The Untamed: The Post-Series Wrap-Up
Feb. 10th, 2020 08:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
galaxysoupWhere better to start than the beginning? Here was what I knew about The Untamed going in:
You know, I thought everyone was humoring me when they said I basically had everything, but. Uh. None of this list is actually wrong, and several sections of it cover large swathes of Important Plot Arc. As a list it doesn’t actually do a terrible job of encapsulating the show.
Wish there’d been more donkey, though. :D
It is very unfair that they all wear identical outfits. Nevertheless, there is clearly a Nice Ghostbuster (the one who is kind to what he thinks is a crazy person) and a Jerk Ghostbuster (the one who is... not).
Aw, Lan Jingyi, I apologize for calling you a Jerk Ghostbuster. I stand by ‘Nice Ghostbuster’, though. Lan Sizhui, you are An Sweetheart.
Ooooooh whatever Wei Wuxian-whoever did in the past, it did NOT END WELL for the people who supported him
Ah. Ahaha. Aha. Ow. ;__;
The 'Nightless City' is very inaccurately named, btw, since it's ALWAYS NIGHT THERE.
I stand by this one.
I kind of like Goth Girl. I hope she turns out to be cool.
WEN QING BEST DOCTOR ;___;
I really like Lan Big Bro. With the understanding that this story is A Drama, I hope he doesn't get completely fucked.
Well. I mean, he survived? But I think we can say he did get pretty fucked. He got his Trust all busted up, that’s for dang sure. :(
Is it normal to ship Lan Big Bro and Meng Whatsisface, the Nie love child? Cause I kinda do.
NO STOP THAT (also he’s a Jin lovechild, jeez)
Wei Wuxian's brother (??) whose name I can't remember seems to exist in a constant state of near-aneurysmic stress.
Well there’s Jiang Cheng’s life in a nutshell
Um. The Nie kid is not necessarily the first one I would trust with the WHOLE STORY of the ULTRA TOP SECRET MISSION they're on. He is, and I say this with affection, spectacularly useless.
Fell for that one, now, didn’t I??
I hope that at some point [Wen Qing] gets to punch Psycho Goth Prince in the genitals.
Wei Wuxian’s revenge was pretty satisfying, but I maintain that this would have also been extremely cathartic.
Is it normal to ship Goth Girl and Flashback Girl (I need a better name for her) even though they barely have any screentime together? It's just, let's be real, neither Jin Trust Fund Baby nor Whatsisbro are anywhere near cool enough to be proper matches for them and it is the obvious solution.
Wen Qing + Jiang Yanli = the ship that would have saved lives and all of our hearts (sidenote: THERE’S A VID)
... there seemed to be a lot of potentially significant undercurrents happening between Meng Kid and Psycho Goth Smirkface and I don't think it would be unreasonable to assume there were some conniving shenanigans going on here.
HEY GUESS WHO SAW THAT ONE COMING IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD EPISODE 10 \o/
I don’t know what that whole interchange between Meng Kid and Wei Wuxian about his sword meant, but I’m pretty sure it was significant
Okay, so now I think I have it: Meng Kid carries a flexible sword that basically curves invisibly into his waistband (and which, despite him being AWFUL, is actually pretty cool). I don’t know if this was what Wei Wuxian was going for when he asked about the sword, but it does stand in pretty neatly for Meng Kid’s personality: his sword, the symbol of a cultivator, is not worn openly but is instead concealed in a way that lets him use it unexpectedly on an enemy. Which is pretty much his whole MO, really.
Augh baby starving Wei Wuxian! I’m really curious about how exactly he ended up on his own.
Still waiting for this backstory... and I still want to see the prequel all about Wei Wuxian’s mom.
Has anyone made a supercut of all the times Wei Wuxian collapses into Lan Wangji’s arms?
I actually did go searching for this and was unable to find one. :(
Meng Kid is straight up about to murder a patriarch for not letting him hold a baby
WELL
Lol at Nie Kid trying to hide behind his fan. Nice try, kiddo.
W E L L
Awwww Lan Sizhui feels safe around Wei Wuxian just like he feels safe around Lan Wangji! That is stupidly adorable.
Dear Past Me: it’s because they’re his dads. Best, Present Me.
