't recognize him because they used the Xiao actor for this scene until after the face ripping off part, a Fun Fact I learned from the internet where someone was all "Xiao actor did such a good job pretending to be Xue Yang in disguise" and not by being able to see that he was literally a different person, the way that, like almost everyone else on the planet operates. *sigh*) Xue Yang was working for the Evil Wen Clan, got sent to Yueyang for the Yin Iron. He got CAPTURED by Dude and Other Dude (not our dudes, these were different dudes) with an assist from our man Wei Wuxian, iirc.
Wait, are these those dudes? The capturing dudes? Yes! These are those dudes! This makes a lot more sense, now. Xue Yang is getting revenge on the dudes who, I guess, captured him, and he was there for the whole blinding thing because he was the dude who did it, ouch, there's a lot of history here. Anyway, now I've got it.
Er, no, I don't got it.
I get why Xue Yang gleefully explains his horrific revenge to Xiao Xingchen, dish best served cold, no fun if people can't see you doing it, yadda yadda. That part's fine.
I get why Xiao Xingchen kills himself, that's also fine. Cannot live under these circumstances, death would be preferable, totally makes sense.
I don't get why Xue Yang cooks like a date night dinner for two place settings (I guess him and dead Xiao Xingchen?) and then puts talismans all 'round the corpse of Xiao and... waits for him to revive like Wen Ning did? (This does not work.) And then Xue Yang is seriously rage/grief stricken when it becomes clear that Xiao Xingchen isn't going to rise up.
That part there I don't get. Xue Yang, if you play that rough with your toys, you cannot really be surprised when they break irreparably.
So, with that arc or whatever wrapped up, we go to the festival and buy a rabbit lantern and then Lan Wangji's older brother shows up, the other Cloud Recesses guy I can reliably recognize. And he and Lan Wangji and our man Wei Wuxian have a talk about the identity of Most Probable Suspect where it is very clear that all of them know the person being discussed.
We as viewers are also probably expected to know who the Most Probable Suspect is. Easily. Like, this is not something where you are supposed to be confused.
I, however, sat there yelling at the screen about Or one of you could just fucking SAY HIS NAME after rewinding once to make sure that I didn't miss it somewhere when they said who they were talking about. I feel completely fucking clueless.
It's fine. They will tell me eventually, in the Grand Reveal part of the story. All in good time.
That said, my money's on that round-eyed guy with the silly hat who smiles too much. The concubine's son, the one who was the inside man stabbing the Captain of Team Wen in the back, that guy. I find him very... suspect and he's tight with Lan Wangji's elder brother because that was his point of contact during the whole business with the Wen clan and the Yin Iron and so forth.
Man, if Most Probable Suspect IS silly hat guy, elder brother is gonna be totally blindsided and feel really betrayed because right now he's all "I don't think that person is the kind of person who could do such things". But... but I think he is that kind of person. He smiles too much, inappropriately. Like, there's just something off about him.
Also I'm going by the exigencies of the narrative, sort of meta-knowledge about how effective stories work.
Your important characters have to have a reasonable amount of screen time so that they ... work. For heroes, this isn't too bad. They're the main guys and they get to be on screen a lot.
But for bad guys, it's harder. If the bad guy is just obviously the bad guy, it's straightforward and you can just have them there doing their scenery chewing and it's cool. Iago from Othello is 100% obviously the bad guy and he tells you how he's gonna do his bad guy things and it's pretty awesome to watch him get on with it. Xue Yang from the coffin town rabbithole (and other appearances) in this show is also obviously a bad guy doing his bad guy things obviously. And that's A-OK.
For SECRET BAD GUYS, it's a lot harder because you have to have the secret bad guy on screen enough for the audience to know him and emotionally invest in him. (For good or ill, either way we have to know the guy first before we can *feel* about him effectively.) So, the story has to get you to know the secret bad guy without bloody obviously tipping its hand that he's the secret bad guy. The whole point of having a secret bad guy is to have a Grand Reveal so you can't have people twigging too early about the identity of same.
