#dastardly discussions

[villainous-queen]

Mad Sweany calls Laura "dead wife" because calling her "Laura" is too personal and he doesn't want to get personal with her but calling her "Laura Moon" reminds him that she's "Shadow Moon's wife". Also by calling her "dead wife" he is constantly reminding himself that he is the one who killed her and he feels like he deserves that guilt.

[anghraine]

It feels extremely silly that only today did I realize that pantry and panadería are slightly similar-sounding for a reason >_>

(The English word pantry is one of the many, many common modern English words derived from Anglo-French: in this case, panetrie, from Old French paneterie, "bread room" ... Spanish panadería also has a complex etymology, but all are related to Latin panis, "bread.")

[wackywatchdotcom]

something about ragatha since that post has been a hit is the fact that i do really think like 70%+ of her day is just.... filled with compulsions

like. people pleasing doesnt necessarily have to come from ocd but w the way i read her its related. that she is very obsessed with people liking her and will do as many Nice things as she can reasonably do or else theyre gonna HATE her. that shes concerned abt their safety so shes gonna keep an eye on anyone she can because what if smth bad happens and its too much for them to handle???

and i think these two obsessions are also interconnected (i need people to like me, i need people to be safe, if im around people i can make sure theyre ok, if they like me i can keep them safe, if theyre alive then i can make sure they dont hate me, if they dont hate me then i can keep them from abstracting, etc) (add some moral ocd in there too she feels like she has that. and more!)

and w reassurance seeking? ragatha is absolutely like. notttttt good at avoiding it. and bc cast members seem to be a little put off by the way she ALREADY checks in on them i geeet the feeling that the way she seeks reassurance is like. she knows how to covertly seek reassurance

[historyartthings]

the first trailer for book one of CJ Sansom’s ‘shardlake’ series (Dissolution) is out and…

Is it just me or is this marketed as if it’s an action thriller? Down to the editing, the music, the fonts used. Which is frankly bizarre since it’s supposed to be a murder mystery. It’s set almost entirely in a monastery! It’s not a big sprawling epic…

[tom-foolery-incorporated]

Lmaoo imagine if the autobots saved Soundwave's and Shockwave's human spouse, thinking that the human is being held captive, so while the bots discuss how to help the human, Y/N's just sitting on the sofa and thinking "these guys are fucking cooked"

Ratchet: Why do you have traces of energon inside you?

Y/N: Um- uh, well you see-

Ratchet: I should have known they'd start to perform experiments on the local species soon. I'll try to reverse whatever they're done to you

Y/N: ...experiment is one word for it... or maybe experimental

The Autobots would be so happy to have saved you. Like Shockwave is notorious for his dastardly experiments and Soundwave loves his mind control.

They probably thought they were keeping you as some sort of lab rat to experiment on in the name of Megatron.

The Autobots get you out of there kicking and screaming and they’re like damn they really fucked this human up!

Poor little thing even has traces of energon inside of them!! And look at their left hand! They have a ring! The Autobots are so disgusted that the Decepticons would snatch up a human from their spouse to experiment on them like humans don’t have thoughts and feelings an-

Wait what is that ring made out of?

Rachet recognizes the makeup of spark casing when he takes a closer look at their hand.

“Hey what’s that big red bar above us?” Hotrod asks pointing upwards.

“Yeah and what’s with that loud aft battle music?” Wheeljack responds.

All the while you’re just sitting there like that taxidermy fox.

[critterbitter]

I'm wheezing over Ingo and Litwick's dynamic jgjbjjxjsjwkfiisiq and TYNAMO FITTING INTO EMMET'S SCARF IS SOOO CUTE!! Love how you draw the little sbubby bois, their conductor themed outfits are soo freaking cute!!!

I have so many thoughts when it comes to them it’s insane. Glad you like the characterizations!

Here’s a quick one shot under the cut, as a treat for making it this far.

Emmet finds Tynamo three months before Ingo meets Litwick. Ingo has some thoughts.

Ingo and Emmet are part of a pair.

If Emmet is the fuck around and find out, then Ingo’s been relegated amused damage control. This has always been the case, right up until Emmet found tynamo. Then suddenly, it’s “wow emmet, you’re so responsible!” “Golly gee Emmet, what do you mean you don’t want to go exploring the cave systems after dark?” “Gee whizz, what do you mean curfew for your eel puppy?” “Why in Reshiram do you get to have a whole pokemon three months before we agreed to get starters, and i don’t?”

Ingo doesn’t say the last part. He’s a bitter world-weary twelve year old languishing about the unfairness of the pokestray distribution system, but he also loves his brother. Emmet found an injured tynamo in chargestone cave and decided to help— tynamo decided to stay. It’s every child’s film plot. Ingo being a grouchy gengar makes him objectively a terrible friend.

Oh dragons, is Ingo a bad brother?

“Ingo!”

Speak of the cold, and he shall enter. Ingo swings his whole body around to better brace for the flying tackle.

“Emmet!”

“I am emmet! You are sulking.”

Ingo clicks his mouth closed and tries not to sulk harder. He fails.

“You are not being verrrry convincing, brother dearest.”

“I do not have any idea what you are going on about,” Ingo’s traitorous mouth blurts. “Be convinced I love you and am not planning dastardly plots.”

Do not think about getting a ground typed starter. Do not think about getting a ground typed starter.

Emmet shoots him a judgemental look from under the brim of his hat. Ingo glowers back, and slowly starts leaning forward, smooshing Emmet under his weight.

“Ttttell me why you look like a crushed joltik.”

“Keep this up and you are going to be the crushed joltik.”

Anyways, Emmet is becoming more bold by the day and even actively discussing electric types with the new girl in elementary prep, Elesa. Ingo thinks she’s cool, but she flinched when he blurted a once again too loud greeting so he’s… letting that cool off. They definitely don’t have anything to talk about beyond pokemon, and Emmet and her already have pokemon. Ingo feels a bit left out.

Caught in the ennui of not having a blitzle or tynamo, Ingo slips as Emmet rolls out from under him. The two go down in an ungraceful tangle of limbs.

“Tell. Me. What’s. Wrong.” Emmet gently slaps Ingo’s face like a ripe oran berry. “You want to tell me sooo badly. Ooh.”

“Emmet- aurgh. Gerroff’”

“I don’t speak denial.”

Ingo gives up. His entire body deflates. Emmet, not expecting the sudden loss of spinal infrastructure, slides sideways and knees Ingo’s lungs.

Ingo wheezes. “I’m sulking because you were crushing my spine.”

“Tell me the truth.”

Uh oh. Ingo studies Emmet’s face. It’s the same one he looks into the mirror with, but marred with concern and self consciousness. Ingo made Emmet worry. He’s not just a bad twin. He’s the worst.

“You are Emmet.”

“I am Emmet.”

“You have Tynamo.”

“Tynamo’s charging at home.”

Smart ass! Emmet knows what Ingo means. And by Emmet’s smug grin, Emmet knows too.

Ingo struggles to explain that Emmet has Tynamo, and Elesa, and… that’s only two other individuals. He is truly the worst twin in all the land. Emmet gets two new friends and Ingo’s being an infant about it.

One day, Ingo will have his own pokemon partner and team— but right now, Ingo only gets to have Emmet.

Ingo feels this is an unfair trade equivalent, but he does not want to say it in a way that sounds rude, so he stalls.

Emmet has no such prefunctures. He squints at Ingo, who avoids eye contact and squirms. “You are… jealous?” He tilts his head in visible confusion. “What?”

Ingo covers his face with his hands, defeated.

“You arrrre jealous!” Emmet cries, bewildered. “Why??”

Ingo lets out an unintelligible wheeze. Emmet remembers he still has a knee on Ingo’s chest, and hastily sits back.

“I don’t want to be jealous,” Ingo finally bursts. “I am very happy for you Emmet! You and Tynamo are a winning combination!” His voice cracks embarrassingly. Emmet doesn’t flinch at the volume, even muffled under Ingo’s palms. “I don’t want to be a bad brother being jealous.”

“You aren’t a bad brother, Ingo.”

“I am. I am angry that you found your starter and I haven’t. I’m sad I interrupted your schedule with my inane demands. I have made you feel like you did something wrong. I apologize.”

Peeking between Ingo’s fingers, Emmet’s face falls. Ingo wants to be struck by a giga impact rather than face this. He would rather be a dusty imprint. Where is Uncle Drayden’s Haxorous when you need her?

“Ingo, Ingo listen to me.” Emmet’s hands dart forward to settle Ingo’s shoulders. The pressure is grounding. Real. This is where Emmet tells Ingo he’s being stupid.

He hears Emmet exhale.

“I’m sorry.”

Wait, that doesn’t sound right. “Pardon?”

“I wanted to train Tynamo as my conductor, and I left our two-car train unmaintained.”

“Pardon??”

Emmet looks uncomfortable and sad. It makes Ingo uncomfortable and sad. “Yesterday night. When you wanted to go to the caves. For our weekly charting. I said I’d rather help Tynamo.”

Oh. Yeah, Ingo remembers that. It had stung. “You are not obligated to say yes,” he protests. “In fact, you should say no more. You always say yes.”

“Yes.”

“What did I just say.”

“No. You’re my brother. I left you out.”

Ingo slowly puts down his hands. His face still feels warm, but he feels less scared. Now he just feels embarrassed. He can’t help but let out a meek plea slip. “Don’t go where I can’t follow, Emmet. Please.”

“I would never! We are going on our pokemon journey together, yep yep. You, me, tynamo, and whoever your starter will be!”

The two sit there on the side of the dirt road. Emmet’s declaration sounds like a dangerous promise. Ingo realizes at that moment he would do anything for his brother, who’s his best friend and confidant and world, starter or no starter. He opens his mouth to tell Emmet that.

“Wwwwwait. You are trying to go back to the caves. Ingo! Are you trying to find a starter by yourself!?”

Never mind. Emmet’s gone for his soft underbelly, and Ingo’s in pain. “Emphasis on trying,” he mutters instead. The joltik are not interested in him. The local tynamo swarm fled. A curious drilbur had sniffed him once, turned up its nose, and then trundled into the wall.

“…ah.”

Nothing had felt right for Ingo— too scared, too judgemental, or too uninterested. He’s starting to accept that maybe none of the pokemon in this town area match his truth or ideals.

Emmet was quiet for a long time. He had his thinking face on, so Ingo did not interrupt. He took the time instead to look up at the sky, watching the giant puff of clouds drift by. A plume of swabloo lazily inches their way across the horizon.

A shadow falls over Ingo. Emmet dusts himself off, and helps drag his twin to his feet. The two sway, clasping hands.

“We’ll ask Uncle Drayden,” Emmet decides, and Ingo is enthralled by the sheer truth of that statement. “He’ll let us use the subway! And you can look elsewhere, for a starter who is ideal for you. Wwwwith me and Tynamo, instead of by yourself.”

“Truly?” Uncle Drayden is a scary man.

Emmet nods. It’s easy to talk to Emmet— he just says words that Ingo would spend hours ruminating on. “I am verrrry persuasive.”

“You mean staring at him from the corner until he cracks?”

“Brother, you know me so well!”

Ingo cant help but laugh. He still feels guilty and bad for feeling envious, but a world with emmet by his side is significantly less hostile. Emmet’s hand is warm in his.“Thank you!” He cheers, startling himself with his volume. “Bravo,” he tried in a quieter tone.

“Bravo!!” Emmet replies, pointedly louder. Ingo squawks as Emmet pulls him off balance. “You are my brother! We’re going to find you a starter!”

Ingo tugs back just as fiercely. “Bravo!! We are going to harass Uncle Drayden into letting us board the train!”

Emmet leans with his whole body, dragging Ingo into the fulcrum of his centrifuge. “BRAVO! YOU ARE GOING TO HELP ME WITH TYNAMO’S TRAINING!”

Ingo digs his heels in, and then stumbles. “BRAVO, I, what?”

Emmet looked distinctly patrat-esque. “We’re in this together, Ingo. No backing out now.”

Ingo thought about it long and hard. He gets to see his brother get electrocuted. But he will, also, most likely, get electrocuted.

(Tynamo is Emmet’s starter. But maybe, it can also be Ingo’s friend.)

But brother say brother do, and Ingo’s probably obligated to run damage control if Emmet decides to, say, shove a fork into an outlet for Tynamo to snack on.

(Emmet fucks around. Ingo finds out. Even two steps apart with new people between, this is the way of their world.)

“Alright,” he crumbles. When they step this time, they step in sync. “We do this. Together.” (Enjoy this? Here's the link to the rest of my rat crimes.)

[bogkeep]

the thing i keep running up against in discussions around Prioritising Your Well-being is that it keeps getting framed as an act of Dastardly Hyperindividualism in opposition to Our Glorious Collectivism. but that's... that's a false dichotomy. i'm not saying nobody has ever used "self care" as an excuse to be cruel, but like if you really want to be collectivist and organized, being able to care for yourself and knowing your limits is a vital skill. it's sustainable.

taking on more suffering than strictly necessary does not serve the collective. going hungry makes you cranky and unpleasant. trauma fogs up your conflict resolution skills. breaking your body breaks your body. taking on too much work does not make you more productive. i think the insistence on martyring yourself is far more hyperindividualist than prioritising yourself when you need to

[lexicorp]

Transformers Earthspark: Another Place, Another Prison

[screenshot edit thats a bit silly--the maltos are actually generally rather chill even with star being a bit of a lil shit lmao]

This chapter really shoves Starscream into a social gathering with all da peeps for a series of goofy games. Which he roasts the shit out of the majority of the time. He's more into it at the start and gets progressively more drained from it all. It's not as fun if you don't plow the competition after all--XD

just a chap with fun family shenanigans and definitely nothing sus

Previous Chapter: Bee's Good Guy Crash Course

First Chapter: The Need For Read

Next Chapter: Make or Break

Chapter 11: Family Feud

The “Malto Family Game Night”. An intriguing premise. One Bumblebee thought he should drag Starscream into, it seemed, despite the title clearly only set to invite those who are real members of their collective. It even seemed a stretch that the humans and Terrans considered Bumblebee an “honorary” member to begin with. The Terrans, as Earthen cybernetic children, theoretically shared some level of kinship with humans to an extent. As well as apparently being bonded to them on a deeper level. But both he and Bumblebee had no such connection, why should they be roped into human nonsense? 

