#no fucking wonder JGY is just doing the dead-eyed stare past him and not acknowledging his questions

[paradife-loft]

OH LORD THAT BIT. yeah, @veliseraptor​ and I have definitely torn our hair out over wondering how on earth we could get that whole sequence to make... any sense... with what’s actually shown on-screen, and I believe ultimately come to the conclusion of “continuity errors in production because people didn’t keep track of the dangling plot threads they were adding well enough; there is no actual explanation that can be gleaned from the canon as it is, so for fic purposes feel free to pick and choose details and do whatever”.

(the CQL Yi City crew timeline in general is. a mess. a mess that isn’t helped by the years added to the timeskip, or the “10/16/etc. years ago” text put onscreen at various points if you take those literally... anyway.)

BUT okay, given that.... honestly I don’t think it’s possible to reconcile all the bits and pieces shown or stated onscreen without resorting to speculation without direct evidence, for the reasons you’ve already mentioned re: speculation that is supported by evidence from elsewhere. In that case, the ideas I’ve come up with include:

The tiger seal we see in the NMJ and a-Qing scenes is a first attempt at a recreation that was done prior to JGS’s death, possibly using material from a portion of the original tiger seal that the Jin clan recovered from the battle at Nightless City. They’re not able to reverse-engineer something that works the way a whole one would, and only manage to get about half power. Only later, after XXC has died, does Xue Yang eventually come crawling back to JGY begging access to Wei Wuxian’s notes again, with the final scrap of Yin Iron he’d reserved originally and never actually told the Jins about to begin with, same as he never originally told Wen Ruohan. That, again, still never works quite right, maybe because there’s not enough metal compared to WWX’s sword, or maybe the notes aren’t clear enough, or JGY isn’t interested in setting up zombie experimentation grounds 2.0 when this is his own tenure as xiandu he has going and he’s not actively all that invested in demonic cultivation himself.

Same general idea as the first one, except the Jins haven’t recovered the OG tiger seal and XY has to turn over his held back piece of Yin Iron earlier. When he comes back around a second time after XXC’s death, it’s less “heyyyyy so I have this extra resource we could try again with,” and more “please, please just give me some more time and another chance, I’ve got some new ideas, I hadn’t thought of last time; I know you were holding out on me with the entire set of YLLZ notes so if I can see all of them then maybe; etc. etc.”

On a note that’s less speculative and a bit more interpretation, except in that it again still relies on the assumption that there was a second point where XY came back to Jinlintai a few years after being near-fatally kicked out - Jin Guangyao in his line of dialogue that you note, is replying specifically to Lan Xichen. Lan Xichen who (presuming book-canon exchanges that didn’t make it into CQL but have no real contradictory reason why they wouldn’t also apply) is perfectly aware that the Jin sect was keeping Xue Yang around, and that Jin Guangyao was doing unsavory work around the same time for his father. So I can see it making sense to interpret his question and JGY’s answer as strictly discussing a time when JGY and XY were collaborating for their own sakes, outside of the (old news to Xiyao in particular) time when their work was under orders from JGS.

...My head is spinning a little at trying to simultaneously keep all the details of this straight and also explain them in understandable words to others, so I hope this is like. At least vaguely coherent lmao.

Mostly I think it’s just a problem stemming from, early-ish on in filming when the Guanyin Temple scenes were done, everyone was adding in more and more Bad Things to use for a game of Pin The Blame On The Jin Guangyao, and then forgot about cleaning up the rest of the scenes and timeline to make it work sensibly, and just went ahead adapting the same old book material without realising they created a batch of plotholes in the process. And so any attempt to make sense of it, imo, unfortunately kind of requires tossing out the surface-level text and making up entirely new events that are implied by logical elimination of other possibilities but never actually shown anywhere onscreen.

(Let this be a lesson in why to not run around vilifying a-Yao willy-nilly, kids! All you end up with is plotholes.)

@ my yi city folks, I'm trying to work out the XY and Yin Tiger Seal timeline, any advice would be appreciated

So—in episode 48, JGY says that XY tried to build the Yin Tiger Seal to save XXC

(I haven't double-checked the transcription and there may be typos but it should be basically correct)

HOWEVER

In A-Qing's Empathy flashback, we see XY have it when he's fighting SL?

And in NMJ's Empathy flashback, it's clearly what he's trying to use to subdue NMJ:

And oh, sure, maybe it's distorted Empathy...except that he explicitly says it's only got half the power of the true Yin Tiger Seal, and why the heck would NMJ imagine that???

I mean. I guess the thing that makes least no sense is that JGY is lying in the temple there, but what does he get out of telling that particular lie????? Like—it doesn't make him look as good as the truth, so why would he lie, but it doesn't make him look exactly bad, it doesn't really do anything except be false?? I guess??? I'm so confused.

Wondering if there's a standard explanation for this or standard XY-tiger seal timeline in the Yi City corner, any help would be very welcome!!