#I DIDN'T SAY IT ZZJ DID HA HA

[pillow-boi]

"The only colour in a world in black and white."

[thatswhatsushesaid]

Xiyao?

oh!! xiyao is the otp to end all otps for me (@verdantrivers tagging you as well since you also asked about them, even tho you already know everything I'm going to write anyway)

ship it 🤌

What made you ship it? in the novel, it was absolutely the teacups scene. but uhhh this is embarrassing but I came into this fandom backwards, and so my first exposure to xiyao was the show! tl;dr I was looking for a show on netflix to fill the void left in my soul after the depressing end of The Rise of the Phoenixes, and someone somewhere rec'd The Untamed because "it's gay and the gays get a happy ending!!" me, a depressed bisexual, "oh, what a relief, I could use a happy ending for the gays after all that depressing straight people nonsense I just suffered through." (joke's on me, my chosen gays did not get their happy ending, I clowned myself) anyway, /scuffs foot, it was the box scene. their cute little shuffle over the box. the shy yet lingering eye contact. meng yao's eyes doing the thing that zhu zanjin has them do every time he looks at lan xichen for longer than a second, like he's noticing how beautiful starlight is for the first time, and lan xichen looking like meng yao just awoke something in him that he didn't even realize was there until that moment. meng yao's beautiful face journey when he sees lan xichen and rushes to say goodbye to him. like... I feel it bears mentioning at this point that I knew so little about this show or the canon source material that I literally thought that xiyao was going to be the main ship with the happy ending just based on this moment alone, and so you can imagine by dismay once I realized how tragically wrong I was. RIP past me. anyway, while I absolutely prefer jgy's characterization and arc in the novel canon, I will nevertheless die for the way lhk and zzj chose to bring xiyao to life on-screen. they did the reading.

What are your favorite things about the ship? besides the siren call of a decades' long near-romance that is doomed by the narrative, probably that when given a choice (or rather, when jgy believes that he has a choice), jgy and lxc always choose each other, both when the stakes are low and when they are extremely high. one bad faith and garbage take on their dynamic that I often see trotted out by jgy's harshest critics is that he exploits lxc's affection for him exclusively to cement his position within the lanling jin sect and to further his own ambitions, which seems like such a dull and reductive way to view the nearly two decades they spend together in each other's lives. I also just don't understand where this interpretation comes from?? is it just from jgy using the pass token to get the song of spirit turmoil from the library pavilion's forbidden section? because yes, that was a violation of lxc's trust, but also like... would there even have been a forbidden section in the library pavilion for him to steal from if jgy hadn't sacrificed so much of his dearly bought social and political capital upon gaining his recognition from jgs to help the gusu lan rebuild the cloud recesses? this is not me trying to diminish that violation of lxc's trust, but just to emphasize that jgy actually had very little to gain, politically speaking, at the time he pressed his father to provide aid to the extremely vulnerable and weak gusu lan, but he did it anyway, and he did it because he knew lxc needed the help. smaller stakes: given the choice between being in anyone else's company or each other's, they always gravitate towards each other in any space they occupy together, and that does things to me lol.

Is there an unpopular opinion you have on your ship? with very few exceptions, I don't enjoy lan-furen as a concept 🤷‍♀️ I didn't even fully understand why the lan-furen AUs didn't work for me until I read commentary specifically by you and @fincalinde and @confusion-and-more (I think) about how deeply jgy's pursuit of his birthright with the lanling jin is integral to his character. because I do remember reading objectively good and well-written lan-furen fic that should have been providing me with emotionally satisfying xiyao catharsis after getting hit by the truck that is the canon ending, and instead left me feeling like I'd eaten too many bites of a pie that was good yesterday but has already started to turn. idk that metaphor is getting away from me. also, more fics where jgy is the soft dom in the bedroom, please, that's my favourite jgy flavour.

[skalidris]

i would absolutely love to hear more about your course on semiotic analysis in theatre and how it had influenced your opinions on mdzs/cql, when/if you have brain space to talk about it. 🧋

First, thank you for asking--I hadn't actually thought about how that course influenced my take on mdzs and the derivative canons, but in hindsight, it really super did.

