明月清风晓星尘 Bright Moon and Gentle Breeze, Xiao Xingchen
For @mdzsnet’s XXC Birthday Event!
(With less than an hour to spare in my timezone… yeah… I’m a mess… >.> )
For @fytheuntamed ‘s Untamed Fall Fest. Day 29: Carving
“尸体火化。魂魄安养。负霜华，行世路。一同星尘，除魔歼邪。待他醒来，说对不起，错不在你。”
“Cremate his body. Care for his soul. Carry Shuanghua, travel the world. Together with Xingchen, eliminate demons and annihilate evils. When he awakes, tell him sorry, it’s not your fault.”
- Ch 42
I picked this for 3 reasons. 1) Xue Yang carving out Song Lan’s tongue. 2) Xiao Xingchen almost touching the engraving on Song Lan’s sword. 3) What their ending did to my heart.
Edit: oops. I typed carve instead of carving. Orz. Edit 2, about 15 hrs after posting: I spelled sour instead of soul. Yaaaay. Orz. Bad at proofreading when I just want more sleep. Fixed now. Probably too late...
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tenniest-deactivated20201003
song jiyang twirling his sword while wearing airpods
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I think we don’t do enough with the fact that the one time Baoshan Sanren appears as a real character rather than an unseen mythic figure, she’s specifically mirroring/paralleling Lan Wangji. In Lan Yi’s story about the Yin Iron, Lan Yi is a lot like Wei Wuxian - daring to do the unconventional/potentially dangerous and suffering for it - while Baoshan Sanren is the one saying “hit the brakes, this is not a great idea”. Which is interesting, because everyone else associated with Baoshan Sanren is more like Wei Wuxian (Cangse Sanren, Xiao Xingchen). Given that the Lan clan is, well, the Lan clan, you’d almost expect Lan Yi and Baoshan Sanren’s roles to be the other way around - but they’re not! And I think that’s significant.
That's a scene only in CQL/Untamed, I believe.
But nonetheless it's a good point. I think the parallel is not unexpected, however.
Bssr has gone off to hug her mountain (in case anyone doesn't know bao can mean to hug and shan is mountain... She's basically an ancient/post-apocalyptic sword wizard hippie and I love it) but Lan Yi is still tied to the mortal realm. I think that speaks volumes about where their cultivation state and mental state are. Despite all that the Lan sect tries to do, they have not learned to transcend. Lan Qiren still get riled up by wwx acting like his mom. LXC is still tortured by fraternal love and betrayal. Lwj is still driven to extremes by romantic love and devotion. All of these are so human despite their sect striving for enlightenment via austerity.
Bssr, on the other hand has transcended. She's left everything behind and gone into seclusion. We know she's effectively immortal but we know nothing else. She has reached that immortal peak everyone alludes to within the cql world. And no one can really understand it.
What we see of her students are those who chose to leave and never return. The three discussed in the novel and the two we kinda get to know are her foils. They show what she is not. For them, the call of the mortal realm is too great. They all suffer for that call and they all perish. Cssr is known to have Wwx's personality. I read Wwx's suffering as an extension of cssr's price for leaving bssr.
Lwj's actions towards wwx are parallel to what bssr tried to do for lan yi. But he is devoted and refused to give up. Bssr left. I wonder about what they could've done together if bssr were as stubborn as lwj. But that's not her temperament. And that makes all the difference.
shuang hua: translation, etymoloygy, and thoughts
I had a revelation today while forcing my husband to watch the untamed with me. In the netflix translation, they describe Shuanghua (霜华), XXC’s sword as having frost flowers. wtf are frost flowers? (霜花)
So.. frost flowers are how the chinese describe the fractal patterns in frost. snowflakes are snow flowers. an egg beaten and slowly drizzled into boiling water forming egg drop soup is egg flowers. the use of the word flower is pretty lax. Given the context, I would translate the description as fractals. Granted, it’s anachronistic, but i’d like to argue for accuracy of diction over historic context.
Anyway, what’s so fun about the name of the XXC’s sword? Last november, I went on an impromptu trip to China. We ended up visiting Hua Shan（华山). Per the tour guide, the Hua in Hua Shan was a reference to the way it looks like a flower. At some point in time, the two characters 华 and 花 diverged. One ended up being flower, and the other indicating splendor. Interestingly enough, 华 is also the character the Chinese associate with China in some sense, likely named after the mountain (the Chinese diaspora is known as 华侨; people’s republic of china is 中华民族共和国). (For those who watch Eternal Love/Three lives, three worlds, ten miles peach blossom, in one of the BTS videos on youtube, i think Mark Chao (who went to hs and college in canada i think) translates 夜华as night flower while off screen.
Based on that translation, 霜华 can either be translated as the fractal/flowerly patterns of frost or the splendor of frost.
Either way, it’s rather poetic, don’t you think?
Side note: for anyone who is interested Wuxia, 华山 is THE place to have a kungfu showdown. It’s the place where people die every year from falling off the sides of the mountain. 华山论剑 (duel on huashan) is as common a trope as 比武招亲 (finding a spouse vial martial competition) in wuxia... but i can go into that another time. that’s actually one of the reasons i dragged my poor husband to 华山. i was a day trip away from, what was for me, wuxia mecca. i had to go!!!
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Anonymous asked:
do you think yi city arc would be different if song lan didn't tell xiao xingchen to go away? it seems like everything that happened is kind of his fault
damn noonie
Idk if I’d say everything is his fault because he told xingchen to go away
if you go further back (in the novel, I think it’s the extra chapters) it’s zichen who first makes contact with xue yang and pisses him off + that’s when xue yang says “I only brushed past his arm, so what was with that look he gave me? Sooner or later, I’ll dig out his eyes and shatter his heart. Let’s see what he’ll do when that happens.”
but at the same time, if zichen had not tried to stop xue yang from whatever destructive bullshit he was doing at the time (I don’t remember any more, wasn’t he like terrorizing people in the market?) then he wouldn’t really be zichen that xingchen knew and loved, would he?
In the end, everything caused by xue yang can’t be anyone else’s fault but xue yang’s. you can think about it this way: what would have happened if xue yang had never existed?
I always think of xue yang as a plague, or war, or any other chaos-causing event. yes, you can judge how people act and react when faced with this event, but you still have to acknowledge that the event is the main cause of all actions and reactions, good or bad
as far as song zichen’s reaction to the slaughter of baixue temple, it’s hard to say how things would have turned out if he hadn’t turned his grief and anger on xingchen. but i’m fairly certain that xingchen’s guilt, even if zichen had not blamed him at all, would have driven him away from zichen anyway
i love how you say you think of “everything caused by xue yang as a plage, or war, or any other chaos-causing event” because that is his MOOD. and his sword is named 降灾 which means descending/bringing down disasters. your statement fits him (and his sword) perfectly!
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miska-za-deactivated20221119
someone on twitter once brought up the idea of songxiaowangningxian and at first i laughed just because the ship name alone looked so funny but then i was like. Wait. This is actually kinda good lol