#it's bad for my wallet

[shijiujun]

Final Thoughts on KDTM + Finale

Where do I even begin?! Honestly this show was filled with a number of plotholes but as long as you're not watching for logic but stupid men in love it's 100% fine XD Like there's really so much to love about the mafia fam dynamic, and this one gave me so many surprises!!

Perfect acting, much better than most Taiwan BLs I've seen - none of that awkward whatever, they were super into it, and it's no wonder too since Hsu Kai is a long-time actor and Jiang Dian is a talented boy who already has an award for a role under his belt, and it SHOWED?!

They've got the childhood friends growing up together plot, the student x teacher, the on-the-road saving thing, all the smexy plots, and they're really not shy to show just how much they desire each other, but it didn't feel like the smexy scenes were THE point which is such a feat considering how many there were LMAO, they've got the old man yaoi, the EVERYTHING

DRAMA >>>> NOVEL so much like the drama filled up so many holes and even then we could probably have used another 10 episodes - novel really left out everyone else but Bai Zongyi and Fan Zherui

Every frickin like trope I liked was there, there was a bit of whump toooooo and like?!?!!? All the usually cringy stuff was great too in this one ;-; (like ahem couple cushions my god)

I AM JUST A LITTLE SAD WE DIDN't GET the part about Fan Jiang Ruichen and his boyfriend (?? maybe 7th uncle ahem??)

Very happy there was like no real amnesia and I have to say everything closed up from start to end more or less, even the last minute knifing :DDD

They really gave every CP enough screen time and I love that they were so damn extra to put every single other BL drama actor in, I'm just sad we didn't get FRICKIN CHRIS JAKE but it's okay we take what we get, because this show is proof that all our Taiwan BL couples live happily ever after okay?!!! EVEN BUY SALT CP they live in other jdramas and whatever else not JUST ARGH not this one and MODC in actuality

AI DIIIIII MY LOVE the most thoughtful, most feral, most sweet and loyal and devoted MEOW MEOW

SO MANY GOOD LINES from the drama <3 The humour was super on point as well and the slightly sad parts too <3

I WILL BE CRYING MYSELF TO SLEEP FOR FOUR WEEKS GOING COLD TURKEY FROM THIS SHOW

[lgbtlunaverse]

What kind of saber is baxia anyway?

I love my bloodthirsty princess of a cursed blade, and in my heart of hearts i am nothing but a sword nerd, so i've been extremely fascinated by Baxia and how we know frustratingly little about what she actually looks like!

I mean, look at bichen, right?

Bichen in the donghua:

Bichen in the drama:

They're clearly not exactly the same. The scabbards are different, and the guards have a different shape. But these are recognizably different iterations on one theme, right? Thin jian with a white grip silver guard, light blue tassel and silver mounting accents on the scabbard.

Now this is baxia in the donghua:

And baxia in the drama:

????????

THAT'S A COMPLTELY DIFFERENT WEAPON

it doesn't stop there either, the audio drama is kind enough to give us ANOTHER COMPLETELY DIFFERENT BAXIA

pretty! But how is that he same sword??

And when we go back to the novel, we get very little information on her appearance other than the fact that her blade is tinted red with all the blood she's absorbed. Which none of these designs incorporate.

This is not a dig on the designs itself, they're all quite gorgeous in their own right and i'm going to spend a while discussing all of them! Because isn't it fascinating how, since we know little about novel baxia beyond "saber" all of these designs ended up so different? What kinds of sabers are these, anyway?

So, a chinese aber, aka a "dao" (刀) just means a sword that has only one cutting side. As opposed to a jian, which has two.

You can see how that leaves a LOT of room for variaton.

I've actually seen some people get confused because Huaisang's saber in the untsmed is thin and quite straight, making it superficially resemble the jian more than drama!baxia, but it is still clearly a saber!

See? only one cutting blade!

This, to me looks a lot like a tang dynasty hengdao

credit to this blog for providing his image and being a great source for all this going forward.

TANGENT: during all this I found out the english wikipedia page for dao is WRONG! Ths is what they about the tang hengdao!

So that sounds like the hengdao was called that during the sui dynasty, but then, after that, started being called a peidao, right?

WRONG

I LOOKED AT THE SOURCE THEY USED AND IT SAYS THIS:

IT WAS CALLED THE PEIDOU UNTIL THE SUI DYNASTY, AT WHICH POINT IT WAS CALLED A HENGDAO. Which would carry over to the Tang dynasty. This was the source wikipedia linked! and it says something else than they say it does!

Anyone know how to edit a wikipedia article?