But, you have to dribble out enough breadcrumbs of information for the super-observant people to be able to get it. Gotta do the groundwork, so that when you get to Grand Reveal, people can think back on what they saw and didn't notice or didn't take seriously enough and go "Yeah, okay, I get it" instead of "WTF?! NO WAY!" and furiously start retconning the whole thing online because the author did it wrong.
If you consume enough media, there is a point where the people getting attention (screen time, space in the story, whatever) in the narrative *have* to be furthering the narrative in some way. And if you can't tell if these other people getting attention are good guys or bad guys but you KNOW who the heroes are, for sure, then these other people are probably the bad guys. Probably.
In this here narrative, there is absolutely no chance whatsoever that Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji are anything other than The Good Guys, full stop. I am sure that they are the heroes, no doubt, WW's dabbling in necromancy notwithstanding.
The bad guy is not gonna be pulled like a rabbit (lol, rabbits everywhere, prolly they are symbolic because it's not *just* Lan Wangji likes rabbits. There are too many rabbits in this show for a character just liking them. There is some kind of THING with the rabbits.) from a hat at the very end. We already have to know who the bad guy is RIGHT NOW or there will be no emotional impact to hand when we get to the Grand Reveal.
And so, in the late-30's of the episodes, we've seen Silly Hat Guy on screen rather a lot. He seems... continually ineffectual in ways that don't look right for a clan leader. He's not... good at the leading part, particularly. Can't make decisions. Tries to be weirdly friendly with everyone? He doesn't make sense.
Other clan leaders, like elder brother over at Cloud Recesses and Jiang Cheng of Lotus Pier and so forth, they are good-at-cultivation-stuff. Like, their magic whatever is pretty awesome when we see it. They have Leadership Qualities. They don't just smile creepily at people and demur ineffectively. Silly Hat Guy, do you even cultivate, bro?
But Silly Hat Guy keeps on being a clan leader while being VISIBLY BAD at clan leading activities. Too, he's got a backstory that could push him in the direction of being a secret bad guy. Like, unhappy youth and concubine mom and stuff. He's plausibly a suspect for Secret Bad Guy and, of the available choices, has been getting more narrative attention than anyone else.
But mostly, I think he smiles too much.
I put this out in public so that I do not get slammed for being relatively unable to differentiate all the little disciple/novice/initiate fuckitall beginner level cultivators running around with our man Wei Wuxian in the second half. They all dress in white and while two of them have names and speaking parts and personalities, the rest might as well all be one for as far as I can tell them apart. *sigh*
I do know that the snobby little shit with a dot on his head is the more-or-less nephew of our man Wei Wuxian. He's the one with the dead parents, one killed by Wen Ning and one skewered in the Rooftop Flute Battle Against The Clans Following The Slaughter Of The Remaining Wens (episodes 32, 33). He carries an axe he grinds constantly on the WW is super evil stone, frequently throwing sparks on WW-as-reincarnated-dude. I expect he got that from his OTHER uncle, the one running around with WW's golden core inside him. Jiang Cheng? Him.
There's another helpful/thrifty/reverent/brave/kind boyscout of a Beginner Cultivator and he gets a name and defining character traits sufficient for me to pick him from the herd on an ongoing basis. I expect it'll be clarified later who he actually is, but he's not just fleshed out just "so that the snobby little shit has someone to talk to". There's more to it than that. He's somebody we are supposed to know.
Hopefully differentiating the other Beginner Cultivators won't be on the final exam because lolnope.
Happily for me, when Wei Wuxian comes back, he looks JUST LIKE he did before. This is awesome for me because he's damn pretty but it also means I can recognize him on screen. It's not ... great in explaining how other people don't know it's him, though. A lot of these people were there in person for the first round of Wei Wuxian and I think if he ... showed up again looking exactly the same PLUS ALSO played a flute in melee combat situations plus also could summon Wen Ning at will, plus also has the particular, very attentive company of Lan Wangji, disguising himself with a mask that he doesn't always remember to wear would be about as effective as using a tissue-paper umbrella in a downpour.
HOWEVER, there are people who don't know it's him. Tracking who knows it's WW and who does not is a bit... much for my ability-to-follow. I'm going to have to do a rewatch to get all of this straight.
