Hey, something Iâve been wondering since I first watched CQL: in ep 5, thereâs a line where Wen Qing is talking to Wen Ning and says something like âOur family has been doctors for centuries, but I canât cure my own brotherâ (thatâs verbatim from the US Netflix subtitles) and Iâve always wondered about that word, âcureâ. As someone who lives with mental illness, Iâm a little sensitive to the idea of a mental affliction being âcured,â as though itâs a malady to be remedied, as though thereâs something âwrongâ that can be âfixedâ. The word âcureâ brings up all that discomfort for me, but I only know English, and Iâm curious to know how accurate the concept of a âcureâ is to the actual conversation taking place there? I think a lot about the way neurodivergence is discussed in CQL, and I donât want to misjudge connotation based on translation error.
hi there! so this ask is *checks* a month old yikes, but iâve been thinking about it for a long time so here we go (finally)! :D
so hereâs the scene in question:
[ID: two screenshots from episode 5 of the untamed. wen qing is speaking to wen ning. the subtitles read âćĺ´ć˛ťä¸äşčŞĺˇąĺźĺźçç â and âbut i canât cure my own brotherâ. /end ID]
with regards to your grammar/language question: 沝 can mean both âto treatâ and âto cureâ. there are certain sentence constructions that can make it clear which it is, but not all of them do so.
for example, 沝弽 is definitely âto cureâ - the grammar there is [VERB + 弽] can mean either âto finish VERBingâ or âto VERB wellâ. so, to finish treating = to cure.
however, in this case, thatâs not the construction thatâs being used, and I would say itâs not clear-cut. âVERB + ä¸äşâ is âto be unable to VERBâ. because 沝 is ambiguous on its own, what she says here, âćĺ´ć˛ťä¸äşčŞĺˇąĺźĺźçç â, comes down to âbut I am unable to treat/cure my own younger brotherâs illnessâ.
what I think is maybe a more complicated issue is the idea of mental illness and/or neurodivergence in CQL and how understandings of it impact our perceptions of the characters/narrative.
Iâve seen a lot of interpretations of Wen Ningâs affliction in CQL to be neurodivergence, but Iâm actually quite surprised when I hear this. i believe the illness wen qing and wei wuxian refer to when talking about wen ning is his susceptibility/weakness towards resentful/yin energy, which manifests in fainting spells and long bouts of unconsciousness. to me, that is not analogous to mental illness or neurodivergence so much as something like epileptic episodes brought on by exposure to specific triggers. by CQL canon, we know that he has not always had this -- he contracted the illness after his encounter with the guanyin statue that sucked away part of his soul when he was a child, and this now gives him a weak constitution and makes him largely unsuitable for night hunting, especially unsupervised. this is what wen qing is trying to treat and/or cure. in mdzs, he does not have this condition, and wen qing never mentions anything about trying to treat or cure him at all.
given that this condition is most likely a creation for the sake of getting around censors at least in part (basically: a way to create a reason for why wen ning isnât âdeadâ -- in addition, probably was also meant to increase wen sibs screentime/sympathy), Iâve always seen it as a bit of a handwavy physical condition that was tacked on as opposed to an actual statement about his character, if that makes sense.
in general, Iâm hesitant to outright assign labels of neurodivergence or mental illness to mdzs/cql characters because I think that labels like that are inherently societally and culturally dependent. with the rise of identity politic rhetoric in the US and all of that kind of getting tangled up with our conceptions of being ND or mentally ill, I worry about trying to analyze mdzs/cql through such a lens because identities are so inextricably tied to environment. even if both i and a character could be âdiagnosedâ with the same condition, I think it would be undeniable that our experiences of such would be very different because we come from different cultural backgrounds. not just, chinese author vs american reader but like, fantastical xianxia chinese conception of a character vs chinese-american conception of identity.
alskdjfl idk if this even makes sense, but!! basically, I actually donât think that CQL discusses or really portrays neurodivergence at all, not in such terms. I think itâs completely appropriate and valid to headcanon and interpret characters in ways that resonate with you! i certainly do, lol (morally scrupulous twin jades anyone? :D đĽ), but im nervous about asserting that any CQL characters actually are/have xyz condition because I donât think that a discussion on that front is particularly meaningful. I know that this hesitance comes both from my own views on what neurodivergence/mental illness mean and how useful those terms actually are, and also from a very personal anger over some moral injunctions that Iâve seen people place on portraying charactersâ ârealâ or âcodedâ mental states that are seriously misguided, harmful, and extremely culturally american in their claims (that will probably be a separate post though lol).
that isnât to say there isnât value in thinking about how one can interpret characters in one way or another, or that there isnât value in discussing how unintentionally, a character might fall into archetypes that evoke certain identities and how that subtext might or might not impact a personâs experience or takeaway from the media! but I think all of that has to be contextualized as opposed to generalized. /o\
this.... came out a lot less coherent than i wanted it to be, but my brain is Not having it for some reason. I hope that I at least managed to answer your question/help you along in your continuing thought process!!! :D
(ko-fi)
