#MXTX WHAT IN DA HELL

[rokonrrc2]

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just finished the book HUALIAN HUALIAN HUALIAN IM GOING INSANEEEEEEE

[lilnasxvevo]

I will say. That I saw someone the other day, and I don’t remember who and I’m sorry if it’s someone who follows me and I want you to know there’s no hard feelings, saying that they didn’t get why LWJ is the character everyone latches onto as being the most obviously autistic when (other character, I honestly don’t remember who) is more obviously autistic in a way that isn’t, like, clearly influenced by his upbringing and the rules of his sect.

And I kinda disagree with that because like, yes it’s true that Gusu Lan is Autism Heaven in many ways (and autism hell in others, as I imagine that people who have trouble controlling their volume have a bad time in the Cloud Recesses, and also stimming in public is pretty much explicitly not allowed in Da Rules), but Lan Zhan is…how do I say this? Significantly more autistic about it than the rest of his clan.

I don’t have the brain juice to make a full big post about it right now but Lan Zhan has problems with black and white thinking that the rest of his clan struggle with way less, and he sticks to the rules way more strictly than the rest of his clan who are more willing to bend the rules when it comes to making nice with other clans or just making things easier for themselves (and in this I’m kind of on Lan Zhan’s side—what the fuck is the point of the rules if you don’t follow them??). Lan Zhan is very very rigid in his thinking and gets equally upset by someone breaking an minor rule as someone breaking a major rule. He also seems to struggle with unspoken social rules that Gusu Lan definitely still has, and sometimes faces disapproval for failing to follow these rules that are not written down.

He also speaks equally formally regardless of social context which is not true for other members of Gusu Lan, leans waaaayyyy into the vague rules of his time period that keeping your eyes lowered is polite in many circumstances and uses those rules to avoid eye contact whenever possible, and avoids verbal communication whenever possible, as if it is difficult for him.

Is he the only autistic-coded MXTX character? No. There are lots. But he IS so so so autistic and I love him so much.

[crossdressingdeath]

i just realized jc is just mdzs' version of chloe bourgeois from miraculous ladybug, down to the stans taking the piss on the creator and claiming they've been set up and that the creators hate them just because they've been presented as antagonists when ??? how could a creator hate something they created ??? the characters r just serving their narrative purpose that the creator gave ???

I wouldn't know, I don't watch Miraculous Ladybug. But it's like... yes, sometimes creators hate their characters! You can tell when that happens! Like, I've talked about Anders before; his DA2 writer apparently legitimately despised him and you can tell by how badly the story butchers the character they set up in Awakening and even the first act or so of DA2. The writers in general hated Anders and what he stood for and you can see that in Inquisition and Trespasser and how the characters respond to him (even if Hawke agrees with him they'll still pretty much say he was crazy and it's possible for a Hawke who romanced him to pretty much say they put him down like a rabid dog, plus things like how Trespasser was like "Uh... there was so much rubble from the destruction of one building it changed the tidal patterns in a coastal city and killed hundreds of people, don't question the logic of that"); the writers wanted the audience to see Anders as a bad guy and when parts of the audience didn't come to that conclusion they doubled down in the next game. That is a creator hating the character they created. And you might not know this if you're not into DA, but the mages in DA and specifically Anders are heavily coded as neurodivergent; yeah, Anders is heavily coded as part of a group that is discriminated against in the real world and that is important to keep in mind when talking about the writers hating him. A character belonging to one of if not THE most privileged groups in the setting AND out of universe being written as an antagonist and treated like an antagonist is not the creator unfairly hating them.

JC is presented as an antagonist from his first appearance. His first act is hurling abuse at a teenager for not murdering his own uncle in cold blood! MXTX could only have been more obvious about JC being an antagonist if she'd straight up interrupted the story with an author's note to say "Hey, don't root for this guy he's a bad person"! Or possibly had him kick a puppy or something. A rich, powerful man belonging to the dominant culture of the setting being the villain is not the sort of character that the author hates and wants to mock because of social bias against the group the character is part of or coded as being part of, which is generally the only reason an author creating a character would keep a character they hate as-is instead of changing them to be more likeable (yeah, authors do that, y'know). Even with villains, unless they're specifically designed to be a hate sink the author probably likes them at least a little. At most it could be a message in the work, railing against the dominant group, that sort of thing. And from what I've seen of MXTX talking about JC (which admittedly isn't much) I don't get the impression that she hates him. He's just... an antagonist. That's his role. Authors do not inherently hate their antagonists, the antagonist was created to be an antagonist and is doing their job. JC not living happily ever after is not MXTX hating him, it's the basic writing principle of "the antagonist does not get a perfect happy ending in a story with a happy ending"! I don't see people insisting MXTX hates JGS because he died!