After WW gets back to the land of the living, we're back to the beginning and following the... clues (pointy left arm, ghost sword, whatever) to find out what all caused the weirdness at Chez Mo. En route, we wind up in the coffin town rabbithole, which ... again I am confuse. Do we know these people? (We may be SUPPOSED to know these people but I got fuck-all.)
Who is blind guy? (Blind Guy is Xiao Xingchen. He wasn't blind before, tho, and I had no idea who the hell he was on my own because I CANNOT SEE FACES and also foreign names are hard for me and it's BEEN A WHILE. I had to wiki.)
Who is angry ghost? (Angry Ghost is Song Lan. He was blinded by Xue Yang with powder, we saw that on screen, but he got new eyes from donor Xiao Xingchen, see above, so he was blind sometimes and sighted sometimes and yeah. I also didn't know who the hell this was.)
Who the flying fuck is blind girl with stick? (This thing has like six named female characters with speaking parts. I would have NOTICED if we had blind-girl-with-stick before this. She must be new.)
Wait, what, blind guy isn't the guy he says he is, he's just taken off his face and he's the PSYCHO SCENERY CHEWING BAD GUY FROM LIKE A BAZILLION EPISODES AGO, the smug bastard one, Xue Yang, the guy who blinded Song Lan. Didn't recognize him until he started with the gloating smirk. (It turns out that I didn't recognize him because they used the Xiao actor for this scene until after the face ripping off part, a Fun Fact I learned from the internet where someone was all "Xiao actor did such a good job pretending to be Xue Yang in disguise" and not by being able to see that he was literally a different person, the way that, like almost everyone else on the planet operates. *sigh*) Xue Yang was working for the Evil Wen Clan, got sent to Yueyang for the Yin Iron. He got CAPTURED by Dude and Other Dude (not our dudes, these were different dudes) with an assist from our man Wei Wuxian, iirc.
Wait, are these those dudes? The capturing dudes? Yes! These are those dudes! This makes a lot more sense, now. Xue Yang is getting revenge on the dudes who, I guess, captured him, and he was there for the whole blinding thing because he was the dude who did it, ouch, there's a lot of history here. Anyway, now I've got it.
Er, no, I don't got it.
I get why Xue Yang gleefully explains his horrific revenge to Xiao Xingchen, dish best served cold, no fun if people can't see you doing it, yadda yadda. That part's fine.
I get why Xiao Xingchen kills himself, that's also fine. Cannot live under these circumstances, death would be preferable, totally makes sense.
I don't get why Xue Yang cooks like a date night dinner for two place settings (I guess him and dead Xiao Xingchen?) and then puts talismans all 'round the corpse of Xiao and... waits for him to revive like Wen Ning did? (This does not work.) And then Xue Yang is seriously rage/grief stricken when it becomes clear that Xiao Xingchen isn't going to rise up.
That part there I don't get. Xue Yang, if you play that rough with your toys, you cannot really be surprised when they break irreparably.
So, with that arc or whatever wrapped up, we go to the festival and buy a rabbit lantern and then Lan Wangji's older brother shows up, the other Cloud Recesses guy I can reliably recognize. And he and Lan Wangji and our man Wei Wuxian have a talk about the identity of Most Probable Suspect where it is very clear that all of them know the person being discussed.
We as viewers are also probably expected to know who the Most Probable Suspect is. Easily. Like, this is not something where you are supposed to be confused.
I, however, sat there yelling at the screen about Or one of you could just fucking SAY HIS NAME after rewinding once to make sure that I didn't miss it somewhere when they said who they were talking about. I feel completely fucking clueless.
It's fine. They will tell me eventually, in the Grand Reveal part of the story. All in good time.
That said, my money's on that round-eyed guy with the silly hat who smiles too much. The concubine's son, the one who was the inside man stabbing the Captain of Team Wen in the back, that guy. I find him very... suspect and he's tight with Lan Wangji's elder brother because that was his point of contact during the whole business with the Wen clan and the Yin Iron and so forth.
Man, if Most Probable Suspect IS silly hat guy, elder brother is gonna be totally blindsided and feel really betrayed because right now he's all "I don't think that person is the kind of person who could do such things". But... but I think he is that kind of person. He smiles too much, inappropriately. Like, there's just something off about him.
