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waterscrollI'm up to episode 10 and am delighted to find that there is plenty to think about, it's not just pretty boys pining and lusting prettily after each other, although it is very much that too. And tropey slash fanfic on screen, yes it is that too. But right now I'm also struck by the nature mysticism, which I understand was based in Chinese traditional folk religion in the original novel, and censored about as effectively as the m/m romance. Sure, space aliens, we'll call it that. But what it feels like, at least to me, at least right now, is an allegory about trying to love a terrifying world.
Warning: personal reactions to a canon that I am fairly new to and might be getting completely wrong. I've read some spoilers but not enough to be able to think through more of this show than what I've actually seen on-screen.
So here I am in April 2020 and I haven't left my apartment building for, welp, as of today, exactly a month. I live in a small apartment in a very dense urban area and out of my windows all I can see is other apartment buildings. I can't even see a single tree, or even a blade of grass. I've always been a city dweller, the three years I had to live in a rural area for work were the worst of my life, but I've always been able to go outside to get to parks whenever I wanted to. Well, until now.
People are still going for walks outside but the mayor yells at them to go home. Which makes sense. The city that I live in is having a particularly bad outbreak and I'm in a particularly crowded area. There are now police checkpoints to keep people from going to parks.
So I sit here in this apartment and the natural world is something that I miss and long for and is a kind of beauty that I can't access directly because it might kill me. And I wonder: maybe this is a more normal way of relating to nature, historically, than the way I'm used to. Maybe it's rare for humans to relate to nature the way I previously had, as a kind of public amenity. Right now there's a world out there that is beautiful and terrifying, the kind of terrifying that things are when they are actually dangerous. That's probably what the natural world has been to most people most of the time.
The world of Guardian is full of nature spirits thinly disguised as space aliens. Very thinly. Let's just call them nature spirits. Then there are the spirits of the underworld, very thinly disguised as...oh let's not even bother. The underworld spirits seem to inevitably - or almost inevitably - cause harm to humans that they interact with, even when they try not to. Even when they love them desperately. The only way that they can be kept from doing harm is to return them to the underworld. But because they are capable of loving humans, the cost of that sometimes feels very high.
One non-shippy scene that I found particularly powerful was the conversations between Shen Wei and the plant spirit. Mostly because of Shen Wei's highly expressive face, I found myself able to buy into the worldbuilding and feeling like what looked like a conversation between a professor and a nondescript bush was really a complicated political negotiation between a hell demon and a nature spirit. And, what if the world is actually like this? What if there are spirits everywhere, with emotional lives of their own, in everything that we call nature and the world?
And, what if some of them are motivated by (terrible, impossible) love?
As of where I am in episode 10, Zhao Yunlan is doing his best to seduce Shen Wei. He's working really hard on it, to the point where his co-workers are starting to talk. Shen Wei wants him desperately, pines for him beautifully, but since he actually knows what is going on has some understanding of what is at stake here and he's holding himself back.
I don't, yet, know what is at stake here, because canon is being fairly coy about telling me (and so is Shen Wei). I know what happened to the lesbians in episode 3 who could never touch and then finally did at great cost, because love between an underworld person and an above-ground person will always cause harm (but might be worth it). I know that Shen Wei, in his role as the Black Cloak Envoy, spends most of his time making sure that underground people get returned safely underground before they can do too much harm above ground, including to the people they love. But I also know that Shen Wei and Zhao Yunlan were lovers at some time in the past, a very long time ago, and that this is important. As it feels like it should be. Since this is going to be a story about the Power of True Love, they have to find a way to be together again. But what will that mean for their universe?
I am in general very fond of human/deity pairings, but I've mainly worked with them (under a different name) in western canons drawing primarily on western religions. I am delighted to encounter something similar but working from a completely different religious tradition. I'm very happy to have found this show and at this point in canon I'm feeling like I am well on the way to getting extremely invested in it, and also like the emotional roller-coaster is just starting.
