#and honestly I am all for wwx setting down in the cloud recesses so Yeah

[zelkam]

— barbie as the princess and the pauper (2004) yes, amazing source, I know

[crossdressingdeath]

It's not Just JYL. MDZS fandom has this problem where a lot of people strip away all of the complexity and actual character traits from the female character, for the sake of protraying them as "perfect angels and "badass Queens", then they complain that the female characters of MDZS até not complex. The large number of people that thinks drama!Mianmian is better than novel!Mianmian show this. Novel! Mianmian is Far more interesting, both as an individual character and part of the narrative

I think most fandoms (and honestly a lot of media in general) have this issue where it's like they're scared to admit that women can have personalities beyond "perfect mother" or "stone cold badass who hasn't had an emotion in the last decade", and you can definitely see that in the MDZS/CQL fandom. I honestly find this fascinating in terms of CQL, because... yeah, the female characters get more screen time! But they're weaker as characters. As secondary characters in a gay romance they understandably don't get much development in MDZS, but it becomes so much more noticeable in CQL because they're there more! Also they're literally just... hanging around, not doing shit. CQL rammed them in and then did nothing with them. Like... what purpose does making Mianmian JZX's childhood friend serve, beyond vastly weakening the story of a young woman working her way up from nothing and throwing it all away without hesitation when her place conflicts with her morals? What does JYL do in the Cloud Recesses, beyond adding some more scenes of her babying JC while WWX does the emotional labour? What do WQ's added scenes do beyond screaming "love interest crammed in to make it less gay"? The additional scenes are just so pointless and add nothing to their characters! Sure, CQL has more scenes with female characters numerically, but that means fuck all when they didn't actually give the female characters anything more to do! Also, am I the only one who finds it hilarious that people go on and on about how much more the girls do in CQL when... CQL actually took one of Mianmian's major actions in the plot (giving WWX the pouch of herbs that may well have saved LWJ's life) and gave it to WN, a guy? Also, setting up JYL as someone who actually can cultivate and still having her go down without a fight when MDZS justified it by making it clear that she didn't cultivate at all was just dumb, at least let her kill a couple puppets.

Basically I think the additional screen time for the female characters in CQL has the same issue as literally everything else the writers shoved into the plot: they made zero attempts to actually make it fit in the fucking plot. So yeah, the ladies are around more... but just giving secondary characters more screen time doesn't make them major characters, it just makes the fact that they have the characterization and development of secondary characters more noticeable and also a problem rather than just the correct choice for their level of importance. Somehow they managed to make the non-combatant more of a damsel than she was in the version of the story where she couldn't fight and turned WWX's badass adoptive older sister who would fight to the death for the people she loved into a love interest while cutting out the bit where she's a love interest, it is wild.

[butterflydm]

The Untamed Rewatch (ep 10)

Previous Episode | Index | Next Episode

There's a lot of plot movement in this episode! Plus not one, not two, but THREE of WWX's antagonist parallels feature in it, in addition to the partnership parallel of SongXiao. Very exciting for me. ❤️

Xue Yang is revealed on a roof. There are… there are a lot of important roof moments in CQL. I also just straight-up love the composition of this shot, it has a lot of depth. There's Xue Yang on the roof, the hanging bodies in bright red under him, then Lan Zhan and Wei Ying in the foreground.

So… Xue Yang is a terrible person but a really great character. Here, though… ah. The man in black waits on a roof, standing elevated over the bodies of his victims and ready to challenge the people who are here to call him to task for his crimes, then a hero dressed all in white flies in to challenge him. From the point of view of the cultivation world, that's the story that started to (was supposed to) happen during the fight in eps 31-32.

Xue Yang and Wei Wuxian are only superficially alike. Their hearts are very different. But that's one of the themes that I enjoy — how differently things look when you only see them from the outside. Visually and on the surface, WWX & LWJ match up to either Xue Yang and Xiao Xingchen or Song Zichen and Xiao Xingchen. But once you scratch the surface, it becomes more clear that WWX's heart is nothing like Xue Yang's.

