#eirenical.screencaps

[eirenical]

Mysterious Lotus Casebook | Episode 3

A few hours later...

I legit forgot this moment happened until I rewatched this episode and I'm going fucking feral about it now.

So, a few facts laid out:

Li Lianhua is in possession of a very expensive and rare piece of silk armor that Di Feisheng was known to wear.

He uses it as a pot holder.

He picked it up on "the beach" a "few" years ago.

Reading between the lines of this set of exchanges, he either picked it up on the beach after their fight or he had it in his possession already. And either way, I'm losing my mind because this is what Di Feisheng's armor looks like:

His outer armor is usually dark or bright red. So this silk armor has to be an underlayer like the one you can see here peaking out from underneath his collar. Which means that no matter HOW Li Lianhua got it, Di Feisheng must have been at least partially disrobed at some point for it to have come off his body.

I'll uh... leave that to your imagination how that happened. ;D

But what really gets me is the use of the shirt. It's in kind of sorry condition because he's been using it as a potholder/trivot for (presumably) ten years. So that could be a sign of disrespect.

Or it could be a sign of exactly the opposite.

Because what's the one thing that Li Lianhua is quickest to brag about from the last ten years? He learned to cook. He learned to grow things and feed himself. And this is one of the few pieces of his old life he has left. He has the sachet from Qiao Wanmian. He has the soft sword that was a gift from Shan Gudao, his shixiong. He has the drinking gourd from his Master. All three of these things he keeps on him at all times.

And the one last thing he has is this silk armor from his arch rival. It's too conspicuous to wear or to carry with him. But he keeps it in his home, and he uses it every time he cooks. This thing he's most proud of. As if to carry Di Feisheng into this new life with him in whatever way he can.

And I'm just... going a bit feral about that. TT^TT

[eirenical]

Mysterious Lotus Casebook | Lian Hua Lou | 莲花楼 | Episodes 3 & 9 - The Letter

There is so much we don't know about what happened ten years ago between Sigumen and Jinyuanmeng.  A lot of it gets unraveled as the show goes on, but one thing remains true: there is a hell of a lot of unreliable narration to pick through to get to the truth.  And when it comes to the particular truths of what happened between the individual people involved, that becomes even more true.

And one of the little mysteries that always bothered me was this letter that Qiao Wanmian wrote to Li Xiangyi to break up with him.  Because I absolutely could not figure out when he actually got that letter.  Anyway, I finally caught a few details that helped me to tease that apart and my first realization was that he fucking LEFT HER ON 'READ' for about a month (Li XIangyi, PLEASE OTZ) and the second realization was that we get two different versions of these events YET AGAIN, but this time both from Li Xiangyi's POV in flashbacks, and I'm CHEWING GLASS OVER IT, so naturally I have to share.

So the first time we get this particular flashback is in episode 3.  Li Lianhua is remembering the aftermath of the Donghai Battle, how he fell into the ocean and washed up on the shore... a husk of what he had once been.

He wakes up and makes his way into town and to Sigumen's steps, overhearing all this terrible news as he walks.  People injured, homes destroyed, people killed, and so much of the blame being placed on all the sects, and on Sigumen in particular.  And as he walks, you can see it all starting to weigh him down, until he's literally bent over from the weight of it on his back.

And then the final betrayal.  His people, his friends, want to disband the sect.  They want to walk away.  They blame him and his hubris for this disaster.  And the coup-de-grace is Xiao Zijin asking Qiao Wanmian... "You don't like this place either, right?"

And the sad look on Qiao Wanmian's face finally breaks Li XIangyi of his paralysis and he turns away, back to the scene unfolding on those steps and drifts back to the shore, where he ultimately collapses.

And that's all we get.

We know he returned to Sigumen.  We know he overheard them wanting to disband the sect.  We know he left without a word.  And that's the end of the story as far as Episode 3 is concerned.

But this makes sense.  Li LIanhua is mid-Bicha attack and has just left Fang Duobing on the side of the road when this flashback comes on.  He's fighting his own body in a desperate bid for survival to complete the one task he's set himself and Fang Duobing has just dredged up all this stuff and gone off on a tear about how he's Li Xiangyi's disciple.  A road Li Xiangyi never got a chance to walk.  Another person he failed along the way.  And so he's focused on all the ways in which he is a failure in that moment, all the ways he doesn't live up to Fang Duobing's hero, Li XIangyi, all the ways that he is no longer that man.  So he zeroes in on the moment he lost it all: his reputation, his sect, his health, his power.  So that's the part of the flashback that we get.

But in Episode 9, we have an entirely different set of circumstances.  He's just saved his A-mian.  He's focused on helping her let go of the man he thinks she still loves.  He's putting himself aside to focus solely on her (or so he thinks—that's honestly a question for later, but bear with me, we'll get there ;D) and what she needs.  And we get dumped into this flashback again.