This series has such complicated things to say about betrayal
BOY DOESN’T IT. You’ve got actual betrayals, perceived betrayals, apparent betrayals, betrayals of people, betrayals of ideals, betrayals of semi-sentient swords... the list goes on.
So... Wei Wuxian’s resurrection really was just a wildcard event? It genuinely was Mo Kid, messed up and angsty, doing a bit of resurrecting all by his lonesome?
So it took me until my third watch-through, but I finally picked up on the fact that in the first episode Nie Kid paid the stroyteller to tell Yiling Patriarch stories in Mo Kid’s town for three days, and it was done to inspire Mo Kid to come up with the resurrection idea ‘on his own’. DANG, Nie Huaisang. The subtlety of his manipulations really is impressive. Meng Kid was toast from the beginning.
It also makes me wonder – did Nie Huaisang bring back Wei Wuxian in order to then have him as a chess piece, or did he partly see bringing back Wei Wuxian as a righting of past wrongs on its own? I mean, probably it was a combination, but I do like the idea that one of the wrongs Nie Huaisang was trying to fix was Wei Wuxian’s death. I wonder if he also felt guilty for not standing with his friend in Nightless City, even if grand and obvious gestures for the sake of Doing The Right Thing are... not exactly in his wheelhouse.
His motivations are really opaque. Even by the end of the series, they’re mostly laid out as speculation from other characters. We never once hear his side of it in a clear way (dear Jin “two-episode-long dying monologue” Guangyao: TAKE NOTES)
I feel like it would have been tempting to have the whole thing play out as a cat-and-mouse game between two different geniuses – Wei Wuxian and Meng Kid...
SIKE it was Meng Kid vs. Nie Kid all along! Everyone else was just caught in the crossfire.
Lol poor Nie Kid... all these big revelations and he has no context for any of them.
OH PAST ME YOU JOKER
Aw, A-Yuan/Wen Ning road trip buddy comedy!
I gather they’re actually making a follow-up movie about this??
And so we have reached the end, for real for real. Thanks everybody for keeping me company as I did this thing! :D I started reading the book translation and am about 15 episodes into King’s Avatar, so if anybody wants to yell with me about either of those you are more than welcome.
- There is a character who only wears white and is very serious, and one who only wears black and smiles a bunch, like a reverse Shen Wei/Ye Zun.
- The one in black is either evil, or misunderstood, or both.
- Playing the flute is Very Bad.
- One of the main characters may get reincarnated a bunch? Unclear.
- At some point the character in white gets drunk.
- At several points the character in black passes out dramatically.
- And falls off a cliff at least once.
- Somehow as far as I can tell both of them nevertheless survive to the end.
- There's a donkey.
You know, I thought everyone was humoring me when they said I basically had everything, but. Uh. None of this list is actually wrong, and several sections of it cover large swathes of Important Plot Arc. As a list it doesn’t actually do a terrible job of encapsulating the show.
Wish there’d been more donkey, though. :D
It is very unfair that they all wear identical outfits. Nevertheless, there is clearly a Nice Ghostbuster (the one who is kind to what he thinks is a crazy person) and a Jerk Ghostbuster (the one who is... not).
Aw, Lan Jingyi, I apologize for calling you a Jerk Ghostbuster. I stand by ‘Nice Ghostbuster’, though. Lan Sizhui, you are An Sweetheart.
Ooooooh whatever Wei Wuxian-whoever did in the past, it did NOT END WELL for the people who supported him
Ah. Ahaha. Aha. Ow. ;__;
The 'Nightless City' is very inaccurately named, btw, since it's ALWAYS NIGHT THERE.
I stand by this one.
I kind of like Goth Girl. I hope she turns out to be cool.
WEN QING BEST DOCTOR ;___;
I really like Lan Big Bro. With the understanding that this story is A Drama, I hope he doesn't get completely fucked.
Well. I mean, he survived? But I think we can say he did get pretty fucked. He got his Trust all busted up, that’s for dang sure. :(
Is it normal to ship Lan Big Bro and Meng Whatsisface, the Nie love child? Cause I kinda do.
