Every time @bbcphile and I watch another episode on our MLCB rewatch, we're both filled with meta thoughts (to the point it once took us like... an hour and a half to get through one episode XD ...though to be fair, it was a VERY juicy meta episode). And I keep saying I'm going to post them and then I don't, but this one is brief enough that I think I can do it. XD So I give you...
Holy Costume Changes, Batman!
(Mysterious Lotus Casebook, 莲花楼, episode 11)
At Cailan Manor
We start off this episode with Di Feisheng in this purple and deep magenta outfit with white piping and crisscrossing tabards, Fang Duobing in a silver/grey and light blue ensemble with medium blue lapels and belt over a robe with crossed lighter blue lapels, and Li Lianhua in a moss green robe with a dark green belt and over-robe. All have white underrobes and Di Feisheng has a silver/grey middle robe. Pretty standard outfits for all three of them at this point in the series.
In Town
OK, this isn't REALLY a costume change, but by the time they've gone to town to seek lunch (and secrets), Li Lianhua has decided it's a bit too warm out and shed his outer robe. But since no one is carrying it, then one presumes that at least a stop was necessary to put it somewhere? So I'm going to count it.
Di Feisheng and Fang Duobing? Still in their clothes from earlier; no changes here.
In The Dress
Well. We all know how this one happened. ;D
For Reasons that have nothing to do with Li Lianhua wanting an excuse to wear a pretty dress, we swear, Li Lianhua has now changed clothes completely into the pomegranate wedding dress and is being helped over the suspiciously rough terrain by Di Feisheng.
Di Feisheng and Fang Duobing? Still in their outfits from earlier in the day.
After One Dunking and Before Another
And now this is the one I find truly interesting. Rather that change back into the green outfit that he was wearing before putting on the pomegranate wedding dress, the outfit that was Right There in the bride's room somewhere, Li Lianhua has presumably traveled all the way back to his room (or even Lianhualou?) to get a complete change of clothing. He's still sporting a white underrobe, but now he has a red middle robe, a matching red belt, and a white outerrobe that's so sheer one wonders why he even bothered.
(Di Feisheng and Fang Duobing? STILL in their outfits from earlier.)
But what I find so truly fascinating about this particular costume change (and it's going to spawn a fic at some point, I'm SURE of it), is that these are not Li Lianhua's colors. These are Li Xiangyi's colors. Li Lianhua tends to stick to earth and sky tones: soft greens and blues, creams and later whites, but he just... doesn't wear red. At all, really. Except for this one outfit and when he's being forced to resurrect Li Xiangyi for some reason or another.
Maybe it was his near drowning in the wedding dress that brought memories of Donghai to the surface, or maybe it was being so close to solving the mystery of his shixiong's missing body, or maybe it was traveling with Di Feisheng and the constant banter between them bringing up memories of the past, or maybe it was something else entirely, but something brought Li Xiangyi to the surface enough for Li Lianhua to don his colors. And I find that endlessly fascinating.
Also I'm just laughing at him having like 4 outfits in the same span of time that the two men who are MUCH better known for being clotheshorses than he is have had exactly one each. XD
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I have no idea how I watched this show as many times as I have and did not cotton on to the fact that the second person in this dungeon was Wuyan until YESTERDAY. OTZ I suppose, in my defense, it is VERY badly lit, but STILL. His face is very distinctive, even with his hair out of its customary ponytail. Oops? XD
Anyway, now I'm sitting here unable to stop thinking about Yan-wang Xunming (and WHY exactly does that get translated as "King Xunming of YAMA?") and Wuyan trapped together in this dungeon for the entire time that Di Feisheng was traveling with Li Lianhua and Fang Duobing as A-Fei. The last they heard of him was him going off to confront Jiao Liqiao and then he disappears and Jiao Liqiao routs out all the remaining people loyal to him and takes over Jinyuanmeng, rebranding it as her own.
