#mikke watches the untamed

[mikkeneko]

Wen Ning, carrying Jiang Cheng out of Lotus Pier on his back: This is going great! :) I am definitely going to get a good grade on my treason, a thing both reasonable to want and possible to achieve

[mikkeneko]

Nie Huaisang:

Nie Zonghui: so this is Sword Sacrifice hall

Nie Huaisang: okay cool

Nie Zonghui: where we sacrifice people to the swords

Nie Huaisang:

[mikkeneko]

I think one of the things that makes Wei Wuxian appealing to me, from a character design standpoint, is that he is a living example of the idea that a character’s good qualities and fatal flaws are the same traits.

Wei Wuxian is extremely smart! And also convinced that he’s the smartest person in the room, and he always knows best what to do, and that nobody else can have a better idea than him.

Wei Wuxian is very accomplished and capable! And also unbearably prideful, and incapable of humbling himself to accept help.

Wei Wuxian is wonderfully funny! And a lot of fun to be around, until you know  that something’s wrong and he’ll keep deflecting with jokes forever and never let you in. 

Wei Wuxian is incredibly loyal! Which is great, until he finds himself with a debt that can only be repaid by turning his back on the entire world  and rejecting all his friends and family in order to honor it.

Wei Wuxian is deeply loving! And that will lead him to mutilate himself and lie about it to suffer in silence forever for the sake of someone he loves rather than allow them to be in pain.

He’s a classic Greek tragic protagonist whose intrinsic flaws lead him inevitably into disaster, except that all his flaws are his best qualities, as well.

[mikkeneko]

haters gonna see you command a zombie army with your dark magic flute and complain that you don’t have a sword

[mikkeneko]

Wei Wuxian: ...not that I'm not enjoying this nice cozy break, but don't we have a murder mystery to solve. a perpetrator to foil. a conspiracy to unravel. a --

Lan Wangji: I spent sixteen years practicing my domestic headcanon fantasies while you were dead. Sit tf down at MY table in MY dining room in MY house and drink your wine

[mikkeneko]

2 solid years into MDZS fandom, I’ve finally gotten around to finishing watching the donghua

[mikkeneko]

Rewatched episode 1 after getting to the end of the flashback arc and realized for the first time that the guy in the street who tosses money to the storyteller was Nie Huaisang and was like OH... THAT MOTHERFUCKER... HE PAID THE DUDE TO TALK UP HOW EVIL AND VENGEFUL THE YILING PATRIARCH WAS... WHERE MO XUANYU WOULD HEAR ABOUT IT...

[mikkeneko]

On The Untamed, tragedy, and the right place to stop

I used to have a saying that I would occasionally pull out as an author to explain why I had written something sad: "The key to a happy ending is knowing when to stop."

This mostly came from a fashion that was going around a while back where fans of a story could ask the author to write Where Are They Now outtakes, small reprises that showed the characters of that story a year or two years or five years later. As it happened, most of the later outtakes that I wrote for my fics -- most of which had happy endings! -- were fairly sad. What I meant when I said that was that if the story goes on long enough, it always  ends unhappily; because eventually people die, relationships end, time brings destruction to all your works. To get a happy ending, you have to stop the story before the inevitability of sorrow.

This year I got into The Untamed. And it really got me thinking about the structure of story, and what it means to have a happy or unhappy ending. 

Because the thing is that if you stop at episode 32, The Untamed is unequivocally a tragedy. People die. The innocent are not saved. The hero's flaws provide his undoing. Those that survive are consumed by grief and punished for their loss. All that they have worked to build is lost, and the bad guys walk away with all the power.

But it's only a tragic ending if you stop there.

In the world of The Untamed, life goes on. There are still children, and children grow up. The villains are old men, and old men die. The world rebuilds itself into the hollow places caused by the destruction. And at the end of thirteen (or sixteen) years, the hero is born again, and he gets (and makes) new chances.

If you stop in the middle of the story, the ending is unhappy. If you let it run its full course, it's a happy one again.

And I think I came to realize that the idea of an unhappy ending  is as much of a fictional construct as a happy ending.  In real life, there are no neat and tidy endings. There are no endings at all. The worst day of someone’s life will be, for a different person in a different place, merely a tuesday. We craft fictional narratives and end them either happily or unhappily for a lot of reasons, to fill a lot of needs. But an unhappy ending is no more 'real’ or ‘correct’ than a happy one.

In my world, the last few years have been pretty terrible. In my world, the last year has been full of tragedy. But there has been no ending. The world goes on, and in some places it gets better. Old villains die. Children grow up. The world rebuilds.

I want to thank The Untamed for teaching me: the ending is only unhappy if you choose to stop the story there.

[mikkeneko]

man Wei Wuxian is straight-up not having a good time

[mikkeneko]

i honestly think it’s kind of hilarious that Wei Wuxian is generally such an outgoing and friendly guy -- it’s a consistent pattern that he goes out of the way to be nice and supportive even towards people who normally get disdained or overlooked

but every single interaction he has with Jin Zixuan -- the nicest of the Jins!! not that that’s much of a bar -- has been full on MEET ME IN THE ALLEY BEHIND THE CLUB IN 10 MINUTES FOR AN ASSKICKING

[mikkeneko]

Watching Fatal Journey  at last, and the main thing I’m taking away from this so far is that Nie Huaisang is an ace fucking comedian

[mikkeneko]

it’s Donghua Time! 

i’m expecting a lot of fabulous magical effects and magnificant hair and that’s about all, really

I actually came to like the idea of watching the donghua a lot more once people started complaining about it making a bunch of weird changes. ironically, it takes a lot of the pressure off to watch a thing if people aren’t waving it in my face as The One True Adaptation Everybody Has To Like Best.

[mikkeneko]

[mikkeneko]

me: I like this fic except it does kind of rely on the device of Lan Wangji failing to communicate in any kind of useful way to Wei Wuxian for the first two-thirds of it 

me: wait what am I saying

me: Lan Wangji failing to communicate important information to Wei Wuxian is the summary of the entire post timeskip arc

[mikkeneko]

I am delighted by this summary of The Untamed by @thethirdamell​ who has never watched it

[mikkeneko]

sometimes I watch the untamed and i’m just like “did y’all forget you can literally fly”