ANYWAY

BACK TO BAXIA

Since we're already at the drama, let's look at drama baxia: She's also straight! the general term for straight-backed saber is Zhibeidao, but that's a modern collector's term, and doesn't really say anything about which historical kind of saber baxia could be based on. Another meta i found on the drama nie sabers already went on some detail here.

I'm gonna expand on that a little: The kinds of historical straight-backed sabers we see resemble the hengdao a lot more than they do baxia. They don't go to their point as harsly as she does (she's basically a cleaver!) and they're all way skinnier.

No, my personal theory is that instead of being based on any kind of historical sword, drama!baxia is based on a Nandao.

I mean, come on, look at it!

Baxia!

The Nandao... isn't actually a historical sword. It was invented for Wushu forms. There's a really fascinating article about its conception, but that's why the swords in the images look a little thin and flimsy. Wushu swords are very flexible and light, they're dance props, not weapons to fight with. There are actual steel versions of Nandao, but they're recreations of the prop, not the other way around.

So That's one way in which Baxia differes from the Nandao: she's actually a real weapon. The other is that, as you can see above, the nandao has an S-shaped guard. Baxia doesn't. She's also much more elaborately decorated, of course. Because she's a princess.

Now: audio drama baxia!

This is much easier. with that flare at the tip?

Oh baby that's a niuweidao, all the way!

There are more sabers with that kind of curved handle, but the broad tip is really charcteristic of the niuweidao. The Niuweidao is also incredibly poplar in modern media, often portrayed as a historical sword, but it originated i nthe 19th century! And it was actually never used by the military!

That's right, the Niuweidao was pretty much exclusively a civilian weapon! That makes its use here anachronistic, but so is the nandao, and considering that the origin story of the Nie is that they use Dao intead of Jian because their ancestors were butchers, portraying them with a weapon historically reserved for rebels and common people instead of the imperial military is actually very on theme!

Finally, Donghua/Manhua baxia. These two designs are so similar I'm going to treat them as one and the same for now.

Unlike both previous baxias, The long handle makes it clear this baxia is a two-handed weapon, though Nie Mingjue is absolutely strong enough to wield her with one hand anyway. Normal rules don't count for cultivators.

Now, this is where things get tricky, because there are a lot of words for long two-handed sabers. And a lot of them are interchangable! This youtube video about the zhanmadao, one of the possible sabers this baxia could be based on, goes a little into just how confusing this can get. This kind of blade WAS actually in military use for many centuries, making it the most historically accurate of all the baxias. But because of that it also has several names and all of those names can also refer to different kinds of blades depending on what century we're in.

So here's our options: i'm going to dismiss the wodao and miandao, because these were explicitly based on japanese sword design, and as we can see manhua baxia has that very broad tip, so that won't work

(Example of a wodao. According to my sources Miaodao is really just the modern common term for the wodao, and the changdao, and certain kinds of zhanmadao... do you see how quickly this gets confusing?)

Next option: Zhanmadao.

Zhanmadao stands for "horse chopping saber" so... yeah they were anti-cavalry weapons. meant to be able to cut the legs and/or necks of horses. That definitely sounds like a weapon Nie Mingjue would wield. But if you watched that youtube video i linked above, you'll know the standardized Qing dinasty Zhanmadao looked very different from earlier versions. It was inspired by the japanese odachi, and more resembles the miandao than its ealrier heftier counteprarts.

Earlier Ming dynasty Zhanmadao on the other hand were... basically polearms. the great ming military blog spot, another wonderful source, says these are essentially a kind of podao/pudao (朴刀) which looked like this

Now that blade looks a lot like baxia, but the handle is honestly too long. Donghua!baxia straddles the line between sword an polearm a little, but while zhanmadao have been used to refer to both long-handled swords and polerarms, this was undeniably a polearm, not a sword.

If you want to know what researching this was like, I found a picture of this blade on pinterest-- labeled as a "two-handed scimitar"-- and the comment section was filled with people arguing about whether this was a Pudao, Wudao, Zhanmadao, Dadao, Guandao, or a japanese Nagita.

So... that's how it was going. This has kept me up until 2 AM multiple times.

However! Thanks to this article on the great ming military blog I found out there have historically been pudao blades with shorter handles!

Specifically, Ming dynasty military writer Cheng Ziyi created a modified version of the pudao to work with the Dan Fao Fa Xuan technixues-- aka technqiues for a two-handed saber, which would alter heavily influence Miaodao swordmanship-- thereby, as the article points out, essentially merging the cleaver-polearm type Zhanmadao with the later two-handed japanese-inspired design.

This is the illustration for the Wu Bei Yao Lue (武備要略) a Ming dynasty military manual

This blade shape in the illustration doesn't match Baxia exactly, but since it's a lengthened Pudao-like blade and we've seen above that those can match Donghua Baxia's shape, i'm gonna say that calling Baxia a Zhanmadao with a two-handed grip isn't all that innacurate!

