Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
The Untamed Episodes: The First Life
13 Plays3 days ago
It's 'the biggest goddamn BL in the world', and we're finally going to talk about it. Ben, NiNi, Shan and Bookworm talk The Untamed. In Part 1 of our two-part episode, we talk censorship, the journey from MDZS to The Untamed, and the first half of the story.
Episode transcript available here.
00:00 Welcome
00:55 Introduction
03:55 Censorship in Media: A Global View
12:37 The MoDaoZuShi Phenomenon
24:33 The Big Picture
33:36 The First Life
40:07 The First Life: Thoughts and Impressions
46:21 The First Life: WangXian and Other Fucked Up Love Stories
01:01:17 The First Life: Various Random Musings
01:11:02 Outro: Notes From the Future
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction of Hosts & Podcast
00:00:21
Speaker
Welcome to The Conversation, the queer media and brown liquor podcast. I'm Ben, the media critic. I'm Nini, the vibes queen. And we're your drunk Caribbean uncle and auntie who are sitting on the porch in the rocking chairs.
00:00:33
Speaker
We're here to talk queer film and dramas with a special focus on Asian QL. So if you like deep dives into queer stories. If you like cracked out takes on art and commerce and queer media.
00:00:45
Speaker
you just enjoy simping for attractive people. We believe in simping. Tune in.
00:00:57
Speaker
And we're back.
Retrospective on 'The Untamed'
00:01:00
Speaker
This week we're doing a little bit of a retrospective. We're going to be covering the Untamed, friend of the pod, pod team member, and troll of the pod, Shan, who is of course here.
00:01:12
Speaker
Say hi, Shan. Hi, people. Jan mentioned during our Diamond League episode that this was a huge oversight in the pod's discussion history. And so we successfully bullied Nini into finally watching it.
00:01:28
Speaker
And she managed to watch the whole thing. I'm so impressed. It was a struggle. It was a lot. There were some episodes in the middle where I was just like, ooh, okay, I'm just gonna have to push through. But I made it.
00:01:39
Speaker
You sure did. Because the Untamed is such a large project to discuss, we brought an additional clown along with us.
00:01:51
Speaker
Everyone welcome back, Bookworm. Say hi, Bookworm. people. Bookworm, despite how busy she is, has been following Shannon's recommended BL's list for like two years now.
00:02:05
Speaker
And then for about one month period, we completely lost Bookworm to reading all five of these books. And then during Christmas of 24, I think you guys watched all of the Untamed in like a week.
00:02:19
Speaker
We did it in two weeks, I think. Six episodes a day That is commitment. Bookworm has very short windows where she actually has a lot of free time, so we took advantage of the holiday season.
00:02:32
Speaker
She trapped me between Christmas and New Year's. I just strapped her to a chair and said, we're watching the episode, let's go. She's good at doing that. Sure is. That's how she got Ben to watch Goblin.
Censorship in Media: China, India, Trinidad & U.S.
00:02:43
Speaker
Wow, that was a moment. That was so good. I'm really proud of my accomplishments. but Goblin was at least better than Coffee Prince because there was a moment when I was watching Coffee Prince around like episode 10 where I'm like, I'm over the show.
00:02:57
Speaker
He was so mad because he was waiting for the turn and it hadn't come yet. He was getting so frustrated. and Episode 10 of a kid drama. That's not when it happens. Come on. He just didn't understand the rhythms yet. He pushed through and then he came around and ended up loving the show.
00:03:15
Speaker
Goblin did a much better job of not losing me during the episode 10 phenomenon because they had great bonds between men content. Every time I'm like, ooh, I'm getting a little tired of this modern angst shit. They're like, here's a scene from the past with that one guy you love. There he is. There's my boy.
00:03:32
Speaker
I think that's a good segue into what we're going to talk about here. Bonds between men, because this is a show that works on multiple levels deliberately because of details that we're going to talk about. So let's dive into talking about The Untamed.
00:03:48
Speaker
The
00:03:55
Speaker
Normally on this show, as you all know, we would do like a Ben, what the fuck is the show about? And I'd give some kind of snarky blurb about it and then we'd get into it. Because we're talking about the biggest Chinese BL that exists, we're going to unpack a ton of the context around our understanding of Chinese censorship.
00:04:17
Speaker
Shan, you've done a bunch of the background on this one. Take us in. So first, just an acknowledgement up top that censorship exists in all media, that there are standards in every country that have to be met for anything that is aired on public television in particular, in movies. This is not a thing that is unique to China.
00:04:34
Speaker
And most Asian dramas are censored to some extent according to whatever the social norms of their home country are. That said, Chinese censorship is especially strict. It's considered one of the worst state censorship models in the world.
00:04:47
Speaker
The Chinese Communist Party monitors everything that comes out. They're very often concerned with curtailing political opposition and promoting Chinese nationalism. If you include more of it, you can get away with doing stuff they don't like.
00:05:01
Speaker
They want to prevent negative depictions of Chinese history. They're also very often just doing basic morality policing around sex in particular. So even in heterosexual romance media, this applies.
00:05:14
Speaker
You see very little sex in C dramas, even when they're het. Angle kisses, stuff like that still exists even in het media. Of course, this is even more severe for queer media.
00:05:25
Speaker
Typically, you're not even going to see things like onscreen kisses in queer media out of China. They also put limits on things like magic, which is very relevant for the story we're going to talk about today. It has to be depicted so as to avoid seeming more powerful than the state or promoting superstition.
00:05:41
Speaker
This is very often why characters who use magic are not really allowed to have happy endings. You can't show... a character thriving because of their use of magic in Chinese media.
00:05:52
Speaker
So sometimes magic is changed out completely in these stories for quasi-scientific explanations where magic is used and then the characters have ambiguous or sad endings in order to counterbalance that.
00:06:05
Speaker
On top of those censorship norms, there's also
Danmei and 'Modaozushi'
00:06:09
Speaker
law around pornography. Pornography is completely illegal in China. Technically, since the mid-2010s, homosexuality is not criminalized legally anymore in China, but there are a lot of really vague laws that still exist around abnormal sexual behavior, quote-unquote, and obscenity, quote-unquote, that allow for queer media to be targeted by censors.
00:06:33
Speaker
In terms of Chinese BL shows, there were a handful of them prior to The Untamed that did make it to air. Most of them adapted from novels. We'll get a little bit more into that in a minute. 2017, in the middle of the airing of Addicted...
00:06:50
Speaker
is when the censorship crackdown on BL really took shape. That show was very popular and was actually depicting things like kisses between men, and it immediately got terminated, yanked off the air, and then the censorship laws got much stricter.
00:07:08
Speaker
Y'all probably remember that, Needy and Ben. I think you were around in fandom when that went down. I sure was. I wasn't quite there yet. I watched Addicted after the fact and I didn't have the context.
00:07:18
Speaker
You confused, right? You're like, why is this shit such a big deal? Both of those guys kind of disappeared from acting for years afterwards. They got blacklisted. They're only just now starting to work again.
00:07:30
Speaker
Yeah. So that show got yanked off mid-airing right after the first kiss aired on TV. And then after that, you never saw anything like that. Even the few Chinese BLs that managed to get released after that, you don't see things like on-air kisses or acknowledgement of sex at all.