Only this time it doesn't start on the beach.  It starts here:

It starts with Li Xiangyi seeing his sect disbanded again.  Only this time, he remembers the words that come from Xiao Zijin differently:

There's no speaking out load of "you hate it here too, don't you?" or any similar sentiment.  Because at this point, Li Lianhua knows this isn't true.  She can't hate it there.  She lives there.  She didn't leave.  And she doesn't hate him because she very obviously misses him and mourns him.  So in his mind, he gives this moment a little less abrasiveness.  A little less fierceness.  But because he's so focused on A-Mian in this memory, we finally find out that there is an entire piece to this incident that we haven't gotten until now.

A-Mian's grief.

A-Mian's recognition that he was there.

And the letter.

The letter she wrote a month ago.

A letter Li Xiangyi NEVER READ.

We get to see A-Mian's regret.  We get to see her grief: both for her own sense of shame at being unable to keep up with the man she loved, and her sense of loss over her own innocence and the opportunities that they'll never have now to make amends.  And we get to see her break from her grief for just a moment to rush down those stairs because some instinct in her just won't quit.

Li Xiangyi had returned.

And she knew.

But it was too late.  She no longer trusted herself.  And Li Xiangyi, having heard her outpouring of grief, had already decided that he owed it to her and to everyone else to just… walk out of their lives for good. 

And he did. 

But he owed her one last thing first.

He owed it to her to read the letter that she'd written him a month ago and he'd never opened.

So before he goes back to that beach, he returns to his rooms in Sigumen to retrieve that unopened letter and read it.

On first watch, I had assumed this was after his healing with Monk Wuliao.  That he was RE-reading that letter, not reading it for the first time.  But these are clearly his rooms in Sigumen.  The desk he conducts business from is at the bottom right and the table he confronts Shand Gudao from is on the left. But unlike when we usually see these rooms, brightly lit during the day, they're now mostly in darkness, the sun clearly setting given the angle of the light coming into the room. This is the sunset of Li Xiangyi. The last moments of his life, in a way.

And the letter is very VERY obviously unopened when he first takes it out:

And reading that letter is the final nail in Li Xiangyi's coffin, I think.  Final proof that he'd failed in every aspect of his life: being a brother, being a lover, being a sect leader, being a friend, being a student.  After this, he leaves Sigumen and goes back to that beach to lay down where he washed back up initially, ready to let the death he temporarily escaped take him away.  And when the monk saves his life anyway, he still manages to kill off the part of him that was Li Xiangyi.  Li Xiangyi is dead, he insists over and over and over again, until he believes it himself.

Because in that letter—a letter he left unread FOR A MONTH—Qiao Wanmian manages to show him that he never really saw her at all.  That he never saw one of his dearest loved ones in pain right in front of him—pain that he finally witnessed on the steps of Sigumen as she poured out her grief and regret in sending this letter to begin with.  How ironic then, that a letter she'd sent intending to set him free of her to fly up to the heights on his own, was the final arrow that brought him down.  I don't think that's what she would have wanted at all.

But I really feel for her.  I do.

Just imagine sending this letter and knowing that it's sitting in Li Xiangyi's mail pile somewhere… and assuming that he read it and that's what spurred him on to this last desperate fight.  Because in that outpouring on the steps that clearly what she thought she did.  She thought this letter sent him to his death.  And in that moment she's wrong, because HE NEVER READ IT.  Not until long after that.  Not until after this moment.  And fucking HELL, but that just hurts me.

Maybe it wouldn't have changed anything if he hadn't witnessed that moment.  Maybe it wouldn't have changed anything if he hadn't read that letter.  Maybe he still would have felt that he'd failed enough to warrant death of some kind.

But maybe not.

I guess we'll never know.

[eirenical]

莲花楼 | Mysterious Lotus Casebook | Episode 13

Yesterday, I made a joke to a friend about Di Feisheng's quest to get Li Lianhua to fight him one more time: "Also former enemy [Di Feisheng] constantly looks like he's one step away from suggesting he fuck the will to live back into him [Li Lianhua]. XD"

...AND THEN TWO EPISODES LATER, THIS HAPPENED. XD

That is... one HELL of a wording choice. XD

...at least it looks like they're enjoying it? ;D

(Seriously though, where is the fic where Di Feisheng suggests dual cultivation as a solution? Do I have to write that one myself? XD)

[eirenical]

Mysterious Lotus Casebook | Episode 30

These screenshots are terrible, so I'm not going to bother editing them, but can we talk about the fact that Fang Duobing's mother INVENTED A CAR???

