#(I mean this is all fanwankery but it makes sense to me!)

[benbamboozled]

Please join me in…

A SALUTE to JUDD WINICK…

for his commitment to the Panty!Jay Agenda.

For example, here.

And here

And here

Oh and here

And let us not forget…

Thank you, Judd Winick 🤝🫡

Sources are Batman #645, Batman Annual #25, Robin 80th Anniversary 100-Page Super Spectacular #1, Red Hood: Lost Days #1, Batman & Robin #23

[chalkrevelations]

So, Word of Honor, Episode 36 (and “Episode” 37) again, because I want to do a little bit more unpacking of this, particularly with some of the extra material and information that people have been able to point me to.

Spoilers, obvs. For right now, I mainly want to pull out this bit of my initial reaction to 36 & 37, because I think it remains a key point for me:

It would be nice, though, if the connective tissue from 36 to 37 made any sense. Or existed whatsoever. Just, like, throw me a bone, show, some kind of explicit hand-waviness that actually gets mentioned for why Ye Baiyi apparently was not as smart as he thought he was and didn’t really know what he was talking about when he was doomsaying about how one of the pair will surely, oh surely perish. None of this “Sooooo, they managed to figure out the technique and master it?” from some random shidi who never actually gets an answer. I mean, the door was left open for fanwankery on this one, with what looks to be a very last-minute conceit of all this being a story told by grown-up Chengling to his disciples, which begs the question of how much of what he’s telling them is totally accurate, given any number of issues …

I do feel like there’s an interesting meta thing going on here, in that the entire show has been about – let’s be honest, it was never really about the plot – queer-coding this couple in ways that supposedly fly enough under the radar that people can handwave them as Just Good Friends and Brothers (I mean, I guess) with a Bury Your Gays tragic ending (ugh) for good measure. And Chengling is telling a story in-universe that seems to conform to some of this same formula. And yet, we all know well and good that these guys were husbands … So are we supposed to carry the same assurance out of the show, on a meta level, that what appears to be happening in the story at the end of Ep 36 – what we discover we’re learning through Chengling’s story-telling, isn’t really the truth? Just, look: While we’re getting the Good Friends and Brothers push, there’s stuff like obvious voice-over work that doesn’t match the much more queer version of what the actors actually said, which is apparently blazingly clear to any viewers who know Mandarin and can manage to lip-read. The show has literally put de-queered words into these characters’ mouths. You can’t trust what you hear. But apparently the show has also made this obvious enough that, if you’re a good enough speaker of the language the show is being told in, and you have a good enough eye, you can see what is actually going on. Are we being taught to trust our eyes more than our ears, are we being told that what we’re being told – by the end of Ep 36 on a meta level, by Ye Baiyi-through-Chengling’s-story on an in-universe level, and by what we learn about what happened from Chengling’s story, itself, also on an in-universe level – is inherently untrustworthy, but that if we “speak the language” of this show well enough, and have a good enough eye, we can decode it and see what “actually” happened and is later made explicit in Ep 37? 

So, that’s a lot, but the reason I wanted to pull it back out is because I feel like this no-homo, surface-level, smoke-and-mirrors effect that gets layered over a queer bedrock of “reality” is precisely what the show did with its ending, and I want to approach that on a couple of different levels. Particularly since I’ve seen several reactions from other people who didn’t seem to have seen/didn’t have access to the extra of “Ep” 37, or who also found it difficult and vaguely unsatisfying to make the leap from Ep 36 to full belief in, and commitment to, “Ep” 37.

When I first posted this, I was really leaning on the idea of a classic Rashomon effect, given that we see – imho – a final Zhou Zishu/Wen Kexing scene in Ep 36 that’s filmed to lead us to believe that Wen Kexing died, with a subsequent cut to Zhang Chengling wrapping up a telling of the “story” of ZZS and WKX to his disciples. The easiest fanwank on this is that all of what we’ve seen so far has been Chengling telling the story of ZZS and WKX to his disciples, making him an unreliable narrator who in fact doesn’t know the truth of what really happened. I was actually reminded of the contrast in The Untamed (god, I don’t need to warn for spoilers for The Untamed, do I, we’ve all seen Chen Qing Ling at this point, right? Anyway, SPOILERS FOR THE UNTAMED) between the cliff scene in Episode 1 when they make it look like Jiang Cheng stabbed Wei Wuxian, leading to his fall off the cliff, and you go back later and realize this is the version that the storyteller was telling to the people in the teahouse vs. Episode, god, what is it, 33? When we see the cliff scene in “real” time, and discover that’s not what actually happened, that what happened is that Jiang Cheng stabbed a rock and Wei Wuxian shook himself free of Lan Wangji’s grip to fall to his death. You can’t trust what you hear. Also … well, we’ll get back to Chengling in a minute.