00:07:46
Speaker
It's hard for a lot of these shows to get made in the first place. Even after they get made, a lot of them don't end up going to air or they start airing and then get yanked off TV very quickly. There are many, many Danmei adaptations sitting on the shelf in China. There are shows that have been made and will never get released.
00:08:03
Speaker
It's a really rough environment for creators who are trying to make this queer content and get it out in the world. Let's add some additional context, if we can, about censorship outside of China.
00:08:15
Speaker
Since we have two Americans and two non-Americans here, Bookworm or Nini, do you have any specific cultural memories of censorship in media from your home countries? Because I have a few American ones I will, of course, bitch about.
00:08:30
Speaker
I'm going to let Bookworm go
'The Untamed' Narrative Style & Impact
00:08:32
Speaker
first because India and censorship, this is a big one. I know, right? So in India, the most prominent kind of censorship that I've noticed in media is almost a self-censorship by the creators themselves around things that deal with caste or religion and we very rarely get homosexual depictions but whatever we do get it's almost always a tragedy. I've never seen a gay character have a happy ending in Indian media yet
00:09:02
Speaker
When we have inter-caste romance depiction, for example, the story will struggle between the realities of how caste can affect these relationships and how it will be received and how difficult their lives will be made and giving them a happy ending.
00:09:22
Speaker
In India, even though openly we say that it's bad, they shouldn't be clinging to the caste systems now in the 21st century, it's still there. And even though it's not said out loud, most of the powerful media producers and people who can fund this tend to be people who are from upper cast.
00:09:43
Speaker
So if you make something that is openly against their cast, it's just never going to come out. So when I watched The Untamed, it was very relatable to Watson thing, where they wanted to do more, but you can see that they just can't In Trinidad, we don't have very big recorded media tradition. a lot of our art is theater based.
00:10:12
Speaker
you can find pretty much most things in the theater, but it's mostly for comedy sake. So there's a lot of sex farce, that kind of thing. In terms of recorded media, there isn't that much. But what there is, you don't really see like actors kiss that much.
00:10:30
Speaker
That's not a censorship thing because it's not like they would not be able to air that. It's just a question of the traditions being different. There's no standards boards or things like that.
00:10:42
Speaker
But we don't put very much on the air anyway. In America, they they just lie. That's all they do. All men do is lie. They pretend that the advertisers or the nebulous white Midwesterner won't want to watch things like Pose.
00:11:00
Speaker
Or if a gay actor says something out of line, they hurriedly cancel their show despite the show being really fucking good. Having to pick up the scraps that the establishment here is willing to make each
Wei Wuxian's Journey & Relationships
00:11:14
Speaker
year is incredibly frustrating.
00:11:16
Speaker
There's a lot to be said about top-down state-level censorship, but I don't think it's inherently worse or better than this. Yeah, there's state censorship and then there's censorship due to trying to attract sponsors and advertising dollars. But it ends up in the same kind of results of not having honest depictions in media.
00:11:36
Speaker
And I think American media is very susceptible to the latter. There's also some interesting things there between how sex is censored and how violence is censored in Western media.
00:11:48
Speaker
i wouldn't say that it's not censored, but you can get away with a lot more violence than you can with sex. I have a lot of feelings about the MPAA, so we're not going to get into that. But let's just point out that you can have somebody run through a building shooting up everybody and get a PG-13 rating as long as there's no blood.
00:12:05
Speaker
But if two gay people even look at each other too long, that's an R rating immediately. Mm-hmm. This stuff is not new. it is not unique to any one country. It exists everywhere.
00:12:16
Speaker
But currently, in 2025, China has one of the strictest state censorship models. And so that's the context under which Chinese BL is made and the context under which The Untamed was released.
00:12:37
Speaker
All right, now let's get into Modaozushi properly. This has been around for a while. So Danme is the term that is meant to describe Chinese literature that features male-male romance within a whole bunch of different genres. It's a very broad term, Danme. It just means male-male romance.
00:12:57
Speaker
These typically are published as web novels, usually serialized, written mostly by and targeted mostly to a female audience. Danmei exists in a kind of a gray space legally in China.
00:13:08
Speaker
It's both queer and pornographic, so it's technically not allowed, but there's not really an enforcement mechanism. The authors stay anonymous because, of course, if they're caught publishing this stuff, there could be serious repercussions.
00:13:19
Speaker
A lot of Danmei novels have become available in recent years to an international audience First via fan translations that were done just purely out of love. And then those translations got passed around via the online whisper network of international folks who were interested in these stories.
00:13:37
Speaker
And this genre became so popular that there are now official English translations of some of these stories. books being made. There's a publishing company called Seven Seas that has acquired the rights for many of the most popular danmays and are publishing them over time.
00:13:54
Speaker
And so that is how this book, Mo Dao Zushi, aka Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, became much more widely available to an English-speaking audience. This book originally started in 2015, and the writer is Mo Zhang Tongzhu.
00:14:11
Speaker
It was so popular that it has been over the years translated into over a dozen languages. It was first passed around international audience via a very popular fan translation and then became officially published in English starting in 2021.
00:14:25
Speaker
Made the New York Times bestseller list, expanded the audience for this story even further. This is a story that is set in a genre called zhanzi, which is a popular Chinese media genre.
00:14:38
Speaker
about humans in historical China who are called cultivators, which basically means that they do martial arts enhanced by magic. They have paranormal, spiritual, physical powers that help them achieve immortality.
00:14:49
Speaker
This story was so popular that it's had a bunch of adaptations. It's had a webcomic, an audio drama, an animated series and a spinoff to that, an audio book, a mobile game, and of course, The Untamed, the live action show, which we are going to be discussing today.
00:15:04
Speaker
And there are additional adaptations still being announced. We just found out that there's going to be a Japanese stage adaptation in the theater, which I'm very curious to see what that's going to be like. So this is an extremely popular story that has really gone global through fan word of mouth.
00:15:21
Speaker
It's a huge deal in terms of its reach and its enduring popularity with fans. You have no idea how much time Shannon Bookworm spent trying to get all of these notes in order. It's a lot to cover.
00:15:33
Speaker
We had a whole side thing with Twig about like a canceled international tour that was going to happen before COVID. I didn't even know about that. Let's establish when everybody came to this. So I came to The Untamed through normal Tumblr BLSphere around episode 25-ish of the drama, I believe.
00:15:58
Speaker
Shan, when did you come to The Untamed? It's hard for me to remember now. I've been so up in this stories business for years now that it's really hard for me to actually untangle in my brain when I got to certain versions of it and how.
00:16:11
Speaker
But I didn't watch it live. I definitely binged it after the whole thing was out. So I think I probably first watched the series 2020 2021.
00:16:20
Speaker
read the novel and then watched the series again. i was watching a lot of Asian dramas. I had started getting into BL and Netflix just told me to watch this. They put it right on top. And I was like, oh, this is interesting. I haven't seen anything quite like this before.
00:16:34
Speaker
It's kind of remarkable that I'm just sitting over here in the United States and Netflix is telling me to watch this Chinese BL web series. This aired in China Tencent Video, but it was so, so popular. It became one of the highest earning dramas of 2019.
00:16:50
Speaker
Over time, it passed 10 billion views. Netflix picked it up in late 2019, brought it to a much broader international audience, and that's how people like me saw it. This is a story that, in both novel and show form, spread fiercely by word of mouth. People just loved it so much that it kept getting picked up and brought to new audiences.