Why would they allow them to encroach on their little tradition? Perhaps this was some sort of test pertaining to the practice the bug had wanted Starscream to get, after his little lecture. A challenge to see how well Starscream could interact with them. 

Well, for whatever goal the bug had, he certainly could stand a bit of competition. A chance to destroy them at their own ridiculous games? Irresistible. The anticipation of victory, especially one he could lord over the scout later, might just make the growing chaos around him bearable. 

There were too many conversations about too many things being discussed in one room. He’d tried to track a few, but quickly found his audials begin to mute the chatter with a light ringing. If it hadn’t, he wouldn’t have been able to stop himself from calling them all into order himself.

Finally, Hashtag got everyone’s attention and pointed to the whiteboard that now held doodles of all their faceplates, separated into groups. “Alright fam! The teams we’ve decided on are: Me, J.B, and Nightshade with our name NightTagBreaker! Mom and Dad as Purple. Thrash and Mo as Mash–”

“‘Cause we’re gonna MASH the competition!” Thrash cheered as he smacked servos with his human partner.

Hashtag didn’t even seem fazed by the interruption, and scoffed without a hint of disdain. “We’ll see about that! There’s also Robbie and Twitch–”

“Their team’s name is Twobbie.” Mo said with the most dastardly smirk toward her brother, and a mocking tone to the name.

Robbie and Twitch both stood with crossed arms, the human retorting first with an air of superiority. “Uh no. Our name is Twin Blades!” 

Twitch plucked her swords from her back and twirled them as an example with a proud grin. “We’ve got the blades, and we’re basically twins. And way cooler than Mash.” 

Thrash gasped melodramatically with a servo to his chassis, “How dare you!”

“We’ll see who has the cooler name when we beat you!” Mo shot back with a throw of a digit in their direction. Threats so early in the competition? Bold.

Hashtag edited the name on the board discreetly, then turned to ask, “What’d you guys decide on for your name Bee? I was thinking it could be StarBee or Beam for the combo style like ours–” She gestured to her two partners– “Or BugBird, because y’know, Bee is bug coded and Starscream can fly. OR you could be Primary! Because together you have yellow, red, and blue!”

Starscream took his servo from under his faceplate to tip it at the crowd, straightening his posture with a slight tilt of his helm as he offered confidently, “Why not simply call us The Victors?” He wasn’t exactly thrilled that they had just decided that he was paired with the bug, but that wouldn’t change his plans of total domination over this strange event.

Many of them rolled their optics at Starscream’s proclamation, but Hashtag actually had to stop herself from laughing. Not entirely the correct response. Still, at least she was amused, rather than angered by his insinuation.

Bumblebee shook his helm in a way that Starscream couldn’t tell if he actually disapproved or not. “StarBee is fine, Hashtag.” He determined, then mumbled, “Even if it would be nice if my name was first…”

“Well, you always were more of just the backup, rather than a leader, scout.” Starscream pointed out haughtily. “Obviously my piece of the title would come first.” 

Bumblebee glared at him, “I am not your backup! We’re partners and this is friendly competition! And please try to remember what I was telling you yesterday…” He sounded exasperated. 

Starscream dropped his smirk and crossed his arms to align himself with a more professional posture. “Are you going to disclose the rubric, or will your little test be void of any comprehensible scale like all of your Autobot riddles?”

Bumblebee was about to respond, but the Malto matriarch, Dorothy, interrupted. “No tests. We are not making game night about work again. Right Bee?” The bug nodded, looking rather guilty. “We’re here to have fun.”

“Yeah!” Twitch flew up to meet Starscream’s faceplate, “So don’t you ruin it! Family time is sacred!” 

Starscream leaned slightly toward her, thoroughly unamused. “Yes, how dare I encroach on your ridiculous expression of familial bonding.”

“Okay guys!” Hashtag interjected, “This isn’t exactly supposed to be the mood of this scene. Can we rein it in please?” She looked more at Starscream than her sibling, with a pleading look to her optics. Twitch backed down, as did he. 

“Wonderful!” Nightshade collected a set of cards that seemed to be sized for Cybertronians. “The first game Hashtag and I decided upon from the list of requests, is Uno! Three teams will be in one group, and two in another.”

“Then we shuffle it until every team has had a chance to go against each other!” Hashtag added while shuffling the cards and splitting the deck into two stacks. “First group will be NightTagBreaker, Twin Blades, and Mash; then Purple and StarBee.”

“Would it not make more sense to put the team of three into the group with just two teams?” Starscream asked not as much for some level of fairness, but more in the hopes that he could avoid interacting with Megatron’s little spy. He’d much rather attempt their card game with Hashtag and Nightshade. 

“I mean, maybe, but we’ll get there eventually.” Hashtag gave him an awkward smile, then quickly moved on. Scrap. 

They all took to their tables and dealt the cards. Starscream attempted to read the rules from the little box that was cast aside, but Dorothy’s human conjunx told him that it was apparently quite simple. Same color, same number or action, and you could play your card on your turn. The wild card and plus four were clearly above all the other pathetic actions in the roster. Although the skip option was satisfyingly petty. Starscream managed to skip Bumblebee three times in a row, in fact, which he found hilarious. 

The bug however, was less amused, “We’re supposed to be on the same team! Could you maybe not sabotage me and actually try and collaborate?!”

“Only one of us needs to win to get the credit. I don’t need your help to claim victory over these humans at this silly game.”

“I don’t know about that.” Dorothy tauntingly raised her singular card. “Uno.”

“WHAT?” Starscream’s wings flared and he looked over at the bug’s absurdly large set of cards, then slammed a servo on the table to get his attention. “Unleash a counterattack you fool! You must have something in that embarrassing stack in your servos!”

“Oh look who came crawling back for my help.” The scout hoarded his cards with juvenile snark. 

Starscream stuttered and his optic twitched as he growled through gritted dentas. “Excuse me, but if you don’t we both lose you bit-brained idiot!”

“How about not calling your partner names, and actually asking nicely? Or just working with me instead of acting like I’m still your enemy?”

The bug was a stubborn fool. Ask nicely? Did they expect him to phrase orders as optionary as the Prime did? That’s ridiculous! And of course the bug was still his enemy! How stupid was this mech? Bumblebee had been the first to point a blaster at Starscream in the Titan. Just because the Autobots were acting as if something had changed, didn’t mean anything. This was all just another assignment for the scout. 

Wait…who said that Starscream couldn’t simply take the bug’s cards and do it himself? If they were on the same team, then what did it matter who carried out the move? He didn’t know what stupid arrangement of words they wanted from him. It’d be far easier to–

Starscream forcefully snatched the cards from Bumblebee’s servos in a crimson flash, and slapped down a plus two to destroy the Malto’s hope of victory. He made sure to keep his own remaining two cards safe from getting lost amidst his stolen pile. The bug complained and tossed his servos around before attempting to steal his cards back, as Starscream pushed against his faceplate to hold him off.

Then, Dorothy cleared her throat before crossing her arms. “I win.”

“Wha–HOW?!” Starscream shoved the bug aside before pointing a digit at the human. “You lost your turn and were supposed to gain additional cards as the action dictates! You couldn't have possibly won!” 

Her optical ridge rose and she tapped the card plainly placed upon the one he’d taken from Bumblebee. “My last card was a plus two, and I can stack it on yours. Maybe, you should have actually talked it out with your partner.”

Oh, so this fleshling aimed to lecture him now? And since when could actions be placed upon one another as a means of canceling the other out? That made no sense with the rest of the rules! Sure, if you were not at the receiving end and were simply the player that is being skipped towards–but mid-action?? That was ridiculous, she made that up!

Lightning flickered between his wings. He didn’t lose. She’d only crafted some absurd reason to disguise the fact that she was clearly only attempting to prove some point, and make Starscream look like an idiot. That’s what it was. But he couldn’t do anything about it. The human was Megatron’s little agent. Starscream would be scrapped if he did anything against her. 

Starscream’s optics were burning as he wished again that he could set those blasted cards ablaze with only his processor. This game was just another tool for them to mock him. His vents were the same.

“Chill, it’s not like losing one game is the end of the world. Even if I am definitely blaming this loss, on you. I was just the card draw scrapyard–” Bumblebee was attempting to retrieve the scattered cards, and Starscream reflexively grabbed his wrist and pulled the scout up as he rose to his peds. 

“This IS your fault!” Starscream said dangerously, even as the scout transformed out his blaster with his other servo. But as a deafening silence strangled the cavern, and Starscream stared into the bug's startled yet defiant optics…he hated it. He was doing it again. 

His anger attempted to subside, replaced by something else as his grip loosened on the bug. But the curse didn’t seem to approve of that, and it instead tried to channel its power into the servo which mistakenly held Bumblebee. Starscream’s optics widened and he wrenched his servo away. Then yelped as he found Wheeljack’s little device had sent an equal pulse up his ped in some pathetic counterattack to the power. Instead of neutralizing the surge at his servo, all it did was make him fly back clumsily, and hit his helm on the ground. All while the power still felt as if his arm was being ripped apart by scraplets.

“Uh, you guys okay over there??” Twitch called from their own game.

“Ugh…Peachy.” Bumblebee commented dryly as he picked himself up after having apparently fallen back as well. “Someone is just a sore loser.”

Starscream only sat up to grip his violently shaking servo as he glared at it. He wasn’t like Megatron. “Perhaps…It was an overreaction.” He couldn’t apologize. He was too distracted. But he could acknowledge the bug’s point. Maybe that would be enough. 

Bumblebee watched him a moment before a ridiculous grin came to his faceplate. “No kidding.” 

The scout offered Starscream a servo, and he stared at it hesitantly as the lightning slowly died from his frame. He didn’t smack it away, but he didn’t take it either. Instead, he forced his annoyingly numb right ped to cooperate as he pulled himself up. “Besides, with the human’s knack for simply realigning the rules to her whim, how could either of us be at fault? Megatron clearly taught her well.”

“Excuse me?” Dorothy put her servos on her hips. Apparently his comment was somehow offensive. Even the buckethead’s agent detested being compared to him. How poetic.

Starscream paced to give himself enough distance from bot and human alike, before tipping a servo and his hip out in unbridled sass with an innocent vocalizer, “Oh but I’d never blame you for such a thing. In fact, I might have pulled such a stunt myself if we were more acquainted. Although that was a bit of a clumsy rule you constructed in your haste. Perhaps I could give you some advice for–”

Dorothy put her servo up to silence him. “No. I didn’t make it up. Well, not right at that moment–it’s just a common house rule for the game. It makes things a bit more interesting, and can lead to crazy close calls like that.”

“Yes we would never cheat! Especially Dottie!” Her conjunx attested with a protective servo around her shoulder, which she patted with hers. Disgusting.

Starscream’s faceplate scrunched at their show of affection, but willed himself to put on a smile. “I meant no disrespect, truly.” He gave her a half-afted bow, then began assisting the bug in collecting the cards that had fallen to the floor. “So I assume we shall be shuffling the groups now then?”

Not a moment later, there was an obnoxious uproar from the kids as the Twin Blades team celebrated their victory. They had their own argument about how it was achieved, yet it seemed more out of curiosity for their strategy. Of which they happily went into dramatized detail. They all laughed and congratulated them, with playful counters at how close it had been. No one was angry, or accusatory. The only touch they shared was gentle. Starscream stared at them, transfixed. 

Sure, it was not as if he had always fought with his trinemates over such silly things. But still, there had typically been some sort of transition into a wrestling match to settle the true victor. Anything close to that here was meager at best. He wasn’t surprised…only, afflicted with a strange sense of yearning. Which was ridiculous.

“Sounds like it.” Bumblebee remarked as he placed the now reforged stack of cards on their table, then added teasingly, “Are you actually going to be my teammate this time, fly boy?”

“Yes, it seems that might be necessary.” Starscream avoided the bug’s optics as he took his seat again. 

Team NightTagBreaker switched places with Purple. He didn’t quite care for the dinobot, but the other two terrans could be rather pleasant. Although it did seem that “J.B.” was far more focused on the game than attempting to bite his peds this time. 

Starscream and Hashtag shared a glance, and he was the first to break the silence between them, “Do not expect us to go easy on you.” Mimicking her siblings’ manner of playful banter.

“Wouldn’t dream of it!” She responded with a theatrical tone and servo to her chassis. 

“If anyone should be going easy, it is us!” Nightshade added, to which the dinobot seemed to finish the thought.

“Yeah! Because–we are three bots, and you are not.”

“Don’t think that numbers are everything kids.” Bumblebee warned as he fanned out his new selection of cards in his servos. 

This time, Starscream collaborated with the bug as they discreetly disclosed which cards they possessed, and plotted how to best use them. He used his skips to instead protect his unlikely ally from unwanted card draw, until he could change the color again. As well as parrying reverses, or waiting until the other also had a plus two, as to avoid friendly fire. Perhaps that strange rule could be rather useful, when he actually knew to utilize it. Then, he also did not see why they could not stack other actions in such a way as well…

When the scout had called Uno, the dinobot attempted to skip him to postpone their victory. Unbeknownst to them, Bumblebee also had a skip card, but the bug did not place it down. A pause for dramatic effect?

Starscream cast aside his own useless cards and smacked the bug’s shoulder plating. “Reveal your card already you–eh, just what are you waiting for? We won. Cancel their action with yours!”

Bumblebee looked baffled as he stared at his card then back at Starscream. “What?? Jawbreaker skipped me, I can’t cancel that. It’s your turn. Why don’t you use that reverse card you had?”

Starscream’s wings pulled back and he ripped his cards back off the table to hit them with his other servo. “This scrap will do nothing to change it to the correct color! Why on Cybertron can you not just do as that human did before?! Countering an action of equal title mid-attack is perfectly legal in your stupid house rules! We’ve even done it multiple times this round, how is this any different?”

“Stacking only works with the plus two’s and four’s,” Nightshade attempted to explain their absurd standards, “It is not as if you can add onto one skip with another.”