NO STOP THAT (also he’s a Jin lovechild, jeez)
Wei Wuxian's brother (??) whose name I can't remember seems to exist in a constant state of near-aneurysmic stress.
Well there’s Jiang Cheng’s life in a nutshell
Um. The Nie kid is not necessarily the first one I would trust with the WHOLE STORY of the ULTRA TOP SECRET MISSION they're on. He is, and I say this with affection, spectacularly useless.
Fell for that one, now, didn’t I??
I hope that at some point [Wen Qing] gets to punch Psycho Goth Prince in the genitals.
Wei Wuxian’s revenge was pretty satisfying, but I maintain that this would have also been extremely cathartic.
Is it normal to ship Goth Girl and Flashback Girl (I need a better name for her) even though they barely have any screentime together? It's just, let's be real, neither Jin Trust Fund Baby nor Whatsisbro are anywhere near cool enough to be proper matches for them and it is the obvious solution.
Wen Qing + Jiang Yanli = the ship that would have saved lives and all of our hearts (sidenote: THERE’S A VID)
... there seemed to be a lot of potentially significant undercurrents happening between Meng Kid and Psycho Goth Smirkface and I don't think it would be unreasonable to assume there were some conniving shenanigans going on here.
HEY GUESS WHO SAW THAT ONE COMING IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD EPISODE 10 \o/
I don’t know what that whole interchange between Meng Kid and Wei Wuxian about his sword meant, but I’m pretty sure it was significant
Okay, so now I think I have it: Meng Kid carries a flexible sword that basically curves invisibly into his waistband (and which, despite him being AWFUL, is actually pretty cool). I don’t know if this was what Wei Wuxian was going for when he asked about the sword, but it does stand in pretty neatly for Meng Kid’s personality: his sword, the symbol of a cultivator, is not worn openly but is instead concealed in a way that lets him use it unexpectedly on an enemy. Which is pretty much his whole MO, really.
Augh baby starving Wei Wuxian! I’m really curious about how exactly he ended up on his own.
Still waiting for this backstory... and I still want to see the prequel all about Wei Wuxian’s mom.
Has anyone made a supercut of all the times Wei Wuxian collapses into Lan Wangji’s arms?
I actually did go searching for this and was unable to find one. :(
Meng Kid is straight up about to murder a patriarch for not letting him hold a baby
WELL
Lol at Nie Kid trying to hide behind his fan. Nice try, kiddo.
W E L L
Awwww Lan Sizhui feels safe around Wei Wuxian just like he feels safe around Lan Wangji! That is stupidly adorable.
Dear Past Me: it’s because they’re his dads. Best, Present Me.
This series has such complicated things to say about betrayal
BOY DOESN’T IT. You’ve got actual betrayals, perceived betrayals, apparent betrayals, betrayals of people, betrayals of ideals, betrayals of semi-sentient swords... the list goes on.
So... Wei Wuxian’s resurrection really was just a wildcard event? It genuinely was Mo Kid, messed up and angsty, doing a bit of resurrecting all by his lonesome?
So it took me until my third watch-through, but I finally picked up on the fact that in the first episode Nie Kid paid the stroyteller to tell Yiling Patriarch stories in Mo Kid’s town for three days, and it was done to inspire Mo Kid to come up with the resurrection idea ‘on his own’. DANG, Nie Huaisang. The subtlety of his manipulations really is impressive. Meng Kid was toast from the beginning.
It also makes me wonder – did Nie Huaisang bring back Wei Wuxian in order to then have him as a chess piece, or did he partly see bringing back Wei Wuxian as a righting of past wrongs on its own? I mean, probably it was a combination, but I do like the idea that one of the wrongs Nie Huaisang was trying to fix was Wei Wuxian’s death. I wonder if he also felt guilty for not standing with his friend in Nightless City, even if grand and obvious gestures for the sake of Doing The Right Thing are... not exactly in his wheelhouse.
His motivations are really opaque. Even by the end of the series, they’re mostly laid out as speculation from other characters. We never once hear his side of it in a clear way (dear Jin “two-episode-long dying monologue” Guangyao: TAKE NOTES)
I feel like it would have been tempting to have the whole thing play out as a cat-and-mouse game between two different geniuses – Wei Wuxian and Meng Kid...