Warning: personal reactions to a canon that I am fairly new to and might be getting completely wrong. I've read some spoilers but not enough to be able to think through more of this show than what I've actually seen on-screen.
So here I am in April 2020 and I haven't left my apartment building for, welp, as of today, exactly a month. I live in a small apartment in a very dense urban area and out of my windows all I can see is other apartment buildings. I can't even see a single tree, or even a blade of grass. I've always been a city dweller, the three years I had to live in a rural area for work were the worst of my life, but I've always been able to go outside to get to parks whenever I wanted to. Well, until now.
People are still going for walks outside but the mayor yells at them to go home. Which makes sense. The city that I live in is having a particularly bad outbreak and I'm in a particularly crowded area. There are now police checkpoints to keep people from going to parks.
So I sit here in this apartment and the natural world is something that I miss and long for and is a kind of beauty that I can't access directly because it might kill me. And I wonder: maybe this is a more normal way of relating to nature, historically, than the way I'm used to. Maybe it's rare for humans to relate to nature the way I previously had, as a kind of public amenity. Right now there's a world out there that is beautiful and terrifying, the kind of terrifying that things are when they are actually dangerous. That's probably what the natural world has been to most people most of the time.
The world of Guardian is full of nature spirits thinly disguised as space aliens. Very thinly. Let's just call them nature spirits. Then there are the spirits of the underworld, very thinly disguised as...oh let's not even bother. The underworld spirits seem to inevitably - or almost inevitably - cause harm to humans that they interact with, even when they try not to. Even when they love them desperately. The only way that they can be kept from doing harm is to return them to the underworld. But because they are capable of loving humans, the cost of that sometimes feels very high.
One non-shippy scene that I found particularly powerful was the conversations between Shen Wei and the plant spirit. Mostly because of Shen Wei's highly expressive face, I found myself able to buy into the worldbuilding and feeling like what looked like a conversation between a professor and a nondescript bush was really a complicated political negotiation between a hell demon and a nature spirit. And, what if the world is actually like this? What if there are spirits everywhere, with emotional lives of their own, in everything that we call nature and the world?
And, what if some of them are motivated by (terrible, impossible) love?
As of where I am in episode 10, Zhao Yunlan is doing his best to seduce Shen Wei. He's working really hard on it, to the point where his co-workers are starting to talk. Shen Wei wants him desperately, pines for him beautifully, but since he actually knows what is going on has some understanding of what is at stake here and he's holding himself back.
I don't, yet, know what is at stake here, because canon is being fairly coy about telling me (and so is Shen Wei). I know what happened to the lesbians in episode 3 who could never touch and then finally did at great cost, because love between an underworld person and an above-ground person will always cause harm (but might be worth it). I know that Shen Wei, in his role as the Black Cloak Envoy, spends most of his time making sure that underground people get returned safely underground before they can do too much harm above ground, including to the people they love. But I also know that Shen Wei and Zhao Yunlan were lovers at some time in the past, a very long time ago, and that this is important. As it feels like it should be. Since this is going to be a story about the Power of True Love, they have to find a way to be together again. But what will that mean for their universe?
I am in general very fond of human/deity pairings, but I've mainly worked with them (under a different name) in western canons drawing primarily on western religions. I am delighted to encounter something similar but working from a completely different religious tradition. I'm very happy to have found this show and at this point in canon I'm feeling like I am well on the way to getting extremely invested in it, and also like the emotional roller-coaster is just starting.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-13 01:21 pm (UTC)I like this as a possible direction for things to go - the tragedy of Haxing/Dixing relationships is caused by the separation between worlds, a separation that both protagonists are in some way actively involved in maintaining. The terrible consequences of these relationships can make the separation feel like a moral good but it's actually causing more harm than it is stopping, because it is the effects of the separation itself that is causing these relationships to be harmful.