There are no horses here. All those gears in the back are what propel it forward, I think?

He Xiaohui's Cloud-Chasing Carriage IS A CAR.

She invented that.

She built that.

Episode 30 really is the gift that keeps on giving. ���😍😍

(Also, I'm doubling down now on wanting a spinoff series all about her. I think I'm in love. 😍)

[eirenical]

“Inflicting pain is easy.  Protecting someone from it... that's another story.”

-- Shades (Hei Xiazi/Hei Yanjing) from Time Raiders (the game)

...every now and then, this game drops a gem that leaves me fucking BLEEDING.

Because this really is Hei Xiazi to a tee.

And of course, my brain automatically drifts to Heiping here.  Xiazi and Xiaoge have known each other for SO LONG.  Decades, a century, possibly longer.  So Xiazi has been there, forced to bear witness to so much of the pain that Xiaoge has suffered over the course of their long lives and only very rarely has he been able to do anything about it.  Memory loss.  Betrayal.  Golmud.  Banai and the damned BASKET.  Chen Pi Ah Si.  The Bronze Gate.  And that has to eat Xiazi alive. 

Because Xiazi may talk a good game about only being in it for the money, but he’s so obviously NOT.  He cares so much about everyone, and he does everything that he can to keep people safe, to put himself in harm’s way rather than let someone else be hurt.  We see it with Xiaoge.  We see it with Wu Xie.  We see it with Xiao Hua.  We see it with Chu Chu.  We see it with the ducklings towards the end of TLTR.  We see it EVERYWHERE.

We’re on to you, Xiazi.  We know this is your driving motivation.  We know that you’re the biggest big brother/uncle/papa figure out there and that you just want to wrap your arms around people and protect them.  You just don’t want anyone to KNOW THAT.

And that’s why I love him.  ^_^

Anyway.  I hope you enjoyed this episode in “today this silly little game breaks my heart AGAIN.”  We now return you to your regularly scheduled browsing.  ^_^

[eirenical]

So, the DMBJ game runs events for many holidays. It's currently running a Valentine's Day event. This is the event image:

That's so freaking adorable, I can't even stand it. BUT ALSO.

WU XIE WHAT ARE YOU DOING. XD

Did you pass out from eating too much chocolate? Did Hei Xiazi drug you to keep you from stealing Xiao Hua's spotlight?

...is Xiaoge under there with you?

Inquiring minds want to know. XD

[eirenical]

The Lost Tomb 2: Explore with the Note | Dao Mu Bi Ji 2 | 盗墓笔记2 | Episode 32

Lieutenant Zhang Buxun and his highly attentive lover adjutant, Dou Cheng

Zhang Buxun is injured, and Dou Cheng is worried.

Zhang Buxun mourns the execution of the child who tried to assassinate him.

Dou Cheng thinks the kid had it coming to him for daring to try to kill Zhang Buxun and the General agrees, so THERE.

Zhang Buxun thinks Dou Cheng doesn't respect life and threatens to promote him!

You... You PROMOTE Dou Cheng? You promote him away from your side like he is WORTHLESS?? Hot soup for Lieutenant! Hot soup for Lieutenant until he takes it back and lets Dou Cheng stay--

NO WAIT DON'T DRINK THAT, LIEUTENANT, IT'S TOO HOT!! D: D: D:

In other words...

Help, I've fallen in love with two flashback characters that seem to be drama-only characters and I'll bet there's next to no content for them! TT^TT

[eirenical]

Guardian | Zhen Hun | 镇魂, Episode 1

It is worth noting that in the Viki subs, Professor Ouyang says, "Shen Wei, we are both people who're in contact with top secret information."

...oh REALLY. 👀

And then Shen Wei pulls his "Awww, shucks, I'm just an ordinary professor. *dimples*" look on Professor Ouyang, who just shakes his head in resignation and moves on, confessing to be stumped about what goes on in Shen Wei's mind.

What I'm saying is... whichever subs you go by, what must Professor Ouyang think of our mild-mannered Professor Shen?

Is he a top secret government agent?

A spy?

A superhero?

...Dixingren?

Mainly, I'm just sitting here thinking about Professor Ouyang being Constantly Flummoxed by Shen Wei's polite refusal to give up ANY information or clue to his identity and combined with Professor Zhou's good natured bragging about him, he must be CONVINCED that there's more to Shen Wei than there appears to be. And he must be irritated AF that he can't figure out what it is.

...And that makes me very, very happy. XD

[eirenical]

The Lost Tomb 2: Explore with the Note | Dao Mu Bi Ji 2 | 盗墓笔记2 | Episode 32

Left: Zhang Buxun being asked to join Zhang Gaoyuan.

