got lucky with you

It's very interesting to notice how DD/LWJ's face changes throughout the shooting of CQL. These two frames are from the same episode (29) and are a continuation. But the left frame was shot in the early days of filming (April 18th), while the right frame was shot later, in early August.

Like GG says in this interview, DD was criticized because of the way his eyes were pulled by the wig at the beginning, making his expression not LWJ-like in the eyes of the fans, so they changed it. His eyebrows are also different, I guess making him look more regal and stern in the right frame.

I think GG/WWX's changes aren't that visible because it seems the way the wig pulled his eyes wasn't as noticeable as DD's, and they didn't change much of the shape of his eyebrows either.

Guess what, folks! It's summer! And it's gonna be a hot one, because they all are, recently :(

Did you know you can lose about a liter of water, a gram of sodium, and 300mg potassium in an hour of profuse sweating? If you're working outside in the heat, or even just existing in a very hot and humid environment, you're gonna want to replace the electrolytes you're losing, and you're gonna have to be purposeful about it.

But electrolyte drink mixes, while convenient, are surprisingly expensive for what they are. So I'm going to give you a top secret recipe that you can whip up for literal pennies that will replace what you're losing in sweat.

1 liter of water

1/2 tsp table salt (about 1g of sodium)

1/8 tsp potassium chloride salt substitute (about 350mg potassium. NuSalt is a popular brand, it's sold near the salt at the grocery store. If you don't have this, replace 6oz (180ml) of the water with orange juice or eat something high in potassium, like a banana, each hour you're sweating)

6-8 tsp of granulated sugar (you do actually need this and not a no calorie alternative- sugar helps speed up the absorption of electrolytes in the gut. You can omit if using orange juice for your potassium source, though!)

Lemon or lime juice for flavor, optional

Mix together and drink 1 liter for each hour you're profusely sweating. Adjust your intake so that your pee is light yellow.

If you want to make this mix ahead of time, put 1x the recipe of salt, sugar, and potassium, along with unsweetened Kool Aid powder or crystalized lemon or lime juice, in a small baggie. I do not recommend putting multiple servings worth in a baggie, as the ingredients settle differently and you might not get the right ratio.

NOTE: like any electrolyte drink, it works better if you sip it instead of chugging. If you chug it, you end up pooping out a lot of your electrolytes, even with the sugar.

A Chinese billionaire hires 4 professional thieves to rob the British Museum and repatriate to China artifacts looted during the 2nd Opium War. However, his true goal is to acquire and drink Emperor Qín Shǐ Huáng’s Wine of the Immortals, as exposed by the 4th thief who just turned 188-years-young!

(Watch closely for the reflection!)

during the euro 2024, over 300 cases of domestic abuse and violence were reported, with the cause all the victims believed to be being linked back to the major football event occurring. major events like these cause women and girls to live in even more constant fear than they may already do.

in a different study, it was found that government statistics undermine the extent and seriousness of cases of violence against women by 39%, whereas it is 26% with cases of violence against men. in cases of domestic violence, statistics reduce serious domestic violence against women by 59%, whereas with men, it is only 5%.

Like, when we first meet him, he's the Ghost General. His name is spoken in whispers. He's this terrifying undead powerhouse with edge-to-edge black eyes and black veins. He can plow through dozens of trained cultivators like it's nothing. Someone wrapped him in yards of chain to try and contain him and it's not working.

And so, when we meet him when he was alive in the flashback to the Cloud Recesses, and he's this shy, sweet, kinda dorky guy, it's like, awww, no, now I like him, and I already know this poor dude's going to die and end up a zombie. :(

And this just gets worse as we get to know Wen Ning further, and witness how much he adores his sister and how devotedly and bravely he's willing to stick his neck out to help Wei Wuxian, just based on a little initial kindness. Oh, nooooo - now I love this character, and I still know he's going to die and end up a zombie!

And then, of course, we do see him die, and it's fucking devastating. And the show ratchets up the tension as Wen Ning is suspended in limbo, with Wei Wuxian trying to revive him. We've all seen this play out before, in countless other stories. This is the Came Back Wrong trope. The grieving loved ones try any kind of dark power at their disposal to get the departed person back, but what they manage to revive is... hollow, or soulless, or changed in some hungry, terrible way. A violent abomination, wearing their loved one's face. We've already seen what Wen Ning turns into. It's a foregone conclusion.

... AND THEN HE DOES COME BACK AND HE'S THIS:

THIS MASSIVE FUCKING DORK:

He is an undead powerhouse, but he's still fundamentally himself: goofy, sweet, brave, and inclined to use his new abilities only to defend the people he loves. It's a great twist in itself, and also sets up an even more unsettling mystery (if death didn't turn Wen Ning into the figure we met in the beginning of the show, what did?).