00:17:09
Speaker
When did you first hear about this show, Bookworm? I think I was just vaguely aware of a very long Chinese drama that was on that's like, I possibly could have seen it on my recommendations before getting into a watching BL at all.
00:17:22
Speaker
I started watching BL only in 2022. So I definitely was not in the fandom when this released live. So how I was introduced to this, the time was December 2023, and I just went to Shane's DMs to talk about how my BTS bias was going to the military.
00:17:43
Speaker
And she was like, here you go. Something distract you. Here's a picture of this man who's so beautiful and always wears white for some reason. You can't think about this man. And I was like, what do I do to know more about this man? And she was like, I know exactly where I should send you. And she just directed me to all the books.
00:18:03
Speaker
So yeah, that's how i spent my 2023 holidays. Just locked
Cultural Context & Visual Language
00:18:08
Speaker
in my room like a crumbling, inhaling all the books. Yeah. I did not remember that I showed you Wangji because B was going to the military.
00:18:19
Speaker
That's exactly what happened. You trapped a freshly grieving army wife. It just amazes me how Shan is so good at tempting people.
00:18:31
Speaker
She knows exactly how to get people to do things. It's a little bit scary. The whole thing was done in 10 days. I genuinely don't think I slept for more than maybe four to five hours. You did not.
00:18:44
Speaker
You were talking to us in a haze. You're screaming about sections. The thing about Bookworm is she also likes to live blog her book reading. So we were long for the ride. That's right.
00:18:55
Speaker
Every time something happened, I bothered them. It's kind of their fault. She hasn't put me through it. like She has to suffer. I had to be there for emotional support after doing that to you. Exactly. That's the thing. Shine's going to be the temptress that is seducing you with the apple, but then she'll be right there with you when you fall apart.
00:19:15
Speaker
Exactly. yeah It's my duty. Nini, what did you know about this whole experience from just sort of seeing it in the background noise of BL constantly for the last five years before you sat down and engaged with it?
00:19:29
Speaker
So I don't think it's any surprise to anybody who listens to this show that I don't watch sea drama, but the show is sort of inescapable.
00:19:40
Speaker
I have friends who are not BL fans, who are not Asian drama fans, who watch this and rave about it and talk about it all the time.
00:19:51
Speaker
This thing is fucking monster and completely inescapable. And i was just like, ah yes, I know everybody says it's good. it probably is really good. i don't know how I feel about censorship like this.
00:20:08
Speaker
I don't know if this is something I want to watch, if it's going to frustrate me. i was aware of it out there in the world and aware of how big it was, but yeah not sure it's for me.
00:20:22
Speaker
And then after the Diamond League, I was basically shanned and and into watching it. We're going use shand from now on, like to shand somebody.
00:20:35
Speaker
ah That is a good word. we are going to use that. We're going to coin a new term, shand somebody. I'm just here enrich you lives with this amazing media that you need to see. Nini ended up enjoying this way more than I thought she would. So I was very pleased.
00:20:50
Speaker
We're going to jump ahead slightly and tell on Nini. Nini is now watching Word of Honor. She sure is. She is. She
00:20:59
Speaker
Oh, the evil plan is proceeding very nicely. I will say, though, word of honor is like the passions to the days of our lives that is the untamed. Yeah. That is so... Anybody who does not understand what that means, I'm so sorry for you.
00:21:14
Speaker
It's exactly right. It's me. ah I'm the one who doesn't understand what that means. These are American soap operas. American soap could have been on forever. Days of Our Lives is wild.
00:21:27
Speaker
Passions is lower quality and wilder. Yeah. It's true, though. Like, this show, this story, the book, all of it, it's ubiquitous if you hang out in fandom spaces online. You cannot avoid it if you are in those spaces. It is one of the biggest fandoms. It's certainly the biggest BL fandom on the internet.
00:21:46
Speaker
When we watched this in 2019, I was minding my own business, watching shit like Until We Meet Again and Trapped. And then they started posting all these gift sets of all these Chinese boys with really long wigs and very clean outfits.
00:22:05
Speaker
There was a lot of screaming. I'm like, what the fuck is going on? Why is every goddamn lesbian Tumblr howling about this show? Why are the girls freaking out?
00:22:17
Speaker
And we all know from listening to this show that Ben listens when lesbians talk. I was like, I don't know what is happening, but every goddamn girl in BL is losing their minds over a censored Chinese BL in 2019. Have we not learned?
00:22:35
Speaker
And they wouldn't shut the fuck up about It went on for so long. I'm like, all right, that's enough. All right. Episode 20 to 25. I got intrigued by the bonds between men stuff. There were some gift sets at the time. like, oh, this looks like man angst.
00:22:49
Speaker
Hold on. I'm intrigued now. Let me go check this out. I remember going through the untamed loop, being kind of overwhelmed with details in the first few episodes. And then, okay, we're in the flashback sequence.
00:23:03
Speaker
Oh, guess we'll be here for like an episode or two. We weren't. And then i ended up catching up with where the show was around episode 38, which was great timing for me. Like I ended up catching up to the show right around the time we got into the present. And I was like, I have context.
00:23:24
Speaker
And then watch the rest of the show live with everybody else. It had a pretty good time. And then like a week after it finished, I ended up watching the show again. as I feel like I needed to reprocess it.
00:23:37
Speaker
I don't think I was prepared for how sticky the show has been for fandom itself. I guess I shouldn't have been because fandom really loves to fill in the blanks on stuff. That's their favorite thing.
00:23:52
Speaker
I grew up watching a lot of Chinese action and a lot of wuxia films. And so i had a good time, but I was not expecting this to be the show for everyone. I like this show. A fair amount, but I was very surprised by this becoming one of the biggest BLs of all time.
00:24:08
Speaker
It's not only the fill-in-the-blank stuff, but it's also that there's just so many characters, so many relationships, so many dynamics that are just great fodder for meta and fanfic and just thinking. There's just so much here, and I think that's why it has endured for so long. ¶¶
00:24:33
Speaker
Okay, we are going to now attempt to talk about the show. I'm glad you said attempt, bestie, because there's just so much hair. Please don't get mad at us for whatever we inevitably leave out.
00:24:49
Speaker
but Let's just get that out of the way. We will not be able to discuss everything that happens in a 50-episode drama adapted from a five-book complex novel series.
00:25:01
Speaker
We will be covering some
Interpersonal Conflicts & Political Pressures
00:25:03
Speaker
highlights of things that are interesting to us and doing some comparisons along the way. is a pretty big story and at its core, it's a mystery. So if you've been holding off on watching this and you feel some kind of way about spoiler culture, I personally don't subscribe to it, but we will be talking about the details of this show for the rest of the episode. So if you'd like to resume this later, go ahead and pause.
00:25:29
Speaker
grab a shit ton of snacks, go watch The Untamed, and then come back.
00:25:36
Speaker
Be prepared to not sleep for a long time. Two weeks is the bare minimum. You have been warned. All right. So the Untamed is primarily a story about a talented young cultivator named Wei Wu Shen.
00:25:55
Speaker
it was kind of in a high-ranking role within one of these major clans that organize themselves around cultivation. They have a role in their society where they help manage supernatural phenomena and protect regular people from supernatural and ghost-related bullshit.
