Waking Life

2. this Gary-Oldman-in-the-Fifth-Element bitch

Speaking of the capacity of acting to elevate a production, I love the absolutely bonkers principal antagonist. Respectable Actor Fu Dalong chews to bits every possible bit of scenery as Mo Yungao, the campiest a villain on Chinese television is allowed to be by law.

The short version is that when Mo Yungao was a twerpy younger man in the army, he ran into a mysterious Zhang in a black cloak and lost his eye in the process. Now he's dedicated his life to finding said mysterious Zhang and wreaking a lot of incidental havoc along the way -- and being a waistcoated floppy-haired melodramatic lunatic the whole time. This part must have been so fun to play, because that joy really shines through in the completely over-the-top performance choices.

Mo Yungao is one of those Joker-style baddies, the kind where the sheer force of their whimsy is terrifying. He has an enormous amount of power and the ability to make lots of soldiers do whatever he wants, and whatever he wants can change on a dime. You don't even fully need to keep up with whatever he's trying to do at any given point in time -- just know that if he wants it, you shouldn't give it to him.

It takes Mo Yungao a little while to rise to the front of the show, though, because you've got some equally camp-as-hell bad guys to take down first. I do not know what possessed this production to make ninety percent of the antagonists fruity like classic animated Disney villains, but it was a brilliant choice. Come watch our heroes battle creeps such as Sexually Threatening Zhang, Man Who Likes Collecting Human Skin, and Badly Dubbed White Boy #5!

It's interesting, really, because DMBJ usually takes its villains much more seriously. Even the ones that are meant to be kind of laughable are played with a mostly straight face. Not so in the Southern Archives! These are the grownup versions of the guys who menaced your favorite Saturday morning cartoon heroes. Skeletor and Cobra Commander would be right at home with this bunch. I will almost always prefer something that can laugh at itself to something that takes itself too damn seriously, so you know I was having a good time.

3. World's Worst Mom Boss

Zhang Haiqi is a terrible person. She's a terrible mentor. She's a terrible parent. She's a terrible distant relative. She's a terrible guest. She's a terrible friend. She's a terrible manager. I love her so much.

She says she's a hundred years old, but you get the sense she's rounding down. As the director of the titular Southern Archives, she's got a lot on her plate already. But she decided maybe a decade ago to take in two orphan boys and raise them to be perfect agents of the South-Sea-based wing of the Zhang Family. She is Wire Mother. There is no Cloth Mother.

It's not that NPSS is bad at writing female characters. (Okay, those of you who have seen other series, stop laughing.) It's that he's not always great at writing female characters who are not female first and characters second. In DMBJ land, there are two genders: normal and woman. Zhang Haiqi does not fall so neatly into this binary. I would truly believe that she got the Ripley-from-Alien treatment, in that she was originally sketched out as a male character, then got girled.

It works out great, though, because she's not just a male character incidentally played by a woman. Zhang Haiqi is a lady. She is a hyper-competent woman in a male-dominated field in an incredibly patriarchal and homosocial society, and she has been holding her own place for a century now. She can weaponize femininity against the dipshit men that surround her, but she obviously does not feel compelled by gendered social norms in her private life. She's a hard-drinking kickpuncher with no maternal instincts who still likes looking pretty. We have no choice but to ask her to step on us.

I sometimes go to c-drama subreddits -- I know, I shouldn't, but I do -- where I see complaints about growing trends to make female main characters flawless and perfect and pure of heart. While I don't tend to see that as much in the types of shows I frequent, I understand the objection. You do not often find a c-drama woman who is both unambiguously one of the good guys and kind of a total bitch, and you especially don't see one where her male counterparts love her and accept her just the terrible way she is. That's Zhang Haiqi, baby!

And speaking of those male counterparts, those boys absolutely, 100% do not regard her as an object of romantic or sexual interest. Despite the different ages of the characters, the actors are all essentially the same age, so I was prepared for some streams to get crossed. No way. They love her and are deferential to her and recognize her authority in every possible aspect, and the show mercifully recognizes that men who feel this way about a woman do not automatically have to proceed to the next step of wanting to fuck/wife/possess her. It believes it is possible for men to be normal about women! What a concept!

It's good they don't, too, because Zhang Haiqi has absolutely no time for romance. There are men throwing themselves at her feet left and right, and this queen forgets about them the second they leave her field of vision, if she even noticed them in the first place.