“Uh-huh, you can’t do that Starscream, that’d be cheating.” J.B. insisted like a foolish child. “Right? Because, that’s definitely against the rules.”

Lightning jumped across Starscream’s frame again.

How was he the one cheating? Their “mom” had come up with it first! Noone had cared when she did it. How did it make any less sense to use the skip card in such a way than the other one? Of course the skips could be added onto one another! All they’d need to do is make it a double skip so that–if he and the scout didn’t already win–it’d send the next turn over to Hashtag. How was that concept so hard for them to understand? This game was stupid. 

Bumblebee nudged him, “Hey, we haven’t lost yet!” Starscream didn’t look at him, nor say anything for a long stint of time. “C’moooon, what cards ya got huh?”

Starscream’s optics flickered red and he took in an extended vent, then hiked his wings up with a strained grin and peak to his vocalizer. “Fine, yes, of course! Let's look at what cards I have. Numbers and a single useless reverse action? That will surely lead us to victory. Especially, when as soon as I place something down, those three will no doubt begin a chain of plus two actions of which you would be defenseless against. Or a plus four. Or they could start a reverse chain between one another. Or lock us in a color neither of us have in a plot to instigate the idiotic notion of infinite card draw!”

“You don’t know what cards we have,” Hashtag seemed to be getting frustrated with him, “And besides, it’s just a game. If we outplay you, we win, it’s not that deep!”

“Well, Uno does contain a higher percentage of RNG than skill, but that is a fair point regardless.” Nightshade nodded.

“Um, so, can we just…finish the game now?” J.B asked meekly.

Starscream’s wings swiveled up and down as he forced the stupid power back into the corner of his spark. “Sure.” He could play nice for Hashtag’s sake.

The game proceeded just about as insufferably as he anticipated. He and the bug ended with far too many cards, and Nightshade claimed the win for their team. That was fine. He didn’t care.

Every other match of that accursed Uno left Starscream and Bumblebee once again so close, only for it to be ripped away time and time again. Every instance, more inane than the last. How could they have not even won once?! The last time was entirely the bug’s fault, when he’d blatantly ignored Starscream’s order. He made sure to tell the scout just how stupid that had been, but then the others only seemed to get mad at Starscream for it instead! 

The next game that was chosen attempted to usurp the last in stupidity. The “tic-tac-toe” was near impossible to not end in a tie. It had to be replayed repetitively until a victor was concluded. It was boring, exceedingly plain, and the only viable strategy was far too easily thwarted. In fact, when Starscream was in the midst of cornering their opponent, they instead reversed it back onto him! Bumblebee had obviously ruined the whole thing with his insistence on starting in the middle when it was clearly best to start at a corner. Even when they finally did manage to succeed in one matchup, it was anticlimactic as slag. 

The next was a quite straightforward game titled “Spot-it”. All that needed to be done was match an icon on your own card with the one in the discard. And finally, Starscream was able to dominate. Every single match, he rapidly pinpointed the correct image and practically blazed through his entire stack with only minute lapses in his speed. No one stood in his way! No one even got a chance! It was glorious! 

Starscream laughed maniacally as he gained yet another point without the pathetic aid of the bug. “HAHAH you all are not even TRYING! This game is far too easy. Or perhaps you simply have a slow processor for such things, eh, Bumblebee?” He flicked the bug’s helm and fluttered his wings. Elated that he at long last obtained even a fleeting moment of triumph amongst them. “Good thing you have me to carry your constant lag.”

Bumblebee glared at him, then rolled his optics, “Riiiight. You’re taking this whole thing way too seriously.” 

“Why wouldn’t I?” Starscream stated in a more dismissive than questioning manner with a slight tip of his helm and a shrug. “What’s next then?”

“Pictionary!” Hashtag held up the box with far more excitement than she’d had previously. “Nightshade and I even made more little figurines and an extended board for all of us to play together!” She and her sibling began the setup, while J.B. distributed the items required for each team. “The person who draws whatever it is rotates, then the others on your team need to guess what the person is trying to show them! The color on the board determines what subject it is, and you kinda get a bit of a clue on what it is from that too.”

Simple enough, if the bug could draw a straight line. Starscream claimed the marker first, as he was far more confident in his own artistic ability. The first object he got was a “basketball”. He didn’t know what that was, but he did know how to depict a basket and a ball separately. Surely the scout could comprehend an icon based word puzzle as simple as that. Which he did. But the words only got stranger from there, and that is where their downfall began. 

Items like “Taylor Swift”, “Swan”, or “Cell Phone”, were ridiculous. Was he supposed to have done research before this blasted thing? They had to redraw cards in an attempt to acquire a usable item multiple times. Yet even then, there were many moments where the bug had far too much confidence in his ability to depict whatever it was he’d gotten. His illustrative skill was predictively lacking, and he was lucky Starscream had been able to make out any of it at all. At the very least, Bumblebee was adequate at determining what Starscream was forced to illustrate. 

The worst of it was when there had been the perfect opportunity to draw himself throwing Megatron into the Pit–for the action topic of course–and the blasted timer ran out before he could finish! Apparently there needed to be some sort of middle ground in which to prioritize what details were necessary. He could make sacrifices for the sake of their victory, sure, yet it was still disappointing. How was he to find any sort of satisfaction in this game, if he could not at the bare minimum depict the buckethead getting tossed into a scrapheap?

Although he would admit that this game certainly seemed the most balanced, those with their ridiculous bonds and understanding of one another, inevitably gained some sort of advantage. Which got annoying fast. Every little moment longer the scout took to guess what the item was, or the next incoherent blob he depicted, made the tapping of Starscream’s ped quicken. 

Starscream growled and his wings flicked back, “NOW what is it?” He squinted as the crude image began to take some sort of shape. “The Autobots?” The bug shook his helm and gestured for it to be more general. “Cybertronians?” A gesture for him to elaborate. “What other word is there!?–” His optics flashed red, with a brief moment of his spark feeling as though it were being wrenched out of his intake, as the word came to him–“Transformers.” A disgustingly rudimentary title. Of course that was all that they were reduced to in this human game under the subject of pop culture. 

He was correct. But he still felt distant from the bug’s excitement toward their apparent close call. Starscream hit a servo against his own helm in an effort to knock out whatever had possessed him. This reflex was evidently questionable, but he was easily able to brush it off. He couldn’t have his processor glitching in the midst of this event. It would not only be quite discomfiting, but would also bring more petty disruption to something the Terrans seemed to have put a great deal of effort into. He had to keep it under control.

By the end of it, he and the bug only managed to cross half of the spaces needed to win. Infuriating. Starscream despised losing. They weren’t even able to claim second best. Pathetic. 

By the next game, Starscream was decidedly over it. 

This “Charades” only served to make one dance around like a fool in some absurd hope at expressing the word on their slip of flimsy scrap. It was near identical to the concept of the last, but regressed into something far less tolerable. Perhaps it could be more amusing if it was less about imitating Earth creatures and instead aimed toward mimicking someone else in their group. That had been a favorite amongst his trinemates back in the more tolerable cycles amidst the Decepticons.

Bumblebee flapped his arms around stupidly as he attempted to display what he’d plucked from the pile. He looked utterly ridiculous. Starscream would never catch himself offline doing such a thing. What was the bug even supposed to be? He was acting as though he were attempting to fly, similar to how Nightshade seems to need to operate their alt mode. Clearly some form of Earthen avian, but how was he supposed to know which classification was required?

“Ugh,” Starscream rubbed his optics, “what do you call those tiny avian creatures on this planet?” 

“Birds!” Twitch chirped in an oddly endearing manner.

“Right. That is what he is, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, basically.” Bumblebee halted mid motion to shrug, then whirled his arms around before finding his balance again. “Think we can count that one Alex?”

“Mmm…” Dorothy’s conjunx, Alex, squeaked his uncertainty at the notion. Obviously unsatisfied with such a vague answer.

Dorothy smacked his shoulder, although it looked like it barely connected. “I think we can give it to ‘em. Starscream hasn’t exactly gotten as acquainted with what all our little guys here are called yet.”

“I don’t need your pity points, human.” Starscream muttered in a visceral hiss. When would he have had the time to study such things? Why should he care what all these birds were labeled on this insufferable planet? He had far better things to do! Starscream had a million other exceedingly more important matters that required his brilliant processor, than reverting back to cataloging miscellaneous fauna on some backwater rock!

 “Oh, I suppose it’s alright.” Alex relented, none the wiser to Starscream’s bitter comment. “Why don’t you try another one, Bee?”

Bumblebee chuckled as the timer ran out, “Sorry pal, but I’m afraid you’ll have to wait until next time to witness my famously flawless acting skills. How about you and Dot go next? Gotta show me your moves too!”

Starscream watched the rest of them play out what remained of the game with blank optics. The images he processed paced in a choppy framerate, and the clarity distorted to a lower quality. A moment's glance at the scoreboard told him that there was absolutely no way they would win in the larger scheme of things. It meant nothing. He couldn’t even attempt to sabotage the competition, or challenge the validity of his competitors' victories. He’d surely get caught, and only gain pointless drama that’d get him into trouble. Which he did not need more of.

Had he even passed that scout’s stupid test? Even if Starscream didn’t claim the more favorable glory he sought, it’d be worse if the failure was calculated against whatever new standard Megatron sought from him. Starscream was actually surprised his ever looming Lord hadn’t made further appearance by now. He was sure something was bound to happen soon. Perhaps this was all some sort of means to get him to let his guard down. Or to determine what could be used to force him in line. Megatron might be getting a byte more creative in his time as a traitor. Even if he was attempting some type of psychological approach, surely he’d revel in any excuse to beat the slag out of Starscream for any reason he could pull out his exhaust pipe.

This whole ordeal seemed too calm. Too casual. They all had many moments of clear annoyance towards him, yet constantly held themselves back but only a few meager remarks. It was not as if he held any particular power in this situation to warrant them to fear standing against him. They only seemed unsure, or dismissive. Even occasionally acting as if their apprehension was entirely absent. They were clearly hiding something. 

Starscream had been lost in his own thoughts for so long, that he’d just about missed their little awards ceremony to conclude the night. That was until there was a crack and pop that sent a far too familiar shock through his muddled audials. He flinched and stumbled backwards away from the noise. Nearly trampling one of the Terrans but unable to utter an apology as he barely processed their presence. 

It was only a device to distribute colorful material over the crowd. Their laughter was mocking him. Their celebration over their stupid series of trials that they rigged towards their own success, was disorienting. 

Starscream was done. He’d played their games. He was not about to attempt to decode what they wanted next. 

He stealthily retreated back into his corner of the cavern. It hadn’t been all horrible, he supposed…Regardless, he was tired. They were all too loud in the wrong way. 

The curse flared with thoughts echoing some stupid impulse that’d use its power to blast them into oblivion. Then he wouldn’t have to worry about any of it. Then their threat would be neutralized.

But that wasn’t right.

Lightning flickered and stabbed across his frame as he now sat with his wings to those soaring seekers on the wall. He just wanted to leave. To fly away to a Cybertron where they were waiting for him. Where he too could enjoy such festivities. Where they’d cheer his name for his achievements. Where he could revel in their praise–perhaps even…alongside his trinemates, untainted by his mistakes.

Where…it would all feel real.

[bwat5-blog]

Beginners Guide To Making A Point: Arcane

**Spoilers For Arcane**

Good morning my friends. Have you or someone you know been victimized by one of the mean folks like myself ripping apart your takes on the show Arcane? Well today there is hope. I’m here to share the sinister secrets of our trade that allow us to commit such dastardly deeds. So the next time one of us comes knocking, you will be ready!

All too often, I see kind and gentle folks like you innocently trying to make statements like the ones below:

1. Caitlyn Kiramman murdered kids!

2. Caitlyn never showed any remorse!

3. Caitlyn lost her mom and acted like that was a justification for her crimes!

4. Caitlyn looked down and didn’t love Vi!

Now you aren’t doing anything wrong. Just sharing your take on this story and what happens. But then someone like me will come along and reblog with some snarky title and something like this:

1. There is no evidence of that whatsoever in any single moment of the show

2. I’d run down the various moments where she does show remorse

3. I’d list the long series of traumatic incidents that severely impact her mental state leading to her eventual fall into Ambessa’s clutches

4. Id explain that there are three moments and three moments only when she ever says a negative thing about Zaunites.

A- she calls the people who attacked the memorial animals immediately afterward. And lets be clear, they were.

B- She says Vi and Jinx share blood during her lowest and darkest moment.

C- She says something regarding the depravity of Zaun or something when talking to Singed after the Stillwater massacre. Of course I’d use the whole quote.

Then I would point out that she saved Vi’s life twice, spared Jinx after all she’d done to Cait in season 1 because Vi asked her to, started a war by trying to save Vander, and gave Vi the choice to free Jinx knowing full well Vi may leave and never return.

And you’d have a bunch of mean comments that hurt your feelings and people making fun of you and so on. But! I’m gonna show you how I do it and help you make your next case in a way people like me can’t attack. First we need to discuss one very simple rule

If you can’t back it up with content, it didn’t happen:

Now this one sounds simple. But it can be tricky to master. Let me give you an example-

Example: “Caitlyn murdered innocent Zaunites with The Grey!”

Okay. Now I know in your mind you see this and think, “well yea? I mean we saw the sketches of people who grew up surrounded by it their whole lives having problems. And Jayce suggests Viktor’s condition may have been caused by it. She exposed people to it that means she killed them”.

There is not in a single second of any frame, evidence that anyone died from exposure during the strike team’s operations. In fact we see several characters who were exposed, Caitlyn included, who are fine later. And I know, what you are thinking:

“But OP we don’t know if there were long term latent complications!”

Correct. And unless Riot and Fortiche tell us we never will. Vi could have CTE, Jinx could have untold issues from being infused with Shimmer, Sevika could have lung cancer. It’s all speculative. So if it didn’t happen, it isn’t good for analysis.

Going a tad bit deeper

Now this one does go even further. Let’s use this example:

Example- “Caitlyn never apologized!”