Right: Zhang Buxun immediately after joining Zhang Gaoyuan and moving into his house.

*squints at hairstyle change*

HEY. HEY ARE YOU IMPLYING SOMETHING. I THINK YOU'RE IMPLYING SOMETHING.

😂

[eirenical]

For anyone interested, I did the meta post for this week over on sid_guardian, and I chose to discuss Da Qing’s memory loss and return and the parts that certain people played in that.

And on the oh-so-tenuous connection of Lao Li lying to cover up his part in Da Qing’s amnesia, and all those truths eventually coming to light, I’m going to say that this fills my @guardianbingo square for “lies.”  ;D

[eirenical]

@besanii​ replied to your post:                    TFW you had a GREAT meta you wanted to write… and...                

   I guess in CQL the equivalent would be the metal band LWJ/LXC have in the centre of theirs, but technically LJY is a clan disciple and his one has an embroidery and not a metal band?    

besanii replied to your post:                    TFW you had a GREAT meta you wanted to write… and...                

   Actually, non-clan disciples have forehead ribbons (see Su She), but they don’t have the cloud embroidery on them    

Yeah... that’s what I thought, too, but then I went back and looked...

Inner Disciple + Su She:

Two random outer disciples:

And every single disciple that made it into the cave had a headband and most of them didn’t have the metal cloud piece and they got in just fine.

So, I don’t knoooooooow.  OTZ

I also went and checked up on Jingyi and found out that not only did HE not have a metal cloud piece, but SIZHUI DIDN’T EITHER???

And since Sizhui is Lan Wangji’s adopted son, I would think that he definitely should have one, if anyone would?

I even went and checked in The Living Dead and he still doesn’t have one then either:

So, now I REALLY don’t know.  -.-;;;

[eirenical]

eirenical’s original content masterpost

OK, so I figured it was about time I started one of these, especially given the fact that my old tag post is so outdated, it’s not even funny.  This is going to be a work in progress because I have a LOT of content to sort through and I will probably start with just linking the big tags, but... we have to start somewhere, I guess?  ^_^

(Note: These are also going to be in backwards chronological order from newest to oldest, and there are going to be repeat posts, especially in the parts that are split by fandom, because those are search links, not tags.)

My meta: #eirenical.meta; #eirenical’s tag meta

My writing: #eirenical.fic; #snippet; #eirenical writes things; #eirenical.headcanons; #writing meme answers; #original fiction

My Edits:  #eirenical.gifs; #eirenical.videos; #eirenical.photosets; #eirenical.photos; #eirenical.screenshots (screen recordings); #eirenical.screencaps

My Fanmixes: #eirenical.fanmixes

(Note #2: I have never been able to figure out how to make tumblr links work on mobile.  None of these do.  Sorry.  :P  If you want to use any of the links in the masterpost on mobile, just open them (or the master post) in a mobile browser; then they should work just fine.)

And behind a cut for the fandom specific stuff, I think.  ^_^

Anime

Gundam Wing: Fanfiction

C-dramas | K-dramas

Granting You A Dreamlike Life: Fanfiction | Gifsets | Meta | Tag meta

Guardian: Fanfiction | Gifsets | Meta | Tag meta | Photosets

Hotel del Luna: Screenshots

The Lost Tomb 1: Fanfiction | Gifsets | Tag meta

The Lost Tomb 2 | Explore With the Note: Fanfiction | Gifsets | Tag meta

The Lost Tomb Reboot | Reunion: The Sound of Providence: Fanfiction | Gifsets | Tag meta

Mysterious Lotus Casebook: Fanfiction | Gifsets | Meta

The Untamed: Fanfiction | Videos | Meta | Tag meta | Photosets

Movies

Flatliners: Fanfiction | Gifs

A Knight’s Tale: Fanfiction

Ladyhawke: Fanfiction

The Mighty Ducks: Fanfiction

Rise of the Guardian: Fanfiction

Rocketman: Fanfiction

The Secret of Roan Inish: Fanfiction

Star Wars: Fanfiction | Meta | Tag Meta | Gifs

Musicals

Book of Mormon: Fanfiction

Hair: Fanfiction

Jesus Christ Superstar: Fanfiction

Les Miserables: The Calendar | Fanfiction | Photosets | Gifsets | Meta | Fanmixes

Newsies!: Fanfiction

Next To Normal: Fanfiction

Tommy: Fanfiction

TV Shows

The 4400: Fanfiction

Being Human UK: Fanfiction | Gifs

Law & Order SVU: Fanfiction

NCIS Los Angeles: Gifsets

Once Upon A Time: Fanfiction

Power Rangers: Fanfiction

Saved by the Bell: Fanfiction

Teen Wolf: Fanfiction

Vikings: Fanfiction