#jitd meta

you maybe already knew that "zhang xincheng's acting skills" was in the top 10 weibo hot search all day yesterday, but if you didn't i think you can now see why. i left out the more ghastly parts of this scene (as well as all the shots of fu xinbo's superbly horror-stricken face, the face of a man seeing something no one should have to see, the face of man looking directly into a war) bc that's not what's relevant to me here. and lbr any old first-year drama student can have a fake seizure.

instead what i wanted to focus on is some of the most astonishing transparency i've ever witnessed a television actor offering their audience. this is a character dragging himself deliberately into the pit of hell bc he thinks that's what he has to do—to be saved? oh no, not saved. fei du doesn't think he can be saved. he's just trying to pass as a creature that's shaped like, behaves like, something roughly equivalent to a human being. this is part of how fei du has crafted his "painted skin," the one that only lwz ever sees through.

(and whichever screenwriter decided lwz should have to be there for this? should watch fei du put himself through self-torture as a way to visualize figuring it out?—whoever you are, screenwriter, i could cheerfully kiss you. this choice doesn't just compress and expedite narrative but it gives us additional character payout: amazing.)

and yet! not as amazing as that moment when zhang xincheng leans forward and smiles. it's not that fei du sees lwz, not in this reality; if he's smiling at anyone, it might be fei chengyu. but i would also put it to you that at least part of the reason luo wenzhou is so absolutely horrified is that he's afraid of his own complicity in this nightmare. what if his crabby chinese-dad lectures, the belligerent fussing, the constant criticisms, have done a kind of work he never intended? fei du genuinely believes (but thanks to fei chengyu, not lwz) that he's incapable of human emotion and reactions, empathy and connection, and that he has to be punished into some simulacrum of personhood. when he leans forward and smiles like that? "i'm good now, aren't i? look at me trying—i want to be good, like you and tao ran. it will never work. i'm unsalvageable, i'm worthless, i'm wreckage. but i'm trying to be a person, i'm trying to be good like you are—"

from this moment on, lwz has a newly doubled responsibility. it's not just what his shifu had told him (and what luo wenzhou recognized, when a young fei du had first looked at him with "a gaze so clear it had been nearly wild…stifling never-before-uttered cries for help"): namely, that "if someone ever looks at you like that, you…absolutely cannot fail to live up to those expectations." lwz's been carrying that burden already; after all, he's been investigating this case for over seven years. but now, it's also his responsibility to make sure that going forward, starting from today, he doesn't fail to protect fei du from himself (from fei chengyu, really; and the drama does a little sleight-of-hand here, but more on that some other time). he starts by ordering fei du to "come back to the bureau and work overtime with me," his first desperate attempt to stop this, without having to confront fei du (who he knows would simply shut him out anyway, at this point—put on his glasses and his mask and smile the cold polite little peach-blossom smile, the rehearsed painted skin).

here's the interesting thing, though, and then i swear to god i will shut up and let you go on your way: apparently no one ever told fei du, or he never read about or internalized, despite his brilliance—that you can't teach new behavior through negative stimuli. it's basic operant conditioning; he should have known this. think about it for one second: "don't do that" doesn't tell you what you should do. it teaches an organism to be aversive, but it doesn't give them any positive behavior to fill the void instead. that's why the word "no" means nothing to a well-trained service dog. "no" doesn't give any direction or instruction; it doesn't suggest any outcome. in a very twisted kind of way, this actually proves what fei du loves to deny: that he has raging ptsd. it's just plain self-punishment, not self-correction, and he's deluding himself. absolutely none of what he's doing in the basement would be making him better, EVEN IF he were antisocial.

(the visual metaphor for this is the completely unnecessary scarring he's inflicted on himself through his own badly-administered ECT. it shouldn't leave scars. but he's not trying to do it the right way, or to achieve a result. he's doing it bc he believes he deserves to suffer.)

we all know what it will take to make fei du better, at this point; he's proven his ability to dodge around therapists for years on end. instead it has to be wenzhou's traveling bag full of patience. his persistence, him breaking a lock with the same bit of wire he once used to fish his police ID out of a trashcan (metaphorically). it's water-cooled noodles, and the way he won't let fei du get away with either his grandiosity or his self-loathing. it's lwz's ability to startle him speechless by kissing him on the forehead, his genuine warmth and tenderness and the uncomplicated pleasure of real connection, as well as someone who will thwack him affectionately on the back of his head, whose irreverence will jolt him out of his tragic main character narrative and bring him right back to the here and now.

the fact that steven fucking zhang compresses all of this into like four minutes of red-saturated camera B roll? is just astonishing. he does it with his whole body; he does it with every slow, deliberate, hypnotic, almost serene gesture. in the novel we never see any of this. in the drama, he's made it into a graceful ritual, into kink, into an erotic spiritual practice, with the stringently enforced purity of his self-discipline. it would almost be beautiful, if it weren't a travesty of all these things. and even worse? the ghastly contrast of his self-violence against the fact that he does all of it while somehow also literally being the most beautiful man in the entire world? lwz's gay little brain has to be pinballing around in his skull like an agitated squid, how does he cope with this.