The second level of uncertainty to unwind is Gao Xiaolian calling bs on Chengling’s story. So, I felt like the kid who’s practicing his forms in the snow and being coached by ZZS in “Ep” 37 might actually be someone, not just a random kid, and that might be important, but I could not for the life of me figure out who he might be. I wasn’t aware until I watched some of AvenueX’s wrap-up of the show (I think that’s the first place I heard this info pointed out) that this kid is supposed to be the son of Gao Xiaolian and Deng Kuan, and the dad who comes to take him home is Deng Kuan (formerly Da-shixiong of Yueyang Sect, who – let’s face it – Gao Xiaolian really wanted to marry). Seriously, I spent so much time making fun of ZZS’s stupid facial hair tricks in this show, and then they actually do just put a dumbass mustache on a guy, and I completely don’t recognize him. I have to admit, the mustache threw me enough that I had no idea that was Deng Kuan (well, and maybe only seeing him for three episodes also helped). But if that’s Deng Kuan, and if the kid is his and Gao Xiaolian’s son, then she would have some reasonable standing to know a story detailing WKX’s death was bs.

 Finally, and most crucially – thanks to everyone who directed me to resources (including AvenueX and other fans who were able to do some translation) who were able to talk about the voiceover work in this final ep, because when I talk about how you can’t trust what you hear, but if you speak the language well enough and have a good enough eye, you can catch what’s really going on? When I talk about de-queered words being put into these character’s mouths? Apparently, this is what happens to Chengling in the final scene. That last scene - and the story he tells his disciples - apparently DOES provide the connective tissue from Ep 36 to Ep 37, but you can’t trust what you hear. Apparently, this is one of the places where you can see something different from what you hear if you’re able to lip-read, with Chengling telling the disciples something much closer to the idea that two people who love each other equally can equally support each other through this cultivation technique and both come out alive.

In the AvenueX discussion of this (Livestream #21, starting around 1:22:30), there’s an additional tidbit about the use of the word “cauldron” – I believe by Ye Baiyi - to describe one person in the pair, a word with a specific and widely-understood meaning within the genre that’s not necessarily known outside of the genre with, yes, sexual connotations. (Come on, slash fans, don’t tell me you don’t giggle every time you pass a perfectly innocent Jiffy Lube auto shop, at something that the mundanes don’t think twice about.) Apparently, “cauldron” is in the script, I believe it’s in the English subs, and it apparently was in the original Chinese subs, until too many people started talking about it and how it had been slipped past censorship, because it’s a perfectly common Jiffy Lube auto shop, right? and then it appears Youku went back and changed the character in the Chinese subs to something that doesn’t even make any sense. So again, we get an example of a case where if you’re a good enough speaker of the language this show is being told in – in this case the vernacular of wuxia – with a good enough eye, you can catch what’s really going on. Something that then gets no-homo’d. And has some nonsensical de-queered meaning laid over top of it. How many times do we have to do this until we learn the lesson that you can’t trust what you hear?

 ANYWAY, I’m wondering if the visuals are important, too: Something we see in the last scene with ZZS and WKX in Ep 36, when WKX is either unconscious or dead (CLEARLY UNCONSCIOUS), is that ZZS – twice – doesn’t let WKX’s hands fall. He catches him by the wrists and then catches him again by the hands as WKX’s hands start to slip away from ZZS’s hands – aaaannnnd end scene. I have to wonder if that’s not a subtle but important detail, that we see ZZS refusing to let WKX physically slip away, and maybe, by implication, refusing to let WKX slip away from him into death.

Also, again with Ye Baiyi – in the flashback when WKX is yelling at ZZS, Ye Baiyi says “No one dies!” as he comes bursting into WKX’s sickroom. And then even reiterates it – “No one dies before me!” But then the voiceover during the qi transfer, he’s supposedly going on about here’s how WKX is going to have to kill himself to save his husband? I think the script has dropped the ball in a few places, but that would really be a tremendous flub. That also deserves some unpacking, but I’m running out of free time right now.

So, just some additional thoughts. I will probably have more, but next up, I think, will be a re-watch from the beginning.

One last thought, tho’: What’s the likelihood that Nian Xiang is Actual A-Xiang and Goa Xiaolian’s/Deng Kuan’s kid is Cao Weining, reincarnated?