Now I see this one a lot. And I get it. She never says sorry out loud. So if you misunderstand the rule that means she doesn’t. But you notice it says “if you can’t back it up with the content”.

So while Caitlyn never speaks the words, we know she :

1. starts a war to save Vander

2. takes no action when Jinx has her back to her and instead rushes to save a wounded Vi

3. keeps Jinx in the Kiramman bunker rather than Stillwater and forgoes judgement until Vi wakes

4. has several bits of dialogue expressing her regret and self-hate

5. lets Vi make the choice to free Jinx, shows Vi love and acceptance when she feels she lost everyone

6. is quite clearly remorseful touching the place where she hit Vi.

These are quite clear signs of her remorse. So what does that mean? It means that even if it isn’t explicitly shown I can back it up with clear examples that are content driven. None of that is speculative. It is all clear and on screen.

And some of these are harder, like this one:

“Ekko clearly didn’t dispute the use of The Grey”:

We didn’t see Ekko. We didn’t hear from him during the strike team’s mission about what they were doing. So how can I say that?

1. We know he was in Zaun

2. He’s the firelight commander and has been battling Silco/shimmer for years for his people

3. He fights for the people of Zaun

These are all indisputable. And I can source each of these details directly from content. So sometimes you have to dig alittle deeper. But you can still support your ideas with plain on screen evidence.

*An Important Note*

We must also be careful not only to be sure we only use detail we can back up, but that we don’t exclude detail that does not support us. A great example for this is this one:

EXAMPLE: Caitlyn lost her mom and acts like that single loss justifies a full on dictatorship.

Now someone like me would come along and list the multiple times Jinx almost killed Caitlyn, the total eradication of Caitlyn’s faith in the pre-existing system after Marcus tried to murder her, the deaths of many of her peers in front of her, her abduction and possible torture at Jinx’s hands, listening to Jinx try and convince Vi to murder her, sparing Jinx at Vi’s pleading then watching Jinx murder her mother.

Now I’ve come and used all those details you left out and made you look silly. No one wants that! So be sure to include everything relevant. If its a good take it will survive it.

Conclusion:

So, using this guide hopefully you can craft your next analysis with the detail and content and avoid interactions with unpleasant folks like me. Just remember! Let’s leave the imagination in fanfics and keep the analysis to the content itself. Don’t worry though, if you lose track I’m here to help you out.

[ethicaltreatmentofcowplants]

prev | next

Like last time, I have no pictures of cute animals to post, so let's start with a shirtless Mister and collect our daily flag. Love the look on Caden's face - "well, we won't be flagged because of me."

Tiago is just happy to be in the great outdoors and no longer around such a dastardly criminal presence as Mister - "...he's standing right behind me, isn't he?"

(Mister was actually complimenting Lilac's appearance, but let's pretend.)

For some reason, everyone is congregating around this one tile. Perhaps Tiago figures there's safety in numbers? Delphine shares Caden's skepticism about Mister's claims, and he's too busy locking eyes with Lilac to convince her otherwise.

And look, we are three for three in shirts! This is not a drill. For this momentous occasion (👕👕👕), Mister receives a hug of gratitude from Lilac.

Lilac is just vibing when she receives a text from Spencer. Naturally she declines, but that pixel is nothing if not persistent 😅

Next minute, we have a surprise and very unplanned guest. Spencer. What are you doing here? This isn't your rotation. And oh, the old "neighbourly gift" story - when you're currently loaded into a San Sequoia household and should not be able to visit anyway!

Barrel Bunny (or more accurately, Caden) soon send him on his way. I made sure that he and Lilac never interacted, so this little visit doesn't advantage him in any way.

But Lilac is not the only popular lady in this household. Our security woof-woof Lou Howell invites Delphine over to his pad! Men, Lilac, isn't she right?

Interruptions apparently done with, the rest of the afternoon settles into a more familiar routine of flirting with and serenading the bachelorette (and shirtless Misters). Even Tiago no longer seems concerned about the villainy in their midst.

At one point no-one is talking to Lilac, nor has any interactions queued with her. So as a kind of litmus test I send her back inside alone - and surprise! Caden is the pixel thoughtful enough to check on her. And flirt, naturally.

Caden then autonomously DISCUSSES HIS FEAR OF COMMITTMENT, and in spite of Lilac's hands on hips stance, the conversation goes well.

By now, I feel that his NON COMMITTAL trait no longer suits him. As there's no way to get rid of it short of proposing (which obviously isn't an option), I message @mdshh and ask if it's cool to remove it. So Caden is no longer a NON COMMITTAL pixel, but still has MATERIALISTIC as a negative trait in the context of this challenge.

Elsewhere Delphine is smart and strategizes, picking up a skill book to increase her chances of making it to the merge. Since skills will no longer count past that point, this is the last time anyone will be able to take advantage of them.

Later Tiago is showing off his moves in the kitchen - and Mister is once more insisting he's a CRIMINAL MASTERMIND. Mister, please! No one seems to like that joke anymore 😅

tbc

@mdshh @changingplumbob @igglemouse @simsfvr - and @akitasimblr's spencer for a hot minute

(current state of shirtlessness - 1/3 👕👕👕)

[villainous-queen]

A recurring theme in The Collector is that Maya is constantly worried that Morgan doesn't like her because she's a former homeless sex worker and drug addict however she doesn't understand that Morgan likes her BECAUSE she is these things NOT in spite of them. He believes himself to be an irredeemable monster who brings with him suffering wherever he goes so he believes that if he hangs out with humans then he'll inevitably ruin their lives so he chooses to only surround himself with people he believes he can't ruin or taint; people who have already hit rock bottom so they have no where to go but up, he picks these people because he believes that these are people he can help; however as soon as they do begin to thrive he then pulls away because now they have something to loose, now there's the possibility that he could ruin them and reverse all the progress they've made.

So Maya spends all her efforts trying to reach out to Morgan, tries desperately to become a better person in the pursuit of being worthy of him but her reward for progress is distance. The more she improves, the less he gives her. The more she reaches out to him, the more he pulls away. And so she fails, because he pulls away she only confirms to herself how awful and irredeemable she believes herself to be and thus she falls and now she's in a state in which Morgan can reach out to her again. And so the cycle goes.

[hibiscesque]

Gave my word to OOMF that I would get over my fear of y'all sophistiqué fellas on Tumblr and actually post an analysis here, so here goes nothing.

Mori and Dazai: a noncomprehensive opinion-based analysis of the most talked about parts of their relationship by me, Lily, that has been fleshed out and crossposted from Twt.

[Feat. attached screenshots of some of the interesting contributions others made when I posted this there over the summer at the end, and the links to their Twts so you can check their accounts out if you're on the hellbird app too!]

I figure the best place to start is the place where discussion about Mori and Dazai's relationship often starts and ends: abuse.

It is an unequivocal fact that Mori was in a position of power over Dazai, as his elder, superior in rank, and the doctor who saved him. I wholly agree with this piece of the fandom collective consciousness. I do have a bit of a different interpretation, however, regarding how he used this power.

I do not think Mori lorded it over Dazai to take advantage of him sexually or hurt him physically, and from my reading of it, canon seems to support that. In fact, it was in Mori’s best interest in his relationship with Dazai to do what all the best manipulative abusers do: pretend that this power does not exist at all.

He presented himself to Dazai as Dazai’s equal, a partner in a dastardly scheme to take down the Port Mafia boss. He knew Dazai would say yes—as a disillusioned boy who seemed to have no attachment to his old life, what other answer would he give?—but took deep care to give him the illusion of choice.

Maintaining the illusion that they were equals was very important, as Dazai was older and of an entirely different breed than Yosano. His old strategy wouldn’t fly here. I think this actually displays the versatility of Mori’s manipulative skills, how he was so easily able to adjust between them. Even the narrative of Fifteen, whether this was deliberate or accidental, seems to intimate to the reader that there was not the power imbalance between them that you would expect. It specifically corrects you from seeing Dazai as Mori’s son or charge, seeming to want you—or want you to see Dazai—come to the conclusion that they are, though I use this word very differently than we do when it comes to SKK, partners in crime. But that is absolutely not true. He was a fourteen-year-old playing adult games.

Mori probably figured out pretty fast that Dazai was used to being the best manipulator in the room, and that he was usually incredibly adept at hiding this from the adults around him. It was to his advantage to utilize this fact and let Dazai think that he was the one in control between them, ergo the easy agreement to giving him a painless death later on when he had absolutely no intention of ever granting him that.

That's not to entirely de-dimensionalize their relationship. I do think in some ways, a lot of ways even, Dazai had Mori wrapped around his finger. For starters, we see several examples of him being petulant or defiant to Mori that evidently amuse Mori rather than anger him. Furthermore, I think I can go so far as to say that in the early days, Mori admired Dazai, in a way. Dazai effortlessly lived an existence lacking traditionally defined humanity and empathy, something that hadn't come quite so innately to Mori. He himself hadn't had to cultivate that cold, heartless calculation until the Great War, at which point he got himself so far into this "character", for a lack of a better word, that he played to protect his country, that he'd begun to grossly overcompensate. Become the exact monster he believed he needed to be, though I don't think he'd put it in those exact terms.

But to Dazai, all of this seems to come easy as breathing in the light novels. It must have been fascinating, in a way, to meet what he spent so long striving to become in the form of a fluffy-haired, teenage attitude-filled, lower secondary schooler.

Even the fond admirenvy, however, would eventually become a tool. There's a clear logical advantage to Mori to letting himself feel regarding Dazai to the degree he did where he allowed himself be jerked around a little bit. It would make Dazai more secure in the thought that he was the one in control between them, exactly the belief paradigm Mori needed him to keep existing within to be able to maneuver him to the utmost degree of exactitude when it mattered.

Something else I do disagree with the fandom about, which you've probably been able to ascertain by now, is that Mori, so to speak, birthed the darkness in Dazai. Made him that way. Forced him to be that way. Anything like that.

This darkness, in my opinion, already existed when they met.

I think Mori sensing that, as aforementioned, is part of the reason he chose to ensnare Dazai in his web in the first place. There's a whole other discussion that could be had about the sheer coincidence of acquiring the one child in the world with an ability that could turn off the Deus ex machina we know as Corruption that existed within the second child he would acquire not a year later—and yet another about why the mafia higher ups saw Dazai as a credible witness to the old boss' death—but while no, Dazai would probably have not gone on to become a mass murderer and expert torturer were he not brought into this life by Mori, he was very likely not an angel otherwise.

To me, the adroitness with which he manipulated Chuuya into joining the mafia makes this clear. That is not something he’d picked up within the last year he’d known Mori. Seamlessly using manipulation of that caliber is a skill that usually comes from being exposed to other manipulators from a very young age and/or a natural predisposition toward it. Usually "and". It's still a skill that can be cultivated, whether on purpose or not, but it's not something that's easy to just pick up and learn intuitively unless you're pre-tuned to it for one of those reasons. I also bring up that infamous scene in Fifteen where Dazai empties a magazine of bullets into a dead body. I see many things in that instance, but primarily a hurting and psychologically disturbed child.

While watching the death of the old boss could easily have been a traumatic experience for him, I think we can extrapolate from Dazai’s other aforementioned behavior that one, he’d been exposed to the darker side of society far longer ago than when he’d met Mori, and two, he was at that point, whether by natural means or not, rather stunted in the empathy department. I’m not saying that Dazai is incapable of feeling it—simply that he does not feel it to the degree the average person does. I know a lot of Dazai fans will disagree with me on that, but I do believe this very strongly.

This all comes back to the circle of bonding him to Mori; Mori always presented himself as his equal in that way, after all. While I’m sure Dazai had met more than one unempathetic adult before him, this could easily have been the first time he'd met one who was like him in the sense that their intelligence allowed them the manipulative skills to use this "lack of compassion” to their advantage.

I think Dazai was quickly and, to steal his own word, indelibly fascinated by Mori. We can see that he’s adopted many of Mori’s mannerisms—the most obvious example being using a dramatic shtick to lower people’s guards and make himself appear more harmless. For Dazai that's his ridiculous suicide attempts that will never work and appeals to women for double suicide, and for Mori that's playing the doting, haggard father to Elise. I think they both enjoyed these roles more than they let on, especially Mori, but they do serve a purpose. Correct me if I’m wrong on this, but to this point I even believe I remember a Japanese-speaking fan saying that Dazai copied some of Mori’s speech mannerisms in the untranslated text of Fifteen that were hard to emulate in English.

I think Mori, in his own way, for the reasons I shared earlier on, is equally as fascinated by Dazai as Dazai is by him. Mori is such an enigma, however, that I’m left with a question when analyzing a certain part of canon that I think the answer to depends on how charitably you want to interpret Mori: why didn’t he just kill Dazai instead of ousting him from the mafia?

I think there are two possible answers to this. One, he knew Dazai would be useful to him in the future. After all, he wouldn't be able to use his Deus ex machina more than once without him. And of course, there's Natsume's Greater Plan, the lengths to which Natsume has gone to set dominos in place for I think we're only just starting to grasp.

But then there's also two, that he, against what anyone might expect, cared about Dazai enough that he didn’t want him dead. Perhaps it was even both. I will leave you with that to ponder. Thanks for reading! 💝

& Now... Bonus!