Also I'm going by the exigencies of the narrative, sort of meta-knowledge about how effective stories work.
Your important characters have to have a reasonable amount of screen time so that they ... work. For heroes, this isn't too bad. They're the main guys and they get to be on screen a lot.
But for bad guys, it's harder. If the bad guy is just obviously the bad guy, it's straightforward and you can just have them there doing their scenery chewing and it's cool. Iago from Othello is 100% obviously the bad guy and he tells you how he's gonna do his bad guy things and it's pretty awesome to watch him get on with it. Xue Yang from the coffin town rabbithole (and other appearances) in this show is also obviously a bad guy doing his bad guy things obviously. And that's A-OK.
For SECRET BAD GUYS, it's a lot harder because you have to have the secret bad guy on screen enough for the audience to know him and emotionally invest in him. (For good or ill, either way we have to know the guy first before we can *feel* about him effectively.) So, the story has to get you to know the secret bad guy without bloody obviously tipping its hand that he's the secret bad guy. The whole point of having a secret bad guy is to have a Grand Reveal so you can't have people twigging too early about the identity of same.
But, you have to dribble out enough breadcrumbs of information for the super-observant people to be able to get it. Gotta do the groundwork, so that when you get to Grand Reveal, people can think back on what they saw and didn't notice or didn't take seriously enough and go "Yeah, okay, I get it" instead of "WTF?! NO WAY!" and furiously start retconning the whole thing online because the author did it wrong.
If you consume enough media, there is a point where the people getting attention (screen time, space in the story, whatever) in the narrative *have* to be furthering the narrative in some way. And if you can't tell if these other people getting attention are good guys or bad guys but you KNOW who the heroes are, for sure, then these other people are probably the bad guys. Probably.
In this here narrative, there is absolutely no chance whatsoever that Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji are anything other than The Good Guys, full stop. I am sure that they are the heroes, no doubt, WW's dabbling in necromancy notwithstanding.
The bad guy is not gonna be pulled like a rabbit (lol, rabbits everywhere, prolly they are symbolic because it's not *just* Lan Wangji likes rabbits. There are too many rabbits in this show for a character just liking them. There is some kind of THING with the rabbits.) from a hat at the very end. We already have to know who the bad guy is RIGHT NOW or there will be no emotional impact to hand when we get to the Grand Reveal.
And so, in the late-30's of the episodes, we've seen Silly Hat Guy on screen rather a lot. He seems... continually ineffectual in ways that don't look right for a clan leader. He's not... good at the leading part, particularly. Can't make decisions. Tries to be weirdly friendly with everyone? He doesn't make sense.
Other clan leaders, like elder brother over at Cloud Recesses and Jiang Cheng of Lotus Pier and so forth, they are good-at-cultivation-stuff. Like, their magic whatever is pretty awesome when we see it. They have Leadership Qualities. They don't just smile creepily at people and demur ineffectively. Silly Hat Guy, do you even cultivate, bro?
But Silly Hat Guy keeps on being a clan leader while being VISIBLY BAD at clan leading activities. Too, he's got a backstory that could push him in the direction of being a secret bad guy. Like, unhappy youth and concubine mom and stuff. He's plausibly a suspect for Secret Bad Guy and, of the available choices, has been getting more narrative attention than anyone else.
But mostly, I think he smiles too much.
no subject
Date: 2023-06-24 09:58 am (UTC)I've also had it happen in real life that people act like they know me and I'm thinking really hard where I know them from. XD Often, it's because they know my parents/grandparents, but it could also be horse-related, or from work or whatever. I was at a meet-up from a website once where a girl and I stared at each other for quite a while, because we both felt like we knew each other from somewhere. Names didn't ring a bell and we couldn't find a connection where we might have met. Was this my lost soulmate from several lives ago? Who knows. XD We never could figure out why we thought we must know each other. Weird.
But anyway, you don't need to keep all these juniors disciples straight, as only three (+1) are important: The two Lan boys (nice Lan Sizhui and loud Lan Jingyi), the arrogant Jin boy (WWX's nephew) and kinda Ouyang Zizhen (the kid dressed in red who is a romantic) - he's not really important but he is very beloved by the fandom and they make a fun quartet.