I love that WWX wants to stand back and observe before acting, here. Contrary to what might be assumed about his impulsive nature, he's very perceptive and strategic, and it's enjoyable to watch that here. He acts to level the playing field, then stays out of the fight to assess the fighters and when he does act, it's very calculated. This is one of the things that makes him a good teacher way later on, I think.

I also like that we see Xue Yang appreciates WWX's skills and more whimsical approach to things. So, one of the things that separates WWX from Xue Yang is that WWX has a sense of perspective and proportion (...actually, now that I think about it, this is also one of the things that separates WWX from MY/JGY, though in a different way). Like, one of the reasons XY is fun to watch is that he's generally always having a good time even in situations when it's extremely inappropriate. Whereas that may be what LWJ thought about WWX when he first met him, but he realized there are things (moral and ethical things) that WWX is quite serious about and doesn't joke over.

I also love the mutual admiration society that goes on after Xue Yang is captured, and Xiao Xingchen says nice things about our kiddos and then Lan Wangji turns it around and says nice things about him back. It's polite but it's also very sweet.

Xue Yang laughing over the hypocrisy of the honored cultivators — another WWX/Yiling Patriarch parallel moment there.

We also get another early moment of Lan Zhan currently refusing to do a thing that he will do with all his heart in the future, which is hold Suibian for WWX.

And then we get more detective work from WWX & LWJ — searching Xue Yang, realizing that the evidence no longer points to Xue Yang still having the Yin Metal, WWX working through his thoughts about it out loud. I really do love the partnership vibe.

I also have feelings about Jiang Cheng on one side of WWX, LWJ on the other side. They're in pale blue outer robes of slightly different shades, but the color underneath is very different and matches their clan. The color choices for the clothes on this show feel very deliberate, so while I might read the wrong things into it, I don't think I'm wrong for reading into it at all.

Xue Yang and WWX's outfits are so similar. Really, the main differences are WWX having red accents and Xue Yang having gold ones. But the main colors and silhouettes just… yes. The conversation here, about personal vs the wider picture, is a reoccuring theme as well. Because those things are hard to separate — the personal grudges affect the world as a whole when people with power are the ones with the grudges (again, a theme that will come up with JGY). Xue Yang doesn't have political power, but he has a skill and knowledge set that are useful to people in power, so he has more freedom to do terrible things and get away with it than something without those skills and knowledge would.

Meng Yao and Nie Huaisang are here! 

I do love this for Nie Huaisang's characterization — he was hesitant to come when it was just him and just a few young cultivators his own age, but once he has some serious backup, he immediately came to help. He does want to be helpful but he knows his own strengths.

We get the second mention here of Nie Mingjue being known for being forthright and honest with his judgements (Lan Xichen had mentioned it previously). It's something he's widely known for, it seems.

...I hadn't remembered that Wei Wuxian had said his bit about himself and Lan Zhan working together out of like-mindedness in front of Nie Huaisang and Meng Yao. I remembered Jiang Cheng, of course, but I hadn't remembered the other plot-important people who heard that said. The show really does set up this specific dynamic where the people who are involved in the main plot are all very aware that there's a special bond between WWX and LWJ. And Jiang Cheng's reaction is also in front of Meng Yao — I'm sure that he remembered this moment in the future, when he was poking at Jiang Cheng's ego-related issues about WWX. Because just like he did in front of Nie Huaisang in the earlier episode, here WWX separates himself out with Lan Wangji specifically, excluding everyone else from their partnership.

I love this lovely moment of validation that WWX gets from XXC, where XXC says that Baoshan would be happy to know him if she had the chance to meet him. And, again, I love that the person connected to WWX is the LWJ parallel. This is one of the moments when CQL just feels like a show that… even though many sad or terrible things happen in the story… the show wants to give these characters moments of kindness and absolution. It just feels very… affectionate. The show feels like it was made with real, genuine love and sympathy for the characters. That's one of the things that I like best about it, honestly. It feels tender, even in the hard parts. It wants to be kind.

