#sanniang

I picked up some of the Mystic Nine side movies the other day. (I ended up skipping Four For Abelmoschus because the horror elements were too strong.)

First thoughts: there’s more straight up magic than in the main series. I... would guess that these were only airing on-line and have different censorship standards to meet, but don’t know for sure.

Also also, there are some intense tone shifts between stories. 

Er-ye’s story was austere, and beautiful, and about resisting the Japanese, those shitty parvenue invaders with both physical skills and artistry, and he adds a new level to the ‘What To Wear While Tomb-Raiding’ options, eschewing ‘Hard-Wearing and Comfortable’ and even the tricky but stylier ‘Figure-Hugging Black or Red Leather’. No, Er-ye literally floats down into a tomb holding an umbrella wearing unsullied, drifting white, walks through it with perfect posture, solves puzzles and locks through his superior knowledge of geomancy, and in general looks cool as fuck at all times. He’s always been a ‘in one hand a flower, in the other a sword’ kind of a guy and this story supports that. The triggering event involves a friend? rival? on the tomb-raiding side heading off to transport a Relic MacGuffin somewhere so the Japanese can’t find it. (Note - a grave-robber doing an admirable thing, this is truly an Er-ye story.) Anyway, the guy gets halfway caught, is injured and crawls into an ancient tomb to hide, sending a message for Er-ye to pick it up. To get inside the military camp that is now on top of the hidden entrance, Er-ye moves into his role as an operatic star and wangles an invite. And... enlists the aid of an old rival? friend? who is also an operatic diva. So. Balance. And it’s all very patriotic. (Though. I had a moment, when Er-ye is throwing shade to the Japanese and generally giving an air of being above it all to think, Sir, your friends and relations rob graves. Sir.)

Jiu-ye’s story was claustrophobic and many-layered and crowded, which pretty much fits him as a person, and the character of his family. It’s raining, constantly raining, there is suspicion and murder and endless family members and retainers milling about getting in the way and noticing things and gossiping and, and they have a Family Culture you could cut with a knife. There are a lot of cgi effects by way of a circle of enormous abaci working as Jiu-ye thinks and thinks, and I found them a bit jarring at first but I’m wondering if that slight mismatch between the cgi and the background was intentional. Jiu-ye is constantly being flattened by headaches bad enough he takes morphine, and that hyper-reality increases the air of a fever dream. (Also, he actually has a secret library with an identical ring of giant abaci in his cellar, and there’s layers and layers.) This was a prequel - he’d just taken on the role of family leader and it was interesting to see him young and a little unsure. And his increasingly ruffled hair as the story goes on, his awkward, occasionally desperate affection for the little dog he was looking after, made my heart hurt.

(I will note that Little Flower is the grandson of one of these people, and the disciple of the other. Little Flower makes so much sense now.)

And then there’s Ganges Killing the Trees, which involves San-niang, the only female head of the family. And it doesn’t have styly tomb-raiding (except in the cold open), and it doesn’t have high-class murder mystery plotting. It’s got a slice of (mostly low-level) members of the grave-robbing groups trapped in an abandoned temple, and some of them are desperados and dangerous, and some are just... servants or civilians, and they are trapped in a very bad situation and most of the story is them fighting each other. Gritty, desperate, on-the-fly plotting, alliances of the moment, sudden betrayals. One of the arc phrases of the series is, ‘Ghosts are one thing; what’s truly terrible is the human heart.’ Ganges sets out to prove that. It’s an interesting counterweight to Er-ye’s high-flying story. (From what I saw of Abelmoschus, that one also focussed on the lower-class and the desperate.)