00:26:12
Speaker
There is an expected way that you're supposed to practice and study cultivation. the most powerful clan who wears a lot of red It's like, that's it, we're taking over everything. And then begins murdering everyone.
00:26:27
Speaker
A lot of things happen. Wei Wuxian ends up developing demonic cultivation in the book, rediscovers it in the show, we'll talk about that later, and helps the not-red clan defeat them.
00:26:42
Speaker
After which we end up in the complex politics that follow after a major power shift. Eventually, Wuxian dies in a major confrontation after he kills thousands of people.
00:26:56
Speaker
And then 16 years later in the show, he is brought back, reuniting with some of his close friends and allies. And because this is a BL, a romance, not romance.
00:27:09
Speaker
As they go on an investigation to figure out why this cursed hand is trying to kill everybody. That is... The simplest overview I can give.
00:27:21
Speaker
You did good, Bessie. That's about the best you could
00:27:25
Speaker
I did not look at the timer when you started talking, so I do not know exactly how long that took. It was about three minutes. I was trying to do it under three. There are a shit ton of characters in this. Wei Wuxian is a very likable protagonist with very clear relationship dynamics with every character. So there's a lot to really dig into.
00:27:44
Speaker
I think you should reiterate for folks what the experience of watching The Untamed is like. There's this very famous tweet that I think we should give some credit to that described it perfectly.
00:27:56
Speaker
We'll post a screenshot and a link to it in the transcript. Gavia Baker-Whitelaw is a film critic who runs her own podcast. She has her own Tumblr blog. I'll link to hers on here. She goes by HelloTaylor.
00:28:07
Speaker
I'm a big fan of Gavia's writing. I really like the way she engages with media. Gavia... went through the same experience as the rest of us in early 2020 of like, what is this show?
00:28:18
Speaker
So Gavia starts watching the untamed and is live blogging on Twitter. What is this nonsense that I'm watching? What is happening? And the user who went by Dr. Kate Wilde at the time writes, there's three stages to watching the untamed stage one. This is nonsense. This is very bad. That's like episodes one and two stage two. Oh, this is quite watchable nonsense. That's around episodes four to eight.
00:28:41
Speaker
Then stage three, I have never cared about anything more in my life.
00:28:48
Speaker
Nini, it was taking her a while to get to stage three. And I said, don't worry, Nini. Stage three comes for all of us at different times. You will get there. And she did. When was stage three for you, Shannon? Okay. So first of all, I am a Len Wangji devotee.
00:29:05
Speaker
I love that man. He owns my heart. So from episode one, as soon as he appeared, i was like, okay, hell yeah, that's my guy. I'm here. I'm seated. But in terms of when the story kind of took over my brain, i think...
00:29:24
Speaker
That really happened for me during the arc where Wei Wuxian is liberating the Wen prisoners of war. And he meets Lan Wangji on the Changji path.
00:29:39
Speaker
in the rain and they have a very sad, intense conversation before Wang Ji decides to let him leave with the prisoners, but does not leave with him.
00:29:51
Speaker
That scene, which by the way is unique to the show, just drilled itself into my brain so deep and I was never normal again, ever. And I never will be. That was the point when stage three took root for me and I became obsessed with this media and that obsession will last for my whole life.
00:30:09
Speaker
I think it was during the cave arc when Wei Wuxian made Lan Wangji vomit blood. I'm like, that's way too fucking gay. I have to watch this little man for the rest of the show.
00:30:23
Speaker
I feel like most people are super in by that sequence, too. That whole section is pretty good, though. Between the handling of the hostage arc, the... Blow Up in the Cave, and then the Sacking of Lotus Pier.
00:30:37
Speaker
It's a really strong section for people who really like historical, political dramas. There's a really strong sense of inevitability at the point at which Wei Wuxian in particular is thrust into the situation because he's not a passive person.
00:30:53
Speaker
ah You can feel the next 15 episodes about to unfold. What about you, Bookworm? For me, I think it's different because I read the books first and the books are structured quite differently from how the show is structured.
00:31:08
Speaker
So the show does it very linear. Once you jump into the flashbacks, you just keep going for 33 episodes. And then you emerge, as Ben said, with context.
00:31:19
Speaker
But in the books, it interweaves between the present and the flashbacks. And the structure kind of gives way to the author releasing information in very small amounts to keep the tension and intrigue going.
00:31:34
Speaker
I'm just the kind of person who starts screaming from the very first moment a question appears on my book or on my show. Like if there is something that needs to be revealed, I need to have it.
00:31:48
Speaker
Just tell me. I don't care if it's a 50 episode show. I don't care if it's a 10 book series. I just start vibrating from the moment I see the puzzle that needs to be solved.
00:32:01
Speaker
So in the books, Beiboshian, when he's in Bojwanyu's body, people are not going to recognize him as Beiboshian. So he was just like coasting on that. And he was doing all sorts of shenanigans with Lan Zhan.
00:32:14
Speaker
But we get to a point where where Longshan calls him Wei Ying and he just freezes and he's like how did you know that it was me and Longshan just tells him you're gonna have to think for yourself and that's it that was stage three last and that dynamic keeps coming up over and over again through the whole story i was like oh my gosh how did he know just tell just tell me that was my stage three
00:32:46
Speaker
What about you, Nini? Nini's came later, right? Mine came very late. Stage three for me came when Wei Wuxian is hanging off the cliff and Lan Zhan is trying to save him.
00:32:58
Speaker
And this implacable man just breaks and his face just completely changes. And I'm just like, okay, I'm in. It was definitely Lanjan's emotional break for you, right?
00:33:10
Speaker
Oh, most definitely. From the outside, he appears controlled, even though it's very clear to anybody who's watching this show that this man is losing his mind at all times. And in this case, he just cracks because he's about to lose this man and he knows it.
00:33:25
Speaker
And that's when I was just like, okay, I'm in.
00:33:33
Speaker
Okay.
00:33:36
Speaker
We got to get into the overall set of arcs that we went through in the show. Wei Wuxian is our viewpoint character. We've gotten really caught up in the romance between him and Wang Ji. But at the core, this is a political power drama where there's a lot of different players vying for control. Wei Wuxian is the wild card because he actually doesn't value political power that much.
00:33:58
Speaker
We at least need to establish, like, what does everybody else give a shit about? We're going to divide this because there's two different time periods. So let's start with the first life of Wei Wuxian, the first time period. When the show starts, we are dropped into the story in a very confusing manner.
00:34:13
Speaker
Wei Wuxian is resurrected. He's in a new body 16 years after he died. He doesn't know why the fuck he's back or what's going on. He runs into lots of friends and allies and enemies and...
00:34:26
Speaker
frenemy And he is running around like a chicken with his head cut off. He's confused. We're confused. You're not really supposed to understand what's going on in those first couple episodes. But there's actually a ton of information packed into them. As Ben said, once you have context, if you go back and watch them, there's so much information in those first couple episodes.
00:34:46
Speaker
This is the this is nonsense stage. Exactly. This is stage one where you're like, what the fuck is going on? Why are all these people running around like this? I don't understand anything. It's intended to be kind of disorienting.
00:34:58
Speaker
Then you jump into this long flashback, which is about 30 episodes long. So you get the political power struggle between the great clans. There are five of them. The Zhang, which Wei Wuxian is part of, the Lan, which Lan Wangji is part of, the Ni, the Jin, the Wen.