Nie Huaisang really does admire regal gentleman. He was all admiring over LWJ, and now he's the same over XXC and Song Zichen. And I also absolutely love how much this meeting affects both WWX and LWJ. WWX is the talker, so he gets the lines about how he wants to have that kind of life, but we can tell LWJ is just as deeply affected by how he watches them leave. And I assume the show already knew it couldn't actually show WWX and LWJ as full-on cultivation partners in the end, so they used this as a way of showing us that this is the path (being partners together) that they're both starting to desire, and they trust us to do the math at the end of episode 50.

Meng Yao is the one who passes along the information about the Wen Clan demanding every great clan to send at least one 'direct disciple' (important? full-fledged? family? I'm not certain of what it means exactly, though Nie Huaisang says he's the only one for the Nie clan, so family seems likely) for training. I love how WWX immediately takes this opportunity to say nice things about the Lans. He whined when he was there, but now that he's not in Gusu anymore, he's already nostalgic over it. Oh, honey. 

So, Meng Yao must already be formulating his plan to… hmm, go undercover? Play both sides? He's always looking for opportunities to advance himself. I feel like we can safely assume that. He's already been rejected by his father and is probably trying to think of ways to prove himself in order to get the public recognition that he wants. Those are the assumptions I'm currently making.

WWX is so thrilled to addressed directly by NMJ, wow! Look at that smile. Then NMJ says nice things about him and Jiang Cheng, and WWX is just over the moon. Cute, cute, cute! Meanwhile, NMJ addresses LWJ just as 'Wangji' like LXC does, so they know each other a lot better. Yeah, unless I get contradictory info, I am on the 'NMJ went to the Cloud Recesses and he and LXC became good friends and this is part of why LXC thought to suggest a similar idea to his brother' train of thought.

Then we have the sentencing of Xue Yang. It's interesting that we see both WWX and Meng Yao react similarly to Nie Mingjue wanting to immediately kill Xue Yang, though I'm not sure if Meng Yao would have spoken up if WWX hadn't — he might not consider his position secure enough to do that. Once WWX makes the initial argument, Meng Yao backs him up, but, yeah. I'm not sure if he would have made the initial argument himself.

Ah, it makes me quite sad, honestly, to see Nie Huaisang, Wie Wuxian, and Jiang Cheng being so admiring of Meng Yao's arguments. Because Meng Yao really did screw himself over. He was talented and smart and capable of winning admiration from others, but he was so focused on what he didn't have that he couldn't see what he'd already achieved. He threw away a good position with a good family in hopes of winning recognition from someone who didn't even deserve an ounce of admiration.

But I do… understand why he felt like it wasn't enough? Because even though he had won admiration from strong cultivators, many people still looked down on him for being a "prostitute's son" and he didn't have enough power to make that stop (as we see in the next scene). And I do think that's… I mean, that's what it was about for him (I mean, that and his incredible ability to hold onto a grudge no matter what. that's also a factor). Just trying to get enough power and enough reputation to make the whispers stop. And there's never enough power for that. No matter how much power he amassed, it would never be enough. Becoming the actual leader of the entire cultivation world still didn't give him the power to make people not judge him for his parentage, and he wasn't, for whatever reason, capable of being like LWJ or WWX and saying 'screw reputation, I want to do what's right'. And so he trapped himself into a doomed cycle that elevated him up higher and higher but then inevitably led to his own destruction. A tragedy, yes, but one built by his own hands.

Still, you know, I watch that scene with Meng Yao and the guard captain and I'm like. okay, yeah. I get why he killed the guy and tried to frame him for Xue Yang's escape. It was awful and he shouldn't have, but I understand the motivations. Just having to be polite and give out a customer-service smile, over and over, to people who are disrespecting you (and your mom)… it's exhausting and soul-killing.

Hmm, when WWX first crosses over to stand next to LWJ, the timing felt a little random, but then I realized it's connected to the whole thing he's been stressing since the Yin Metal trip started.

He sees himself and LWJ as the partners on this, and everyone else is a little bit on the outside.

I like Nie Mingjue's facial hair — it does a good job, I think, of displacing him forward in time compared to the rest of the cast, and making them all seem like agemates compared to the slightly older NMJ. I like his whole character design, tbh.

Oh my god! WWX suggests here turning a piece of Yin Metal into a weapon. Which is. Exactly what he does later on. He literally suggests right here the thing that he does later on that wins the war. Huh.