Wuyan and the three kings are the only people Di Feisheng was really close to in Jinyuanmeng. They're the only people he trusted even a little. And now they're stuck here in this dungeon, not knowing if their Zunshang is even alive or dead. And it's very clear from how quickly they break their chains when Di Feisheng arrives that they could have gotten out at any time, so why didn't they? Why didn't they leave and go looking for Di Feisheng? Were they biding their time? Hoping to gather useful intel? Did they really believe he was dead and were waiting for an advantageous time to avenge him? I WANT TO KNOW. THE MOTIVATION.
(Side note: DAMN but Wuyan looks like 10 miles of badly traveled road. He has absolutely been put through the wringer here and I want someone to cuddle him. TT^TT)
AND THEN THERE'S THIS NONSENSE:
WUYAN. *headdesk* ARE YOU SERIOUS.
YOU NEVER THOUGHT.
THAT JIAO LIQIAO.
WOULD CONSPIRE WITH OUTSIDERS AGAINST HIM???
After everything she's done both recently and 10 years ago to do exactly that??? Either Wuyan is the WORST kind of blind romantic or he has so much faith in Di Feisheng's ability to be the most terrifying motherfucker in every room that he never thought in a million years that Jiao Liqiao would have the balls to stand up to him, much less successfully take him down.
Either way it's... a little bit adorable? And there's no question that that blind faith in Di Feisheng is a good deal of what makes him good at his job, but it's also given him some giant blind spots that can't be helpful.
Either way, I'm now mentally reevaluating my opinion on his age. I think the Three Kings were probably about of an age with Di Feisheng or fairly close, maybe a year or two off in either direction. But now I think Wuyan must have been younger--just enough younger that that blind faith had a chance to root and grow.
...and now I want to write all the fic about their imprisonment leading up to this episode (and them trying to comfort each other that Di Feisheng is probably FINE without trying to act like that's what they're doing) and their background--when they met, how they formed Jinyuanmeng, just... bb!Wuyan tagging along with Di Feisheng and the boys who would become the Three Kings and doing his best to keep up even if it kills him.
*...sigh*
*tosses the new plot bunny into the pile with the rest of them*
(I've had this meta percolating in the back of my mind since my second or third rewatch... so it's been a while. XD)
This show doesn't do anything by accident, so I have to believe that putting these two scenes so closely together serves a purpose. In both cases, Li Lianhua comes flying through the air, gets whipped around a person who is acting as a center pole, and then lands, more or less, stably on his feet. That's a very obvious visual parallel. But if you look a bit more closely, these two moments couldn't be more different.
1) Who is controlling the beginning of the spin?
In the first spin, Shan Gudao grabs Li Lianhua's wrist as he's coming out of his Whirling Steps. In the second, it's Li Lianhua who reaches for Fang Duobing, but the moment Fang Duobing sees him, he reaches right back.
vs.
2) In that first spin, Li Lianhua is jerked right off balance; his entire body goes through a whiplash motion as he's pulled into the air, and when he lands, he's at a sharp diagonal, barely able to keep his feet. With Fang Duobing, he goes into that spin at a MUCH sharper angle; he's practically horizontal, but SO IS FANG DUOBING. And yet somehow they both manage to stabilize each other so LLH can deliver that powerhouse kick to the Demon Monk and STILL land lightly on his feet with both of them well balanced enough to attack again if need be.
vs
And you can see in that second shot of Fang Duobing and Li Lianhua that Xiaobao is contorting his body SO HARD to make sure that Li Lianhua is stable enough to deliver that kick (you can see this better in the gif, but oh well XD). He doesn't let go until the kick is over and Li Lianhua has both feet on the ground.
So why put these two scenes with such a distinctive move so close together?
(This is getting long, so behind a cut we go...)
So first, these two so-similar-yet-so-different moves show exactly how different Shan Gudao and Fang Duobing are. This is a show that goes out of its way so many times to show that while blood relation may be important, it doesn't necessarily make you who you are. And that family you make for yourself is at least equally important.