It's just... such a stupid argument. "Oh, the antagonist doesn't get everything he wanted, clearly the author hates him!" This is such a basic thing it hurts, JC getting a happy ending would weaken the entire ending. And hell, the only thing he doesn't get is his punching bag back. So people are bitching about MXTX hating JC because... the guy this antagonist murdered decided to get married instead of going back to the childhood home that he moved out of over a decade earlier. To go back to DA, Anders was one of the party members. In two games. And his reward was being called crazy for eventually going from peaceful protest to inciting a riot so that his people would no longer be tortured and murdered. You want to talk about creators hating their character, that's the example to go to! Not the only surviving antagonist of a novel not getting everything he wanted when not even the HEROES got EVERYTHING they wanted!

[touchmycoat]

Hi Mido I don’t have much to say this time (maybe I’ll send another ask, I’m not very sure)! If you want you can disregard my previous asks 😅 I just finished the whole novel and I very much cried at the end hehe that’s it! Tho I’m still missing the extras but it’s almost 2am here so :PP

Ah and good morning for you! Have a nice day~

YAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH CONGRATS CONGRATS CONGRATS holy hell you slammed through that novel at the speed of light. sorry i wasn't faster about replying TTTTT rl's been running me ragged

BUT I'M SO FUCKING EXCITED OKAY OKAY. Tell me your thoughts on Hualian, all their back and forth and secret devotions and 800 years and 'oh were you talking shit about dianxia? no problem i'll just eviscerate you' and THE CAVE WITH THE STATUES AND THE GIANT MECHA BATTLE.

the fucking coffin kiss lakjdsnflaksjdf yeah the bingqiu energy, mxtx really has a thing for coffins doesn't she. i mean, mood. and do you like how they literally built the coffin themselves and was like "oh noooo it's too small, huh, guess we'll just have to embrace each other ever-so-tightly and take the opportunity to express our respective top/bottom/switch preferences what do you mean we could've just made it bigger that makes no sense"

and tell me your quanyin thoughts!! Yeah jesus christ i feel so bad for yin yu but i also adore quan yizhen with my whole heart, and like, mxtx took SUCH an interesting direction with them and they're honestly my favorite side story?

WELL OKAY NOBODY BEATS HE XUAN FOR ME. Like, the fucking TRAGEDY of him. The man who should've become a god gets everything stolen from him for literally no other reason than coincidence. Because he just HAPPENS to be born at the same time as SQX and have the same character in his name. Gets completely beaten down by life and still finds the strength while dying to become a Calamity, does the most hardcore undercover gig in the entire universe, finds the time to exact his revenge only for Hua Cheng's dearest Dianxia himself to throw every single wrench in his works and he can only scramble to work around Xie Lian ndjfnksjdnfk. And then at the end to exact the revenge he wanted. Fuck me up. Fuck! me! up!!!!!! he's so fucking hot!!!!!!!!!! HIS REALM IS WATER AND HE FUCKING TOOK EVERYTHING BACK FROM SWD!!!!!!!!!! ugh, goddamn, i love this guy.

and SQX!! good for him!!! like honestly, his strength of character really shined through at the end there!!!! That's what he chose, after all, when HX gave him the choice, and I really do think he can live a good life chilling out there with the beggar bunch. Putting him and SJ together would be such a fun plot experiment, wouldn't it—completely opposite trajectories of life, and completely different attitudes about the respective places they ended up at.

also SWD. Like, I fucking love this guy. I'm all in favor of him getting super murdered, but i really, really love him. He fucks. MXTX always goes ham with the side stories that share the same frequency as the main story, and SWD, like XL, is the guy who takes the third option. He decides his own fate and nobody else. Except, ofc, XL has a bottom line—and XL would've never been the same manner of god as SWD but he certainly came close to trampling over the lives of others to satisfy himself. Anyways, everything about SWD fucking slaps, his Water Tyrant nickname, when he says he makes choices about his life, not the gods...goddamn. The fact that he dies just makes me hornier for him.

snickers you're right, what's up with the da-ges losing their heads. The good thing about SWD though is that I don't think I could bring myself to write the decapitated skull-fucking of my dreams with NMJ, but I can certainly do it with SWD sjdfnkdsjfnksjdnfkjsdnkfsd

[justawanderingbabbit]

Thoughts on Untamed, I has ‘em

In terms of casting, with certain exceptions (Nie Mingjue and That Mustache) I think The Untamed was pretty near spot on.

In terms of plotting... those parts that kept more to the book were the parts I liked best. The rest of the plotting just didn’t work at all for me. Characterization also had some shaky places.