Another important rooftop scene — WWX goes to sleep on the roof over LWJ's quarters, instead of sleeping in an actual bed. These ridiculous boys with their ridiculous crushes, I swear. And LWJ is already falling hopelessly in love with him. My heart overflows. They are so incredibly, ridiculously romantic and I will never recover emotionally.

I like the confrontation between Wen Chao and Nie Mingjue. There's a lot of tension in the scene. In terms of the antagonist characters, Wen Chao isn't my favorite but he is very sharply defined and I feel like I get a good sense of who he is as a person. And we get the introduction of Wen Zhuliu here, as someone who can go toe-to-toe with this Sect Leader that our protagonist characters are all impressed by and respectful towards. So that setup works for me really well. And it's very telling of Wen Chao again as someone who talks big but likes to send in other people to fight his battles for him.

Most of the Wen sect wear black and red in equal amounts, while Wen Zhuliu is mostly black with just a hint of red accents… like WWX does in this episode. I've talked about this character comparison briefly, I think, and it'll come back later but — Wen Zhuliu plays the second fiddle to the direct son of the sect leader, despite being clearly far more powerful a cultivator, but he believes he owes a debt to the family for taking him in so he suppresses his own potential ambition or choices for the sake of the sect. Now, this is not what WWX does, but it's the situation that WWX is in, or very similar. But WWX chooses to act against the interests or orders of his sect when it conflicts with his ethics.

And I note —  in this time of crisis, WWX instinctively gives Jiang Cheng an order and it's followed. And WWX is his head discipline, it makes sense! But that's also a habit that can be hard to transition out of once Jiang Cheng becomes Sect Leader in the future. Like, even if everything with the Wens hadn't shaken out this way, they still might have come into conflict due to WWX being a natural leader.

The mess of Meng Yao getting caught killing the guards and trying to lie his way out of it, then throwing himself in front of Wen Zhuliu's sword, then WWX challenging Wen Chao and everyone hearing that his brother, Wen Xu, is off to destroy the Cloud Recesses… it is a lot, though the pacing of the scene works for me. It's just that a lot of things are piling over and over on the characters (oh, and we get Meng Yao noticing and being concerned about Lan Xichen after he hears about Gusu).

Hmm, so the final scene with Meng Yao and Nie Mingjue. It does… ah, echo for me with how Meng Yao ultimately dies, with regards to how he acts with Lan Xichen in their final scene. Here, he tells Nie Mingjue that meeting him means he has no regrets. At the end, he will tell Lan Xichen that LXC being willing to die for him is 'enough'. In both cases, there's a sense of… Meng Yao knows there's a good chance he might actually die here, so I feel like he's doing his best make to try to make it so that at least this person will carry him with them the rest of their life, that he will impact them by his death. Which ties into his deep, deep desire to matter. Nie Mingjue dismisses it as — the viki translation says 'this little vanity' — but. I mean, it's easy for a sect leader to dismiss someone else's desire to be seen as important? Nie Mingjue has never been unimportant a day in his life. This doesn't excuse Meng Yao's actions, of course, but, I do think dismissing something that is clearly the cornerstone of someone's life doesn't lead to understanding. And Nie Mingjue does want to understand why, but I think his and Meng Yao's lives are just so different that the gap was just too wide to bridge with the tools that he had at his disposal.

I do think that both Nie Mingjue and Meng Yao are clearly emotionally marked by this confrontation/breakdown of their previous relationship. I didn't know either of the characters very well in my first viewing, so I'm just… I'm a lot more emotional about this scene now than I was the first time.

Next time: Lotus Pier! Excited to be seeing it again for the first time in the rewatch. And all the painful/fascinating family dynamics.

Previous Episode | Index | Next Episode

[butterflydm]

The Untamed Rewatch (ep 1)

 Series Overview | Index | Next Episode

Oh, yes, I was very correct about this all hitting me a lot harder after I’d seen the whole show. I am also watching it on viki.com this time and the subtitled translations are already a lot better than the ones on the tencent youtube channel. They flow much more naturally as lines of dialogue (there’s a new set of translated videos popping up, too, that I might check out on my… third viewing… that will probably happen after this one… I really like this story y’all).

