#sheesh the list is actually longer than i thought! which is awesome! | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

olderthannetfic · 4 years ago

Text

Escapade Vid - The Sleuth of the Ming Dynasty

Here’s my writeup of my vid, crossposted from DW.

This is one of my two vid premieres for Escapade Con 2021. It spoils all of The Sleuth of The Ming Dynasty, specifically anything involving Wang Zhi. The discussion below is similarly spoilery.

I fell hard for The Sleuth of the Ming Dynasty, harder than for The Untamed or anything else for ages. (Okay, that's a lie, I fell that hard for Kingdom, but I don't ship anything there.) I knew I wanted to vid it for the con because it's so beautiful and because I knew a lot of people wouldn't be familiar with my favorite character via osmosis.

Sleuth is a historical mystery series (no magic/fantasy) based on a danmei novel. It has three leads: the two halves of the book ship and my fave. Facepalm.

I got into the series by knowing it was new-ish, some kind of buddy mystery series, and that fans liked it. That's it. I glanced at a poster, but I hadn't properly osmosed that there were three leads, not just two, so when Wang Zhi showed up, I naturally assumed he'd turn out to be a villain. His introduction is him driving a man to suicide. Practically the first thing we find out about him is that he's a palace eunuch with a high political position whom the politicians fear, look down on, and hate.

Could there be a more stereotypical villain for a historical drama?

So I went through a rapid progression from thinking he'd be the smiling pseudo-ally they have to defeat later to loving him and being like "They'd better not make him a villain!" to realizing I'd completely misosmosed this series.

I had a lot of feelings.

Picking a song / How I got into BTS:

Finding a vidsong for Sleuth was tricky. I had other vid ideas I could have made. I was tempted to make three vids, one for each lead (though not all for Escapade). I was tempted to make an OT3 pimping vid. My problem was that I also have had a lot of feelings about BTS this past year, and I knew I wanted to use them for an Escapade vid, but that presented a problem.

BTS… man… How to explain…

I grew up not really listening to music. My mom was a music teacher and only listened to Classical. When I eventually got into popular music, it was Enya and Alice Cooper. (Yes, syrupy Celtic crooning in various languages + shock rock is a pretty good summary of teenage me, why do you ask?) Also Cat Stevens, who was even more of the wrong generation for anyone else to care. The first time I really gave a shit about music was when I was living in NYC in my 20s absorbing the taste of someone with strong and specific music interests. I would by no means call myself knowledgeable about music.

A year ago, I tried to learn a little about BTS before Escapade so I could pick some shippy vid and stick it in the dance party. I want people to be able to go to the party and feel like they've got their finger on the pulse of fanfic-adjacent fandom even if they aren't into all of those fandoms themselves. I've never been into idol music, and it's not for lack of exposure: many successive waves of jpop and kpop idol-loving friends have tried, and I've been immune. It's the soppy ballads. I cannot. Some of the bouncy stuff is fun, but it wasn't enough.

Unfortunately for me, BTS is fucking confusing, so there was no easy 101. The only way to know anything about the fandom dynamics and which ships are popular was to know a lot. And once I'd bought in that far, I was up for some fic reading because huge RPF fandoms always have tons of AUs that are practically original fic, and hey, that sounded fun… I tried their reality shows a little bit, but my allergy to idol music is second only to my allergy to reality shows. I'm bad at getting things done if I don't sit down and commit properly, so I made myself a spreadsheet of all of their albums, guest appearances, and side projects and sat down to listen to the lot via Youtube…

They blew me away.

I didn't know. No one told me! I would never have predicted what they actually sounded like. It's not that they're good. Lots of idol groups are good. It's that they can rap. Korea has plenty of good rappers, but they're not in idol groups! I cannot properly convey the level of shock I experienced or even how and why BTS are so good. I like hip hop, but I don't know enough to describe anything properly.

When I made it to Hip Hop Lover, it all made sense. Imagine my reaction as a much more confused and incoherent version of this youtube video. Of course RM is into Talib Kweli and everyone else like that. Of course he's into conscious hip hop, a lot of it from NYC. Everything about their dense lyrics and their choice of subject matter made perfect sense after looking at their self-described list of influences. But in a way that Monq can articulate and I cannot.