I say this as someone who usually doesn’t have a strong reaction to the differences between a movie and a book, even when it’s a book I love. I didn’t mind the Narnia movies or the Hobbit or even Lord of the Rings. But the changes made to Mo Dao Zu Shi just don’t sit right with me.

Follow me below the cut for spoilers and some ranting. (Full Disclosure: I have not actually watched the series so everything I’m saying is based on what I’ve read about it, seen in crack vids and the like. This makes me a serious Not Expert.)

1) The whole “Rediscovered Research” thing. In the original book, Wei Wuxian claims he learned demonic cultivation from scrolls he found in the Burial Mounds. This isn’t entirely impossible, of course, but there’s a strong sense that (as he often does) Wei Wuxian is blowing smoke up everyone’s arses. Having there be a previous source for the whole thing makes Wei Wuxian less of the Mad Genius he is in the book.

2) The Yin metal concept feels like an attempt to make the mystical aspects of MDZS go away. If there’s a metal containing some hitherto unknown power, there’s nothing spiritual about it. I realize undead and cultivation is incredibly Unscientific but the story’s a fantasy. It doesn’t need to lose the spiritual and magical aspects.

3) Wen Ning being alive but... what... infected by the Yin metal... somehow? The man was dead dead dead deadity dead in the book. You’ve already got undead wandering around (at least I think that’s what they are) so let him stay undead.

I note that he remains a darling cinnamon bun in the series but loses something of that in the follow up flick (which I did watch because, damnit, Wen Ning and Lan Sizhui teaming up? YEAH.) 

4) The final temple scene. Now this I have watched because I wanted to see how they handled it. They didn’t even have a real enemy showing up, just the resentful energy from Nie Mingjue’s sword? And JGY just runs off screaming and is presumed dead. I mean... what happened to him?

5) Timeline. Okay, I get it. The timeline in the original book is a mess. MXTX is not the best at keeping her dates straight. Who am I to judge given some of the things I’ve done in my professional writing?

That said, aside from the 16 vs 13 year thing (which was fine because, ages, man!) the fact that Jin Guangyao (apparently?) kills daddy dearest (So sad, too bad) before he kills Nie Mingjue means he no longer needs to kill Nie Mingjue because he now has the power to do what his Da-ge demanded of him.

Which brings us to the last complaint:

5) I didn’t like Jin Guangyao when I first read the story. It wasn’t until the temple scene and Wei Wuxian realizes that so much of what went wrong in Jin Guangyao’s life was the result of the same sort of thing that messed up Wei Wuxian’s. Namely, good intentions and that road to hell.

For Wei Wuxian it’s a kind of “There But For the Grace of Lan Wangji go I” kind of moment. One which made me speculate that Jin Guangyao’s actions (to some degree) might have had better intentions than everyone assumed. Some of his actions were incredibly over the top, (like burning the brothel) but others we only have other people’s side of the story.

The Untamed’s version of Jin Guangyao is so completely villainous, compared to the book’s that he loses a huge chunk of personality. In the drama, he’s ruthlessly ambitious, a mastermind of all masterminds, brought down at last by a mastermind who he underestimated because he never saw Nie Huaisang as capable.

For me much of what makes Jin Guangyao a fascinating character is how grey his grey scale can be. You can, if you want, see him as the devious mastermind seeking control of the entire cultivational world. Or you can see him as someone who acts to preserve what he has, creating a tangled web of secrets behind the mask of a beautiful smile. A tangled web that even he knows will fall apart someday. I tend to prefer the latter, a tragic villain who might, given the right chance at the right moment, might have done so much better.

5a) Minor sidenote: Nie Huaisang is often assumed to be an incredible mastermind, one who persuades Mo Xuanyu to destroy himself in order to get vengeance on Jin Guangyao. And it’s possible. Wei Wuxian certainly thinks he did. If he did, however, he’s as bad or worse than Jin Guangyao because he uses a messed up kid’s life to achieve his purpose. And if that’s the case, I’d be worrying for the cultivational world he might end up leading.

Final Note: I don’t say The Untamed is awful and don’t watch it. There’s plenty of reasons (mostly eye-candy, for me) to do so. But for me, the book will always hold a much higher place in my heart, if only for the nuances and understanding of characterization that MXTX put in her story.

[tringstarruuu]

just finished the book HUALIAN HUALIAN HUALIAN IM GOING INSANEEEEEEE

[rokonrrc2]

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just finished the book HUALIAN HUALIAN HUALIAN IM GOING INSANEEEEEEE

[urlocal-ghosty]

SO me core

just finished the book HUALIAN HUALIAN HUALIAN IM GOING INSANEEEEEEE