SIKE it was Meng Kid vs. Nie Kid all along! Everyone else was just caught in the crossfire.
Lol poor Nie Kid... all these big revelations and he has no context for any of them.
OH PAST ME YOU JOKER
Aw, A-Yuan/Wen Ning road trip buddy comedy!
I gather they’re actually making a follow-up movie about this??
And so we have reached the end, for real for real. Thanks everybody for keeping me company as I did this thing! :D I started reading the book translation and am about 15 episodes into King’s Avatar, so if anybody wants to yell with me about either of those you are more than welcome.
Nie Huaisang <3
Date: 2020-02-11 12:05 pm (UTC)<3<3<3 I love him so much. He is so smart and so subtle and so GOOD. Which reminds me I wanted to check the first ep with the Nie brothers again to see if their relationship now seems different to me - I wonder if his brother was aware of Canary Guy's devastating competence (even if it's totally different from the way Nies are expected to be competent), or if he was simply unable to see something so far removed from his own competencies.
His motivations are really opaque. Even by the end of the series, they’re mostly laid out as speculation from other characters. We never once hear his side of it in a clear way (dear Jin “two-episode-long dying monologue” Guangyao: TAKE NOTES)
I think at this point, revealing himself in such a way is so antithetical to everything he's had to turn himself into that it would have been a very bad choice to have him Come Officially Clean. He's only effective if nobody sees him coming. He's going to continue to be harmless and confused and underestimated, because there are sure to be more troubles ahead.
But on the whole, I did think his motivations were clear from the context. He wanted to stop Slimer because he needed to be stopped, and Nie Huaisang was well aware nobody else could or would. That he was able to bring back an old friend who'd been one of Slimer's victims in the process was definitely a huge plus, but not an end in itself. And he also just wanted revenge.
grand and obvious gestures for the sake of Doing The Right Thing are... not exactly in his wheelhouse.
I think he is concerned with being effective, not making himself look like a hero. In the end, that allows him to do the Right Thing when nobody else managed. If he'd made himself conspicuous, he would not have been as effective, and it would not have benefited anyone. So... I'm totally with him here. :-)
I gather they’re actually making a follow-up movie about this??
They already have. I haven't seen it, but unfortunately I hear that it's very bad, with none of the awesome potential exploited in the least. (Evidently they even fail to use the set-up the series provides.)
Re: Nie Huaisang <3
Date: 2020-03-15 03:43 pm (UTC)I wonder if his brother was aware of Canary Guy's devastating competence (even if it's totally different from the way Nies are expected to be competent), or if he was simply unable to see something so far removed from his own competencies.
Omg YES that is such a good question! Did he really see Huaisang as useless and incompetent, and was it to an extent true? Was Huaisang always thinking like a chessmaster and presented himself as useless as a shield the entire time, or did it take his brother (and maybe to an extent Wei Wuxian) dying to make him snap into business mode and get revengy? I feel like if Mingjue knew about Huaisang's chessmaster abilities he would have tried to weaponize them during the Sunshot Campaign, but maybe he discounted them as inherently poliical/social in nature and therefore not of value...
I think he is concerned with being effective, not making himself look like a hero. In the end, that allows him to do the Right Thing when nobody else managed. If he'd made himself conspicuous, he would not have been as effective, and it would not have benefited anyone. So... I'm totally with him here. :-)
Oh, for sure! It took someone better at manipulation than Meng Guangyao to take him down and untangle all the threads he'd put in place, absolutely. But given the world Nie Huaisang lives in - and the brother and sect he comes from - I do wonder if he occasionally wished he was willing/able to make the kinds of grand gestures the flashier characters get to do on the regular.
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Date: 2020-02-11 01:34 pm (UTC)I loved Nie Huaisang from his first moment on-screen and when that big end reveal happened let me tell you I YELLED. Agreed with all the points
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Date: 2020-03-15 03:44 pm (UTC)Nooooo, they could have had it all! It could have been so good! I love both of those characters so much! :((((
Fingers crossed for Fatal Journey, I guess...
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Date: 2020-03-15 05:16 pm (UTC)It is, at least, very pretty.
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Date: 2020-02-11 04:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-15 03:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-12 02:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-15 03:45 pm (UTC)