I didn't mention her specifically up top because I knew I was going to give Zhang Haiqi this whole third point, but absolutely Jiang Peiyao deserves all the flowers for doing such a good job with this role. She conveys perfectly that essential Zhang quality of being too old to give a shit. Her Zhang Haiqi isn't a block of ice -- she laughs and cries and shows off and gets angry and makes selfish demands, and she absolutely does not care what you think about any of that. You can feel the weight of the years on her, but instead of tiring her out, her long life has made her a composed, elegant gremlin.

I'm sorry, I'll stop before I go on way too long about her, but I cherish her so. Zhang Haiqi is a fucking delight. If you too support women's wrongs, you will love supporting hers.

sidebar: Not as ableist as it could have been?

Okay, so: You know that Asia is, on the whole, Not Great on disability issues. So you also know when you see that silhouetted figure in a wheelchair in the opening credits that you're going to have to grit your teeth at least a little through some of this. The bar is in Hell.

And you know what? Southern Archives clears it! I'm mainly talking about the character who fairly early on goes from walking to using a wheelchair because of an injury. The show winds up being so much better about this than I was afraid it was going to be, which may be damning by faint praise, but we take what we can get.

Where I'm going to give it the most points is that it presents I'm such a burden and you should just kill me since I'm useless now self-talk as objectively incorrect. It's not even halfway about that -- in fact, it puts those same words in another character's mouth specifically to horrify the one who said them originally. We're not going to Million Dollar Baby this shit. While the character's loss of mobility is treated as a tragic (and there's some I wish it had been me instead of youuuuuu bullshit), it's not a full-on tragedy. Physical therapy is placed in direct, literal parallel to learning how to do cool new martial arts moves. Both are heroic expenditures of effort that take time, patience, concentration, and repetition.

I did not edit this; this is a literal screenshot.

The show also gets credit for showing just how infuriating benevolent ableism is. You be as bitchy as you want to to that girl who tried to push your wheelchair without your permission, baby! If she's telling you that you need to be careful because you're too pathetic and enfeebled to care for yourself, you stab her and show her how wrong she is!

Now, it does do the thing where some of the Big Bad guys are visibly disabled; one of them is missing an arm, and Mo Yungao has some light facial scarring to go with the eye thing I mentioned earlier. It's cheap shorthanding, and yeah, it's not great. I don't know if it makes things better to show that they were both bad guys before they suffered their disfiguring injuries? Wait, I've just been handed a note that says it doesn't. Cool.

Anyway, if you are inclined to be critical about how this series treats disability, there's a lot to criticize it for. If you are inclined to be charitable, there's some stuff to praise it for. You know your own tolerance levels. Proceed accordingly.

4. A(nother) fun-filled action-packed romp of nonsense!

So let's talk about the silly parts now.

As is the way of action-adventure series like this, the plot takes place in multiple video-game-like stages, many of which completely defy conventional understandings of little things like reality. (Do not ask how that bottomless chasm fits in the cargo hold of an ocean liner.) As our heroes in various combinations travel through what are essentially point-and-click-adventure dungeons with occasional combat, they have to solve puzzles and fend off creepy crawlies. There's fighting and flipping and punching and blowing things up. There's a lot of blowing things up. Cool Zhangs don't look at explosions.

Please do not hear it as a criticism when I call the adventure parts silly. They are silly like the adventure parts in the Indiana Jones movies are silly, which means they are Rule of Cool'd within an inch of their lives. Physics behave exactly as they need to so that our heroes look awesome. This is not the place for people who are going to get hung up on how snakes, blood, aerodynamics, thermodynamics, immune systems, the human mouth, American accents, boats, smells, death, and tattoos simply do not work that way. This is the place for those of us who go fuck yeah! and cheer the nonsense on.

If anything, the nonsense keeps the tone (mostly) above how grim it would be to take a lot of these premises seriously. The show has a huge NPC body count. An enormous number of Southern Archives agents, professional soldiers, hired goons, friendly bandits, and plain ol' civilians die, both offscreen and on. Wherever the plot goes, the streets wind up littered with corpses. If the show lingered on that, it would bum you out real fast! So instead we're back to the video-game logic, where we'll be sad if someone with a character portrait dies, but everyone else is kind of background noise. Now watch this cool razor blade trick!