And here we have two people, blood relations, in fact, who have both been so important to Li Lianhua in the course of his life. And one uses this move to attack, to knock off balance, to throw Li Lianhua away from him. The other uses this move like centrifugal force: to pull Li Lianhua closer, to balance them both, to stabilize him when he's flying in faster than he can easily control himself.
And that's so deeply encapsulating of Li Lianhua's relationships with both of them.
Xiaobao grounds Li Lianhua. It takes him a long time to grow into that role, but once he gets there, he's going to hold on with all his might. And I love this as a representation of that. It's Xiaobao saying: "My father didn't have your best interests at heart and he never did. I do, and I always will. Take that leap and I'll catch you every time."
But why on Earth did Li Lianhua choose to do this move with Fang Duobing in the first place? Especially after what just happened with Shan Gudao maybe ten minutes earlier? We've never seen Li Lianhua and Fang Duobing train together. Hell, until maybe 30 minutes before this, Fang Duobing didn't even know Li Lianhua knew any martial arts! So this is not a move they could have trained or developed together. Fang Duobing, on sheer instinct alone, saw what Li Lianhua was trying to do, adjusted his own stance out of FALLING BACKWARDS AT A SHARP ANGLE into being a counterbalance weight that could stabilize them both and maintain the momentum that Li Lianhua needed to deliver that kick. First of all, that was some RIDICULOUSLY FAST mental calculations on Fang Duobing's part. O_O (All that STEM training paying off, I guess? XD) Second of all, even if figured it out that fast, he still had to physically execute the maneuver! So, like... good on you Xiaobao. Hot damn. 😁
So they had no time or reason to train this move, so why on EARTH would Li Lianhua attempt it?
(And this is where I slide off the meta train and into headcanon a bit. Please indulge me. XD)
I wonder if this was a move that Li Lianhua used to perform with Shan Gudao the way he did with Fang Duobing. With Shan Gudao being so much larger than him, especially in the beginning, he'd have been easy to toss around. And with his whirling steps, a move like this would be a natural extension of the rest of his fancy footwork.
So maybe, like telling Li Lianhua about their shifu's death, using this move against him was yet another way to destroy a piece of the life they had together. To rip the rug right out from under Li Lianhua's feet. And MAYBE Li Lianhua using it so shortly thereafter with Shan Gudao's son, knowing Shan Gudao would have known that they'd never trained that move... would have been a way to take that piece back. Like saying: "You see this thing that was ours? You can't take it away from me because I've already given it to someone else. To your SON."
Mysterious Lotus Casebook | Lian Hua Lou | 莲花楼 | Episodes 3 & 9 - The Letter
There is so much we don't know about what happened ten years ago between Sigumen and Jinyuanmeng. A lot of it gets unraveled as the show goes on, but one thing remains true: there is a hell of a lot of unreliable narration to pick through to get to the truth. And when it comes to the particular truths of what happened between the individual people involved, that becomes even more true.
And one of the little mysteries that always bothered me was this letter that Qiao Wanmian wrote to Li Xiangyi to break up with him. Because I absolutely could not figure out when he actually got that letter. Anyway, I finally caught a few details that helped me to tease that apart and my first realization was that he fucking LEFT HER ON 'READ' for about a month (Li XIangyi, PLEASE OTZ) and the second realization was that we get two different versions of these events YET AGAIN, but this time both from Li Xiangyi's POV in flashbacks, and I'm CHEWING GLASS OVER IT, so naturally I have to share.
So the first time we get this particular flashback is in episode 3. Li Lianhua is remembering the aftermath of the Donghai Battle, how he fell into the ocean and washed up on the shore... a husk of what he had once been.