[breakfast-at-anteiku]

TG:re 123 - Alas Poor Yoriko (aka Lend Yoriko a Hand 2k17)

x I couldn’t decide what title I wanted

x Why did I make live reaction posts a thing now? No one asked me to make this a thing. But it is now a thing.

x @ the blurb: No, Ishida, you don’t get to do that. How dare you. sobs

[Warning: TG:re 123 spoilers, long post, picture heavy content]

x W-w-would it be too much if I called out into the fandom and ask someone to draw Yoriko in this dress/any wedding dress? Just to soften the blow of this chap idk

x The use of “Watashi” vs “Ore”. Mutsuki tends to switch between the feminine/formal versus the masculine/informal “I” in this chapter. It makes me wonder if 1) yandere!Mutsuki = female!Mutsuki, and more importantly 2) Mutsuki is having a more severe dissociation of personality than Kaneki did.

x It makes me wonder if weak-willed but more stable m!Mutsuki and strong-willed batshit crazy f!Mutsuki will ever merge into one core personality. Or if, indeed, there is a third Mutsuki in there - the real one, an actual core personality who’s not defending against the trauma of their father’s abuse nor masquerading as a stable person.

x (Also, I am not looking forward to the gender discourse after that switch in lexicon. While interesting and engaging at times, it kind of turns into fanwankery. But I digress.)

x Aaaand I believe Mucchanko’s kill switch has been flipped.

x Wait, I assumed all this time they didn’t live together with Mutsuki anymore. But if that’s the case, did no one do anything about the extreme downward spiral Mutsuki had in the last few weeks? I mean, Saiko at least was aware of it.

x Also, I know this is nitpicking, but did Mutsuki not have a reaction to Urie’s own nadir? I mean, I know they’re obsessed with “Sensei” right now, but still.

x Urie, meet Mucchan’s wall of crazy.

x Has. Literally. No one. In. That. House. Noticed. Mutsuki’s. Trainwreck.

x Okay, I looked at two translations here, but I don’t know which is more accurate. (I don’t know what the original Japanese said.) Because this implies 2 very different things. The first one (MS) implies that the Mutsuki the CCG member feels betrayed as a comrade, but the second (JB) implies that Mutsuki the woman feels betrayed.

x Because on the second, Mutsuki switched back to the feminine “I” again, meaning they’re speaking as a woman. In that context, the subtext of this statement is, “As a woman, did I mean anything to you?” and that says a lot.

x I’m not sure if anyone still doubts Mutsuki = yandere, but I’ll just leave this here.

x Again a difference in translation (MS vs JB) that implies two different things.

x Take the second translation. It has somewhat suggestive (?) language there by Mutsuki. “Come back to me” implies she’s always thought of “sensei” as her own. Not as the Qs’ leader (”me” not “us”, she says) but as her “person”, so to speak. Someone whose existence revolved around her, just because Haise showed her even that little bit of kindness she’s always been craving.

x No way. Is that the Fueguchi spine quinque???? Am I wrong? I’ve got to be wrong. Why is Mutsuki using it????

x Aura, my sweet summer child. You do realize that 1) Your aunt is alive - bedridden, yes, but alive and looking better than most; and 2) You’re challenging the guy who (nearly) beat Arima???

x I honestly don’t know if I approve of using Aura as Mutsuki’s sidekick, narrative-wise. His motivations are way too weak as it is. There’s no dramatic tension with him fighting Kaneki. He could be replaced as a random red shirt and I wouldn’t know the difference. (Tbh I kept forgetting his name, I had to google it.) But I guess it’s to give Kaneki a challenge against a 2nd Gen Q. Idk.

x Touka, my queen YAAAAS so glorious, so beautiful I am unnnffff

x “Die you thief. Catcatcatcat” would I think be better translated as “thieving cat” (dorobo neko) - a Japanese metaphor for a man’s sidechick. Basically, Mutsuki is portraying herself as the main squeeze and Touka the mistress. Totally lost in translation I guess.

x TOUKA THOUGH.

x HERE IT COMES.

x OKAY BUT JUST WHY. WHY YORIKO. WHY.

x I mean, it came out of nowhere but also it makes a lot of sense?? Like I thought Ishida was only using Yoriko as a way for Mutsuki to put two and two together, not as freaking mangled bait against Touka.

x The thing is, chopping of her freaking ring hand is the cruelest possible way Ishida could bring her in the story.

x Firstly, it’s her ring hand = the symbol of commitment between her and Takeomi. Their wedding the one bright spot in the CCG right now, and now it’s been tainted horribly.

x Secondly, she works with her hands, gundammit. She’s a passionate chef/baker, and Mutsuki took that away so very, very violently. I mean, I’m not sure if I want Yoriko alive if it’s going to make her extremely miserable to live anyway.

x I do think that she’s alive though - Ishida doesn’t just kill his characters. He usually does lets them live to torture further. So yeah, I’m not too reassured.

x But there are a couple of good things I can see out of this: 1) If she is alive, she could reconnect with Touka, and 2) getting through a crisis like this would give her and Takeomi better development. I lowkey ship them so I’m hoping they get out of this intact (if not in one piece, clearly.)