That really would be an optimistic direction for the show to go, and provide a clear path forward.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-13 06:46 pm (UTC)I wonder if the current thing with the Hanga and Ge Lan/Sang Zan is supposed to be foreshadowing in some way (particularly episode 11, being deliberately cagey since I'm not sure if you're avoiding episode specific impressions and spoilers!)
I'm also very curious what you'll think of the end of Sang Zan and Ge Lan arc.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-14 05:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-04-14 04:35 pm (UTC)(I also realized I confused episode 10 and episode 11, oops! I could have totally told you this yesterday. :P)
Some muddled reasons I think this:
1. All the camera work and the expressions during the "oh yeah, I'd be super pissed if the people I dedicated myself to destroyed my love too" scene made me think that Shen Wei had actually gone through this himself.
When Zhao Yunlan is talking about ambituous and resourceful men and what they would do in a situation like this, the camera cuts to Shen Wei's MANY COMPLICATED MASKED EXPRESSIONS. And there's a bit before that when Zhao Yunlan starts talking about how he understands people like Sang Zan, and Shen Wei gives him a brief quick look that's...also complicated.
Zhao Yunlan seems to be talking in hypotheticals, wherbased on his understanding of people like Sang Zan, but Shen Wei talks with more certainty, and enough conviction that it surprises Zhao Yunlan.
Taken from the YT subs:
My Chinese language skills are really rusty and I'm definitely not immersed in the media culture (there's a reason I watch things with subs!), so take this with a grain of salt, but I think the translation may fail to capture just how *extreme* Shen Wei is being. qian dao wan gua is a term for lingchi, which is a torture/execution method. And I've heard it used idiomatically as the very limit, like "even if [qian dao wan gua], I won't leave you!" in the climatic romance scene. I read the "it'd be hard to forgive them" as essentially, "NO FORGIVENESS, EVER" as a result.
So Shen Wei escalates Zhao Yunlan's hypothetical by...a lot. And he sounds so full of conviction as he says it.
2. There's that line where Shen Wei talks to Zhao Yunlan and says, "I never thought you would sympathize with a person of Dixing." And his voice kind of breaks a bit (*fannishly flails*). Which makes me wonder if past!Zhao Yunlan came across as a lot more unsympathetic to the Dixing people, and Shen Wei is trying to carry out his wishes. And if maybe Shen Wei isn't happy with the separation entirely either, but he just doesn't want to move on because Zhao Yunlan isn't there to tell him to.
3. It seems like both the Hanga and Dixing people are societies that do bad things and eventually get stopped. But the guilt-by-association with which the new!Hanga treat Ge Lan isn't great and ends up contributing to more suffering. Maybe we're supposed to read that this is happening with the Dixing people, too? (Most of the characters we've seen in the war weren't even alive in the war 10,000 years ago...)
4. In ep 11, Purple-hair explicitly accuses Shen Wei of betraying the Dixing. For power, which is clearly wrong, but I wonder if Shen Wei himself would see himself as forsaking the interests of the Dixing people.
But I'm totally just reading foreshadowing into everything. :P
The Ge Lan/Sang Zan story is fascinating in how they create their own tragedy through their actions and their all consuming love that leads to so many deaths.
Yeah! I think one other thing I find fascinating is that...he betrays her trust and kills her dad and she can still forgive him, even if she seems conflicted about it. o.o And there's a lot of power imbalance in their relationship all the way. I am sucked into their very angsty drama.
It's also interesting to me how they almost run away at the end. And I think they could have been happy if they'd succeeded.
Also, wtf at those elders. "I'm going to brutally murder the one true love of this ruthless and brilliant warrior who has already dedicated his life to vengeance once! And then I'm going to give him power over me afterwards! :D :D :D" . How did they think it was going to turn out?
I wonder if in the novel, they didn't give him power back and he had to claw his way to the top again. And then the drama cut that out for time or simplicity.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-14 11:53 pm (UTC)But yeah, I'm going to guess that whatever happened Back When is more than a long-lost love story. Who is Shen Wei so determined not to forgive??? (I'm wondering if it's himself.)