The main one I want to talk about here is the kabedon/wall slam that takes place when they go to investigate the crime scene where Feng Bin was killed.

Obviously, the scene as it appears in the book at that moment in the plot would not have made it into the drama in a million years, even if censorship wasn't the way it is:

So it is a given that there was not going to be an interrupted wallfuck in the drama, and the creators were well aware of that. In many dramas, the usual thing to do would be to say "well, we'll try and do as much as we can, perhaps a generous shove would be allowed."

But JitD didn't do this. Instead they looked into the origin of the interaction and considered where the characters stand at this point.

Previously, a similar divergence already occurred at the point of the car kiss/Fei Du passing out at the front door that happens in episode 13 after having gotten dehydrated and low blood sugar from being sick in the aftermath of Zhou Huaixin's stabbing. The kiss, likewise, could never have been shown in this particular reality. To compensate, the creators of the drama made Fei Du's state during the car ride worse, and likewise heightened the severity of the reaction when it happens.

First with the car ride, in which Fei Du is arguably worse off in the drama. (And I really recommend rewatching this bit, both for the filming and the incredible music they gave this little mini-montage):

Then when Fei Du collapses, in the drama they make him actually fully fall unconscious:

The novel version, Fei Du IS out of sorts, and the general progression is the same, but they do also make out in the car before Fei Du gets out and I think it is reasonable to say on that basis that he's not quite as obviously out of it as in the drama. Likewise, he never fully passes out:

So what happened here is that the creators turned it to their advantage; recognizing they can't have the kiss, they decided to crank up the angst/whump and make Fei Du even more messed up (which, let's be honest, is almost as good). What's more, it is an option that was not available if they had been able to do the kiss. So, in a sense, they have adapted to their constraints and provided us with a "two cakes" option.

This is a good example of what I mean by the translation/substitution. Another one is the way they substitute the flashback childhood fever scene since they cannot do the forehead kiss in the very next set of scenes. But I think folks have probably talked about that already, and it's not the one I really wanted to get to.

So now for that: the kabedon at the start of case 4 (or Verhovensky/Doestoevsky/the Yufen School case, whatever we're calling it). This was the passage I quoted at the start of this post, and it, like the car kiss, could never have appeared in the drama.

And here the drama team again did a translation, but in this case it takes into account not just the novel parallel at this moment in the case/plot, but also the relationship progression for each the novel and drama.

Specifically, in the drama, as stated, there was no car kiss. In addition, the novel sequence puts two other important and relevant sequences between the car kiss and this scene: Fei Du's first and second nights out of the hospital. The first night is the one that involves blanket-burrito Fei Du being handcuffed to the bed and the non-consensual hairdrying (glorious moment), the second involves their first fuck, which takes place the next night, after Fei Du has gotten up for water and interrupted Luo Wenzhou reading Lao Yang's testament, and Luo Wenzhou telling Fei Du that he can't explain everything to him yet, so please give him a few days. I won't go into the excellent translations that do occur in the drama condensed single night of that sequence, but suffice to say, when drama Luo Wenzhou wakes up covered in photographs from Luo Guosheng's crimes 20 years ago and Tao Ran's urgent call, in the novel he's waking up in Fei Du's arms. And so later when Zhoudu are going to the Lovers' Mirror on the crime scene date, this is the first date after the first fuck—in the novel.

Meanwhile, in the drama, there has instead been much yearning and a sleepless night where I am certain they were both horribly desperately wishing they were in bed with the other—but they weren't. (Aside: yes I do also love the other interpretation that the filmmakers were gesturing towards them being together with overlapping cinematic effects, but I'm setting that aside for now, what can I say, I like multiple interpretations, I contain multitudes etc.) Thus this moment is not the same moment as it is when it happens in the novel.

What moment is it?

It's the car kiss.

As far as the relationship beats, Zhoudu are still at the heightened point of tension without much physical contact that their novel versions were at during the car kiss.

And that—that kiss was initiated by Fei Du.