...

x PS Why did I start reading 2 translations? MS kind of takes liberties with translations sometimes - take their hesitation to use honorifics for example - but they do have a clearer way of presenting over JB but what they sacrifice is little language nuances that JB is better at showing.

[chalkrevelations]

And finally, here we are, Episode 36 of Word of Honor, and I have some FEELINGS. Let me show you them.

There also will be Episode 37 here, btw, because I’m not gonna do a separate reaction for a three-minute episode, no matter how grateful I am that we got it.

(Spoilers, so if that’s not what you want right now, scroll on by and come back after you’ve watched it. Them.)

Let’s get to the meat of the episode right away: THE HAIRPIN. And Wen Kexing knowing Zhou Zishu would have it, because he’d definitely take it with him if he was going on a suicide mission! Y’all. I really have to yell about this for a minute: That’s how secure WKX has become in his knowledge of what he means to ZZS! After all that time angsting and hiding the truth of his identity and worrying that he’s not worthy of ZZS and that he’d be rejected if ZZS knew the truth about him! But now, WKX has finally reached a point where he understands and knows (zhiji, the one I know) he’s so important to ZZS that ZZS would never ever go off to die without taking his most precious possession, the hairpin that his husband gave him! I can’t. My heart. This is like a declaration, after all that time saying they were zhiji, that WKX finally is able to truly see ZZS as that, to know him in his bones, and all of this is also delivered in the middle of WKX in a strop, irritably chastising his husband as an evil brat for running away from home to get himself killed, with Gong Jun’s little  >:(  face in full effect, and I am so filled with love for this show and this couple at this point that I have to pause Youtube just so I can roll around on the sofa, clutching at my chest and scaring the cats with my inarticulate noises. This is so good, y’all. It’s everything I’ve ever wanted. Also, now you know how it feels, WKX, you asshole. Which I suppose is why you even confess that it will would be more painful for the one who survives when if the other dies. And you were prepared to do that to him a second time? I cannot believe you, you asshole. You get to sleep on the ice couch for a month.

And then there’s some Six Cultivation Power mind-melding and what looks to be an INCREDIBLY STUPID and HEARTBREAKING ending that would leave us Burying One of Our Gays, so it’s a good thing Episode 37 (all three minutes of it) exists. It would be nice, though, if the connective tissue from 36 to 37 made any sense. Or existed whatsoever. Just, like, throw me a bone, here, show. Some kind of explicit hand-waviness that actually gets mentioned for why Ye Baiyi apparently was not as smart as he thought he was and didn’t really know what he was talking about when he was doomsaying about how one of the pair will surely, oh surely perish. None of this “Sooooo, they managed to figure out the technique and master it?” from some random shidi who never actually gets an answer. I mean, the door was left open for fanwankery on this one, with what looks to be a very last-minute conceit of all this being a story told by grown-up Chengling to his disciples, which begs the question of how much of what he’s telling them is totally accurate, given any number of issues, including the spottiness of human recall, the possibility (based on the fact they’re still on the mountain in Ep 37) that Chengling never actually saw either of them again to get the full story, and the way Gao Xiaolian basically calls bs on the whole thing. But this is still a gossamer-thin thread on which to hang Ep 37. Ep 37 basically functions as reassurance because of the mere fact of its existence, because they’re clearly both alive, right there in front of your face, regardless of the other fact that it doesn’t actually make any sense, based on Ep 36. It ultimately doesn’t matter if there is no Step 2, because Step 3: Profit! is … right there. In evidence. Happening. On your screen. No matter how vaguely unsatisfying the lack of Step 2 may be.

