not-quite-child's-play

When she was just a cameo, I actually planned A-Xiang to be volunteering and therefore wearing a nurse uniform (purple, naturally). But, as her involvement with the plot grew, it became clear that working in an emergency department is neither place nor time to chat up Weining and Chengling, and also there is no reason for her to not be at school while both of them are, so school uniform it is: can’t be purple, of course, so had to give her a purple hair strand instead.

As for designs, wanted to make them distinctly modern but also not mundane: they are still learning to jump on treetops and fight to death with wet towels, after all 😊

A-Xiang’s undershirt should also be a grey V-neck, of course, but she’s a rule-breaker 😋

I didn’t dislike the ending because it was sad, and so-called “episode 37” didn’t fix it for me, because I didn’t want to see them sitting on that stupid mountain without, apparently, ever bothering to inform Chengling at least one of them was perfectly fine.

What I wanted was for one of them to remember their responsibilities.

And, yeah, by one of them I mean mostly ZZS, because for him choosing to live for all those people who still need him would feel like a victory over his own despair (with promise of extra reward if he did it early enough to benefit from WKX coming back from fake-dead). For WKX, even though all the kids were technically his doing, being saddled with 20 not-exactly-well-adjusted disciples between A-Xiang’s death and ZZS’s imminent demise would feel more like “Give the guy a f*****g break, will you?”.  

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I’d like to say it irked me into writing something meaningful for the first time in two years, but what it actually did was annoy me into putting aside a fic for a fandom I genuinely like: to make sure frankly-not-particularly-promising fic ideas won’t get a chance to lure me back to “Word of Honour” in the future.

I cheated on the happy ending, because actually thinking about what would happen after “they meet again, yay!” gives me extra-dark and angsty ideas I’m not going to act upon since I don’t approve of fanfiction being sadder than canon.

It still feels like it needs some kind of an epilogue, so I decided not too look too far into the future and just give them a first date, or smth.

Speaking subjectively, as a viewer expected to sympathise with the PoV character, it feels like an unjust reward for taking the easy way out. And objectively, since the script is frustratingly diligent about setting its pointless ending, it’s been shown repeatedly that WKX alone – or even combined with 22 other people – is not enough to restore ZZS’s will to live.  

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Also subjectively, as far as I’m concerned, gen adaptation totally succeeded where it didn’t intend to.

Like, I never doubted a cut sleeve was not just a cut sleeve, even though I did not understand that reference and had to look it up.

And I have since learned – through no credible source but my own viewer experience – that it is, apparently, Zhang Zhehan’s artistic conviction that sudden and persistent attraction is best expressed through precisely one quarter of a smile.

But, to me at least, it kinda looked like before Longyuan ZZS let WKX tag along because chasing him away would be too troublesome, and after Longyuan showing WKX affection became a chore expected of an older brother. Again, the writers prudently gave him no choice, but it’s hard to imagine someone wanting to keep doing it for centuries to come.  

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Moreover, when you really start to think about it, outside of imminently short doomed romance, they aren’t actually all that good for each other.

I mean, ZZS is obviously the kind of person who won’t make an extra move unless someone forces his hand, and needs a partner who would push him to do better, lest he ends up spending his days on a coach with a beer bottle on a scenic roof with a jug of wine.  WKX, on the other hand, feels the need to constantly ‘earn’ love with usefulness, and needs someone who would forcibly sit him down and cuddle till he lets go.

From the way he was introduced, I assumed ZZS’s character arc would get him a better reason to die than ‘atonement’ that doesn’t help anybody. Instead, his story ends in pretty much the same place where it started:  but not because he fails to find a new purpose in life or loses everything again, – but because he obstinately ignores every good thing he happens to gain (through no effort of his own). And then WKX’s life is thrown into the fire of ZZS’s “great self-destruction”. Gu Xiang and Cao Weining die in the novel too, but, between less dramatic setting and extra postmortem chapter, it doesn’t give the same pointless and hopeless impression.

I don’t actually remember if faking Beiyuan’s death is mentioned on the series, and it’s pretty obvious ZZS didn’t come to them for help because he didn’t want to be saved.

And, for this very reason, he didn’t need to die, neither plot-wise, nor narratively-speaking. 

With everything that happens right afterwards no one even mourns him properly.

If he truly wanted to get ZZS the glazed armour, the smart thing would be to wait for all five parts to be found, using the resources available to the prince. 

And it would have made way more sense for him to be there to arrange the exodus, than to say he meticulously listed two dozen names in his dying delirium, and WKX unerringly remembered every single one (and figured out which one would be their leader, and found a way to approach him and convince him he was indeed HY’s emissary, rather than an unimaginative loyalty check…)

by the final episode Kexing, of course, has his own reasons to want to die: his revenge is done, his one Important Person is dead and the other is about to follow.

When you think about it some more, WKX, as the inherently awesome character who went through hell as a child yet managed to grow up into a capable and relatively well-adjusted adult, would probably pull through, given time, – while ZZS, with the special brand of immorality he gets, is way more likely to drink himself to death.

For book-Zishu, taking the Nails is actually an act of defiance: he rigged the system and bought himself three years of actual, not illusory freedom with 18 months of torture – good for him.

Making random ‘Old Bi’ the last remaining member of the sect series-Zishu already led to slaughter casts the whole situation in a very fucked-up light, but that was probably unintentional. The real point, I assume, was to show how his past is well and truly buried and he has nothing left to lose, thus launching his character arc on an upwards trajectory; or parabolic, should the One Good Thing he manages to find be snatched away from him.

That, however, is not the case.

Meeting his soulmate on its own is clearly not enough to bring Zishu out of his funk. But then, by the grace of screenwriters with considerable help from said soulmate, he is given a child to raise, a bunch of little brothers to torment mentor (plus Han Ying who totally didn’t have to die, but that’s a story for another time) and old friends able and willing to go into considerable trouble to help him. But, instead of grasping the second chance and trying hard to do better this time, – ZZH just grabs the first available excuse to die anyway.

But then he was revealed to be an (extra)ordinary human, who made a pun out of his name, became the youngest Valley Master ever and just happens to be awesome in everything he does. It still makes sense, since he had to be pretty awesome to survive everything he had gone through, so no questions about his awesome martial arts and survival skills, but who the hell taught him music? Or – forget poetry – to read beyond those however many characters he had been supposed to know by the age of eight?

That doesn’t actually bother me all that much. As I said, for a long time I just assumed he had magic, and, once you accept his inherent awesomeness, his personality and character arc make perfect sense, up to and including utterly crazy parts. The real problem here is that, with WKX being such a – well-written, but still Mary-Sue, ZZS, whose own awesome skills get no use past e3 or 4, gets relegated to relatable character: in that embarrassing way where you recite "To be or not to be" as ‘me in given circumstances’, but the hardest dilemma you ever faced is whether to put sugar in your coffee when you’re supposed to be dieting.  

> Sure, I wouldn’t have wanted to be saddled with responsibility for my one sibling at 18, let alone 16.

> Sure, I would have run to the first available adult for help.

> Sure, I’m pretty good at my job, but I still clang to the safety of having a supervisor as long as possible;

> Sure, there are plenty of things I wouldn’t mind kicking my teenage self for.

Perhaps that’s why it’s so unpleasant to contemplate the Seven Nails and all their implications;