I love shit that requires buy-in. All nerds do. I swear, hip hop is the nerdiest damn music there is because it's so into referencing its influences and responding very directly to other artists and to current culture, assuming the audience will keep up if it cares to. BTS know far more than I do about hip hop from here, plus they're Korean and like puns in a language I don't speak, so understanding what the actual fuck is going on in some of their songs is an adventure involving multiple youtube explainers. But they also have enough goofy dance music and rap that just sounds awesome to keep me interested even when I don't get it.

Daechwita dropped in May 2020, and holy shit, can we have a fandom just for that video? Historical architecture, hot dudes with swords, be still my beating heart. This is totally why I ended up watching Kingdom. I was dying to start learning some Korean, but then I got distracted by more Chinese media. Damnit. How do I choose?

So Escapade 2021 was rolling around, and I knew I wanted to make my Untamed vidbunny from last March, but I also wanted to vid Sleuth, and I wanted to vid it to BTS. I was now presented with my problem:

BTS is a 7-member group, and most songs prominently highlight 3-5 of them if not all 7. One might be able to do this as aspects of one character's personality, but it's very hard to make it work for a two- or three-person ship. I started looking at the rap line's songs, which have just the three of them, but even then, you're stuck saying that Character A is singer X and so on. How do I divide up the Sleuth leads? Do I make the angry one the angry one and the sunshine one the sunshine one? But the sunshine one is not the bookworm in BTS, unlike in Sleuth, and that just feels wrong!

That was when I decided to do a character vid rather than a ship one, to pick Wang Zhi, and to choose something off of one of the rap line's solo side projects. And what combination could be more obvious than tiny, angry, beautiful Yoongi paired with tiny, angry, beautiful Wang Zhi?

In the end, I did not pick Daechwita because, much as I love it, it has that kind of monotonous, hypnotic flow, and I feared I'd end up making a boring vid. I went back to Agust D's first mixtape, which is much angrier, and picked a song I felt had more obvious internal structure. I picked it mostly based on sound, as I always do. I needed vocals that I felt conveyed Wang Zhi's personality. Once I had a song in mind, I looked up the lyrics… And kept looking.

This would probably have been helped by not making the vid in like 3 days, mostly after the deadline because my other premiere dragged on way longer than I expected. Doh. Someone said that the vids were great this year because everyone had been stuck indoors with nothing else to do. I can assure you that I was my usual disaster self and was still trying to pick songs like a week before the deadline. There's always next year. Sigh.

So while vidding, I had a couple of okay but not great translations of the lyrics and at least one line I straight up did not understand. My process for all vids is to make a spreadsheet and put the lyrics down one side with clip ideas in another column. If the song isn't in English or isn't straightforward, I have other columns on the lyrics: original writing system, transliteration, translation, notes. I often have a column for song structure (verse 1, chorus, verse 2, chorus version A, chorus version B, etc.), or I might do that part by color coding chunks of the lyrics/translation. In this case, I had a lot of different columns of translation bits that moved around, and I also color coded column A based on whether there was a significant English language lyric. Here's a screencap of part of my planning spreadsheet with colors changing to show song section breaks and some clip concepts I was considering written in. (I usually end up abandoning most of my content notes once I get into actually editing a section.)

I finally found a good translation of it the morning after the vidshow. Sheesh. It wouldn't have radically affected how I vidded that part because the lyrics are so fast that you can't hit every little thing with a relevant clip and still have your audience visually parse anything at all. I still wish I'd had a better translation beforehand.

I foolishly thought it wouldn't be a problem vidding something in Korean, but it turns out I have such a hard time understanding Korean phonology that it's very hard for me to tell which bit is which even with a phonetic transcription. On top of that, most of the translations swap clause order for no good reason--"Your mother will be sad when you lose your last asset, health" instead of "When you lose your last asset, health, your mother will be sad"--despite both working perfectly well in English.

For the purposes of making the vid, I only needed to understand well enough to know how I was matching the lyrics or not, but for posting, I had to come up with something a little more polished. In the end, half before vidding and half after (oops), I have gone through with like 4 different translations, google translate, and an online Korean dictionary to cobble together something that I think is a fairly accurate translation, with clauses in the order they fall in the song, and some attempt at idiomaticness and correct tone and level of informality in English.