(Aside: yes, I also agree with the perspective that Fei Du was trying to get rid of him so he could go have some quality basement time, and he knew that kissing him would make Luo Wenzhou aroused and flustered and furious—and probably he'd storm off. But people can have multiple motivations and he DID want to kiss him too.)

Anyway it is here (apologies for the long screencap):

What does that sound like?

Yep. This is actually the car kiss.

Tbh I don't care at all who tops and I think it is a boring thing to argue about, but I started thinking about this because I was wondering what the writers in the drama were doing and at first glance this was a surprising scene if watched with the novel equivalent in mind. I was convinced that there's no intentional choice made to invert/reverse anything, because in all other matters the creators have been paying an incredible amount of attention to trying to follow the novel in spirit and vibes even when they cannot do so literally. So why would this suddenly be an outlier?

And thus my proposed answer: It's not. It's absolutely in line with the translation strategy they've been pursuing in other scenes previously, but it is complicated by the divergence in relationship progression between drama and novel, the consequence of which its equivalent emotional/horny moment falls at a different plot moment.

because as lwz will say to him later, in one of the extras, he was never worried about whether fei du could outsmart anyone he wanted to. we already know he's stunningly intelligent, we've seen him thinking dozens of moves ahead of everyone else, constantly, from the time he was a child. that's actually not the exhausting part. it's not even his master plan, his long con, the entire-life-as-undercover-operation that's taking a toll on him—or not that, per se; not that qua that. think of the scene in episode 14 when he and luo wenzhou are interrogating zhou huaijin, and fei du tells him: dong xiaoqing may be a killer, but she was just the weapon—don't you want to know who was holding the knife? fei du's whole life purpose has been bent towards uncovering the people with the knife in their hands.

so if it's not his brilliance that's being taxed, or his capacity for plans that stretch over a lifetime, what precisely has made him so tired?

my answer varies, but tonight i think it's two different things, and the first of them is this one: he's unbelievably lonely.

[major spoilers from this point.] even during the long years when fei chengyu tortured him and his mother, she was still there. she was at least allowed to read to him every night (although even that was carefully circumscribed, and she spent most of the time trying to inculcate him with furtive ethical messaging, so he wouldn't be lost). he is able to remember her nursing him when he was ill, but remotely, coldly, as if anything caring or gentle, even eye contact or unnecessary touch, might be punished (and probably would have been). still, he had her. they were together; he wasn't alone in hell.

even after her death, of course, there was tao ran, and it's completely understandable that young fei du would have adhered to him, as thoughtful and sweet-tempered and normal as tao ran is. where lwz can be sharp-tongued and brusque, tao ran is always pouring oil on troubled waters, adding tact and kindness to a situation. in the novel, lwz tells teenaged fei du bluntly, during an outing, "you shouldn't be here, you don't fit in," and fei du smiles: "he didn't want to fit in."

i think when you're a teenager, you can probably tell yourself that, and almost believe it, especially when you've been violently trained the way he was: told repeatedly that you're antisocial, you don't need human connection, you don't crave it, you don't even want it—that kind of sentimental idiocy is for stupid people, people beneath you.

fei du not only internalized that belief, but he's had to behave as though it were true. to play the edgelord playboy with icy purity and, most of all, complete success—since partial success is failure, in this case—no one can get to know you well enough to know what you're really up to. he might have enjoyed some parts of the game; he's to a degree risk-taking, thrill-seeking by nature (as well as, again, by brutal psychological experimental conditioning). the motorcycle/car racing, the epic performative partying, the dissipated indifference, clawing his way to the top of his father's corporation—as the novel says "a beast in human clothing," the "domineering director-general"? sure, some of it might have been fun, or at least distracting. being superb at anything is its own keen pleasure, if you're smart enough.

but later luo wenzhou will have observed fei du from close-up enough to realize that it's all a disguise. and it's one that costs him dearly.

and that's the other thing that's worn him out, i think. first there's the loneliness of carrying it by yourself, having not one other person in the world to know your heavy secrets, the weight of your isolation, because telling anyone the truth would risk dragging them down with you; but there's also the fatigue from just having to keep it up, day after day, getting up every morning and pinning a manipulative disguise onto your face. if parts of the charade were ever stimulating, or even thrilling, that patina of charm has worn off. he just wants a warm bowl of congee and to go to bed on time, like a person, now.

