#dixing

I know you only want me to yourself...

Let's celebrate by spending too long looking at the tiny sign way up at the top of the front of the Dixing Bar!

It's shaped like a U.S. route road sign, but where the road sign would have "U.S." or some other designation, this sign says 酒馆 (bar, tavern). It's got a flame design on the bottom where the road number would otherwise be. Because the bar is, you know. In hell.

Bonus: A truly great visual/screenshot combo:

After... *checks calendar* eleven months and three separate scrap-the-entire-design-and-restart-from-scratch events, I have FINALLY finished my Guardian travel posters! (Sorry to the two people who contacted me on Etsy last spring and asked when these would be available, and I said I'd have them up by May... I had no idea how many problems I'd have with these monsters. T_T)

Since some of my other fantasy travel posters ended up reducing to weird sizes, I gave these a native canvas size of 24" x 30", so they print well at any dimension but reduce to a conveniently-framed 8" x 10" for the mini prints (which are the most popular size). The enormous area means there's also a lot of hand-drawn detail -- and a few frankly ridiculous Easter eggs -- buried in them.

These are for two different @guardianbingo prompts ("Dragon City" and "Dixing/Difu"), but I'm posting them together since they're nominally a set.

Sadly, the only time we get to see the Black Cloak Envoy using his cool official seal is when he signs off on taking Mirror Girl back to Hell -- and the closest we get there to seeing what the stamp actually looks like is this blurry frame right before the shot cuts away.

However, based on what little you can see there, I’m pretty sure that the design that he stamps in episode 6 is the same one that comes up in episode 30 on the order to return to Dixing that Guo Changcheng correctly identifies as a fake. It’s a clever piece of continuity, having Ye Zun swipe that for forgery’s sake, on the presumption that Chu Shuzhi will be in midair the second the Black Cloak Envoy says jump. And oh boy, that’s seal script; I can’t even begin to read that. If somebody else can tell me what that says, that’d be awesome.

There are a few other places that something like the SID seal shows up, but you can see bits of the Haixing logo in the middle instead of the SI shield. They’re not as cool as Shen Wei’s fancypants stamp, though.

I think what confused me the most about the layout of the Dixing palace is where (most) people get tied up. That pole is at the back of the hall, not the front (i.e., where the Regent’s office is). And I really shouldn't say "that pole" because there are two of them, one on either side of the hall. If you were standing in the Regent's office and looking out at the room, you'd see the one everyone gets tied to on the left, and the one Xiao Guo gets stashed behind on the right.

What's delightful about those poles is that they are not load-bearing columns at all. They have no structural function. They taper upward to blorpy little points in a manner reminiscent of some stupa spires. Whoever installed these babies appears to have done so largely for the purpose of having something to tie someone to.

Being tied to a mere pole, however, is a thing only for commoners -- namely, Zhao Yunlan and Chu Shuzhi (twice!). When it's time to tie up Shen Wei, he does get to go to the front of the hall, where he's strapped to the base of one of the Nio. More specifically, he is tied rather meaningfully to the base of the left statue of the pair, Narayana. I'm gonna let Wikipedia do the explaining here, since it's already got everything formatted all fancy:

The right statue is traditionally called Guhyapāda and has his mouth open, representing the vocalization of the first grapheme of Sanskrit Devanāgarī (अ) which is pronounced "a". The left statue is traditionally called Nārāyaṇa and has his mouth closed, representing the vocalization of the last grapheme of Devanāgarī (ह [ɦ]) which is pronounced "ɦūṃ" (हूँ). These two characters together (a-hūṃ/a-un) symbolize the birth and death of all things. (Men are supposedly born speaking the "a" sound with mouths open and die speaking an "ɦūṃ" and mouths closed.) [...] The contraction of both is Aum (ॐ), which is Sanskrit for The Absolute.

So Ye Zun isn't just being a jerk by tying his brother up to one of the big statues, he is being a very symbolic jerk. ...And a symbolic jerk who has to use CG'd dark energy cords to keep him there, because it seems like winding that much rope around the legs of a giant polystyrene guy might have been somewhat prohibitive, but never mind that. He makes do! He's a make-do kinda guy.