Lyrics translation:

The best of the translations I found in terms of being annotated and fairly easy to understand in English is this one by Muish.

Here's my version:

They call me new thang The new recruit is here: take my bags Whole world, concert Not bad, Asiana Asia You could be my new thang Different from the guys who neglect their duties Insubordination from a celebrity Damn, only the strong can fuck with me Some say I made it too easy Fuck you, I'm a thorn in the side of those guys So far from success Honestly, "SSaihanuwar" is embarrassing1 Now, we sell half a million copies a year The k-pop category Ain't big enough to hold me, whoo! Right, go ahead Try booking first class My seat is business You're economy, forever behind me kissing my ass Next goal is Billboard Brazil to New York My passport gets no rest A to the G to the U to the STD I'm d boy because I'm from D I'm crazy, a lunatic on a beat My rap will blow your mind with2 My tongue technology A to the G to the U to the STD A to the G to the U to the STD A to the G to the U to the STD I'll blow your mind with My tongue technology I hunt down those who copy the copiers. Get 'em down no matter who the fuck they are. Doesn't matter if I'm a jerk or if I'm wack or fake, I'm the one who carves history across the field. Among boring rappers, I get the lion's share. I'm about to take your bread. Bros' jealousy making all this noise. Hey ho I don't give a fuck Keep shoveling shit I'll bury you alive in the grave You dug yourself Hey ho you can't handle me You wasted rappers should be grateful I'm an idol Cause I'm busy, I'm busy, 24/7, what rest? Latecomers, go play amongst yourselves. Jealous and childish you wail, Yet you don't know shit.3 Paris to New York, damn My non-stop schedule A to the G to the U to the STD I'm d boy because I'm from D I'm crazy, a lunatic on a beat My rap will blow your mind with My tongue technology A to the G to the U to the STD A to the G to the U to the STD A to the G to the U to the STD I'll blow your mind with My tongue technology I’m sorry. Honestly, I am. I'm sorry I took your daily bread, boy. I'm sorry. Don't be mad. When you lose your only asset, health, Your mom's going to be upset. I'm sorry. Change careers. Amazing how you keep digging, So change, boy. I’m sorry. Honestly, I am. That your rapping sucks compared to mine. A to the G to the U to the STD I'm d boy because I'm from D I'm crazy, a lunatic on a beat My rap will blow your mind with My tongue technology A to the G to the U to the STD A to the G to the U to the STD A to the G to the U to the STD I'll blow your mind with My tongue technology A to the G to the U to the STD I'm d boy because I'm from D I'm crazy, a lunatic on a beat My rap will blow your mind with My tongue technology A to the G to the U to the STD A to the G to the U to the STD A to the G to the U to the STD I'll blow your mind with My tongue technology

1. I straight up had no idea what the "SSaihanuwar" line is supposed to mean when I was making this vid. People said it was a pre-debut song, so I assumed he meant his skills had improved. What it actually refers to is that song bragging that they'd sold 30,000 copies, while as of this song, they were selling 500,000, so that childish bragging about a tiny past achievement is embarrassing now. Of course, as I type this, BTS sells like four million albums a year…

2. This is referencing a movie title, The Wailing, and then a famous line from the movie, which is said in dialect. I haven't seen the movie and nothing online explains the context in which "Important? You don't know what's important!" is used. If anybody's seen it, feel free to drop me a comment. Hopefully, it won't be something I'd radically change in the vid.

3. Literally 'take you to Hong Kong', which can be used like "blow your mind" in the regular sense, but is also used to mean "give you an orgasm", hence the italics on 'blow' above. Yes, it's an oral sex joke. Yes, he means it like that.

What the song means and what I did with it:

Okay, so now that we know the main lyric of this song is apparently "STD", what's it actually about?

Overall, this is a diss track. Like most BTS dis songs, the concept is: I may be an idol, but I'm still twice the man and twice the rapper you are.

I'm not the only one who was surprised to hear good rappers show up in an idol group: the underground rap scene that Suga comes out of thinks of idols as both inauthentic sellouts and as embarrassingly girly. They wear makeup and sparkly outfits. Laaaaaame.

This felt like an excellent parallel to the social position of eunuchs in The Sleuth of the Ming Dynasty: Wang Zhi is one of the most competent and ruthless, yet loyal and honorable administrators we see in the entire series. If he were running the government, all of them would be better off. He's like that version of Lex Luthor or Emhyr var Emreis that astolat likes to write.

