#I love the idea of Meishan Yu as a matriarchal sect of warrior women because why the heck not

[hunxi-guilai]

Hi! A follow up to your Wen Zhuliu and the assassins' biographies and 知己 posts (which were great!) - It got me thinking about the relationship between Yu Ziyuan and her maid/assassins Yinzhu and Jinzhu, especially the line about how they had never served anyone else and were no ordinary servants. No question here, but your post made me think about them a little more, and wonder whether that might apply to them. It is a fun headcanon, at least, given that we really know so little!

(follow-up to this post about Wen Zhuliu and assassin literature)

oh! it’s funny you should mention that, because I remember watching episode 15 and, when I saw Jinzhu and Yinzhu in action, I was a little shook because I got mad 聂隐娘 vibes from them

so who do I have to pay for an all-ladies encore of CQL

聂隐娘 Nie Yinniang is a peculiar but evocative Tang Dynasty 传奇 chuanqi story (often translated as ‘legend’ or ‘tale of the marvelous’), found in the 《太平广记》Taipingguangji. There’s a lot of plot and political machinations packed into the 1400 characters of her legend, but the tl;dr is that Nie Yinniang is the daughter of a general who gets kidnapped by a nun. Said nun spirits Nie Yinniang away to an unknown but vaguely mystical place, where she is trained in the brutal art of assassination, and five years later, gets dropped her off at like nothing had happened. Her father simultaneously dotes on her and is terrified by her because, hello, assassin. A random mirror-grinding youth walks by one day, and she takes one look at him and says “oh I could marry that one” and what’s her father going to do? Deny his half-feral assassin daughter?

They get married. Anyway. Her story’s wild, and that’s just the beginning. 侯孝贤 Hou Hsiao-hsien made a movie about her, 刺客聂隐娘, which I stg I tried to watch but noped out of because I couldn’t understand the dialogue (which was simultaneously speedy and 文言 and I was just like... please... some mercy here...). Living legend Ken Liu also borrows heavily from the Nie Yinniang mythos in his short story “The Hidden Girl,” which, incidentally, is the name of his newest short story collection!

Oh goodness I’m getting distracted. WHAT I’M TRYING TO SAY is that there are two other badass lady assassins in the Nie Yinniang story, 空空儿 Kongkong-er and 精精儿 Jingjing-er (for those of you more familiar with the source story, I’m choosing to read 空空儿 and 精精儿 as the two girls in the line “已有二女，亦各十歲，皆聰明婉麗不食。能於峭壁上飛走，若捷猱登木，無有蹶失” because... narrative Occam’s Razor?). Nie Yinniang ends up going toe-to-toe with the two of them in order to protect an official she decided she liked better than her former employer, and the whole fight between Nie Yinniang and her former assassin-sisters is blanketed in a great deal of mystery and magic. After Nie Yinniang fends off Jingjing-er (by... dissolving her into water? unclear), she says:

隱娘曰: 後夜當使妙手空空兒繼至。空空兒之神術，人莫能窺其用，鬼莫得躡其蹤。能從空虛之入冥，善無形而滅影...

Yinniang said, “Later in the night, [he] will of course send dextrous Kongkong-er to continue [the assassination] to its finish. As for the magical skills of Kongkong-er, its use cannot be seen by people, its footsteps cannot be trodden by ghosts. She can descend into darkness from emptiness and hollowness, excels at formlessness and exterminating shadows...”

(five minute translation, text pulled from ctext)

Which, considered in context of Jinzhu and Yinzhu’s fight scene in episode 15?

on one hand I’m mad because I can’t see the choreography because they’re blurring, but on the other hand... well played, CQL production team, well played

definitely resonates a lot with Kongkong-er and Jingjing-er from the Nie Yinniang story.

I can’t speak to whether this was a deliberate allusion made by the CQL team (since it feels a lot like the fun 福禄寿 Fu Lu Shou resonances in that other meta), but it’s certainly fun to think about!