Thoughts from Alli omgdqzai on Twitter:

[CW: CSA, though not in the form of sexual contact between Dazai and Mori]

Thoughts from Pysta pysta_myn on Twitter:

[scrivenger-grimgar]

au of an au for mdzs where canon plays out exactly as it was supposed to except

wwx became a calamity after dying and cared for his coven of ghosts in yiling before mxy summoned him for revenge.

he still elopes with lwj after solving the corpse question

supreme ghosts have a similar ability to gods taking deputies, except since they're not sharing immortality they can have a lot more of them

wwx's "deputies" are (in order) jiang cheng, the wen remnants, luo qingyang, nie huaisang, mo xuanyu, jin ling, lan jingyi, ouyang zhizhen, lan sizhui, and lan wangji.

being a calamity's "deputy" means that you are soul bonded to them, with a kind of preternatural sense of the wellbeing of the entire coven.

one of the heavenly officials decides to fuck around with time, and only other heavenly officials were supposed to remember, except extremely strong ghosts and their covens also remember because there are TWO gods married to calamities, and calamities are weirdly cooperative with each other (hc, hx, wwx, & gL discuss trade agreements over tea and artistic process over alcohol).

thus like 75 people are now in the past.

wwx's child body cant stand the power his soul has and just kinda crumbles under the weight. thats mostly fine tho cause he can shapeshift.

of course he immediately comes up with a dastardly plan to inflict as much chaos onto the sects as possible while also protecting his loved ones at the same time. he gets in contact with the wen remnants (bigger and there's more of them) and slowly moves them over to yiling while he builds places for them to live on the mountain, and then offers the people of yiling a very good deal:

"we'll deal with all your ghost problems for free, and in exchange we get discounts on food, and you tell everyone who comes asking that the Yiling Wei sect has been here the entire time."

its almost too easy to set up, too. they forge some trade agreements and other documents to place in the other sects' files, waiting to be found, with ease, bc he knows what the filing for the jiang, lan, wen, and nie looks like, and part of the story is that the jin offended them so badly that they just stopped doing business with them altogether and also tend to actively hate them with few exceptions.

meanwhile, huaisang, qingyang, and wangji will reference the Yiling Wei and act like this is something everyone knows about, and jiang cheng catches on and starts doing the same.

wwx's plan is to drive them all insane by appearing out of nowhere and acting like he's been there the entire time. make them question reality.

wen popo, at a discussion conference: i'll be standing in for my grandson so he can participate in the games

jiang fengmian, initiating polite conversation: your grandson? what happened to your son?

wen popo, internally cackling: fengmian! are you so quick to discard changze like this?! for shame!!

jiang fengmian, who has never met this lady: what

wen popo: you know i trusted him when he said he wanted to stand by his sworn brother's side but if this is how you treat his memory after he was so unwaveringly loyal to you, only ever leaving for Cangse, the love of his life, then i'll have to have you stricken from the legacy registry!

wen popo, with unfaltering confidence: good evening wen-zhongzhu

wen ruohan, who has incurable face blindness: well met Wei-zhongzhu (do i know her???)

nie mingjue is the only one who's taking any of this well and thats solely because his brother has been spoon feeding him Yiling Wei propaganda for 13 years. lan xichen has a crisis because his baby brother eloped with a clan leader he met thrice and they're having a spring wedding.

[the-conversation-pod]

The Untamed Episodes: The Second Life

AND WE'RE BACK

In Part 2 of our Untamed discussion, Ben, NiNi, Shan (@lurkingshan) and Bookworm (@neuroticbookworm) talk about our love for Jiang Cheng, our hatred for Meng Yao/Jin Guangyao, and why we will always hold out hope for more Chinese BL.

If you missed Part 1, you can check it out here.

Timestamps

The timestamps will now correspond with chapters on Spotify for easier navigation.

00:00 - Welcome 00:55 - Intro: More Notes From The Future 01:45 - The Second Life 09:23 - The Second Life: The Fallout of Wei Wuxian's Choices 16:52 - The Second Life: Meng Yao's Dastardly Deeds 26:52 - The Second Life: The Tragedy of Wen Ning 32:35 - The Second Life: Two 'Fools' 37:41 - The Second Life: Various Random Musings 48:18 - Page to Screen (and Audio, and Anime, and Stage, and…) 56:59 - Afterlife: The Impact of The Untamed on BL and Fandom

The Conversation Transcripts!

Thanks to the continued efforts of @lurkingshan as an editor and proofreader, we are able to bring you transcripts of the episodes.

Please send our volunteers your thanks!

00:00:00 - Welcome

NiNi

Welcome to The Conversation, the Queer Media And Brown Liquor Podcast.

Ben

I'm Ben, the media critic.

NiNi

I’m NiNi, the VIIBs queen.

Ben

And we are your drunk Caribbean uncle and auntie who are sitting on the porch in the rocking chairs.

NiNi

We’re here to talk queer film and dramas, with a special focus on Asian QL.

Ben

So if you like to dive deep into queer stories…

NiNi

If you like cracked out takes on art and commerce in queer media…

Ben

If you just enjoy simping for attractive people…

NiNi

We believe in simping!

Ben

Tune in!

00:55 Intro: More Notes From the Future

Ben 

And we're back. We're gonna continue with our huge two part episode on The Untamed. We finally bullied NiNi into watching it. We got her into the booth with Shan and our good friend Bookworm. I really hope you listened to the last episode because we're going right into Wei Wuxian's second life. 

NiNi

The second life is so much fun. There's some stuff we talk about in here that I could have continued talking about forever. 

Ben

No more beehive commentary from you right now. 

NiNi 

No more beehives, but I just want the world to know that I love Jiang Cheng. 

Ben 

Ah, that poor boy. What a hot mess of a man. Angry purple man. 

NiNi 

My angry purple dream boat, how dare you. 

01:55 The Second Life

Ben 

On to the second life.

Shan 

So this is after Wei Wuxian is resurrected, 16 years after his death. The Jin clan is now holding the most power in the cultivation world. They have the chief cultivator position. Jin Guangyao has had a meteoric rise to power in the time Wei Wuxian has been gone. His father has died. He has gotten married. He has an heir. 

We also have a whole new generation of junior cultivators along for the ride with us, notably Jin Ling, the son of Jiang Yanli and Jin Zixuan. Lan Sizhui, whose identity is a mystery that's not very well concealed. [laughs] Although, we did not mention our beautiful A-Yuan in the first life, just know that we love him dearly.

Ben 

There's too many things to mention. I didn't even go off on an extended period about Madam Jiang beatin’ the shit out of people.

Shan 

I know, right. 

[all laugh]

NiNi

She was such a bitch, but she came through when it mattered, my God.

Shan 

There's so many characters here, but please know that we love them all dearly even if we haven’t gotten the chance to talk about them all. A-Yuan is very close in our hearts.

Ben

We would just be screaming his name for like five minutes.

Shan

Yes! [laughs] So Lan Sizhui is who we come back to in this new timeline and Lan Jingyi is also around, his best friend—his lifelong bosom companion, you might say. 

Major storylines in the second life. We, of course, have Wuxian getting resurrected in Mo Xuanyu’s body, although in the show it's just the same actor the whole time because they didn't want to do that to us mentally, which I appreciate. He is supposed to settle his grudges as part of that spiritual agreement for his resurrection. So he is pursuing the folks who harmed Mo Xuanyu. The big mystery unfolds with trying to figure out the last grudge that he holds. That aligns with unraveling the big mystery of the hidden foes from the first life.

Jin Guangyao, aka Meng Yao, is the villain behind most of the horrible things that happened in the first timeline. And also getting up to all kinds of other noxious shit like marrying his own sister, killing his own son because he's an incest baby, murdering his father via a gaggle of prostitutes, fucking him to death.

NiNi 

That's a thing that happened, people!

Shan 

Yeah, real normal stuff over there. And recruiting a number of folks to do his dirty work, including villains Su She and Xue Yang. He is a half brother to Mo Xuanyu and responsible for a lot of what he went through, as well. So he's just all up in the business. He also murdered Nie Mingjue and tricked Lan Xichen into being complicit in all of that. 

While that's happening, Wuxian is reunited with Wangji. They are following these clues.

Ben 

I'm sorry, we have to be clear that, like, by following the clues we mean Wei Wuxian wakes up. It's like, “Wow, this place sucks. Whoa, where'd that arm come from? All right, let's put this arm in a bag. Well, the arm’s pointing that way. I guess we're going there now.”

Shan 

That's only in the book, bestie.

Bookworm 

So, in the show it's actually just a sword spirit. 

Shan 

The book is way more gruesome. There’s, like, body parts, it’s a whole thing. The show is a little simpler.

Ben

Okay, yeah, they use a sword but it’s literally like, “oh okay, I guess we’re going east? All right.”

Shan

[laughs] Yeah, the sword points them in the direction they should go to follow some clues.

As Wangji and Wuxian work together to follow the sword spirit, unravel the mystery, the juniors are along for the ride. There is a very devastating arc in Yi City where they meet Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan, who we had briefly encountered in the first timeline, and unravel a whole plot about them being tormented by Xue Yang, who is fucking evil. Very much a fan favorite arc, I think.

Bookworm 

It is the best arc and this is also the most tragic arc.

Shan 

It's quite sad.

Bookworm 

Nobody knew what was going on. Everybody got tricked into it. 

Ben 

The Yi City arc is pretty brutal because we basically see how Meng Yao has orchestrated these complex events to torture and murder people he doesn’t like. Xue Yang does the same thing to two roaming cultivators—not boyfriends—which culminates in him turning one of them into a puppet akin to Wen Ning and then driving the other one to death by making him commit evil acts unknowingly. Which is… diabolical.

Shan

After the Yi City arc, that is when Wuxian and Wangji discover the truth of Nie Mingjue's death, which was very intentionally perpetuated by Meng Yao. By unraveling that, they caught on to his whole evil shit. This all culminates in a confrontation at Guanyin Temple where Meng Yao is fully unmasked, Nie Mingjue's corpse rises and is really out for some revenge—which, fair enough, I would be too. Jiang Cheng confronts Wei Wuxian after learning about the golden core transfer that he never consented to. And we finally learn that Nie Huaisang was actually the one who was behind Wei Wuxian's resurrection and orchestrated this whole mystery plot as a way to get revenge on Meng Yao for murdering his brother. 

While these plot things are happening, there are a couple emotional arcs going on. There is, of course, the continuation of the Jiang family drama and the tension between Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian, which is now complicated by the involvement of Jin Ling, who is Wei Wuxian's nephew and has grown up an orphan because of Wei Wuxian's behavior. Jiang Cheng needs to learn the truth about Wei Wuxian giving him his core. And they have to kind of work through all of their emotions about that, which don't come to any kind of satisfying resolution, because how the fuck could they?

And then finally, there is of course the reunion second chance romance between Wuxian and Wangi. Honestly, their adult romance is so great. Wuxian is resurrected. He immediately reconnects with Wangji. He's having some fascinating mix of memory loss and obliviousness that is his signature and some just emotional denial about the feelings between them. Wangji is having none of that. He is very clear on the fact that he is in love with this man, sticking to his side like glue and not letting anyone hurt him again. So they are traveling together while they solve this mystery. They're having all kinds of very fun ship moments, lots of cute stuff happening. Wangi's getting drunk a lot. 

Ben 

There's a piggyback scene.

Shan

There's definitely some piggybacking happening.

NiNi

There's a definite wedding. I mean, these guys have gotten married like at least three times in the show.

Shan 

Right, exchanging of chickens, very important stuff. [NiNi and Shan laugh] And, of course, standing together publicly in this second life in a way that Wangji was not able to do for Wuxian in the first life. He declares himself very much unambiguously on Wuxian's side in front of all the other clans. He does not give a shit anymore. 

And then of course we learn over the course of this arc that Sizhui is A-Yuan and that Wangji rescued him after Wuxian's death, brought him into the Lan clan and raised him. Wow, what a fuckin’ man. 

They end on an ambiguous note because this is a censored cdrama. [laughs] So instead of the book ending, which involves them getting married and fucking in a field, we get Lan Zhan—very out of character—deciding to become the chief cultivator [laughs] and Wuxian going to travel alone and them having an ambiguously implied reunion right at the very end of the show. But we all know that they got married and had a lot of sex. That's what happened. 

So, yeah. That is the second life in a nutshell.

09:33 The Second Life: The Fallout of Wei Wuxian's Choices

NiNi 

There are two or three really big things that stand out for me, in this arc. One is just seeing Wei Wuxian's regrets. He's looking back at his life like, wow, maybe I shouldn't have done that like that. Or, wow, I was such an arrogant kid, I should have thought about these things in a different way. You see him having regrets as he sees the outcomes of the choices that he made in his first life. 

Alongside that, the choices that he made in his first life have made him kind of a folk anti-hero. He's now the scary story that parents tell their kids about, “Be good or the Yiling Patriarch will come get you.” He's wearing another face, so people generally don't know it's him. So he gets to hear how people are talking about him 16 years later. And he's realizing, “Fuck, I was evil.”

Shan 

He's like, “I did kinda do a genocide. That was my bad.”

Ben 

We really should not downplay that this man literally killed thousands of cultivators.

Shan 

He sure did.

NiNi 

Thousands of people out of anger and arrogance. I mean, you saw how it built up because he really was just trying to mind his own business and everybody kept poking him, but he still killed thousands of people ‘cause he got mad.

Shan

These other clans that hate him, it's for a reason. It's ‘cause he killed all of their family members. It's not some minor petty grudge.

NiNi 

Well, in this arc, but when they hated him before, it was because he had power that they wanted and he wouldn't tell them how he got it.

Shan 

Yeah. In the second life, his reputation is in tatters and people hate him because he killed everybody they love. Which is fair, in my opinion.

NiNi 

It's absolutely fair, completely fair. Totally understand that. 

So that arc is a really interesting arc for me because it carries through all the various relationships. It carries through his relationship with Jiang Cheng because at the end when Jiang Cheng is like, well, what am I supposed to fucking do with this? Okay, you saved my life, but also, hi, got my entire family killed.

Shan 

Fully.

NiNi 

Am I supposed to thank you? I don't know what I'm supposed to do with this.

Shan 

Jiang Cheng was spitting nothin’ but facts in that temple.

NiNi 

Nothing but facts. He was a hundred percent  correct. And he's stuck in this place now because he loves Wei Wuxian. But at the same time, basically his family opened their home to this man and he got them all killed.

Ben

Objection!

Bookworm

Thank you, Ben. 

Ben 

Wei Wuxian did not murder the Jiang clan. The Wens did, and they were going to do it anyway. Wen Chao's active abuse of the hostages was a prelude to them eventually getting killed. When he left them in the cave like that, he intended for them all to die. Wei Wuxian is not the reason why the Wens sacked Lotus Pier. Madam Jiang may be mad because she believes that her husband is probably Wei Wuxian's father, unconfirmed.

Bookworm

Uh-huh.

NiNi 

Pretty much, yep.

Ben

But like, that boy is not the reason why the Wen Clan went on a tear to slaughter their way to more power.