because since fei chengyu's accident, fei du has spent most of his adult life around normal, non-sinister human beings. he thinks he can just mimic their behavior; he doesn't realize he's actually chosen to adopt it as his own. i'm so sorry to tell you this, feishir, but in many ways your genius plan to successfully impersonate a monster has, in fact, failed. you're actually just a regular young adult. you're too kind to strangers. you're far too careful and considerate with grief-stricken old ladies and frightened children—you're even about to pet your cat, and remember what it means to stroke a small warm animal with no purpose other than affection, only wanting it to feel safety and pleasure (and feeling those yourself, in return). abject failure to become an amoral soulless ghoul, president fei; your satanic dad really blew it (which is ofc fei du's other purpose in life: to prove fcy wrong, though he goes about it in the most agonizing way possible).

and then, worst of all, fei du started flirting with luo wenzhou, which probably started as something amusing to do while waiting around for tao ran; but it's become oddly addictive, needling lwz while feeling increasingly curious about how he'll respond. and then—gradually, slowly, as in "slowly the ice age ended"—luo wenzhou, too, has become a trusted, reliable source of safety and pleasure, and rare human connection. fei du, in fact, has started to like him.

but liking him is, he also knows, incredibly dangerous. he thinks he can't have that, not any of it, at this point. if lwz finds out even one of his horrific secrets, and then gets involved, it could all be ruined.

so fei du is alone, and he really doesn't like his job anymore. but he can't quit, and he can't let anyone else into the aloneness. of course he's tired. anyone would be tired, even ruthlessly self-controlled geniuses who tell themselves constantly how sinister they are.

and that's probably a third thing that's worn him down: the unending effort of continually repeating to himself that he's inhuman, he's made wrong, he's broken. fei du doesn't realize this habitual attempt at reinforcing fei chengyu's training has never made it any more true, but what is happening is that it's ineluctably starting to fray him, shred him at the edges. keeping attachment at bay, holding back from your own natural instincts to be close to others, to share your confidences with them, to know and be known? pretending not only that you don't like anyone, but that you aren't even capable of liking?

the cultural critic joyce carol oates wrote once, in an essay on the poet sylvia plath, of this kind of self-hatred: "in art, it can lead to silence; in life, to suicide." and that's precisely what we see fei du choosing here, to be honest (and we can talk some other time about the ways in which fei du's ma has turned sinister in his unconscious: a death-bringer in white, sitting on her funeral bier, inviting him to give up on the arduousness and self-loathing and loneliness of his life).

in the novel luo wenzhou tells tao ran in the emergency waiting room: “when other people get brought in there, they have someone waiting outside. if he doesn’t have anyone, i’m afraid he’ll be broken-hearted and won’t be willing to come back.” tao ran can't believe he's hearing lwz, of all people, say this about fei du, of all people—but in the drama, this is made literal: lwz turns out to be right. if it weren't for his being there, urgently wanting fei du alive and around to give him problems and cause him trouble, wanting him healthy and condescending and annoying, making sarcastic remarks and smiling his irritating peach-blossom smile and just generally being a royal pain in luo wenzhou's ass—if it weren't for luo wenzhou's need for him having become so suddenly, unexpectedly overwhelming that it's literally palpable, fei du's tiredness would have won out.

fortunately, as it is, he's going home now, where he can actually rest in reality, not just in the afterlife. the secrets are coming out, one by one. he won't be alone anymore, and he won't have to keep up the role of lead villain, slain by his own hand at the end of the play. and, if or when he forgets and falls back into old habits, luo wenzhou will be there to fuss at him and whack him on the back of the head, force-feed him vegetables, blow-dry his hair, make him wear long underwear, handcuff him to the bed to sleep, provide him with new parents and a pair of cats—and above all, love him so consistently and so fiercely that there's no room anymore for anything but simple contentment, and sanity, and quiet peace.

episode 13 is maybe the most memorable so far, not just bc it's one of those classic cdrama turning points, that moment when you go oh ariana we're really in it now. shit has been undeniably fucked-up throughout, but this is where, if you're a mo du virgin, you suddenly—exactly like luo wenzhou!—are asked to reevaluate your whole assessment of fei du, very radically and very very quickly. the focal length changes so fast it makes you dizzy and in need of luo-dui to carry you to the sofa and give you sugar water. because OH FUCK OH SHIT FEI DU IS NOT JUST A WEEDY LITTLE PAMPERED FUERDAI WITH RENAL DEFICIENCY, SHIT SHIT SHIT, HE'S, HE, OH MY GOD, WHAT THE FUCK, etc.