Things that stood out to me on this viewing (note: I am going to be spoiling the rest of the story as well when talking about things, including the twists):

Okay, so in the drama, when Wei WuXian is brought back to life, it seems like he definitely does look like himself again from the start —he specifically questions Mo XuanYu’s cousin to see if the Mo family would recognize him and learns that they haven’t seen him without mask or heavy makeup since he left home for a while at thirteen. What I infer from the conversations is that their looks were similar enough that when Mo XuanYu called Wei WuXian’s spirit into his body and the magic reshaped it, his general shape didn’t change enough to be noticeable, plus the family didn’t really look at him much in any case. And Wei WuXian worries that the “Lans of Gusu” might know enough about how he looks to recognize him, even if they aren’t “him”. I mean, obviously the doylist/meta reason is that they hired Xiao Zhan for a reason and they’re gonna have him play the part, but yeah, thinking about it is interesting.

Wei WuXian playing wangxian on the piece of grass: fucked me up so much more now. This show does such an excellent job with this entire romance. The whole way they set up Wei WuXian both wanting and not wanting to see Lan WangJi again is a lovely representation of their push-pull dynamic in the drama as a whole.

Which brings me to how much I love that song. The wangxian love theme is absolutely beautiful, enough that even when they play it like ten times in one of the later episodes, I’m still like “aaaah, so pretty! <3”. The first time we hear it is when Wei Ying has the flashback to Lan Zhan in his Gusu robes when he’s talking to Lan SiZhui and it’s so subtle there but it starts building up the mood of their romance, piece by piece. And WWX is so overcome by the memory that he literally sinks down and sits on his heels.

I also really love Lan Zhan’s theme song, as well. Lan Zhan’s introduction is… a lot. I love that we don’t see his face until it’s WWX seeing his face again, too. And he’s just this floating ethereal being and WWX stares for a long while, transfixed… and then makes fun of the way he’s dressed, with a fond smile. There’s such a good job there of putting in a sense of familiarity and history with how Wei Ying reacts to seeing Lan Zhan again.

The set-up of the sixteen years ago, seeing that moment, and then when we come back to it 30+ episodes later as we see both that there was so much we didn���t know but also that the show didn’t at all ‘cheat’ about the emotions of the scene — the backstory information we get complicates the picture of that day that we start with but doesn’t undermine it.

Wei WuXian also comes back in a much better emotional place? Given the way resentful energy is presented in the drama as a corrupting force, I wonder if part of that is attributable to getting a ‘new start’ in Mo XuanYu’s body — his own original body had been put through so much physical trauma in addition to the emotional trauma. The removal of his golden core. Being thrown down into the burial mounds. Then years of resentful energy being held inside his body and built up over time. Even just getting a chance to wipe that out and start again in a body that hasn’t been through that trauma might be helpful. This fey, trickster Wei WuXian is reminiscent of how we meet him in the flashback.

Though, in the drama (as I understand it, his death happens differently in the novel), another element might be that we did see him reach a moment of peace right before he died — he saved Lan Zhan’s life. He was already able to break out of the stranglehold of his grief and pain long enough to do that before he died, so his mind already started the healing process (but then he died, so it was short-circuited — sort of? Wei Ying does make it clear he was aware of being dead and he even knows how long he’s been dead without anyone telling him). I’m not sure how much of that applies to the novel’s version of WWX, but that’s what I got out of the drama’s version.

I really love Wei Ying’s casual displays of power. Snapping his fingers to freeze Mo XuanYu’s cousin in place… it just comes so naturally to him. He just has this very spontaneous-feel to when he uses magic (is it still called cultivation in this context?) that makes it just part of who he is and it’s very charming.

We see the hints of Nie HuaiSang’s hand behind everything — he paid the storyteller to talk about the YiLing Patriarch for three solid days, probably to influence the timing of Mo XuanYu’s ritual. He makes sure he stays there to see the initial results through — which he does again in the final act of the story. I have much genuine love for Nie HuaiSang tbh. He gets his revenge thoroughly but doesn’t go incredibly overboard the way most of the revenge-based characters do in the series (though he is ruthless about it). He knows his own strengths and weaknesses — he’s not a fighter, but he knows where he can find one. He doesn’t have overweening ambition beyond what he can handle. If his big brother had never been murdered, I get the sense he would have happily stayed a decorative baby brother all his life.