A mixture of protagonist disease and Jiang Cheng being an asshole tends to make people miss that his thoughts and fears are pretty normal and that he has the right to think that the first thing Wei Wuxian should have done upon resurrection is head to Lotus Pier and explain himself. Like he's throwing out a lot of mixed signals here, but like...I think that when family members start dying explanations are in order. The thing I think people miss sometimes is that JC trusting WWX so much is one of the things that added to the tragedy and keeps him up at night. He lets his brother get away with so much! It's much less obvious with JC, but while he's not going COME BACK TO GUSU WITH ME he also expresses unease about Wei Wuxian's creepy ghosts? He's just less stringent about orthodoxy and willing to roll with it if WWX says everything's under control. Wei Wuxian couldn't keep up the pretense forever, but he still managed to last as JC's right hand for THREE FUCKING YEARS without JC catching on just because he trusts WWX that much. He knows Wei Wuxian isn't being fully honest, but he trusts that he knows what he's doing and means well and so just rolls his eyes when WWX says shit like "The more you ask me to do something the more I don't want to" and goes day drinking without helping with the rebuilding while JC works late every night. When WWX breaks out the Wen in what is a political disaster for Jiang Cheng and is doing mad science just because Wen Qing asked when JC asked him fifty million times to teach even just one sword class, JC lashes out and gets his feelings hurt but agrees to the ruse. After WWX broke with the Jiang, it's Jiang Cheng's idea to give him nephew naming rights so he still feels included in their family, and then WWX loses control and kills the father of said nephew which is a little awkward emotionally. But even then as furious as he is he doesn't take the pledge with the others and holds his disciples back, and then WWX hits Yanli with a zombie and JC has to hold her as she dies in his arms. Jiang Cheng continued to trust and love Wei Wuxian and keep him included in their family throughout the entirety of the first life and then his entire family died and he started questioning this decision.

This! This! I also love Wangxian but if WWX personally slaughtered members of LWJ’s immediate family and LWJ didn’t take ANY issue with this, didn’t want ANY kind of explanation for how and why the fuck that happened, did not require ANY reassurance this was not going to happen again in the future…I would not think very highly of Lan Wangji. There’s devotion and then there’s blind stupidity. (And I imagine as outlined above, Jiang Cheng spent a lot of the timeskip wondering just how badly he’d veered towards the latter himself, by placing so much trust in someone who by every measure of appearance had brought devastation to his family and harm to their sect, for reasons that remained opaque to him. I think Jiang Cheng not just angry with Wei Wuxian, but also with himself.)

LWJ occupies a different narrative position from JC, where most of the personal physical and emotional harm LWJ suffers related to WWX is, to a degree, a self-inflicted choice. (And hey, a lot of it is pretty romantic or even admirable from a certain point of view—suffering in silence and watching from afar as WWX damages himself with demonic cultivation, rather than inflicting unwanted/unrequited feelings on him, or forcing him to Gusu for treatment and becoming his father; defying his sect and family to defend WWX, knowing that the consequences for doing so would be severe, etc. The getting drunk and mutilating himself thing, not so much, imo, but to each their own.) That makes very easy for LWJ to forgive WWX, or to not even feel that WWX has done anything that requires forgiveness in the first place.

That is…not the case with Jiang Cheng, whose life is deeply intertwined with WWX’s dating back to early childhood, emotionally and politically. WWX would be JC’s problem even if JC didn’t want WWX to be his unofficial brother problem! Also, they share a Jiang Yanli and lmao good luck convincing Shijie to genuinely cut WWX out of her life even if JC was willing to entertain the idea of doing that for real instead of putting on a public show about it while secretly hoping to bring his problematic unofficial brother home at some point! It’s a non-starter. So yeah, for JC dealing with WWX’s shit isn’t exactly a choice; he spends a lot of the narrative getting dragged around in the wake of the engine-powered speedboat that is WWX and WWX’s decisions. The one choice he does have in all of that is to continue to trust WWX, the way he has for their entire lives—he could have asked more questions; he could have pushed harder for answers to the ones he does ask that WWX blows off—but at the time he’s also a teenager dealing with a lifetime of family dynamics; with a very stubborn, protective person with an older brother complex (and, not that he’s aware of it, who also has a vested interest in lying to JC).

All of this is to say, while LWJ didn’t choose to fall in love with WWX, he did get to choose almost everything about the way he went about pursuing or not pursuing a connection to him. Knowing that you had a choice, that you had agency, can make living with the painful consequences of a choice much easier. All the hurts JC spent 13/16 years living with—the dead brother, the dead sister, the orphaned nephew, the inexplicable abandonment in the first place, the political taint on the Jiang from the Qiongqi Path breakout and Yiling Laozu Burial Mound encampment—were (as far as he knew, and also mostly just were) the result of WWX’s choices, seemingly made with no consideration for how they’d affect JC. Like uh…yeah. That calls for some bitterness!

and like.  okay to be fair we don’t know if xichen is going to stay in seclusion for the next 13-to-16 years?  but he certainly seems to be leaning in the direction of “i don’t continue to exist in the world, i am going to remove myself from society now and let other people deal with my responsibilities because i clearly can’t be trusted with them.”

and jiang cheng didn’t do that!  he obviously didn’t cope in a healthy way or anything, but he did continue to function as a sect leader for those years!  a very successful, well-respected sect leader who rebuilt his sect to a position of power and was at least half-responsible for raising a kid who loved him a whole lot and was surprisingly well-adjusted, all things considered!  

Move aside, Jiang Cheng.

Calm waters Dorset   -   Ruth Stage

British, b.1969 -