00:35:15
Speaker
That main political power struggle is driven by the Wens trying to do a hostile takeover of the other clans. They burn the cloud recesses, they storm the unclean realm, they sack Lotus Pier. And then the war, the Sunshot campaign is a response to that. The other clans joining hands to try to stop the Wens from trying to take over the cultivation world.
00:35:34
Speaker
Lots of complex dynamics between the clans going on there that we will not get into that culminates in this battle of Nightless City. Alongside that political power struggle, we have Wei Wuxian's rise to power and his fall from grace.
00:35:48
Speaker
He is incredibly smart. He's a cultivation prodigy. he is also not as reverent about the traditional ways of doing things. He's very interested in unorthodox cultivation methods, including demonic cultivation, which is very much looked down on.
00:36:04
Speaker
As the war played out and as the Wens to take control, he was part of fighting them alongside his struggles with controlling his own power.
00:36:14
Speaker
He took great exception to the aftermath of the war, the treatment of the Wen prisoners of war, the more innocent Wen clan members who were not part of this, who are just regular folks or wheat cultivators, medical cultivators who didn't actually hurt anyone but were treated badly because they were Wen's by the other clans.
00:36:34
Speaker
So he intervened to protect those folks. That is what led to him retreating from the cultivation world to the burial mounds to live with the Wen's, resurrecting Wen Ning and ultimately setting himself up to be a scapegoat and get ambushed by the other clans because they were very unhappy with him.
00:36:49
Speaker
Alongside that, we have a couple very personal storylines going on. One to do with Wei Wuxian's family relationships and the implosion of his clan family. The Zhang family, they are his adopted family.
00:37:04
Speaker
The heir, who is Jung Chung, and sister Jung Yeon Lee, these are his adoptive siblings. It's a very fraught family relationship. His adoptive mother resents him, partly because of who his mother is and partly because he outshines her son, the sect heir.
00:37:22
Speaker
When Lotus Pier, their family home, is attacked, both of the Zhang parents die. The clan is basically decimated. Zhang Cheng loses his core, and Wei Wuxian decides to pull a real big noble idiocy, sacrifice his own life, basically, for his brother, give him his core.
00:37:42
Speaker
Tell nobody he did this and then start cultivating on the demonic path to try to come up with another source of power as part of his survival. His relationship with his brother is in particular one of the most interesting and dynamic and complicated relationships of the show.
00:37:58
Speaker
And he has a very, very deep love for his adoptive sister, which of course ends up coming back to bite him when, as a result of him losing control of his powers and starting this battle at Nightless City, his sister is killed in the chaos.
Character Motivations & Narrative Impact
00:38:14
Speaker
Huge traumatic event causes him to go off the deep end and destroys his relationship with his brother. Alongside all that, one more big storyline, of course, is the unfulfilled romance between Wuxian and Lan Wangji.
00:38:28
Speaker
We get alongside all of this political power struggle stuff, some actually really lovely moments of them first meeting each other as teens. Wei Wuxian very infatuated with Lan Zhan right from the beginning, but didn't really understand what his feelings meant.
00:38:42
Speaker
Lan Wangji, of course, did understand what the feelings meant and was not happy about it. Oh, he was so mad, friend. He was so pissed. He's like, why do I like this wish? God damn it.
00:38:54
Speaker
Why is it new? So yeah, big gay panic on poor Wangji's side and big oblivious nonsense on Wushen's side. But then we see them over time bond over their shared values. They actually believe in a lot of the same core ideas.
00:39:08
Speaker
They end up doing adventures together. They defeat bad guys together. They survive together and support each other. They're going to develop like a deep friendship that on Wangji's side is always very consciously also romantic love. And on Wuxian's side is a little bit more oblivious.
00:39:26
Speaker
When Wuxian loses his core and starts doing demonic cultivation, there is a divide that comes between them. Wangji does not understand these decisions. Wuxian will not tell him why he's doing any of this stuff.
00:39:38
Speaker
So they end up in this very tense dynamic where they're fighting all the time, but they don't want to be fighting because they really care about each other. They spend some time together and attempt to reconnect, but of course everything ends in despair when Wuxian basically jumps off the cliff after his sister dies at Nightless City and gives up on his life.
00:39:56
Speaker
And that is how the first life arc completes.
00:40:07
Speaker
What I think works well with the drama, I personally like dropping us in And just being like, there's a lot of shit going on. You guys are going to have to figure out a lot of shit over time.
00:40:20
Speaker
and I actually, in retrospect, like the very long, like 30-something episode flashback sequence. I think if they had tried to maintain the back-and-forth nature of the source material, the audience who maybe missed an episode or two here or there would be confused as hell.
00:40:40
Speaker
I also think it's a pretty clever choice because... You start in the present and there's way too much shit going on. And then they flashback like, so anyway, they're in school. And everybody's like, okay, I understand school.
00:40:53
Speaker
Let's meet some kids. I think that's a really smart adaptation choice. Everybody may not understand what's going on in the world of cultivation, but everybody knows what it's like to be bored in a classroom with a stuffy old man telling you to write a bunch of rules down.
00:41:07
Speaker
I kind of had the opposite reaction. I understand why they structured the story the way that they did. But for me, if they had started at cloud recesses, I would have been fine.
00:41:21
Speaker
And I feel like I would have had less of a who's on first kind of thing going because it took me a really long time to clue into what the story was even doing because I was so confused.
00:41:32
Speaker
I didn't even understand that the cloud recesses stuff was a flashback at first. To me, if they had done the story more linearly, I would have gotten it. I understand why they did it the way that they did to set up a hook and to do this reverberation throughout the story of showing that these things happen over and over again.
00:41:52
Speaker
But for me, I would have been fine with a more linear narrative. part of that is also just your unfamiliarity with C-drama tropes and like the signifiers of things like age and timeline shifts and class stuff.
00:42:07
Speaker
One thing I think is really funny, Nini, is that you cued in so quickly to what the hair was telling you, which I thought was So funny. This is the only reason I survived. I was reading the show and all the characters through the hairstyles.
00:42:21
Speaker
So I saw like Wei Wuxian and his wild little tendrils. And I was like, okay, this guy's a rebel. And then Lang Wangji with his very structured beehive. i was like, okay, I know who you are, sir.
00:42:32
Speaker
And then like all the different characters, like depending on like how their hair was styled, I could get a sense of who they were as a character. If this person is mischievous, if they're playful, if they're rules-focused, I could get all of that through the hair.
00:42:46
Speaker
So that was actually really good. I could not remember anybody's names for the longest time. I was in like the chat saying, what is Beehive doing? Or Tendrils is acting a fool today.
00:42:58
Speaker
Yeah. They would know exactly what was talking about. really worked for It really did work. Nini was tracking as Wangji's beehive was getting bigger and bigger.
00:43:09
Speaker
it was massive at one point. I was like, oh, you are really trying to intimidate people now with this. That's what's happening here. It's true. ah Their hair changes with their status and with their age, right?
00:43:22
Speaker
As Wangji attains higher status in the cultivation world, his hair pieces get more elaborate and huge. That's very effective visual language. It's like the Texas rule. The higher the hair, the closer gone.
00:43:34
Speaker
i mean, you're genuinely not wrong. No, it's real. I'm glad that you found something that cued for you. It really paid off for me at the end when Wangji comes to Wei Wuxian and his hair is all down and soft. I'm like, oh my God, he's so in love.