Now that I have given it some thought, I should say first that it's been a while since I studied this, and also a while since I first read mdzs (I'm using 'mdzs' as a shorthand; I actually watched s1 of the donghua first, then s1 of the audio drama, and then I read the full novel. cql wasn't a thing back in those days yet, and neither were the later donghua seasons).

Read more as I'm longwinded! Content: Theatre Studies Semiotics, Why I Use This

Semiotics, even just for theatre, has a lot going on. I'll be simplifying! Very simply, semiotics is about a thing called signs. These signs are expressions of something; rather, they are vehicles of communication. Anything that communicates is a sign. Signs communicate some abstract idea, or carry a meaning--something like that.

It's absolutely irrelevant whether someone put a meaning into the sign, or why that sign came to exist. Intent doesn't matter. Since all material expressions (also, words, or sensory experiences--they're material compared to their meanings) are signs, and the duty of a sign is to carry a meaning, that meaning is what can be derived from the sign. Itself.

This dualistic definition is basically associated with a guy called Ferdinand de Saussure. In the semiotics of equally famous guy Charles Peirce, you get a third category. It's kind of complicated, but for these purposes, I'm gonna go ahead and call that third category the system for understanding the sign--the incoporation of the 'thought' of the sign back into a framework of ideas and concepts.

The essence of semiotics in theatre in so far as I mentioned it in that post is, everything on the stage is part of the performance. Our professors had real-life anecdotes for this, but it's basically this: If in the middle of a staged fight, an actor spits blood and collapses on the stage, some audiences might be empathically upset, others might laugh, someone else might go 'woah. how did they do that?'

But no matter what, all of those responses assume that this is acted--someone, several someones, costume and blood and light and acting, came together to portray 'death' in this way. But that actor actually just died for real, in real life. That's why, intent isn't important for semiotics. Although you can certainly discuss intent, ultimately, once you've agreed to the existence of signs and signification, intent is at most secondary.

Obviously, a novel isn't a play, and neither is a tv show, or a donghua, or an audio drama. Semiotics absolutely can be applied to anything, but I'm specifically talking about theatre here. I personally don't see this as an issue, first, because cql and the audio drama are recorded performance arts (they fall within theatre studies already). two, because I'm fundamentally regarding reading/watching/listening as unique, non-repeatable events in which i, the audience, and you, the audience, are never really passive at all. <<key concept in theatre studies, in particular the work of the theatre semiotician erika fischer-lichte.

I like this approach for mdzs, and it's definitely partly because I just liked JGY so much! And I was not really in a majority with that, and back then, people also didn't like xiyao as much as they do in this post-zzj&lhk era. I wanted to understand this, and I also wanted to know whether I was wrong to like him. Not because it would've made me stop, but because 'I've decided to ignore the author' and 'the author doesn't contradict me' are really different starting positions for thinking about something, and I wanted to know which I was in!

(If I want to stubbornly contradict something, I better make sure I haven't made up a strawman from misunderstanding first. That sort of idea)

Semiotics sort of.. side-steps this? The conclusion I came to is that the text creates its own framework for interpretation. It does this structurally, by what information is presented, omitted, changed, etc, when and how. It does this in how characters talk, in what cues they take from each other (or don't!), in what the narration comments on.

In other words, the conclusion is that, just as in theater, regardless of what intention is behind any individual sign of the story, regardless how it came to exist in the story, it's there, and part of the story. So I am obligated to consider as part of the total network of signs that make up the bigger-scale meanings, such as 'all kinds of intent result in destruction if the circumstances are bad enough' and 'what happens after the terrible thing happened' and so on and so forth

If something doesn't have a meaning, because the whole story is made up of signs and system, it becomes a sign with a meaning anyway. Due to peer pressure.

Luckily, Peircean semiotics allow for system interpretation, so signs like that, the ones whose meanings we can't incorporate well, it's possible to decide not to incoporate them in analysis or whatever ^^

And of course, your own framework might be lacking. Mdzs was my first webnovel, and my first danmei, so with this philosophy in mind I set out to read several more in order to give me more confidence in understanding the story. That is, in order to decide what 'counts' when creating an interpretation and 'what doesn't count' is made easier with a more suitable framework. However, I still think that the story itself gives you the correct cues anyway--they just might get distorted by your framework.

[was gonna put an example here, since I dunno if this makes sense, but I'm too tired. Mayb later.]