#yashou

Cats are bare-knuckle brawlers -- sort of. Da Qing fights with his bare hands, but Da Ji has a moment where she's about to savage Zhao Yunlan, and she sort of gets ... a cyber kitty paw? I have no idea how we're supposed to interpret this. Maybe this is Shen Wei Vision, seeing the damage she can do despite the human woman she appears to be, or maybe it's a frame that was supposed to have more polygons laid over it, except that CG never happened. One way or another, Da Qing's little claw-hand is not an idle threat.

Most of the named yashou characters are also bare-handed fighters, but their magical punches trail equally magical CG colors. Flowers and cats get yellow, crows are black, and snakes are red.

On top of this, Ya Qing also has little feather darts so precise that she can apparently shoot them quill-first through air ducts and into people's throats for an instant kill.

Crow extras have more traditional armaments -- and you know, there are a couple details in the show where I'm just forever baffled that they just let these things die out of focus, and one of the big ones is the Crow Tribe swords. Unlike Shen Wei's weapon, these things are much closer to actual 长刀, in that they are actually swords, and also they are long. But what's really amazing about them is that they have a silver crow-foot claw for a pommel. It's a great detail! ...And alas, these are the best close-ups I can get you.

Snakes have two kinds of weapons. Most snakes have these absolutely gnarly-looking sickle swords, reminiscent of khopesh, and they show up frequently throughout the series. However, there's this one guy who shows up near the end with this naginata-looking thing. (I guess he's the lost Metal Gear protagonist, Polearm Snake.)

The yashou are as consistent about their makeup as they are about their jewelry, which is to say, they're not. I don't mean usual cosmetic makeup; I mean the dark lines of paint on their faces.

If I had to guess, on a production level, I'd say the guiding principles for applying this makeup were 1) not on anybody in the main cast, so you don't have to do it every day; 2) not on women; 3) on other speaking roles and extras as you have time to get them in the chair.

Flowers and cats don't wear any such paint, so that's easy.

Crows generally get an all-or-nothing approach. Both the guy on the left in the phone booth street and the guy in the feathered cloak at the Snake Village standoff (snandoff) appear to have the same full face of three dots at the outer corner of each eye and between the eyerbrows, V shapes that taper to a point by the middle set of dots, and a Ψ-looking shape above those dots that's probably meant to look like a crow's foot.

But there's also this henchcrow, who has the three dots under his eye, but only one line over his eyebrow, and no discernible marks in the middle of his forehead. Crow casual.

It's entirely possible that there are variations other than these, but there are very few crows, and even fewer of them get close-ups. Squinting at the back rows of crowd shots, I can see that there's definitely some paint on at least some of the crow extras. They're just never in focus long enough to give any good detail, and that's even before the matter of how their goofy hoods get in the way.

On the snake side of the yashou world, Snake Fourth Uncle (snuncle) has hands-down the best makeup in the entire series -- just the two little subtle points from the inner corners of his eye toward the bridge of his nose. They look tremendous. I understand why they didn't do this on Zhu Hong (see principles 1 and 2 above), but I wish they had. Fanartists, get on that.

The other snake makeup (snakeup -- ha! that one actually worked!) is much more uniform. It's a mark in the center of the forehead and a dot on the outer side of either eye. It all comes and goes, I guess depending on how the boys are feeling that day. Maybe they think it's more of a night look? Maybe they'd just shed their skins and hadn't gotten around to reapplying it? Could be.

What I am left wondering is this: Is the mark on their foreheads meant to be the sacred stick? It's right in that weird grey area where either it looks like somebody was trying to imitate the sacred stick design and got real abstract with it, or it looks like somebody was just making a cool snake forehead design and the design they landed on just happened to be vaguely sacred-stick-shaped.

I wish they'd been more consistent about yashou fashion conventions, because I think it would've been great to have single-ear jewelry be a quiet sign that the person in frame isn't human.

As it is, Da Qing, Da Ji, and Ya Qing are the only ones we see pulling this off, which I think is a sample size too small to determine if this is meant to be meaningful or just a funky style that the costume people really liked. I think the same thing applies for trying to determine if the ear-side selection is gendered.