The Lan juniors are the cutest lil beans in creation. I love the contrast between them, because we see that Lan SiZhui is much more polite and formal than Lan JingYi, but he’s also incredibly compassionate and his heart is very much present on his face at all times. He’s respectful but openly kind. The moments when his memory is getting tickled by the way Wei Ying is behaving is also… it means so much after having seeing the drama all the way through once. And I love Lan JingYi for many reasons, but also because I think his (tbh kind of straight-up bratty) attitude implies that the Cloud Recesses have calmed the fuck down a bit about their strictness in the past decade-plus. And he finds Wei Ying’s dramatics amusing for the most part, which is cute.

Lan SiZhui recognizing wangxian — I suspect he’s remembering Wei Ying playing it rather than it being a post-death memory of LWJ playing it, since Lan JingYi doesn’t remember it at all. And because if Lan WangJi played it for anyone after Wei Ying died, then I’m not sure he would have been so certain from the start that the person playing it had to be Wei Ying. Meanwhile, Wei Ying isn’t aware of the full emotional importance of the song to Lan Zhan, and he seems to play it a couple of times as a soothing action (self-soothing here, and then to calm down Wen Ning’s corpse in episode 2)? Likely because it reminds him of being cared for by someone (in this case, of course, Lan Zhan). Wei Ying keeps precious hold of things like this and is very sentimental from what we see, and it makes sense that he associates this song with affection in the same way that he associates lotus root and sparerib soup with affection.

I am… honestly not at all surprised that people (even apart from the Lans) are using all the cool shit that Wei WuXian created even while most of the cultivation world still condemns him. That was the way they behaved when he was alive, too. They wanted his cool shit but judged him for making it.

Wei WuXian standing up for Lan SiZhui and the rest of the juniors when Madame Mo is yelling at them: he’s such a natural defender, tbh (which, of course, ends up being a big part of why he and Jiang Cheng end up at odds because WWX doesn’t limit his caretaking nature to his family but extends it to literally anyone who needs it no matter the cost). He’s nurturing in a careless/teasing way at times but he’s also very protective. And that impulse to jump in to help other people is such a big moral thing that he shares with Lan Zhan.

Okay, so, thoughts on grief as presented in the drama: Lan WangJi is well-known and beloved by the young Lan disciples. His reputation is back to being spotless, because it’s been over a decade since he did anything wrong. so, I don’t think he was publicly still grieving, though I will note that the Lan junior disciples seem relatively open to the idea that the YiLing Patriarch was probably not the worst person ever and it wouldn’t suck if he really weren’t dead after all, kind of reminiscent of MianMian’s daughter talking about how the YiLing Patriarch only goes after bad people (Lan JingYi honestly sounds hilariously excited about the idea that the YiLing Patriarch might still be alive, tbh - what have you been telling these children, Lan Zhan? lol).

So while I don’t get the impression LWJ spent most of those years openly pining, I’m sure the subject of WWX has come up, as he’s still a popular monster-in-the-night for a lot of people, and LWJ probably did defend his memory, in his own quiet but solid way. But I also get the impression overall that LWJ put his deep grief for Wei Ying in the same box as his deep grief over his mother, and he did his duty.

Then, he realizes Wei Ying might be alive and everything changes. I love that they both instinctively think of each other by their given names, too. Even when Wei Ying isn’t sure whether or not he wants to see Lan Zhan, that’s still how he thinks of him first — as Lan Zhan. And Lan Zhan just stares at the sword while it’s giving off those black smoke trails, transfixed, and when he first wonders if Wei Ying is alive and there, it’s just... Peak Romance, y’all. Peak Romance.

It does crack me up that the second Wei Ying gets the chance, he dresses himself in his own colors of black & red and doesn’t stick with Mo XuanYu’s colors. The only effort he puts into his ‘undercover’ disguise is the mask. He deserves a “I don’t think you even tried at all” star tbh.

Series Overview | Index | Next Episode