(or idk—maybe you're mentally healthy so you're just like huh, didn't see that one coming, poor kid, while you're on your phone making an appointment to get the car's oil changed and checking slack notifs)

but in mo du, this is just the first big reveal (NOT THE LAST) so it slams into you with all the subtlety of that one video showing what gravity on the sun is like. before this scene, to lwz, fei du is mostly just That Weird Gloomy Kid always hanging around tao ran. (seriously do not rush them: at this point they're both still laboring under the delusion that they vehemently dislike one another.)

but what just happened in the novel is of course the following:

• fei du lost the closest thing he might have had to a friend his own age, and also all his meals for the last month in a bathroom sink;

• lwz drives him home but can tell there's something wrong besides just "friend got stabbed in front of him." but when he tries to ask, fei du distracts him by "committing assault on an officer,"—e.g. pouncing on him in the driver's seat and kissing the breath out of him.

• lwz is feverishly susceptible to this onslaught because he's starting to like fei du. to his chagrin, he's starting to like him rather a lot. so he kisses back, lust-addled, before he gets back control of his brain and decides, as he has been doing for 3 whole volumes now, that fei du is just fucking with him. flirting to exercise some kind of weird one-upmanship, to prove lwz is…what, gay? single? kind of hard up atm?

• flustered and upset, lwz lifts fei du off, tosses him back into the passenger seat, and tells him to get out of the car. but he still watches him walk towards the villa, bc he's still worried, bc he's almost ready to admit to himself that he's maybe kind of into fei du.

Agitated, he glared at Fei Du’s back in the rearview mirror, the faint bit of warmth in his heart leaking away entirely; he didn’t know whether he wanted to peel off Fei Du’s clothes or simply peel off his skin.

yet another reference to fei du's "painted skin," which comes up again and again, and which you can LITERALLY SEE HIM PUTTING BACK ON HIS FACE in the fourth gif, above—because at some point in drama school, zhang xincheng had a stanislavsky professor who taught him to anchor character through physical business. he puts on those glasses like they're armor. sorry, luo wenzhou, brief moment of vulnerability is over. president fei is back in control.

there's also another kiss missing from the drama (inevitably, and i'm not complaining)—but this one's given by luo wenzhou, this time:

Luo Wenzhou…suddenly bent down and kissed him on the forehead. Fei Du: “…” Luo Wenzhou not very gently stroked his rumpled hair, clearly seeing panic flash across Fei Du’s face.—It really was strange that a playboy who could flirt a person into a fantasy, who was equal to anything, would panic like a child someone had confessed their feelings to for the first time because a person kissed his forehead. It was as if he’d never known warmth in his life.

since we don't get this kiss, i suspect the equivalent emotional beat is meant to be the newly added flashback, with young lwz brushing baby fei du's hair off his forehead before feeling it worriedly for fever. the drama keeps doing these emotional equivalencies and it's so, so smart. (it also cracks me up bc it inadvertently turns up the age gap vibes to 11. maybe the showrunners thought if they used an actor who looked 14, that might be awkward? so instead they cast a kid who looks 8 and somehow just managed to make it all even weirder.)

also can i just repeat one of the most importance sentences in this novel so far: IT WAS AS IF HE'D NEVER KNOWN WARMTH IN HIS LIFE (and i desperately want to subject you to fanart of the forehead kiss, so here's one amazing version from the brilliant sitervlitoy).

…because there are things fei du feels confident he can handle:

• violence and death (when followed promptly by self-punishment); • aggressively seducing people in general, so they don't notice whatever he's putting over on them; • riling up lwz in specific so he won't be what he is: a detective, and maybe start detecting things fei du doesn't want him to know. such as that he's about a centimeter away from total psychic collapse.

…and then there are the things fei du really can't handle:

• forehead kisses—undemanding, freely given, expressive of nothing but pure fondness and care, and which are a metaphor for: • the actual reality of luo wenzhou, who isn't dumb and isn't that easy to distract, and who has always paid very close attention to fei du. as he tells him bluntly later, "you were asking me to pull you out." (from what exactly? well, we have a few more episodes to go, to get there.)

[and then there's the whole part where lwz literally throttles him on the sofa, to prove his point. but y'all ain't ready for that yet.]

so just two more things about the drama's sugar water scene—first, note fei du's attempt, above, at his trademark saccharine peach-blossom smile, the incredibly condescending one. but he's a little too frayed to pull it off, the same way he could only barely wave tiredly towards the kitchen (once again, zxc acting with his whole body).

then, luo wenzhou's tiny sigh in response: "oh so we're back to this again, are we? right, got it. back to the game where you pretend you're fine and i pretend i find you a nuisance. sure, i can play, but guess what: you get to listen to another chinese dad lecture, only this time it has a real point, and i'm not letting you off that easily."