00:43:54
Speaker
That's when Nini just started melting. I did. I absolutely did. He had no beehive. He was entirely defenseless, basically, in front of this manor. It's a great visual language for when you have this censorship that you can't say certain things and show certain things.
00:44:10
Speaker
Showing what was happening between the characters through the hair was very effective, for me, anyway. One of the key moments when Nini really queued into the beehive and the tendrils thing was when after Wuxian was thrown into the burial mounds and Zhang Cheng and Lan Wangji was searching for him.
00:44:31
Speaker
He just walked up to the Ben headquarters and the reveal was just slowly, you see his hair and then you he just keeps walking with his sword out and Nini just was like, oh, he has the biggest hive I've ever seen. You guys are done for.
00:44:47
Speaker
like these motherfuckers are dead beehive is up there okay beehive is up the sword is out he came to kill somebody that's what's happening right now i think what works so so well for me with the show and especially on like secondary or tertiary watches is because you start off being told this is a tragedy It, I think, puts you in the right mood when you're watching the past stuff.
00:45:19
Speaker
The show opens with people literally fighting each other for a plot token. We're watching cultivators in the midst of a crisis literally stab each other to grasp what they hope will make them stronger than other people. So we're ready for everything that's going to go wrong because of the opening sequence.
00:45:38
Speaker
It's very well structured and why I think the show got away with some. We know Wei Wuxian's going to die. We know that his brother is going to be furious with him at his death. And we know that this guy who's wearing all these white clothes is going to be very upset about it when that happens.
00:45:56
Speaker
This set me up very well to anticipate a lot of what was coming. You end up meeting all these characters in the past, and then some of these people are just straight up dead 16 years later. And it's like, well, how did these people die? I thought the war was over. And this leads to the next phase of power play stuff that's happening.
00:46:21
Speaker
While this drama is censored, there's all sorts of really fucked up gay energy all over this story. Let's talk about how impressively they managed to communicate the romance without being able to show anything explicit.
00:46:38
Speaker
The romances, because i clocked about four romances in this thing. And I was told that I was correct. So I'm so proud of myself.
00:46:50
Speaker
There's two het romances and two queer romances. The het romances are between Jean Yanli and Jin Shishuan. I love that they low-key hated their brother-in-law. It's such a,
00:47:06
Speaker
Such an appropriate brother experience. There was nothing low-key about it, bestie. High-key it. Zishuan is very immature. He likes Yanli, but he's embarrassed that he likes her.
00:47:17
Speaker
And so he's kind of mean to her. And she, for some fucking reason that I never understood, just really likes him anyway, which is why her brothers hate him. They do eventually get married and for their extremely brief marriage seem to be happy together.
00:47:32
Speaker
Oh, so brief. So sad. We'll get into that a little bit later. Their marriage is arranged originally by their parents because their families have been allies for at least a generation or two, and this is an attempt to strengthen that.
00:47:46
Speaker
And so the parents want these two kids to like each other, so it's actually beneficial for the political goals of the families that, in the end, the kids actually do like each other.
00:47:57
Speaker
But there's complications. People never understand Wuxian's relationship with Yan Li. People constantly misread his relationship with her. And then there's the genuine issue of Zhang Chang and Wei Huixin fucking despising Shuan from being such a dick to their sister all the time.
00:48:16
Speaker
I keep thinking about the whole inn thing where he takes over the entire inn and they can't even get a room. It's so fucking dumb. And he's such an asshole about it. It's so funny.
00:48:27
Speaker
This is the storyline where I was glad that this was here because amongst all the fighting and the flying and the magical shit happening, like fighting a giant in tortoise and being generals in war and all of that, this is where you're like, oh, they're teenagers.
00:48:44
Speaker
Oh, they're so stupid. so true. It's a good reminder that they're all teenagers. Every time Jiang Yanli gives a pass to that man, I'm like, oh my god.
00:48:57
Speaker
I'm like, girl, him? Really? You're like, Yanli, stand up. Stand up, girl. It gets even wilder in the context of the political power struggle going on and the scapegoating of Wei Wuxian because that's her fucking brother and the djinns are going after him.
00:49:12
Speaker
So it's very wild to me that Yanli decides to marry into the family that is actively hunting her brother. Like, I the sense that she never understood how serious that was and I think she felt like her one big tantrum solved the problem.
00:49:26
Speaker
I do think that they set this character up well for that to be believable. She is not a strong cultivator. She is not very involved in sect politics. She is a very caring person who just loves who she loves and doesn't really want to deal with the idea that they won't get along. So she just doesn't allow it to be true in her head.
00:49:45
Speaker
And Wei Wuxian loves her. So he was never going to say to her, I don't want you to marry that man who's trying to hunt me because he wants her to be happy.
00:49:58
Speaker
i think her character makes sense, but she's a character that I can never personally get on board with. I'm just like, girl, your choices are so bad. i feel for her the same way I feel about the messy hits in Coffee Prince.
00:50:12
Speaker
We needed another, like, pat but tragic hit story to make sure that we could get away with this very queer story. That's a good segue to talk about the other very subtle mini romance between Zhang Cheng and Wen Qing.
00:50:27
Speaker
Not in the books, by the way. This was added only for the show. And I think, Ben, when we were watching, you commented that you thought it was really there to add an additional layer of heterosexual plausibility and plausible deniability for the show.
00:50:42
Speaker
I feel like that was part of it, yes, but that is also a romance that doesn't happen. Jiang Cheng is definitely in love with Wen Cheng.
00:50:53
Speaker
Wen Cheng feels sort of the same, but Wen Cheng is also an incredibly practical woman, and Jiang Cheng is not saying anything that is going to help her.
00:51:04
Speaker
Like, at one point, after everything's gone down with the one clan, he was just like, you should leave your clan, which is basically him asking her to marry him.
00:51:14
Speaker
And she's like, dude, really? How do you think this is gonna go? My clan killed your parents. You are the heir. And then you're going to bring me there as your wife?
00:51:28
Speaker
That's not gonna work. I thought it was a really good way to illustrate the rock and hard place that Zhang Cheng was between for all of this show. Oh my God, I love this character. Right?
00:51:38
Speaker
He did care about the Wens. He did want to help. But politically, there was only so much he could do. And what he could do was not enough. He knew that.
00:51:49
Speaker
She knew that. They had to accept that. Given the circumstances he was in with a mostly decimated clan, very young and suddenly thrust into having to lead and rebuild the Jiangs, he just didn't have the power and the resources to do something like offer protection to the Wens.
00:52:10
Speaker
He couldn't do it, and he was not willing to risk the total decimation of his clan in order to try. That's why he and Wei Wuxian ultimately broke, right? Wei Wuxian knew that, which is why he left the clan to do it on his own.
00:52:25
Speaker
It's really good conflict because you can see that people care and they want to try, but they just can't do what they think they should or what they want to. Wuxian did do those things, and he paid for it big time.
00:52:37
Speaker
See, and this is why I like it so much. If we're going to have to do gay tragedy in a story, and need huts to suffer too.
00:52:47
Speaker
Nobody's happy. The Jang family relationship sucks. The leader of the Jin clan is a womanizer and an abuser who doesn't give a shit about all of his bastards he leaves all over the place.