I want to ascribe some meaning to it, though, if only because of how Da Ji isn't wearing those earrings when she's pretending to be a Good Human Wife. (This includes the pictures of her that Lin Jing shows as part of her dating profile, but those are clearly just the actor's extant selfies and headshots, so I don't count that as intentional.) Whenever she's in Kitty Mode, she's got those two sparkly studs in her left ear.

Other yashou style, however, is far less predictable. The only other single earring we see is Ya Qing's earring-cuff combo, which is unique to her. None of the other crows have earrings at all.

Da Qing's transformation ability is absolutely textual: his bio makes reference to it, it's how he stalks people sometimes, he excuses himself to turn from human to cat to soothe Violin Girl in the hospital, it's why Lao Li freaks out and gives him a concussion, and so forth. There are times he does things only a human body could do, and there are times he does things only a cat body could do. Like the other yashou we meet, he is a shapeshifter in control of his own appearance.

The flashback with Da Ji got me thinking, though -- specifically the part where he nearly gets hit by a car, she does get hit by a car, he carries her body off to a clearing, and he nuzzles her corpse sadly before just leaving it there. Now, this sequence of events is pretty intense if they're in their human forms, seeing as you've got both vehicular manslaughter and improper disposal of a corpse, neither of which anyone but these two seems too fussed about. But if they're in their cat forms, it's still very sad, but legally it is not as complicated.

Which makes me wonder: How often, when we are looking at Da Qing, should we be seeing Da Kitty?

I don't think it's very often, but there are a couple scenes where it would make as much sense for him to be a talking cat as it would for him to be a person. In fact, I think it makes more sense for most of his scenes with Da Ji to be neko-and-neko, considering her feelings on cat supremacy. Of course, the known limitations of both technology and animal wrangling means there's no way the script would have intended those scenes for anything but human actors. Still, it's worth thinking about how many of Da Qing's scenes, especially those around SID, would read the same if we were understanding the expressions and gestures we see on his human form, but seeing a big black fuzzball.

None of thise is to take away from what a cat-like human he is, of course, because when he's a boy, he is a very cat boy. I do wonder if he could get away with being as snuggly with Zhao Yunlan as he is because they could tell the censors, it's not gay, he's a cat!

If all Ying Chun had done was show up in a t-shirt and jeans, get real handsy with all the ladies around her (which of course she does, there are no boy flowers), call Zhao Yunlan a “glib-tongued hunk,” and vanish into a puff of bright yellow CG flowers, I still would’ve loved her. The fact that her outfit was clearly designed by a six-year-old girl given too much sugar and the task of designing a fancy flower princess is the icing on her perfect cupcake.

Her hair is a mix of good and terrible choices. The good include the chestnut color she’s chosen, the very cute shoulder-length cut, and how the white hair ties holding her braids together have little leaves woven into them. The terrible include both the painfully fake sprig of yellow flowers pinned over her right braid and the bizarre decision to crimp the hair in only her left braid. Some little flower still thinks it’s 1983. Jury’s still out on whatever’s happening with her bangs.

I personally don’t like wearing the kind of earrings she’s got on, the studs with the dangle backs, but she’s rocking them. At some point, her necklace loses the pearl at the center of its blossom, leaving just the gold frame and the crystal below. She’s also got a little bracelet on her right wrist that may be silver? It’s hard to tell. Someone’s glued flower petals to it regardless.

And then there’s the floofy nightmare of tulle, satin, and silk flowers she calls a dress. Like Ya Qing, she’s got the embroidered mesh over the bodice, which is a different color material from the cream skirt. In fact, none of her colors quite seem to match -- that bold yellow is only in her hair, there’s random grey and red at the center of the flowers at her hip, the flowers around her neck are from a different family of pastels entirely, the dark purple in the embroidery doesn’t show up anywhere else, and the blue of her skirt and sleeves doesn’t match the blue of the bodice. (Cerulean is a gentle breeze, man.) Sometimes the back of her collar flips up and sometimes it lies semi-flat, and honestly I can’t tell which way it’s supposed to go.