I do feel like there’s an interesting meta thing going on here, in that the entire show has been about – let’s be honest, it was never really about the plot - queer-coding this couple in ways that supposedly fly just enough under the radar that people can handwave them as Just Good Friends and Brothers (I mean, I guess) with a Bury Your Gays tragic ending (ugh) for good measure. And Chengling is telling a story in-universe that seems to conform to some of this same formula. And yet, we all know well and good that these guys were husbands. (I mean, barring anything else, they’re a couple in the original source material, so checkmate, censorship.) So, are we supposed to carry the same assurance out of the show, on a meta level, that what appears to be happening at the end of Ep 36 - what we discover we’re learning through Chengling’s story-telling - isn’t really the truth? Just, look: While we’re getting the Good Friends and Brothers push, there’s stuff like obvious voice-over work that doesn’t match the much more queer version of what the actors actually said, which is apparently blazingly clear to any viewers who know Mandarin and can manage to lip-read. The show has literally put de-queered words into these characters’ mouths. You can’t trust what you hear. But apparently the show has also made this obvious enough that, if you’re a good enough speaker of the language the show is being told in, and you have a good enough eye, you can see what is actually going on. Are we being taught to trust our eyes more than our ears, are we being told that what we’re being told - by the end of Ep 36 on a meta level, by Ye Baiyi-through-Chengling’s-story on an in-universe level, and by what we learn about what happened from Chengling’s story, itself, also on an in-universe level - is inherently untrustworthy, but that if we “speak the language” of this show well enough, and have a good enough eye, we can decode it and see what “actually” happened and is later made explicit in Ep 37? Is Ep 37 canon? Does it matter, when “what is canon” is already so slippery on this show, where you can apparently lip-read something that’s different than what you’re hearing, and it functions as canon because of the mere fact of its existence, because it’s clearly … right there. In evidence. Happening. On your screen.

Anyway, just some thoughts on all that, which I guess is my own fanwankery work to join up the end of Ep 36 with Ep 37, which was, of course, delightful. No matter how much I might bemoan the lack of Step 2, I had a stupid, dopey grin on my face all the way through Ep 37 and might have even teared up a tiny bit at the very end. You can’t prove anything. Lemme tell you, though, it’s a good idea to have 37 on hand when you run into the brick wall of the end of 36, because while WKX’s willingness to sacrifice himself for love is theoretically great, it is not something I actually want to see come to fruition, given the pall it would cast over the entire joyous experience that the ZZS/WKX relationship is throughout the rest of the show. Sure, there’s always fic, but there’s a heaviness that hangs over the Bury Your Gays trope, and it’s retroactively ruined shows for me before. So THANK YOU, to those of you who hooked me up so I could immediately move on to Ep 37.

What else? Other things:

OK, so, first, I have to get this out of the way: Did we actually already see all of those “flashbacks” we get in the first part of the ep, during the conversation between Zhou Zishu and Jing Beiyuan, when all the political stuff is supposed to be finally falling together to give us the big picture? I would have to go back and scrummage through those eps to be sure, and I’m not going to spend time doing that (yet) when I still need to do some keysmashing about Zhou Zishu and Wen Kexing OH MY GOD, but I do feel like some of this was new information, not just stuff that I’d glossed over because it didn’t seem important at the time? If so, not on, show. I will be keeping an eye out for that on re-watch. I am, however, perfectly willing to accept – if it turns out to be true – that you utterly distracted me with the failboats-in-love storyline, to the detriment of my focus on, you know, plot or whatever. It’s happened before. (It’s one of the reasons I need to go back and watch The Untamed again, at some point.)

OMG FAKE KEY! And as ZZS points out, this has been foreshadowed for us from early on, with WKX’s fake Glazed Armors plot. :bangs table with fist: YES. This show is going to reward re-watching SO MUCH.

Duan Pengju, oh my god, this asshole. The look on his face when the Armory didn’t open was so gratifying. Also, ha. I wondered when ZZS was finally going to be done with his shit. In fact, so much gratification in this whole scene. Xie Wang’s face when he realizes WKX double-crossed him – what, did you think you were the only tricksy one in that little alliance, Xie’er? And, holy shit – I cannot believe that Xie’er actually words this as WKX failing him, taking us back around to this theme one more time again. I would maybe feel a little worse for you if you hadn’t been a hairsbreadth away from killing him before ZZS stopped you in the last ep, Xie’er. Also if you hadn’t helped get A-Xiang killed. So I think the fail in this relationship is going both ways. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like you’re going to get the time WKX had to start untangling yourself from the ways your abuser has fucked you up and over.

It once again becomes blindingly clear why ZZS has been my ride-or-die during this whole thing: Under the grumpy, irritable, day-drinking yet somehow eminently practical exterior, he’s actually an idealistic do-gooder who just wants to make the world a better place for people and sacrifice himself for great justice. Never let it be said that I don’t have a type. Also, I mean. Zhang Zhehan’s FACE. Let’s don’t discount the power of that.

Final word: Don’t miss Ep 37. All three minutes of it. They are perhaps the most important three minutes of the entire show.

(I mean, not FINAL final word. I expect to be going back for a re-watch and posting more things, particularly on eps from before I started typing up 1000K-word reactions this first time around.)