As part of the proceedings, you're going to be introduced to a colorful supporting cast of good guys, bad guys that eventually become good guys, and bad guys that look like they're maybe going to become good guys except oops just kidding. They're all pretty entertaining and more or less endearing (even if one of them I can only like by ignoring the show's gross take that sexual assault sure is funny when a lady does it!). Because Zhang Hailou's the one spending most of the show criminally unsupervised, they're mostly going to orbit around him, so it's good that man could have chemistry with a lamppost.

And speaking of supporting characters...

sidebar #2: Know Your Lao Jiu Men

The Southern Archives takes place at vaguely yet unspecifically the same time as another DMBJ prequel show. At the risk of quoting myself, there's a couple episodes in the middle where you get introduced real quick to about five different people where it seems like you should already know who they are -- and yes, you should already know who they are, because you met four of them in the Mystic Nine, and one of them is for some reason the Kirkland brand version of an actual Mystic Nine character.

But just in case you don't want to go through a whole ten-year-old 48-episode sprawling semi-unconcluded drama before starting this, here's the CliffsNotes version:

The aforementioned Zhang Qishan -- you'll see him called "Fo Ye" or "Master Buddha" -- is the head of the Mystic Nine. I know he's introduced like he's a villain, but trust me, he's the hero of the other series. In fact, once you know who he is and why these pesky Country Zhangs are giving him such a fucking headache, you kind of side with him in all this mess.

(I have beef with this interpretation of the character, because yes, fine, I realize he's closer to the book version, but also I don't liiiiiike it. I imprinted too hard on William and am now a lost cause.)

I absolutely love it when DMBJ double-casts the old and new generations, so it brings me particular delight to see erstwhile Xie Yuchen actor Ji Xiaobing killing it as Xie Jiu Ye, the billionaire fashion plate of the Mystic Nine. All you really need to know about his character is that if you need someone to menacingly deliver unnecessarily cryptic clues over a game of go, he is 100% the correct choice.

And then Ba Ye. If you don't already know who Ba Ye is, he just comes across as a soft little fortune-teller prone to kidnapping and mild hysteria. If you do know who he is, then you know he is actually a soft little fortune-teller prone to kidnapping and mild hysteria who is also the best and most wonderful numbers boy in the world. Then you are definitely going to side with him re: what those uncultured ruffians do to his nice shop. (Fun fact! Ba Ye is one of the vanishingly few DMBJ characters who has been played in every appearance across multiple series by the same person, the incredible cuddleable Hanson Ying.)

...And then there's two other guys, but honestly, Hei Bei the Sixth gets more screentime here than he does in the original series, and Lieutenant Whassisname is a pale imitation of Zhang Rishan, so it doesn't matter if you walk into those cold.

Anyway, now you know! But you should still go watch the Mystic Nine! Or at least read my rec post about it. I work hard on these silly things. Eh, I'm mostly just entertaining myself, it's fine.

5. Okay, but ... are they gay for each other or what?

All right. Fine. Yes.

This whole show is a love story. You can read it as sexual or fraternal or platonic as you prefer, but it is fundamentally a love story between two men who are each other's everything. One of those men is hurtling towards his own demise at all times, and the other is desperately trying to save him, and then you get about a third of the way into the show and they switch roles.

I implied they'd been raised like brothers, and that's sort of true? Except it's also very not true, because Zhang Haiqi adopted both of them when they were already fully developed little kids with concrete memories of their tragic-ass backstories and immediately tossed them into her own Southern Archives Boot Camp. They are Not Normal about one another in large part because they have never at any point known what a normal family structure is like. I am even being cagey here about some of the precise ways they are Not Normal about one another, so that you can have the joy of discovering them in context.

We see flashbacks to when Zhang Hailou and Zhang Haixia were young enough that they had to be played by child actors instead of the two main stars, and since at least that time, it's been just the two of them. They work together fantastically well. They read each other's cues in a way no one else can. They are absolutely a bonded pair, do not separate. So of course the show is going to spend the whole time separating them and using the angst of that separation to fuel the plot, because that's how dramatic tension works.

The following paragraph has extremely minor structural spoilers, but if you want to go in completely unprepared, just skip down past the next picture, okay? Awesome.

The book (which does not have a satisfying conclusion) removes Zhang Haixia from the narrative in what's basically the second act. But the show has paid handsome Ding Yuxi a lot of money to be here, so you better believe it's going to find a way to keep him around. When you get to the way it finds to keep him around, and you're like, hey, that doesn't seem entirely congruent with the way the story was going at the beginning? Congratulations! You have unlocked the achievement NPSS Was Also The Screenwriter.