When Ying Chun runs, she’s got to grab the skirt, sometimes with both hands; briefly, when she’s running after Ya Qing, you can see her bare legs beneath, which suggests the cream underskirt has some fairly significant slits up the sides. I tried to get some pictures of it in motion to show just how many layers she’s working with here. The skirt is mostly blue, but there are layers of sheer purple and cream under there too, swallowing up her lower half in a truly incredible sea of swishy ruffles.

Shout out to all those of us who came from high schools that did mums for homecoming; we know exactly what the disaster on her right hip is.

The question you never knew you wanted to ask was, “If a bird was also a human, would she dress normal?” Lucky for you, Ya Qing is here with the answer: oh good heavens no.

Ya Qing dresses like a Drag Race contestant got the challenge prompt “Edgar Allen Poe” and had only ever read one thing by Edgar Allen Poe. Her outfit is a combination of thrift-store finds and things you could not find at a thrift store because no one ever wore them in the first place. She looks like a Victorian widow and somebody’s “fallen angel” OC had a transporter accident. I love this for her.

Let’s do this top-down:

Her fascinator is doing amazing triple duty with its poof of feathers, the sparkly beading in the center, and the lightweight mourning veil that hovers menacingly over her forehead. Her hair is pulled back in two braids on either side, each of which gets run through two silver beads; the rest of it gets knotted into a high ponytail that kind of gets lost underneath all the feathers. Whatever burgundy she’s chosen for the highlights, it’s really working for her.

She’s got a single earring on her left ear, one that connects with a chain up to an ear cuff like she’s Bajoran, and the ear cuff has extra wind-chime-like danglies on it. Based on this and the single earring Da Qing wears, I thought briefly they might be going with a thing where all the yashou have single earrings, which would have been a great costuming choice. But alas, no. (For all Zhu Hong loves her necklaces, she doesn’t wear earrings at all.)

Strange as it seems based on the overall effect, I don’t think she’s wearing a dress per se. It looks to me like her outfit is three parts: a feathered cape, a lacy high-cut bodysuit, and a long skirt. In one of the shots up there, you can see both her shoulder and part of her side, which makes it look like what’s covering her torso is disconnected from the other pieces. The bodysuit has a thick, stiff collar, which suits her pretty long neck.

The feathered cape is ... well, it’s a lot. Obviously most of it’s happening around her shoulders, where there’s big sprays of flight feathers just behind her neck and down around her shoulders, with a downy layer between them. It has sleeves too, but those sleeves are like Nightmare Boy’s, in that they’re slit up the side and therefore mostly just suggestions of sleeves. It also has a long cape down the back, almost as long as her skirt is and of the same material, which sometimes makes it hard to tell where one stops and the other starts.

Her gloves are everything. They’re so weird. On the tops of her fingers and the backs of her forearms, they’re a completely different lace pattern from her bodice; underneath, they’re solid leather. They go up just below her elbows, where they stop with a curtain of thin loose silver chains. I cannot tell if the chains are attached to the gloves, or if they’re just an extra layer she’s strapped on. When she has her arms by her sides, her almost-sleeves mostly hide them; this is good, because they have the amazing effect of looking great in motion and kinda doofy when they’re just dangling there.

That asymmetrical pleather belt is every belt my mother owned in 1987.

I love her skirt, which has so many layers that it gives her extra menacing vibes whenever she’s walking. It’s full enough that it’s got about five different hemlines all going at the same time, and it’s long enough that it brushes the ground when she walks. Alas, I couldn’t get a good shot of it, but she’s also got on some amazing chunky-heeled black ankle boots on under there.

I’m assuming that either her look is based on the woman in the first-episode backstory art, or vice versa. However, that lady is clearly supposed to be mutating down in Dixing, so something jumped tracks here. (Obviously Ya Qing herself is in there too, in the shot with all three yashou, but that’s more clearly supposed to be an actual drawing of her final look.)

Most of the snakes we see in the show are man-snakes, but there are definitely two prominent lady snakes, so we can assume the snake yashou have some kind of sexual dimorphism going on. In the same way, while all of the henchcrows are male, the two crows with names and personalities are female. And as few cats as there are, we get one boy cat and one girl cat.

But the flowers are all women.