Throughout the series, politicians and generals see Wang Zhi as less than a man and thus not a worthy enemy or not worthy of his high position, but he's twice as worthy as any of them. He's not only better at being a ruthless badass, but he's better at keeping the body count low. Sure, he's introduced forcing a guy to commit suicide… But Wang Zhi promises him his family will be spared the same fate, where normally a traitor's entire family would be wiped out. The only reason things go poorly later is that the guy's son is too stupid to realize what a favor WZ did them.

Even Tang Fan is a complete asshole to him repeatedly. In this case, he doesn't treat WZ as lesser, but he's so naive and fixated on fluffy feelings that he assumes WZ is cold and cruel when he's pragmatic or that he has no feelings when he's clearly devastated but trying to fix the situation instead of breaking down about it. TF is the worst sort of idiot who values superficial virtue over practical results. It's a good thing he's so endearing!

There's this heartwarming bit at the end of the series about how WZ learned humanity from TF and SZ or something, but it's complete nonsense: him adopting child orphans and pretty much all of the rest of his behavior for the whole series was already merciful within the bounds of their society and the demands of his position.

On to my vidding process: I laid the song out on the timeline and put markers for the sections, color coded by what type of section they were and also made the spreadsheet seen above. That helped me see the structure of the vid. One of the first parts I tackled was the opening, which is long and slow and samples another song. It feels like it should have establishing shots, and it's long enough they could get boring. I realized it was an excellent opportunity to have some text on screen. I love typography, but I normally don't do it because there's no space in the song I've chosen, and I'm making the vid on the day of the deadline and have no time to think about fonts. Poking through all the confusingly-named Chinese fonts I have installed took as long as all the editing in this section.

I then had to figure out what to do with the chorus.

Yoongi's normal rapper name as part of BTS is 'Suga'. He's from Daegu and proud of it. So his solo rapper name is 'Agust D', which is 'DT Suga' backwards. A to the G to the U to the STD is just him repeating his own name. Aside from saying Agust D = Wang Zhi, I didn't have a lot of specific ideas here. Wang Zhi has a really hot mouth, but there isn't that much in canon that's an obvious oral sex joke.

I knew I didn't want to make the vid strictly a linear retelling of canon since the point was more conceptual. I also love the emotional impact of the Yang Fu stuff, both the times it's funny and the times it's upsetting for characters, but it's hard to communicate it in a vid without spending some time, so I decided to use the choruses entirely for Yang Fu. At the very end of the vid I had more story that needed to go somewhere and no more Yang Fu (and I wouldn't have ended on Yang Fu anyway), so I had to vary that pattern.

The final verse is a 2-part one that is slow and even more sneering than the rest of the song, so I picked WZ's most idiotic enemy for that. WZ literally took away his job by killing his father, which caused him to come home from the military and his brother to be fired from his job as an official. His mother is ill because of grief, and everyone keeps telling him to go look after his family instead of chasing WZ around and trying to start shit, so the lyrics are quite apt. This guy is just not up to WZ's weight class, and that's what this verse is about.

The first two verses required more thought. They have a 3-part structure and are fast. I looked for individual Wang Zhi plotlines that matched the specific lyrics of each section thematically. There are shittons of speed effects all over this vid for obvious reasons, but I still needed to pick footage that was naturally more dynamic. The show has a fair amount of talking heads, slow scenes, and cute and fluffy stuff that didn't fit the tone here, not to mention WZ being the least important of the three leads, so selecting the correct bits of WZ plot was essential.

I originally planned to use verse 1 for the horse market case, but there just isn't enough great footage to do the whole thing, so I did the first two thirds. Section 1 has military-sounding lyrics about a new recruit taking over from "hyungs" (older guys) who neglect their duties. This idol (a celebrity) is going to show the underground rappers how it's done. I had wanted to use the 'new thang' lyric with flashbacks to WZ first getting his position at the emperor's side, but that footage makes him look too meek and doesn't connect well to anything. 'You could be my new thang' I wanted for Jia Kui, but again, there isn't good footage that communicates their relationship visually.