(*psst* It's Jiang Cheng, with a g. Chen would be a completely different name. XD And I'm sure he'd be super angry at you. XD He's my beloved angry purple grape.)
Yeah, WWX coming back as himself is a dead give-away, especially because he's really bad at disguising himself. Like, he's got the mask he's usually wearing around the people who know him from before (except Lan Wangji because he knows anyway), but other than that? He dresses the exact same way as before, he can't help but act/talk in his usual way (even though at times he tries to play up the supposed role of Mo Xuanyu, but mostly he forgets XD), he has the fucking flute of evil, and notoriously hands-off Lan Wangji sticks to his site like glue, the deadest give-away to ever give something away. XD It has to be said that many of the characters from his old life can't be sure it's him, though - they do have strong supicions, though, until they're able to confirm one way or another.
Yeah, Xiao Xingchen & Co weren't mentioned for a long while... I also had to actually rewatch eps 1+2 after the flashback ended in ep 33, because I had completely forgotten about the evil sword spirit. XD
The whole Xue Yang/Xiao Xingchen/Song Lan drama is a whole tragic arc - basically, Xue Yang wanted to get revenge but he also kinda... fell for XXC in his twisted way, played house for a while and then had fun getting revenge on Song Lan - which ofc fucked up XXC when he realised that he'd killed his former best friend, so suicide it was. Which fucked up Xue Yang because see twisted "I think I've fallen for my enemy" thing. And since Xue Yang always admired WWX and wanted to be like him, he hoped to revive XXC - or at least preserve him until he could come up with a way to revive him. He hoped that WWX would be able to help him do that but it's not possible because XXC's soul shattered when he killed himself (out of grief, despair etc.). So yeah, XY fucked around and found out, I guess.
Yeah, they talk around the suspect a lot - the sword spirit belongs to Nie Mingjue's sword. Nie Mingjue is the headless corpse in the coffin and who Lan Wangji's brother calls "dage" - big brother; his bestest friend in the whole world who is considered dead after qi deviation though his body wasn't found at the time (qi deviation: where the meridians that hold their spiritual energy inside the body basically fuck up and the person starts... exploding? Kinda). And they are indeed talking about Jin Guangyao, the smiley guy with the big hat, who is also bestest friend with Lan Wangji's brother but had a fraught relationship with Nie Mingjue. So you're right - if he is indeed the evil guy with the mask, Lan Xichen will be very hurt and betrayed.
But, you have to dribble out enough breadcrumbs of information for the super-observant people to be able to get it. Gotta do the groundwork, so that when you get to Grand Reveal, people can think back on what they saw and didn't notice or didn't take seriously enough and go "Yeah, okay, I get it" instead of "WTF?! NO WAY!"
And that's why "subverting expectations" and having twist villains without any build up often gets rejected by the audience after the initial "whoa!" moment of shock. XD If a story is done well, the really observant readers/viewers should be able to guess the villain/twist/whatever - they'll get satisfaction from the reveal for being right about it, while people who didn't catch it initially will get satisfaction from being super surprised/shocked and then realising that yes, there were hints, they just didn't notice. So many stories have fallen flat in recent years because this was not heeded, twists were not set up and therefore the audience got pissed (for example, Game of Thrones...).
There is some kind of THING with the rabbits.
There is indeed! They a re a symbol for queerness. Check out this tumblr post for a short explanation. (No spoilers, you've already seen these things and it's just about the animal symbolism.)
He's not... good at the leading part, particularly. Can't make decisions. Tries to be weirdly friendly with everyone?
Jin Guangyao in general is good at leading a sect (in universe, only Nie Huaisang who is running Nie Sect and called the "headshaker" is considered a bad sect leader), but his background as the son of a prostitute (not concubine, that wouldn't be as bad) causes his standing with the old school clan leaders to be very difficult, especially in his own sect because the Jin are all about class. And being son of a prostitute makes him come from the lowest class. That's why he is so extremely friendly and deferential to everyone; always polite, don't cause a fuss. He does cultivate, but his cultivation isn't very good because he started to work on it so late in his life (a cultivator would start as a small child; he couldn't because again, son of a prostitute).