If you are here for boys who have powerful love and longing for other boys in their curiously misaligned hearts, you have come to the right place. If you lose it when someone loves someone else so much that they're willing to overlook literal war crimes, start your engines. If you think that wounding someone either from a distance or at close range is a love language, you cannot miss this show. The bond between Zhang Hailou and Zhang Haixia is the story, and buddy, it is neither safe nor sane nor always consensual. It is, however, incredibly fun.

And if you want those boys to fuck nasty about it? There's 412 Works in 南部档案 | Archives: The Nanyang Mystery, a mere 72 of which are in English. See you in those Archives.

caveat: If this is your first time in the Tombs ... maybe don't go any further?

Look, there are few pleasures more sublime than talking somebody into loving DMBJ. I have burned entire hours of my life trying to convince random strangers on the internet that what they really need in their lives is a jank-ass adventure c-drama series based on a bunch of books by a guy cursed by a witch to die if he ever writes a satisfying ending. So I need you to hear me loud and clear when I say that the Southern Archives has set your bar in entirely the wrong place, and if you go into the other series expecting them to be like this, you will perish.

By DMBJ standards, the Southern Archives is a show with a tight plot, competent pacing, dynamic cinematography, high production quality, solid CG, and a complete and concluded narrative. If you read that sentence and are like wait, what? then I am sorry, but you may need to stay out of the Tombs.

DMBJ shows are Dude Shows For Dudes. The Southern Archives is a Dude Show For Ladies. It's very aware of how it's both sexualizing and woobifying its main boys. It lets the camera linger on so many beautiful manly eyes brimming with unshed tears. It keeps the poop and pee jokes to a minimum. It passes the Bechdel Test, for heaven's sake. When was the last time a Tombs show passed the Bechdel Test?

I think you should keep going! I think you should watch the Mystic Nine and Time Raiders and Ultimate Note and Tibetan Sea Flower and Sand Sea and Reunion and the heihua movie, arguably in that order! And maybe some of the other ones too! And I absolutely think that if you do not go into them with the right mindset, you will bounce of whichever series you watch next so hard it'll make your head spin.

So what is the right mindset? The right mindset is that of a forty-year-old man's inner twelve-year-old boy.

This is not to say that DMBJ can never be sophisticated, meaningful, intelligent, or affecting, because it absolutely can. It's just that all of that potential is built on a foundation of a guy daydreaming about how awesome it would be if his Marty Stu went on dangerous adventures with a really strong and mysterious best friend who had an awesome sword and an awesome hypercolor tattoo and also semi-magically appeared in times of crisis to save him and only him, would that be awesome or what?

If this is not for you, it's not for you. And that's fine! You can enjoy the Southern Archives as its own separate, self-contained thing, and I hope you have a wonderful time with it. Do not feel compelled to drag yourself further into what will quickly become an exercise in frustration.

Oh, but if you're up for more? I'm so happy. My heart has been living in these Tombs for years now, and I'd be thrilled to have you join me in this catastrophic mess. There's so much nonsense and goodness and homoeroticism and snakes and shitty greenscreen and bronze artifacts and unfinished stories and uncles and friendship waiting for you. Bring your own inner twelve-year-old boy. We'll keep an eye on him.

Are you ready to get salty?

This is an iQiyi exclusive, baby. You can watch the first five episodes for free on YouTube to see if you get a taste for it, but beyond that, it's pretty much back to the Green Site.

If you've made it this far, thank you for letting me get all this Tomb Goo all over your shoes, especially since (unless I go back for Ultimate Note) I'm probably not going to write another DMBJ-related rec for a good long while now. Thus, this has become a meandering, easily distracted post that's not as funny as it thinks it is and definitely just sort of ends with a whimper, but perhaps you can consider it a microcosm of the experience of watching an actual DMBJ series.

I think it is very important to remember at all times that DMBJ is not here to give you -- queer internet-dweller who is probably not Chinese, given you're reading this ridiculous English-language Tumblr post -- what you want. Not to be all 'kids these days!' but I do think a lot of people have gotten spoiled by the ready availability of textually gay media. DMBJ is a bit of a throwback to old-school shipping culture. The Tomb Boys will never kiss. They are not woke. You will have to grind your teeth through a lot of disappointing shit. That's okay. It's good for both you and your inner twelve-year-old boy. It builds character.

Also! You can go read the book if you want to! There's a fan translation here. Just remember the thing about the witch's curse and temper your expectations appropriately.