Shan 

That's true. But he is culpable for Jiang Yanli’s death and that is the one that hurts the most.

Ben

Yes, that part he is.

Bookworm 

I also want to make it clear, like, she ran into a battlefield. That woman gave a month old child to somebody and then she just ran into a battlefield. [laughs]

Shan 

Listen, no one's saying Yanli was the smartest bulb. We're not with some of her choices, but NiNi's point, from Jiang Cheng's point of view, is correct.

Bookworm 

That's true. The facts and the emotions that he was spitting at that moment was very true. 

The reason why the story is so compelling is that you have all of these people who had taken very personal losses and they have very personal emotions that are connected to, basically, a political war for power. What are the motivations behind the people who ultimately want to be at the top? What will they do and how will they manipulate the narrative to just achieve that? If they get a scapegoat, all really good. I'm not saying that Wei Wuxian didn't do all of those things. He killed a whole bunch of people, and he was a dumbass who refused to talk to anybody. 

Ben

I'm just being clear that my client, who did kill thousands of people, [all laugh] did not specifically kill his own clan. He shot the sheriff, but he did not shoot the deputy. All right, let's be clear here.

[NiNi laughs] 

Shan 

Let's get back on track, folks. We got a lot of content to get through. 

The reason that Jiang Cheng's arc is so compelling is because, if you think about things from his perspective… like, wow, what the fuck happened to this kid? He was a teenager when his home was destroyed and his parents were murdered in front of him. His brother then—from his point of view—abandoned him, left the clan, to go protect a different family. Adopted new siblings that he prioritized over Jiang Cheng. Never explained himself. Started doing evil shit. Would not tell him anything about why he was doing these things. Ultimately started a battle that culminated in the death of their sister. And then jumped off a cliff. That is what Jiang Cheng's brother did to him, from his perspective. 

And so, it is not hard to understand why he both loves and hates him in equal measure, why he struggles so much to understand him and why he wants to forgive him, but he can't. And Wei Wuxian can never make it right. He made these huge mistakes that they can never come back from. They will never be able to trust each other and be close again.

Ben 

My favorite thing about Jiang Cheng is the emotional core of why he's so mad at Wei Wuxian is Wei Wuxian will never let him be useful. Jiang Cheng feels like he got no credit for getting them out of the cave. He loses his core because he was trying to save Wei Wuxian. He thought he was gonna die, and he doesn't get to have a noble death. He gets turned into a mundane person. 

Then Wei Wuxian helps him get his core back so he can continue to be a cultivator. But then something's clearly wrong with his brother, he then disappears. And they find him again. He's trying to rebuild his clan. Wei Wuxian is supposed to be helping him, but it's clearly not the same. And he can't get through to him. Basically every time he thought he was doing something for Wei Wuxian, Wei Wuxian was doing something for him. But he constantly feels undercut by the brother he admires’ own excellence and ego. Like, he feels like he is forever playing second to Wei Wuxian and he can't ever get over that because now he has Wei Wuxian's core. And he knows that now by the end of the story.

Shan 

Oof. That's some, like, real mind fuck stuff.

NiNi 

Now he's stuck wondering if all the things that he's been and done since then are because of him or because he has Wei Wuxian's core and therefore because he's Wei Wuxian. So he doesn't ever know if he's good enough, now.

Ben 

Exactly.

Shan

My God. Jiang Cheng, they will never make me hate you.

NiNi 

Never, never!

Bookworm 

Never.

Ben 

I understand that angry purple man.

18:13 The Second Life: Meng Yao's Dastardly Deeds

Shan 

I feel like Bookworm should talk a little bit about the way the Meng Yao and Nie Mingjue and Xichen stuff plays out in this arc, ‘cause I know you have a lot of strong feelings about it.

[Bookworm and Shan laugh]

Bookworm 

All right, let's get to it.

Ben 

I really love when I can hear her getting all of her notes together. 

Shan 

She's getting organized.

Ben

I have to organize my slide deck.

Bookworm

I got notes! All right, so in the second arc, we only start by knowing that Nie Mingjue died this horrible death and we have this mystery of his sword and the sword spirit and leading them around. They're just solving the mystery of this murder who, at the time, they did not know that it was a murder. It comes to heads when they go to the Jin headquarters and solve this mystery by basically having Wei Wuxian turn into this tiny paper man and go and perform—I think it's called Empathy—on Nie Mingjue's severed head that is in Jin Guangyao’s secret closet. I cannot believe there are people who defend this man. [laughs]

We get flashbacks of Wei Wuxian finding out exactly how Meng Yao manipulated Xichen into bringing Nie Mingjue and all of them into this sworn brothers pact sort of thing, after the war, and how he used that to slowly erode Nie Mingjue's composure using tainted music. And finally it breaks him. He runs away and the official account is that he is lost, but we know that Jin Guangyao cut his head off with his own sword and then just keep it in his closet. Like a very normal person. 

The way this is revealed, you see all of the major players trying to understand what actually happened and why Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian chose to kind of have this confrontation with this man. And you can see how he pulls the thread in that scene so well. He orchestrated the action where Wei Wuxian pulls out the sword that was sealed because he lost his core and reveals his identity to everybody in attendance—who are all, we have already established, super mad at Wei Wuxian for killing all of their loved ones. And then you see him kind of imply that Lan Wangji has been seduced into helping Wei Wuxian. 

Ben 

He didn't use a homophobic slur, but we heard it.

Bookworm 

Right! Everybody kind of zeroes in on what Lan Wangji is going to do at this moment, and even Wei Wuxian expects him to remove himself from Wei Wuxian's side. He was worried about what this could mean to the Lan sect itself. So he was like, okay I’m just gonna fly solo from here. But it culminates, of course, with Lan Wangji standing by Wei Wuxian and declaring openly that he is gonna walk the single plank path in the dark till the end with him. Which is just, ah, so romantic. 

Jin Guangyao, he has basically very successfully isolated somebody who has a stellar reputation in the cultivation world within a matter of minutes. He questioned his motivations and he wanted that person to declare his allegiance. And when that person was forced to do it, that's it. That was almost a surgical precision of political strategy. That was insane.

Shan 

It was a real showcase for his skill set.

Ben 

On his back foot, he really won that entire encounter.

Bookworm

He did. That was a fight that Jing Guangyao a hundred percent won. I think at that point, everybody wanted to fight them. But obviously, we know that nobody's going to fight Lan Wangji.

So they then flee. We still have, like, two more showdowns after this, which is where he ultimately loses. But this one, Jin Guangyao a hundred percent won. Even if the cultivation world doesn't know that he was a villain at this point, we as an audience are very clearly shown that this was a man who can talk his way out of anything. That is exactly what he has done for so long, for almost 20 fucking years. He has talked his way to the top of a cultivation world. Like, he has risen from being an illegitimate child to the top position.

Shan

His methods are never to get his own hands dirty. His methods for framing Wei Wuxian in the first life, his methods for continuing to do his dirty deeds in the second life are through these villainous dudes that he recruits into his cause. Su She, who is a former Lan cultivator who has a lot of bitterness that he plays on. Xue Yang, who is another one of Jin Guangshan's illegitimate sons. The illegitimate sons are just all over this story. 

The way the story unfolds—and this is, I think, one of our probably biggest critiques of the show—they eventually end up pinning a lot of what Wei Wuxian ostensibly did in the first life on Su She as a second demonic cultivator who was controlling people when we thought Wei Wuxian was. That's a change from the book to the show. It's a change I hate a lot.

NiNi 

I think about it this way. If Wei Wuxian wasn't doing what he was doing, he wouldn't have created the cover that Su She had to do what he did. So I still blame it on Wei Wuxian.

Shan 

Yeah, I'm with you. I think the show wants to let him off a little bit, but I will not be doing that.

Ben 

I think one of the things that I find compelling about Meng Yao is because of his starting line, he will never be as powerful as someone like Wangji or Wei Wuxian or any of the other clan leaders and named characters in this story. It doesn't surprise me that he ends up teaming up with people who for whatever reason also cannot achieve those kinds of heights. Like, Su She’s just not as good as Wangji and he's envious of him. And he hates that Wangji won't acknowledge him. He hates that Wei Wuxian won't even remember his fucking name. 

Shan 

Wuxian every time: “Who are you?”

[NiNi laughs]

Bookworm 

It's so good!

NiNi 

So amazing.

Ben 

It's notable that the three of them who form this little evil trio all hold specific grudges about the way they feel disrespected. Everybody Meng Yao has killed, he kills because at one point or another, they called him the son of a prostitute. And he's like, “Well, I'm adding you to my list.”

Shan 

Fuck you, then. [laughs] You gonna die.

Ben

Mingjue originally shielded him and elevated him based upon his actual ability and merit. And Meng Yao took out one of his grievances in the middle of a battle and got caught doing it. That's when Mingjue turned against him.

It's the same thing for Su She. Like Su She wants to have his own clan be acknowledged after Cloud Recesses is destroyed. You can see this man's like, “now's my chance!”

NiNi 

But he just sucks. 

Ben

He does! 

Shan 

Yeah, he doesn't have the skills.

NiNi

He just sucks!

Ben

Even the Lan juniors are like, “You are bad. You do not know how to play your instrument.”

NiNi 

The fact that they use the fact that he sucks to hide him in the story as a villain until the very end. Like he's playing the song to attack wrong. But everybody just accepts that because he sucks, right? So of course he's playing the music wrong. He's playing it wrong on purpose, but everybody else just thinks that he sucks at it. Him sucking is how he hides in plain sight. I love that so much.

Ben 

Meng Yao's whole group is shittier versions of other people. Like, Su She is a shitty version [NiNi laughs] of Lan Zhan and Xue Yang is an insane shittier version of Wei Wuxian.

Shan

[laughs] It's true. They're like the sad little copycats who will never have glory.

Ben

That's what I think is so compelling about it. Like, how much of the story would have been solved by people just not being rude to Meng Yao.

NiNi

He would have found another reason.

Shan 

I gotta say, I don't think murder is a proportional response.

[NiNi laughs]

Bookworm 

Right. Exactly.

Ben 

How much is my finger worth? All of their lives! [all laugh] All of them!

NiNi 

Oh my God.

Bookworm 

[Xue] Yang was a fucking unhinged serial killer. Holy shit.

NiNi 

Psychopath.

Ben 

Let me tell you, that actor is my favorite of the whole series. I love his ridiculousness the whole time.

Shan 

That's a bold statement. My favorite actor in this is definitely Wang Yibo, who did so much with so little.

Ben

I'm being a little bit facetious there. Of the side characters—

Shan 

Fair enough.

Ben

—of the supporting characters, he's my favorite because they were like, what's the direction? “Just serve cunt.” “Got it.”

[all laugh]

Shan

And he's serving cunt, but we cannot overstate that he is by far the most fucked up evil dude in this story. What he does to Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan is disgusting.

Bookworm 

My god, yes, let's talk about that.

Ben 

We're gonna get into how evil this man is. But when he talked to Wei Wuxian, he's like, “I need your help with this sort of stuff.” And Wei Wuxian is like, “What the fuck? Why would I help you with that?” He's like, “Well, you started all this shit. What is your problem, dude?”

[Ben, NiNi and Shan laugh]

Shan 

It actually is really funny. He says, “come on, be my mentor.” And Wuxian’s like, “no, no, this is not what I'm doing. This is not connected to me.”

NiNi 

I would like very much not to be a part of this particular narrative.

Shan

Exactly!

Bookworm 

No!

Ben 

We have to talk about Wei Wuxian reflecting. “Is this the company I've collected? Hold on.”

Bookworm

Exactly! Like, holy shit, if this man thinks that I would help him, what does that say about me and my actions so far? 

Shan 

What have I been doing? Exactly.

Bookworm

Yes! What have I been doing?

30:56 The Second Life: The Tragedy of Wen Ning

Shan 

We haven't actually talked yet about what Wei Wuxian did to Wen Ning, and we should.

NiNi

Oh man. The tragedy of tragedies.

Ben 

So Wei Wuxian learns from Wen Qing that the Wen remnants are basically being tormented and experimented on by the Jin clan, who are trying to understand Wei Wuxian's demonic cultivation. When he arrives at this site, he loses his shit, sees that they've killed Wen Ning, and then revives Wen Ning as a puppet—that's the term that they use for, basically, his zombies—and sends Wen Ning on a tear beating the crap out of people. After which he tries to develop a method to restore Wen Ning's consciousness, but he has forever trapped this originally very kind boy in a perpetual state of undead. And he will forever be at the control of anyone who can produce the proper tunes to force him to go beat the shit out of people.

Shan

This is another thing that Wei Wuxian does without the consent of the person involved. He turns Wen Ning, who is a very gentle, loving soul, into a weapon, basically. He turns him into an indestructible ghost puppet who Wei Wuxian uses to perpetuate violence and who other people, we learn, can use to perpetuate violence. One of my biggest criticisms of the story—not just the show, but also the novel—is that it never unpacks what a violation that is on Wen Ning.

NiNi 

Basically, if he hadn't done what he did to Wen Ning, Jin Zixuan would still be alive.

Shan 

Yes, and Wen Ning would not be holding the guilt of having murdered him.

Bookworm

The Wen Ning situation is extremely tragic, but also there are two things that protected the Wen prisoners of war when they were sequestered in the Burial Mounds. One was the Yin Tally, the power of demonic cultivation or whatever. And the other, even though he was not intended for that purpose, once he was resurrected and once he was given the consciousness back and once people understood that he could be a weapon, I think it also protected them a little bit more. Around a year or so, they were able to survive on that mountain. And I really don't think in such a politically tense period, it would be possible to do that without a very obvious threat that they can just sort of unleash on people. It also backfired so spectacularly because his control can be just transferred to whoever wants to take it. 

The Wen Ning that we saw before he was transformed, this boy who tried to help everybody, was so sweet and very shy. Even when he wanted to learn things he was just sequestered. He was secluded, he didn't really interact with people because he knew that the Wen clan was not the greatest. You take that character and you turn him into basically just a walking nuke. 