00:53:00
Speaker
He's a gross, nasty man. The only happy heterosexuals we had died within a year of having their baby. Oh, nope, that's not fair. Mian Mian's doing okay. Mian Mian's doing great. How dare you? She's the one happy he person in this show. She's the one.
00:53:15
Speaker
The only sensible one. Because Mian Mian stood up for the gays. Exactly. because she left the clans, she said, fuck this shit, I'm going rogue, and did her own thing.
00:53:29
Speaker
One of the reasons why I think some of the other censored stuff fails is they just don't have enough hetero plausible deniability in them. You have to give the straight audience a bone if you're trying to get stuff past the powers that be.
00:53:44
Speaker
Let's talk about the third love story that is technically never explicitly confirmed in book canon, but that's, in my opinion, only because the book is from Wuxian's point of view and he doesn't have the visibility to see it.
00:53:58
Speaker
That is, of course, Meng Yao and Lan Zixian. my god. The most tragic of all ah the tragedies. oh Oh no! No, no, no.
00:54:12
Speaker
Go off the perm. I just don't agree with the tragic part of it because... For somebody in Ranjishin's position, he is so oblivious.
00:54:24
Speaker
He was played like a fiddle by this man. This is like dialed to 100 in the show because the way Meng Ya was played in the show, you see him on screen just smirking around.
00:54:38
Speaker
And I'm like, this man... He doesn't have good intentions. You can't trust him. For me, that's the tragedy. The visual language and everything, like the acting is telling me this is a villain.
00:54:51
Speaker
But I trust Lan Juchen so much that when Lan Juchen trusts Meng Yao, At first, I'm just like, okay, well, there must be a reason.
00:55:02
Speaker
If he trusts him, maybe I'm reading this all wrong, or maybe this is a plot because he trusts him so completely. And he is destroyed for that in the end. Like, absolutely destroyed.
00:55:17
Speaker
actually actually love that reflection, Nini. I think that's really fair way to read it. ah just want to quickly add that Nini basically got Niminch Vey into this. Like, she basically did the same thing that Niminch Vey did.
00:55:31
Speaker
yeah That's really true. Niminzue, their other sworn brother, who goes along with trusting Meng Yao, even though he clearly doesn't, only because Zishan asks him to.
00:55:44
Speaker
And then he got his head chopped off for it. He got got. It's so fun watching people watch this show. Nini's like, oh, I love this Dimples of Doom boy. And I'm like, okay.
00:55:55
Speaker
She's falling for the dimples. And then he stabs the battalion commander in the middle of a battle. And Nini's like, oh, I guess I can't like this boy anymore.
00:56:09
Speaker
Then he had a really good explanation for it. And I was just like, okay, maybe I can. This is the thing He's good at what he does. She saw that man stab the commander and then Min Chui called him into the room to throw him out of the sect and Do you remember what Nini said?
00:56:27
Speaker
She said, can you at least treat this man the stab wound before you throw him all in the house? By the end, I was like, no, you should have killed him.
00:56:39
Speaker
Banishment was too good. you would have saved a lot of people if you had just killed this man in that moment. do not feel sorry for Zichen because there were so many signs. Yes.
00:56:50
Speaker
He actively ignored all them. We'll get into the second life arc, but like it took until the very, very end for him to accept, just despite all the evidence he saw, despite everything he witnessed over two decades of being friends with this man.
00:57:04
Speaker
To be clear, Meng Yao, who becomes Jin Guangyao when he moves up in the world, he's married to a woman. But Zichen is basically in this hopeless love with him. They're both clan leaders. They cannot...
00:57:18
Speaker
become a couple in a real way because of their position in society. And because of that love, he is so susceptible to manipulation. He just believes whatever Meng Yao tells him, even if it doesn't make sense, he will believe Yao's words over his own lion eyes.
00:57:36
Speaker
Wangji and Wei Wuxing, we have evidence that this man is the most evil. Zichen, okay, but have you considered that I love him? Drop that down. Oh,
00:57:47
Speaker
Oh, I hate it. That's exactly what it is. It's so white. Oh my God. That's not even an exaggeration. That is almost exactly how it goes down.
00:58:00
Speaker
I think it's a good connective theme between all three of these romances that people have their own ways to separate the politics of the person that they like.
00:58:15
Speaker
And when they want to protect them, do they want to choose diplomacy? Do they want to choose brute force? Do they want to choose compromise? What route do they take?
00:58:25
Speaker
Zhang Cheng, when he came to the proposal, he must know that that's not going to happen. But you can see that there is this need to protect this woman whom he knows is innocent.
00:58:37
Speaker
He also knows that he has this huge weight of clan politics that he's not the clan leader and his clan is severely wounded and he has to make responsible choices to weigh between whether I choose my clan or whether I choose to do everything think I could to protect this person, which is what I want to do in my heart.
00:59:03
Speaker
My problem with Shishin is he... doesn't really separate what the politics of the clan is going through and what Meng Yau is basically feeding him.
00:59:15
Speaker
You shouldn't be this gullible to a person who is basically another important figure in and another clan that you know is doing just shady shit.
00:59:27
Speaker
You know they're having prisoners of war. You saw them use them for target practice. You saw them abuse the prisoners of war, beat them and kill them and all of that.
00:59:38
Speaker
And this man is part of that clan. Not just a part, he is pretty high up in the ladder. He's also a known spy. yeah know!
00:59:49
Speaker
Precisely! You're right. Zeechan does not have an excuse. He witnessed this stuff with his own eyes. I don't care how prettily he blinks in frustration. He's stupid.
01:00:01
Speaker
Bookworm, I found what you just said really entirely fascinating because I think that one of the reasons then that Wei Wuchen and Lan Wangji works is that neither of them are directly in line to take over the clans.
01:00:15
Speaker
Wei Wuchen is an adoptee. He's not ever going to take over the giant clan. So he does in some ways have to make his own way. And Lan Wangji is a second son.
01:00:26
Speaker
He also has to go his own way. So the politics for them, they're still the politics of clan loyalty and all of that, but they don't have the leadership responsibilities that all these other romances are involved with so what they can do and particularly what Lan Wangji can do to protect Wei Wuxian is far beyond what any of the other romances can do to compromise protect whatever Lan Wangji just basically decides that's my man and nobody's gonna touch him even when I am mad at him even when I don't understand what he's doing
01:01:06
Speaker
nobody is touching that mind because that's my mind.
01:01:17
Speaker
Before we leave the First Life stuff, let's do a couple of quick hits. Favorite moments from the First Life, starting with schoolship through the Battle of Nightless City.
01:01:29
Speaker
My favorite moments tend to be tied to Wangji, of course, and his emotional landscape. So the standout moments that feel really crucial to his character arc are where he reaches this emotional cliff that he falls over. And that happens for him several times.
01:01:47
Speaker
It happens when he is sitting with Wei-Yung making a lantern. I knew she was going to fucking say that. ah And he draws him a rabbit on the lantern, which makes him smile. But the more important moment there is that he listens as Wuxian makes a vow for how he wants to live his life.
01:02:09
Speaker
And Wangji turns to him and looks at him like, oh shit, I see you. I understand you now. He agrees with the morality of the values that he holds.
01:02:21
Speaker
And that's a huge moment for him. They were kind of in this stage where Wuxian was being a pest and Wangji was having his little gay panic and they were kind of adversarial with each other. And that moment really shifted things for him emotionally where he was like, I understand him. We are actually on the same page about the things that matter.