He wakes up and makes his way into town and to Sigumen's steps, overhearing all this terrible news as he walks. People injured, homes destroyed, people killed, and so much of the blame being placed on all the sects, and on Sigumen in particular. And as he walks, you can see it all starting to weigh him down, until he's literally bent over from the weight of it on his back.
And then the final betrayal. His people, his friends, want to disband the sect. They want to walk away. They blame him and his hubris for this disaster. And the coup-de-grace is Xiao Zijin asking Qiao Wanmian... "You don't like this place either, right?"
And the sad look on Qiao Wanmian's face finally breaks Li XIangyi of his paralysis and he turns away, back to the scene unfolding on those steps and drifts back to the shore, where he ultimately collapses.
And that's all we get.
We know he returned to Sigumen. We know he overheard them wanting to disband the sect. We know he left without a word. And that's the end of the story as far as Episode 3 is concerned.
But this makes sense. Li LIanhua is mid-Bicha attack and has just left Fang Duobing on the side of the road when this flashback comes on. He's fighting his own body in a desperate bid for survival to complete the one task he's set himself and Fang Duobing has just dredged up all this stuff and gone off on a tear about how he's Li Xiangyi's disciple. A road Li Xiangyi never got a chance to walk. Another person he failed along the way. And so he's focused on all the ways in which he is a failure in that moment, all the ways he doesn't live up to Fang Duobing's hero, Li XIangyi, all the ways that he is no longer that man. So he zeroes in on the moment he lost it all: his reputation, his sect, his health, his power. So that's the part of the flashback that we get.
But in Episode 9, we have an entirely different set of circumstances. He's just saved his A-mian. He's focused on helping her let go of the man he thinks she still loves. He's putting himself aside to focus solely on her (or so he thinks—that's honestly a question for later, but bear with me, we'll get there ;D) and what she needs. And we get dumped into this flashback again.
Only this time it doesn't start on the beach. It starts here:
It starts with Li Xiangyi seeing his sect disbanded again. Only this time, he remembers the words that come from Xiao Zijin differently:
There's no speaking out load of "you hate it here too, don't you?" or any similar sentiment. Because at this point, Li Lianhua knows this isn't true. She can't hate it there. She lives there. She didn't leave. And she doesn't hate him because she very obviously misses him and mourns him. So in his mind, he gives this moment a little less abrasiveness. A little less fierceness. But because he's so focused on A-Mian in this memory, we finally find out that there is an entire piece to this incident that we haven't gotten until now.
A-Mian's grief.
A-Mian's recognition that he was there.
And the letter.
The letter she wrote a month ago.
A letter Li Xiangyi NEVER READ.
We get to see A-Mian's regret. We get to see her grief: both for her own sense of shame at being unable to keep up with the man she loved, and her sense of loss over her own innocence and the opportunities that they'll never have now to make amends. And we get to see her break from her grief for just a moment to rush down those stairs because some instinct in her just won't quit.
Li Xiangyi had returned.
And she knew.
But it was too late. She no longer trusted herself. And Li Xiangyi, having heard her outpouring of grief, had already decided that he owed it to her and to everyone else to just… walk out of their lives for good.
And he did.
But he owed her one last thing first.
He owed it to her to read the letter that she'd written him a month ago and he'd never opened.
So before he goes back to that beach, he returns to his rooms in Sigumen to retrieve that unopened letter and read it.
On first watch, I had assumed this was after his healing with Monk Wuliao. That he was RE-reading that letter, not reading it for the first time. But these are clearly his rooms in Sigumen. The desk he conducts business from is at the bottom right and the table he confronts Shand Gudao from is on the left. But unlike when we usually see these rooms, brightly lit during the day, they're now mostly in darkness, the sun clearly setting given the angle of the light coming into the room. This is the sunset of Li Xiangyi. The last moments of his life, in a way.