Wei Wuxian: do first, think later. One of the things that really gets my goat is that after the massacre at the Qiongqi Path, he had the fucking audacity to go after Wen Ning. He woke up and he was like, “You murdered these people.” I will never forgive that man for that moment. I was like, what the hell are you talking about? OOF!

Shan 

It was brutal. Wen Ning's accidental murder of Jin Zixuan is what caused the entire Wen clan to turn themselves in and be exterminated. It is what led to Wen Ning being basically imprisoned and his mind taken over while Wei Wuxian was dead for 16 years. He was locked up with bolts in his fuckin’ head. They were experimenting on him. When Wei Wuxian was resurrected, he did liberate Wen Ning. But from there, Wen Ning had an extraordinarily lonely existence because he's the only one of his kind. His entire family is dead. 

And so, it was nice to see at the end him get some measure of peace by being reunited with A-Yuan again, finding Sizhui and being able to travel together and bond over their dead family and their connection to each other. But Wen Ning is indestructible and immortal and he is going to live a very lonely life. I wish the story had actually unpacked that in any way or Wei Wuxian had ever reckoned with his choices and how he harmed his friend.

NiNi 

To me the tragedy goes even further because the reason that Wen Ning is so protected at all by Wen Qing and others in the beginning is because he's already been hurt. When he was a child, he's already been attacked spiritually by, like, this fairy statue or whatever. So he's already weak. And in some ways it feels like Wei Wuxian thought that maybe he could make him strong, but he just ruined him even more. He does make him strong in a way that he wasn't strong before, but the tragedy of it is that he's a sweet, sweet kid that he turns into a monster. And Wen Ning never blames him for it. He is loyal to him till the end. 

Ben

Yeah, but again, how much of that is because he's been turned into a puppet or his natural tendency? We'll never know. 

Shan

We’ll never know. I love Wen Ning.

Ben

A lot of Wen Ning mentioned in this section, good job everybody!

38:07 The Second Life: Two “Fools”

NiNi 

If we’re talking about tragedy we gotta talk about the tragedy of Meng Yao and Lan Xichen at the end, because oh my god, he ruined that man. He destroyed him.

Bookworm 

All right, let's go! Round two!

Shan 

This is why I do not buy interpretations of canon that claim Meng Yao truly loved Xichen, because—

NiNi 

He did not.

Bookworm 

Mm-mm. Mm-mm.

Shan

—you do not do that to somebody you love. Absolutely not.

NiNi 

He loved that Lan Xichen loved him, but he did not love Lan Xichen.

Shan 

Exactly.

Bookworm 

He loved the influence that he had on Lan Xichen. He was so over the moon happy that he had this very influential man that he could just control and do whatever the fuck he wants with him.

Shan 

So this all culminated at Guanyin Temple when Nie Huaisang tricked Xichen, basically, into thinking Meng Yao was attacking him from behind. Xichen automatically activated his sword, stabbed Meng Yao. Meng Yao on his way out as he was dying, chose not to comfort Xichen, but instead to guilt trip him for killing him and not saving him. 

NiNi 

Walked down the fucking sword. He pushed the sword in deeper!

Bookworm 

He sure did.

NiNi 

Bitch!

Shan 

Brutal stuff, Xichen destroyed. We know that after this, he went into seclusion for several years to try to recover from the emotional blow of this happening to him. And that is how it was revealed that Nie Huaisang was the one behind all of this to get revenge for his brother.

NiNi

Xichen, man. Oh, my god.

Shan 

He’s tragic, but let’s talk about Huaisang. Oh my God, what a good reveal.

Bookworm 

Yes, let's talk about the only person who's really good at politics and only wanted to use it for own reasons, not for grabbing power or anything. I mean, it was implied at the end that he would rise to the top. That man knew how to play the game. But he would have just minded his own fucking business if nobody murdered his brother.

Ben

He just wanted to draw his porn and play with his fans.

Bookworm 

Yes! Yes!

NiNi

Gaslight gatekeep girlboss. That's what he was doing.

Shan 

He wanted to sit in the background gossiping, listening, collecting tea just for fun. But no, these bitches had to go murder his brother, and then he had to get involved.

Ben 

He understood what he was up against and his plan is really elegant and it works because he understands his friends. He knows that if Wei Wuxian comes back and you give him a little mystery to solve, this problem will sort itself out. [NiNi laughs]

Shan

He’s like, just point Wuxian at it! 

Ben

He's just like, all I need is to bring him back and Wangji has to find him first.

Bookworm

That’s it. 

Shan

And he gave them little nudges along the way to help them find the clues that they needed. He found and set up witnesses to be discovered. He was gathering all of the tea and making sure to strategically place it around where Wangji and Wuxian could find it.

Bookworm 

Do we see Nie Huaisang at the confrontation when all of this was unmasked by Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji at the Jin headquarters?

Shan 

He was not in the room.

NiNi 

He's not there. 

Bookworm 

See, so he saw the goddamn mess Jin Guangyao was able to make of that situation and then he was like, “you know what? I'm not gonna leave this to you bitches anymore.” And then he showed up at both the Burial Mounds and at the temple and he played both of those situations to how he wanted. He was like, “Su She, what are you doing? Why are you being weird?”

Shan 

The great thing about the reveal is when you go back and look at earlier scenes, he is in the background of so many crucial scenes where he is gathering information totally unobtrusively. You don't even notice he's there, but he is.

NiNi 

I notice, because I notice the fan. I always see the fan.

Ben

It's in the past too, like he's one of the people who picks up on the intensity of Wangji and Wei Wuxian's relationship. He doesn't have any aspirations about it, but he's clearly aware of it ‘cause he watches it happen.

NiNi 

Not just watches, I'm pretty sure that he showed Wei Wuxian the porn that he then shows to Lan Wangji. 

Ben 

He did.

Bookworm 

He did!

Shan

And there was that whole segment where he was tagging along on their date, bein’ a third wheel.

Bookworm 

That was so funny.

Ben 

He is relying upon them to help him achieve his ends here. But, like, they were also his friends.

Shan 

That is probably one of my favorite mystery reveals in drama. Very good shit.

Bookworm

Excellent. I remember being just gobsmacked with my jaw on the floor when I read the books and got to the reveal. Yeah, I just blacked out and my ears started ringing. I flashbacked everything that happened for the last five books and tried to figure out. It was so good. 

This is exactly why this show has really good rewatch value. Once you know all the information, you see from episode one how all of them connects. It's so satisfying.

44:14 The Second Life: Various Random Musings

NiNi 

Let's do the best moments in the second life in reverse. So, Ben, you go first.

Ben 

Wen Ning revealing the history of the core to Jiang Cheng. Honestly, the entire set of reveals around the end of the Yi City arc and the reveals at the Lotus Pier, because you get to see how fickle the politics of this era have been. As soon as some folks come forward with some information, everybody's like, “Oh my goodness me, oh no.” 

And I really love the confrontation where Jiang Cheng’s being a bitch again and Wen Ning is like, “I've had enough!” And reveals everything that's going on and you see how devastated Wangji is about this too, with him finally piecing together what was wrong with Wei Wuxian all this time. 

I also really like Wei Wuxian mentoring the juniors in Yi City. Because he's actually good at it. And it makes you sad for what Jiang Cheng was hoping he would get out of Wei Wuxian. Because Wei Wuxian actually is good with young people and good at teaching them stuff.

Shan 

He would have actually been a really good head disciple.

Ben 

Yeah, and it's what he wanted. He genuinely had no designs upon Jiang Cheng's legacy. He really wanted to just support him. He thought that maintaining the dynamic that their fathers had was going to be the best thing of his life. Which is what's so sad about it all.

NiNi 

I think my favorite moments actually are moments within those scenes that you're talking about. When everything goes down at Lotus Pier and Wen Ning spills the tea, there's a moment when Lan Wangji asks, “Was it painful?” And I just fucking broke. He's just found out that this man essentially sacrificed himself for his brother and never told anybody. And he's remembering all the times he got on his ass about it. And all he can think is, “Oh my god, did it hurt him when they did this, when he took out his core?” I was ruined, absolutely fucking ruined. 

And then the time that I giggled, I had a great time, is in the Yi City arc, when Lan Wangji is fighting Xue Yang and Wen Ning is fighting the puppets. And Wei Wuxian is like, well, what am I supposed to do? And then he sees the kids and he's like, “I can do that.” That was a great moment for me as well. 

But then my ultimate moment, and I've been obsessed with this moment since I saw it, is when they're back at Cloud Recesses after they've fled the Jin clan and Lan Xichen is hiding them. And he's talking to Wei Wuxian and Wei Wuxian is starting to think a little bit about what Lan Zhan means to him. And then Lan Zhan walks up, hair down and soft, with two bottles of Wuxian's favorite liquor. They should not be drinking in Cloud Recesses because it's one of their 3000 rules or whatever. He don't care. He loves his man. He missed his man. This man could get anything that he wants. So he comes up with two jugs of the Emperor's Smile and his hair all soft and sexy. And I'm like, “oh, they gone fuck tonight!” They did not, but they should have.

Shan 

[laughs] In our hearts they did.

Ben

Bookworm, favorite moments from the second life?

Bookworm 

One of my favorite movements is the one that I already talked about, the whole confrontation at the steps of the Jin manor when Lan Wangji says that he will walk the single plank path with Wei Wuxian. The reason why it's one of my favorites is, that line is the culmination of 16 years of regret. Lan Wangji was introduced to us as this extremely repressed and extremely by the book, follow the rules guy who grew up in this clan whose politics also seem to be, “We are not gonna do anything unless it becomes a direct and very visible active threat. We're not gonna get into the machinations of the dirty politics stuff. We're just gonna stay above it all.” And then this man sees how not commenting, not acting and letting it become a monster which they can then fight has consequences. And how him not questioning and blindly following all of those rules, how his entire upbringing basically led to the death and complete destruction of the love of his life. And then he had 16 fucking years in solitude regretting all of his actions. Then we finally see Wei Wuxian come back and we see the political world wanting to do the same thing once again to Wei Wuxian. He was like, “Bitch, no, not this time.” And he goes for it. That was such an amazing line and the whole arc of how it came about is why it's one of my favorites. 

Another one, this one's subtler. It's all the looks Jiang Cheng gives Wei Wuxian when they get to the Lotus Pier after their confrontation at the Burial Mounds. Like, he stops and looks at Wei Ying and Wen Ning before they enter, like, “Do you really think you can walk into this place?” And then Wen Ning just walks away. Then they get to the main hall and he turns around once again. And he's like, “Do you think I'm gonna let you into the throne room?”And then Wei Ying just sits on the steps without another word. 

That man is so good. Jiang Cheng’s actor.

Shan 

Let's put some respect on his name. Wang Zhuo Cheng is the actor's name and he is fantastic.

Bookworm 

Fantastic. So good. He is such a nuanced character and there's always at least three different emotions that he's feeling at any given moment. Every time it's just a complicated mess of things that's going on in his head and you can see him playing it out. The first time we see him interact with Wei Wuxian after he's resurrected, you see the doubt and you see that he suspects that this is Wei Wuxian. In that scene somewhere, there's a moment where you can see that he is hopeful but he's also just raging. You see that he's so mad and if he finds out that this is Wei Wuxian, he's gonna tear him apart. That's what that looks means. But he's also so sad that is what it has come to. That was his brother and now he wants to kill him, very rightfully so, but you see him just fighting all of those differing emotions inside him and you see it all on his face. 

Jiang Cheng, on the whole, that character is just extremely complicated, extremely tragic and he was played so beautifully.

Shan 

Y'all talked about some of my favorite moments already, but some additional ones that no one's mentioned yet. First of all, let me just give a shout out to second life Lan Wangji and his sense of humor. That man is fuckin’ funny. He is making fun of Wei Wuxian all the time after he's resurrected. It's so subtle, but it's so well done. I love every scene where he is basically mocking him for not remembering things from the past. [laughs] I love every scene where he's teasing him about, “Bitch, I know who you are because you played our love song as soon as you woke up.” But Wei Wuxian never figures it out. He does not understand that that is the reason Lan Wangji instantly knew who he was. I love all of those scenes.

NiNi 

And then at the end he's like, are we ever gonna give this song a title? And he's like, “Bitch, you really can't remember anything, do you?”

Shan 

Come on! [NiNi and Shan laughs] It already has a title.

Bookworm 

Obviously everybody would have caught it at this point, but in the first arc when they were stuck in the cave fighting the tortoise, when Wei Wuxian asks him what is the name of the song, you see him slowly drifting off, you see the scene blurring, but it is very clear that Lan Wangji mouths “Wangxian” at him, 

Shan 

Yeah, he says it. 

Bookworm

Which is is insane. Like how did they get it in?

Shan

I'm gonna give Wuxian a pass for not perceiving that because he was very feverish and passing out when he said it. When he resurrects in his second life, he doesn't know why he knows the song and he doesn't know where it's from. But it's, like, in his soul and he just plays it without even knowing why. That is why Wangji knows who he is immediately, despite the fact that in the book, he's in a completely different body. In the show, he's wearing that silly mask. All of the scenes connected to that are so funny to me. Obviously, there's a lot of comedy in the drunken shenanigans. 

The other part that I like about the second life arc is the moments where Wei Wuxian kind of gives himself away with his fantasies about Wangji. One of the most stark ones to me is, the only memory he has of his parents is of his mother riding the donkey while his dad leads the donkey down the road. And then we see Wuxian orchestrate recreating this moment with Wangji. He gets on Lil’ Apple and he has Wangji walking beside leading the donkey. And the show never actually comments on it, they just show you. It's so clear, like, in his mind, even when he is still not really fully clicked into his feelings, what his fantasies actually are about the life that he wants with Wangji. I love that. 

And then, this all culminates in the ultimate family moment of him realizing who Sizhui is. I fuckin’ love that scene at the end of the show where Sizhui runs up and tells Wei Wuxian that he knows who he is. And it finally clicks for Wuxian that this is A-Yuan. And without Lan Zhan saying a word, he puts it together that Wangji has rescued this kid who he was helping to raise in the Burial Mounds and raised him as his own son. And that he did that in large part for Wuxian. 