01:02:37
Speaker
And I cannot go back to not knowing that. And then as they have their adventures together and they get to know each other better, moments like in the cave with the tortoise where Wangji kind of explicitly acknowledges his romantic feelings, not in a way that Wushen can understand and receive, but he definitely does.
01:02:57
Speaker
The rain scene on Chongchi Path, when he makes a choice to not stop Wuxian from leaving with the Wen prisoners of war, but also not join him. I think that was a huge moment for him where he came up against his own limitations about what he felt he could do for Wuxian. He was not actually willing to break from his clan and help him, but he didn't stand in his way.
01:03:22
Speaker
And then, of course, that all culminates in... His attempts to bring Wushan back into the cultivation world that ultimately go sideways because of the machinations of the Jinns.
01:03:33
Speaker
And the moment where he is forced to let him go when he is falling off the cliff, that is the moment where his heart just shatters. And then we'll pick up with him 16 years later and all his regrets.
01:03:47
Speaker
right, Shan, no crying yet. I'm doing great. Bookworm! i Wushan. for Lan Wangji if I have to. i think we all will.
01:03:58
Speaker
Don't even try it. Most of my favorite moments will also be tied to Lan Wangji. She already mentioned a lot of them, but we still have a couple. After we see Fei Wuxin lose his core, get thrown into burial mounds and learn demonic cultivation, when he shows up in that Yiling supervisory office,
01:04:20
Speaker
wearing red eyeliner and the black robot. It just naturally goes on. The evil spirit gets the eyeliner on. It's one of the many ghosts in the sword.
01:04:31
Speaker
yeah
01:04:34
Speaker
Just full emo kid up and his revenge on Wen Chao. while Lan Zhan and Zhang Cheng is watching.
01:04:45
Speaker
That scene it was very well depicted. Like, it was very well shot. It was very well acted. I really liked the tension of Lan Wangji realizing that something is different.
01:04:56
Speaker
And you can see his heartbreak. You can see him calculating what's going on. You can see him... just being so happy to finally see Wei Wuxian. Like, he was gone for months, and he just showed up in the middle of a war.
01:05:13
Speaker
And my man wanted to, I don't know, grab him and kiss, but no, this guy wanted to murder. That was his worst priority, and it broke him. That is one of my favorite moments. I mean, obviously.
01:05:26
Speaker
I'm very normal. It's fine. oh
01:05:33
Speaker
There was a moment after the archery competition, and Phoenix Mountain Hunt, we see where Vishen just like lounging in a tree and Manjan shows up.
01:05:45
Speaker
And they finally, finally have this conversation where they try to ease some of the tension that they've been holding because of wings like reticence to engage with Lan Zhan when he asks what is wrong.
01:05:59
Speaker
And Lan Zhan going insane, basically, trying to figure out what is happening with Weyoshi why he's not following the sword path, why he has turned to demonic cultivation.
01:06:12
Speaker
I think that that is one of the iconic moments in the show. And of course, it has a whole discourse about the soulmate's translation. The actual word is Gigi, and it doesn't have a direct literal English translation. So no translation is really capturing it correctly.
01:06:29
Speaker
But it was translated as, I think, soulmate for the show. Lifelong bosom companions. And they were roommates. He's my boon companion.
01:06:44
Speaker
oh Yeah, but I did, I really liked that conversation and how it confused a little bit of the tension that they were holding. And then, of course, everything goes to shit. But at least they were happy for a brief moment. Yeah.
01:06:57
Speaker
I think for me, there's three things that tie together into a line. The two caves, and then when Lan Wangji meets Wei Wuxian Yeeling Town, and he invites him to come back to the Burial Mountains for dinner.
01:07:12
Speaker
There were two caves! Oh my god! For sure, that's legit! God damn, there are a lot of caves in this fucking story.
01:07:21
Speaker
The caves belong to the gays. It is what it is. But yeah, I think those three points in the story form a very interesting line because the first cave is the Cold Pond Cave and they meet up with Lan Wangxi's ancestor who developed the Lan clan's signature martial arts magic style.
01:07:43
Speaker
And she Basically explains to them their mission, what they have to do, this thing about the Plot McGuffin, the Yin Iron. But it's so interesting to me.
01:07:54
Speaker
When they came out of the cave, it's like Wei Wuxian instinctively understood that they don't tell anybody about what happened in the cave. I found that was an interesting change and dynamic to their relationship and also very geek.
01:08:10
Speaker
And then when they're trapped in the cave with the tortoise of slaughter. She really could not get over that fucking name. could not. The tortoise of the slaughter. Okay.
01:08:23
Speaker
um Yeah, so they're fighting this thing and Wei Wujan basically goes into its shell and finds this sword, which is the first step on the path to his demonic cultivation.
01:08:34
Speaker
Everything that happens from the moment he touches that sword took him directly to his break with all the clans and ending up in the burial mounds in the first place so that when they see each other after such a long time apart after everything and he's just like hey friend how are you come to dinner at my house you're gonna go fight a monster fuck that come over It's basically like the Hey Big Head text of all time.
01:09:06
Speaker
And i was completely into it. Hold on, just got triggered.
01:09:14
Speaker
It was such a romantic moment for me. You feel Lan Zhan's feelings the entire time, but it's really the first time that you feel Wei Wuxian's feelings for Lan Zhan and how they confuse him.
01:09:27
Speaker
He knows that he has these strong feelings and he wants Lan Zhan to be around him and in his life. But it's almost like he doesn't know what to call it. Or at least he can't face what to call it.
01:09:40
Speaker
I like moments in the past where people's personal ethics and loyalty to people who have helped them directly makes them ignore the responsibilities they may have to their clan.
01:09:51
Speaker
So the first one for me is when Wen Ning poisons his own clan to help Wei Wuxian rescue Zhongchang.
01:10:02
Speaker
I knew it was going to be about Wen Ning. Ben loves Wen Ning. I really do. You mentioned it twice earlier and I held it in. You did so good. That moment's earned because Wei Wuxian showed him regard and kindness earlier and he returned it in kind.
01:10:17
Speaker
The next big moment I like is Yanli's tantrum when she's like, you better keep my brother's name out your fucking mouth. Because that was really fun for a character who's been very reserved, who doesn't really challenge a lot of people.
01:10:33
Speaker
We have not really seen how all of the trauma they've survived directly impacted her so much. I really liked her in that moment. putting her foot down. No, fuck you. I don't care. You can see Wei Wuxian barely holding on to his control.
01:10:46
Speaker
And the only two things holding him back are his sister and his not boyfriend. And then like within five episodes, neither of them will be present and everything's going to go to shit.
01:11:00
Speaker
Yep, pretty much.
01:11:09
Speaker
It's Ben and Nene from the future! All the way in the future. So far in the future. This episode is too fucking long. We're sorry, guys. We had a lot to say, and we got bookworm in the booths.
01:11:22
Speaker
It's also The Untamed. It's a very fucking long drama. So we're going to take a pause here after the end of our discussion of Wei Wuxian's first life.
01:11:35
Speaker
And we'll pick up in the next episode with his second life. We appreciate you all for joining us. Yeah, we talk too much. And so there's going to be two episodes.
01:11:48
Speaker
So see you guys in the next one. bye to the people, Ben. Peace.