And the letter is very VERY obviously unopened when he first takes it out:
And reading that letter is the final nail in Li Xiangyi's coffin, I think. Final proof that he'd failed in every aspect of his life: being a brother, being a lover, being a sect leader, being a friend, being a student. After this, he leaves Sigumen and goes back to that beach to lay down where he washed back up initially, ready to let the death he temporarily escaped take him away. And when the monk saves his life anyway, he still manages to kill off the part of him that was Li Xiangyi. Li Xiangyi is dead, he insists over and over and over again, until he believes it himself.
Because in that letter—a letter he left unread FOR A MONTH—Qiao Wanmian manages to show him that he never really saw her at all. That he never saw one of his dearest loved ones in pain right in front of him—pain that he finally witnessed on the steps of Sigumen as she poured out her grief and regret in sending this letter to begin with. How ironic then, that a letter she'd sent intending to set him free of her to fly up to the heights on his own, was the final arrow that brought him down. I don't think that's what she would have wanted at all.
But I really feel for her. I do.
Just imagine sending this letter and knowing that it's sitting in Li Xiangyi's mail pile somewhere… and assuming that he read it and that's what spurred him on to this last desperate fight. Because in that outpouring on the steps that clearly what she thought she did. She thought this letter sent him to his death. And in that moment she's wrong, because HE NEVER READ IT. Not until long after that. Not until after this moment. And fucking HELL, but that just hurts me.
Maybe it wouldn't have changed anything if he hadn't witnessed that moment. Maybe it wouldn't have changed anything if he hadn't read that letter. Maybe he still would have felt that he'd failed enough to warrant death of some kind.
"Since you have been poisoned with the deadliest poison, no poison can harm you anymore."
--Monk Wuliao
I've been thinking a lot about this line lately, and its potential repercussions. In context, this is Li Lianhua remembering Monk Wuliao's words from when he was healed as much as he could have been from the Bicha Poison 10 years ago. Shortly before these remembered words, there is a flashback wherein it is revealed that Li Xiangyi had a nut allergy that made him break out in hives. That bowl of food he's eating is a nut porridge brought to him by Yun Biqiu. (There are less dangerous ways to see if this person is your former sect leader, Biqiu! O_o;;;) Anyway, as he is eating this nut porridge, and remembering this line, Li Lianhua is distinctly NOT breaking out in hives.
The conclusion that we are clearly supposed to draw is that the Bicha Poison has prevented the "toxin" of the nuts from harming its host.
...but why stop there?
If a nut is a poison for the purpose of this mechanism of action, then what about other drugs/medications? After all, to quote one of my favorite sayings: "Healers and poisoners are folks with similar skill sets and wildly different philosophies." Or to put it as I learned it in my toxicology class in vet school: "All medicines are poisons at the right dose."
So if a nut can be a poison, then medications CERTAINLY are. And if the Bicha poison recognizes the nut as a poison and prevents it from acting, then we can assume it would do the same to any medications.
That explains why Medicine Demon's priceless potions DON'T WORK.
That explains why the snake bites DON'T WORK.
That explains why Guan Hemeng's medicines DON'T WORK.
It also explains why Li Lianhua is so convinced that Fan Duobing's pill from Tianji Hall and Di Feisheng's Wangchuan Flower WON'T work.
Because once you've been poisoned by Bicha Poison, NO OTHER POISON WILL HARM YOU... or help you.
And taking that a step further, it means that every time Li Lianhua has been sick or injured or in need of pain medication in the past ten years, NONE OF IT WOULD HAVE WORKED. And considering how much more fragile he is now than he used to be, that absolutely breaks my heart.
Just imagine that every time he was ill or injured, he had to weigh the benefits of using Yangzhouman to heal himself versus the risk of using too much and shrinking the time he had left even more. How many times must he have chosen to just power through and hope he makes it to the other side? No wonder he's so reluctant to let Guan Hemeng examine him and try to help. No wonder he doesn't want to waste everyone else's precious medications on himself. He knows they'll do nothing.
...excuse me while I go cry in a corner now. TT^TT
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