You just see the emotions over Wei Wuxian's face as he just puts this together and looks at Wangji. He starts crying. It's such a perfect, happy, joyful moment, him realizing A-Yuan is okay. He survived. He is this kid that he has already come to love as Sizhui, and then realizing that Wangji did that for him. It was beautiful. And then Sizhui clinging onto his leg and just being so happy to be reunited with his Xian-gege from his previous life. Such good shit! 

The show gives it away early on who Sizhui is. So it's not about a reveal there. It's about the emotional culmination of all of them finally putting together who they are to each other. One of my favorite moments in the whole show.

56:32 Page to Screen (and Audio, and Anime, and Stage, and...)

NiNi 

All right, we're three hours. We gotta wrap this up.

Ben 

The only thing I’ll mention in terms of other adaptations, there is an anime version of this, which better mimics the pacing and structure of the novelization. Also, the giggly version of Wei Wuxian that you get in the anime better reflects what I felt like I was reading. Though I do appreciate the way Xiao Zhan approached the character, who realized that all that giggling would be aggravating as hell. He instead does like a very peculiar smirk, which I think is a much better choice for the drama.

Shan

Yeah, it works better on the screen. In terms of story structure, I do prefer the novel structure. Intercutting between the present and flashbacks, it preserves the mysteries a lot better. The show, if you're paying close attention, you can solve everything far in advance because you're just given a lot more information in chronological order that you didn't have while reading the book. So, I do prefer the structure of the book for the mystery purpose. But the show, I think, made the right choices for a screen adaptation.

Bookworm 

We should probably talk about the ending.

Ben

I will say that I don't hate it. Considering the horrors that Twig and I have lived through in queer cinema and BL, they didn't brutally slaughter them or break them up in an unforgivable way at the end of the narrative. I think ending on an ambiguous note is one of the nicest things that this show did for these characters considering the censored nature of this. Everybody who follows any amount of lore knows this is based upon a novel that's way spicier. By not ending on a dour note, I think it makes the curious audience more likely to go read the novels if they want to see what the explicit romance looks like. And I think that's an overall good choice considering the obstacles they were up against. I don't think it's great, but I'm not mad about it. 

The whole show is censored, we know a romance is occurring, but technically one isn't.

Shan 

Bookworm, how did you feel about it?

Bookworm 

Like I said before, I am very used to watching stories culminate in a very ambiguous ending. I've seen so many movies, just ends in a shot of like, I don't know, two people standing staring into the distance. Like Ben said, you are aware that this is a censored BL. That is one of the things that impacts how you receive this ending a lot. 

I read the books first, I could see all of the things that they had to walk around to make this get through the censors but also make an effort to depict the romance in any way they can. When I got to the ending, I will be honest, I started screaming—

Shan 

You did, I was there. It was actual screaming.

Bookworm 

When he stopped Wei Ying, and Wei Ying turns around and they go into the song, I was heartbroken. I was so mad. At that point, I have all the information. I know that they're not gonna end how they ended in the books. But still, it was so heartbreaking to watch this man walk away from Wei Wuxian. It is such an out of character moment. There is no way the Lan Wangji that I read about and the Lan Wangji that was depicted in the show for so long would walk away from Wei Wuxian. 

When we eventually got to the end of the song and Lan Zhan calls Wei Wuxian’s name and he just turns around and we end on this frame where we assume that Wei Wuxian sees him and just breaks into the smile… there was no other ending where the art could survive and get to its audience.

I'm sad that we did not see the actual story, but it was left open to our imagination that Lan Wangji found him again and they're gonna get back together, and I was happy with that.

Shan

Almost every cdrama ends this way. And this includes het cdramas, not just queer ones. Where, if a character has been morally gray, if a character has used magic, if a character has done anything that precludes them from being a perfect, pure person, they're not going to get a happy ending. They're going to get an ambiguous ending. This is just how cdramas work. So, I read the ending as exactly what needed to happen to get this show to air. 

Absolutely, there's no way in hell that Wangji would ever become the chief cultivator because he fuckin’ hates clan politics and he's bad at it. No way that he would ever do this or that anyone would ever want him to. But I recognized that instantly as Chinese nationalism rearing its head for censorship reasons. He needed to devote himself to the state. He had to separate from Wei Wuxian because they weren't allowed to have a happy ending because they use magic and because they did morally gray things. Wei Wuxian had to go and wander the world alone to atone for his sins, quote unquote. These are all really classic censorship things.

I feel strongly that the creators of this show trusted the fans to know why they needed to do these things and to just brush off the pieces of it that don't make sense and understand the real ending. Outside of the trappings of the plot of what happened there, we saw them exchange these meaningful looks. They did a fucking duet together. And then we end on this beautiful scene of Wei Wuxian standing on a cliff playing their song and turning around after hearing Wangji call his name. And smiling as his eyes fill with tears. That is a gorgeous ending. I am so impressed that they were able to work that in in a way that would not preclude the other things they needed to do for censorship reasons.

NiNi 

I'm annoyed, I'm just gonna say it, but I also know why it happens. But the fact that it ends ambiguously is not what bothers me. I really just do not believe that Lan Wangji would ever take over the clan or that he would let Wei Wuxian leave while he did it. It just doesn't fly for me even with everything going on with Lan Xichen. To me they should have just ended where they see Wen Ning and Lan Sizhui off and then they could have just ridden off into the sunset. 

Shan

Yeah, they definitely could not do that for censorship reasons, but I hear you.

NiNi 

I know, I feel like that's the ending I would have been the most satisfied with. Even if the last shot of them was just of them there, standing together and Lan Wangji giving him that look that says we have to part or Wei Wuxian walking away and Lan Wangji standing there, even that would have been more ambiguous to me because I could have spun it in my head as “oh, he's just watching his man walk away and then he's going to run and catch up with him.” But the whole part where he goes back to the clan and he becomes the clan leader, that just doesn't fly with me.

Bookworm 

NiNi, you know what the fix for this is. You just have to read the books. That's the plug.

Shan 

Read the books and a long list of fanfic that I will be sending you later today.

Bookworm

Yes.

NiNi 

Already, Twig has provided, I have read the smutty parts of the books, thank you, Twig. So I have read the full and proper ending and I am quite satisfied with that. And Shan is gonna send me a list of fics, so I’m fine. I'm not a fic girl usually, but in this story it's absolutely necessary. Just too many gaps that I need to fill.

Shan

That's why there are 50,000 fanfics on AO3 for this show. [laughs]

Bookworm 

There are so many fanfics. At one point you read so many of them that you forget what's canon and what's fanon. That's how it goes.

NiNi 

I'm waiting for Shan to curate me a list.

Bookworm 

I do wanna include an earnest plug for the books, though. I think the creators want you to, they've done their best.

Shan 

Yeah, they want you to go there.

Bookworm 

Exactly, they want you to go to the books. And without spoiling much of it, if you want a little bit motivation to go to the books, Lan Wangji only gets drunk once in the show. It happens so many times in the books. 

NiNi 

More than once, more than once. He passes out a few times.

Shan 

He does, but there are more extended drunken shenanigan scenes in the book. There are several.

Bookworm

The wall slowly comes down. Wei Wuxian gets slowly just unraveled, trying to understand what the fuck is going on with Lan Zhan, why is he acting like this when he's drunk? Those are my favorite sequences and I hope it convinces you to go read the books.

NiNi 

Between now and May it's textbooks and case studies. After that we'll see what happens.

Bookworm 

I'm talking to the people, NiNi. I'm also in the same graduate school hell with you.

Ben 

Begging the listeners to go read the books.

Shan

Go read these damn books.

01:07:04 Afterlife: The Impact of The Untamed on BL and Fandom

Ben

We're living in the post-Untamed world. This show brought a shit ton of people to BL who had not been here before. And a bunch of people who had not engaged with Chinese daytime dramas, probably ever, genuinely started watching them after this. Despite how the censors may feel about a queer/not queer work being so popular, this show has had a huge impact on many people's willingness to engage with Chinese media. After the addicted stuff, we had basically written off China. And The Untamed, even five years later, continues to be the reason why people keep hoping that the Chinese creative teams will be able to get more stories to us.

The downside of all of this, fans are still super feverish about this. And AO3 ends up getting banned in China.

Shan 

There was, as always happens in fandom, people writing real person fiction about the actors instead of fan fiction about the characters. And Xiao Zhan's fans got very upset about people posting smutty real person fiction about him.

Ben 

We've talked about some of the fan issues with getting overly possessive about the idols and the actors. This is part of what the party cracked down on. After Word of Honor maybe pushed the envelope too far and the ensuing drama after that, we haven't really gotten much big Chinese BL since then. We started seeing more of it again last year, but there are still projects from, like, 2020 that have been shelved that we've been hoping get released to us. 

It's complicated because you can tell that the powers that be want the attention and tourism associated with it, but it doesn't conform to some of their civic management goals. It's not like the Chinese people are any different than everyone else in the world. They eat the fuck out of BL. Like, they're the primary consumers of 2gether. So, I don't know.

Shan 

There's been a real dearth of quality Chinese BL since. The few productions that started to come out last year are mostly being produced in other countries like in Singapore or in Hong Kong. We're starting to see danmei productions and adaptations happening in Thailand or in Taiwan, that's how these things are getting made now. 

Despite that, the fandom around this show is immense. It is not slowing down. The books have been out for 10 years. The show has been out for six years. New fans still find it every day. Create new fan works every day. New meta all the time. New fanfic all the time. It endures. This is a story that has really connected with people globally. It's something pretty amazing to see.

NiNi 

I would like to personally thank Xiao Zhan and Wang Yibo in particular. Because sirs, you did what you needed to do.

Shan 

Amen, sister.

NiNi 

And what you needed to do was break my heart on a regular basis and be extremely attractive while doing it. Good job.

Ben

I'm really surprised by how much the show succeeded. They did not have a lot of money. They were filming in kind of unsafe ways, two people literally died making this show. But it's kind of wild how much genuine talent they got on this production. Like, nobody's really slacking on this. It's a really impressive project considering this is a web drama.

It's hard to really give final thoughts on the show. I just end up incredibly impressed by what they managed to pull off.

NiNi 

I think to close, I will just say a short summary of everything we've just talked about as follows: The Untamed is a story about an itinerant, freelance, accidental genocidal maniac and the man who pays all his bills and defends his life. And it's amazing. And you should go watch it. That's all we have to say.

Shan

It's a must watch, I think, from The Conversation.

NiNi 

What's the point of even rating it? 

Ben 

Yeah, it's not one that I really wanna give a real rating to. Under the Ben scope, it'd be like a 9. Most people should watch it.

Shan 

Yeah, it kind of transcends that ratings thing that we normally do. If you care about BL, if you care about queer media, if you care about Asian drama, you should watch this show. It's foundational.

Bookworm 

This is a very carefully constructed narrative with so many moving parts. And I think that's the appeal. It just gives you so much to noodle on. Don't be scared that this will not be your cup of tea.

Shan

You'll find something to love.

Bookworm

There is so much going on that something will grab you and you will just be forever obsessed with the story. Go watch it or go read it and then come talk to us about it. Tag us.

NiNi

That is going to wrap us up after three hours and 20 minutes of unedited time on—

Ben 

I'm so hungry.

NiNI

—The Untamed.

Shan 

We did pretty good!

NiNi 

I've been chomping on grapes this entire time, thank god.

Bookworm 

I have to go make dinner. 

NiNi

Alright, we out. Say bye to the people, Bookworm.

Bookworm

Bye people!

NiNi 

Say bye to the people, Shan. 

Shan 

Bye, y'all.

NiNi

Say bye to the people, Ben.

Ben

Peace!

[sweetconfections]

[Watcher story discussion below]

Personally icked that the very first post I see after coming back from finishing the watcher is an extrapolation over why the ancients are so dastardly and egotistical and won't someone think of the poor iterators.

Perhaps it my luck, just a weird thing to drop into after that emotional ride of a story. The furthest thing from the first thought in my head.

The watcher takes us on a very personal journey, and it's tragic and paints a picture wider than the nobles we are presented with in vanilla.

I want to cry. That poor echo, homesick and not ready to move on. Seemingly a child taken on to ascension with everyone they knew and cared about, left behind not for ego or pride.

"Thank you for coming. I couldn't have done this alone. But I fear what is next." I fear what is next. We were there to guide them, and give them the comfort of not being alone, and they were finally able to complete their ascension.

We dont know what comes next, but the existence they were trapped inside was not one they deserved. Countless echoes are out there, "Aloof. Alone. Afraid." I can't help but feel for whatever their personal stories could be.

A week before the watcher dropped, this was fresh in my mind. I envisioned the story of an ancient who loved life and art and the culture of their people. An acient left devastated by the mass ascension of their people. That everyone else was ready before them. And their drive to ascension was the heartache of being left behind. Alone. Would they ascend correctly, or would their longing leave them bound inbetween?

It's sad!!!

[dykesynthezoid]

Actually u know what swinging a bat at the hornets nest again but it’s extremely funny that this exact circle of people got over the n word controversy w Eric Bogosian in like five minutes (which! I agree that there was nuance there and I saw some great detailed takes from Black iwtv fans, and also I don’t think you have to agree with or endorse everything a famous person has ever done to post about them sometimes)

and yet I, a person those people have personally interacted and been in community with, someone with whom these people have had a much more intimate opportunity to actually observe my character, am persona non grata, everybody block this person, callout post look out for this dangerous propagandist!!! for saying that you should listen to Jewish people and not immediately baselessly assume they love genocide when they say something you don’t find immediately digestible.

As if I were the carrier of a social disease. As if I were contagious.

Literally the logic is that “zionist” propaganda is soooo powerful that if some poor unsuspecting person tried to actually consider the content of what I was saying from a stance that was curious and empathetic, they might somehow be tricked or brainwashed by my dastardly wiles. Better to ostracize and exile me completely where I can’t hurt anyone with my dangerous evil arguments (arguments that include “just please don’t be a dick to Jews”).

Idk man maybe the thing you’re so afraid to be infected with isn’t “zionist propaganda,” maybe it’s the fact that if you treat me like a human being, you might be the next one to face a campaign of sudden and exacting social rejection without any discussion or chance to defend yourself. But whatever