However, because all of these terms are so intertwined, there are a dozen other things you could call her that would be about equally correct.

To show that, here's a lightning round of other potential Baxia candidates:

Dadao (大刀)

Which are generally one-handed and too short. However!

Another youtube video i found of someone training with a Zhanmadao that resembles baxia a little also calls it a "shuangshoudai dao" (雙手带 刀) shuangshou means two-handed, and while 雙手带 seems to refer to a longer handled weapon, when looking for a shuangshou dao or shuangshou dadao (双手大刀) we find a lot more baxia-resembling blades like here and here

I also found that, while the cleaver-like Dadao is strictly a product of the 20th centuy, since dadao just means big sword or big knife, it has been used to refer to loads of different weapons! Some people could've called the zhanmadao and pudao "dadao" during the Ming dynasty as well.

Another potential baxia candidate that mandarin mansion classifies as similar to the later dadao (though longer, as seen in the illustration below) is the "Kuanren Piandao"

Which piqued my interest because this diagram classifying different tpye of Dao:

Claims that a Kuanrenbiandao (diferent spelling, same sword) is the same as a modern day Zhanmadao.

(So once again, all of these terms are interchangable)

Another opton Is the Chuanmeidao/Chuanweidao (船尾刀) below you can see a diagram, based on the Qing dynasty green standard army regulation, of blades all officially classified as types of "pudao"

The top middle is the Kuanren Piandao, and bottom left is the Chuanweidao.

Both of these have a lot of baxia-like qualities.

So there you go! live action baxia is based on a Nandao, audio drama baxia is based on a Niuweidao, and Manhua/donghua baxia is some kind of two-handed Zhanmadao/Pudao/Dadao depending on how you want to look at it.

I'm honestly surprised no one has made the creative decision to portray Baxia as a Jiuhuandao, aka 9 ringed broadsword yet.

I mean look at it! Incredibly imposing. Would make for a great Baxia imo. (@ upcoming mdzs manga and mobile game: take notes!)

[bizarreandjarring]

idea from this

[a11eya]

also fyi when bakugou says you smell like (todoroki’s) shitty cologne he says it’s shitty bc he’s annoyed and petty 🙄

but in actuality todoroki smells super yummy fr… my guy has family wealth ofc he wears expensive, delicious fragrances

[adamshallperish]

new hozier and ethel cain out... big day for annoying people

[martianbugsbunny]

So I just spent the last ten minutes all-capsing at my mom over text about Kalluzeb, and she said this:

the holy grail of canon kalluzeb content, is adorable, so she gets it

[arielluva]

theyre soooooo pretty i like this doll so much more than i thought i would

[detectiveneve]

@eggsaladed surprised me with this BEAUTIFUL piece of my tav, emrys, and I've been holding it up and showing it to everyone who is in breathing distance since. the armor? the expression? the NOSE? thank you so so soo much, I'm so in awe of how you took some blathering of mine about medieval-tragic-joanofarc-boyknight nonsense and turned it into something REAL and PERFECT and anyways, I'm totally normal about it. eggs does amazing stuff & everyone should go check out her other art, it's so impressive and I'm just wagghrhrhrhrrrrr <- [wailing sounds]

[suffer-my-beloved-mutuals]

Who wants to see something fun and cool and not at all concerning

[seilnakyle]

Russell saying Dark age Bruce falls in love with Selina at the police station is very funny to me because SHE walked away from that interaction plotting to mug him 😭

[lavender-femme]

i miss getting all dressed up

🥀 men | minors | terfs do not fucking interact 🥀

[bwobgames]

Where can a humble girl buy some background music

Not even full on orchestral I just need some yume nikki vibes

[ghu-leh]

GUYSSS GUYSSS GUYSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS GUYSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

[redhead-reporter]

º ✧ 。i don't think you understand. if these exist in her universe? mj bought SO. MANY. like all of the ones at her local store and a few more online. they hang like fuckin' MISTLETOE in the doorways of her house

[toxiccaves]

Apparently there are plans to complete the rest of the build team!? Unless I am misreading this. Hopefully we can see Power Joe, Mccrane, and Dumpson soon! Perhaps this means we can even expect shadowmaru and kagerou...

Pre-orders for Duke Fire and Gunmax open tomorrow on the premium bandai website.

Duke is 9,900 Yen including tax ($67.20 USD)

Gunmax is 7,920 Yen including tax ($53.76 USD)

They are scheduled to ship in December of this year. I think you can purchase directly from the website without a proxy service? But I'm not entirely sure until their store page is up.

[stars-n-spice]

My outfit for tomorrow:

catch me sobbing on the floor in booty shorts :')