The general from this arc has a similar thematic role: He's a ~real man~ who cares only about duty and is rude to the effete, useless official from the capital, while the other local powers fawn on him… Except Wang Zhi responds to this by being amused, showing up the others, and approving of General Chen. (By the end of the arc, Chen is all offended on his behalf that other dudes think he's merely a eunuch instead of a total hottie capable and honorable servant of the empire.) The first section is WZ on 'new thang' and Chen on 'my new thang'. This third ends with 'only the strong can fuck with me' as Chen joins the welcome feast. Out of all of the people in charge of border security, he's the only one who's strong.

The next third of the verse is about people thinking Suga got to his position too easily, which is also something basically every official feels about powerful eunuchs in Sleuth (and also in every single other historical drama with eunuchs because holy shit is this a common trope, and also in actual history, which is why). In this plotline, WZ is there to deal with the incompetent border guards and sort things out in ways they haven't been able to. He is certainly a thorn in their sides. For this part, I showed one of the obsequious officials smiling, WZ toasting them, and Chen being unamused.

This section finishes up with Suga saying his past bragging is embarrassing because he's so much more badass now, and k-pop isn't big enough for him (which I think is less about wanting to break out of kpop and more about definitions having to be readjusted to accommodate his awesomeness). The scenes from Sleuth are WZ suddenly revealing he speaks the local languages flawlessly--something no normal official from the capital does and that he's been hiding up till now as people insult him--and then WZ resolving the case with murder and smart political maneuvering that puts one of the local chieftains in his debt. The category of eunuch is certainly not enough to encompass Wang Zhi's political ambitions or abilities.

The final section of verse 1 is using a plane/flying metaphor to talk about Suga being ahead of everyone. It also has a particularly awesome lyric in English that I wanted to emphasize. This was the last part of the timeline I filled in, and I used a scene that is not one of the major enemies WZ cares about but where he is wonderfully bossy and in charge. The guy tries to pull rank on him, and he throws away his supposed police informant badge, being like I am the police.

The second verse has the really fast part in this song, so I wanted to show a lot of different cool shit WZ does. Section one is about Suga hunting down poseurs, whether they're new or long-established and powerful. Suga says he's going to take the other rappers' "rice bowl" (livelihood). WZ similarly goes after all kinds of people, including very highly-placed politicians. The serial killer duke was supposedly untouchable, but WZ tells him he's an insect. He'll do the low-level dirty work (running around at night in ninja outfits) and the high level supervision (commanding men at the depot). The line ends by talking about other rappers' jealousy making noise. For this, I used Wang Zhi's trial where all of the politicians team up to wrongly accuse him of a laundry list of crimes.

The next line is about how Suga will bury other rappers alive in the grave they dug themselves, and they should be grateful he's an idol (because if he were a fellow underground rapper, they'd be shown up even worse). There's a suggestion in Suga's lyrics that part of the "wasting time" (digging/shoveling used as a metaphor) these other rappers have done is talking shit about him. They hurt their own reputations by doing it, and he had no desire to take them on until they forced the issue. I used WZ's introduction. That politician doomed himself by talking shit about the emperor's consort. Before he goes to meet with WZ, he talks shit about how eunuchs aren't actually powerful or scary to his drinking buddies. WZ spends the whole scene outlining how his downfall is his own damn fault.

The last section of the verse is about how busy Suga is. Losers should go bother each other, not him, because he has real shit to do. They have no idea what's important, unlike him. I opened with a quick shot of WZ's trial and then the silver case. WZ continually waves off concerns about the trial, even while he's in prison for a few days, because he's concerned about the actual problems occurring at the same time, namely that the entire government is about to go bankrupt and collapse. He's fending off assassins and getting people executed. Wan Tong's embarrassing attempt to mindfuck him in prison is laughable. They're just not on WZ's level.

I capped it off by showing the end of the plot and WZ winning. The three shots of his enemies looking upset are all from times he fucked with them earlier in the series. The final shot of him looking smug is from very early on when he'd just informed his chief rival, Shang Ming, about the suicide he caused in his intro. At the end of the vid, we're back at the beginning of the plot: Wang Zhi was always better. He would have worked with his rivals, but they just had to make it a contest. From the very beginning, they should have known they couldn't win.

The vid I’ve already posted to tumblr, but here’s the AO3 link again:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/29573175

9 notes · View notes