I had a lot of problems with the Ge Lan/Sang Zan story as a romance...as you say, he kills and displaces her family and she turns to him because she has no one else. There's a lot of intense emotion between them, but it read to me like a lot of it was his guilt and her dependence that they were both deciding to call love because it made them sort of more able to live with everything that happened. That Shen Wei saw a relatable love story there made me pretty damned worried for him. I wonder if he has any normal context for understanding what a relationship between people who love each other is supposed to look like, aside from whatever (possibly highly messed up) thing he had going with Zhao Yunlan thousands of years ago.
Anyway, more in a few days.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-17 04:51 pm (UTC)That is so interesting and sounds plausible. It would be nicely tragic in the best/worst way - his own reactions to heartbreak are what force the heartbreak to continue.
Which makes me wonder if past!Zhao Yunlan came across as a lot more unsympathetic to the Dixing people, and Shen Wei is trying to carry out his wishes. And if maybe Shen Wei isn't happy with the separation entirely either, but he just doesn't want to move on because Zhao Yunlan isn't there to tell him to.
And that makes it even better/worse, that they created their tragedy together.
In the brief flashbacks they seem happy together, but now I'm wondering if they were perhaps mistreating each other in some important way, possibly unintentionally. Since as we see from Ge Lan's story, in this universe that can happen with people you love.
Purple-hair explicitly accuses Shen Wei of betraying the Dixing.
Yes! I noticed that too. And maybe it wasn't *for* power, but he got a lot of power in the process, which can look the same to an outsider. I hope eventually we'll get to see Dixing and find out what people think of him there, I'm very curious. Because what you're suggesting here is that lots of Dixing people want to live peacefully with Haxing people, and even love them, and Shen Wei is stopping that because of his own guilt and self-hate.
Shen Wei reminds me somewhat of Sanan - perfectly polite, secretly terrifyingly powerful, and either too good or too evil for this world or both. Something I loved about Sanan's character arc is that it really could go either way, he could be anything from the worst villain of the entire game to a misunderstood self-sacrificing saint, and either way he does exactly the same things up to the route split. That's how I feel about Shen Wei right now, because of the genre I assume he's not going to be too terrible, but the way he's written he *could* be and it would look exactly the same.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-17 08:02 pm (UTC)Yes! And with Sang Zan and Ge Lan, some of it is wanting different things and being on different sides (which applies to them too)... and maybe loving other things, too. Ge Lan loved her family and Sang Zan loved his sister.
I hope eventually we'll get to see Dixing and find out what people think of him there, I'm very curious.
I think we have to! I think that's such an important piece of the worldbuilding, and we're getting very little exposure to it.
I really want Zhao Yunlan to go down there some time. It'd be a nice swap of roles.
Because what you're suggesting here is that lots of Dixing people want to live peacefully with Haxing people, and even love them, and Shen Wei is stopping that because of his own guilt and self-hate.
Thinking about this again, I'm not so sure. Shen Wei seems to mostly leave the Dixing people alone unless they actually use their powers to harm a Haixing person (and he refers to the mirror girl's crime of wanting to see the sunlight as relatively minor and forgivable, never mind that she stole another person's life for years).
And that seems fair, except for the cases that are clearly self-defense.
I also wonder if there's some...myth thing going on. If there's some kind of geas or...something.
But one thing that I've been thinking of is Zhao Yunlan's line about how the dignity of a man is tied to keeping his loved ones safe (and I think by extension, living a peaceful life). And that feels like his core principle -- with how loyal he is to his agency and how he's working to protect the city. And I don't see Shen Wei having the same feelings there toward the Dixing people.
Shen Wei reminds me somewhat of Sanan - perfectly polite, secretly terrifyingly powerful, and either too good or too evil for this world or both.
Oh, yes, I can see this. Something about the mix of conviction and the Feelings buried beneath the perfectly polite facade, too -- and just based on the common route, I think Sanan does the same thing where he tries to deal with those feelings alone?