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canary3d-obsessed · 1 year

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Restless Rewatch: The Untamed, Episode 37 part one

(Masterpost) (Pinboard) (whole thing on AO3)

Warning! Spoilers for All 50 Episodes!

Never Trust a Big Butt and Smile (Poison)

Wei Wuxian has gathered all the juniors together in the paper-offerings shop run by the corpse lady, and asks for volunteers to help him in the kitchen.

Teacher's pet Sizhui jumps forward, abandoning Jingyi and leaving the field clear for Ouyang Zizhen to make his move.

He tells the other kids to stay put, but Jin Ling follows along to go make a nuisance of himself.

DLWJLF (Dad Lan Wangji would Like to Fuck)

Now we get to see Wei Wuxian in a new dad mode; not entertaining and protecting young A-Yuan, but guiding teenager Jin Ling to be less of a prat. On one level he is talking to him forcefully and generally not having patience for his crap, but on another level he is carefully teaching him.

Wei Wuxian explains that glutinous rice (aka sticky rice, aka sweet rice) can cure corpse poisoning, and proceeds to cook it up with every kind of pepper he can find in the kitchen, in a sequence that has got to be an intentional parody (full gifset here) of the lovingly-filmed food porn that shows up in so many Asian dramas (for example).

(More behind the cut!)

While the rice is cooking, Jin Ling finally explains what brought them here; they all came following a trail of hideously murdered "cats." The show avoids having to put an explanatory note on the screen saying "this is a digital cat and no actual cats were harmed" by showing us this ridiculously bad stuffed toy cat.

On this occasion I genuinely appreciate the department of dubious practical effects, since I don't really want to see a realistic dead cat. But wow, this is super bad. It doesn’t even have paws, just weird stubby peg feet. It is probably made from leftover bits of whatever they used to make Wen Chao’s dog. Also, the MEOW noise happens right when Jin Ling opens the door, when the cat is clearly already dead. Maybe the cat's ghost is doing the meowing.

During Jin Ling's flashback, we get to see Fairy in action. Fairy is a special, extra smart, spiritually attuned dog.

His powers include barking at the door when someone stands directly outside the door stringing up a dead cat from the rafters. I feel like maybe Fairy needs to aim a little higher in life.

Wei Wuxian thinks about the cat-murdering, and reflects that it's horrifying, but that whoever did it "didn't actually cause any harm."

Ghosts of a whole lot of deceased cats: easy for you to say, asshole

I'm still a little unclear on who actually did the cat murders. I think it was Xue Yang? since he wanted to lure the Yiling Laozu to Yi City, and couldn't rely on the qiankun bag of plot convenience to get him there. Possibly he also wanted to kill and eat the juniors, like the clown in IT. I've seen people saying it was Nie Huaisang, but I don't think he had a motive to get the juniors to go there, given that Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji were already headed that way because of the spirit thingy.

When the rice is ready Wei Wuxian sends the kids to deliver it to their poisoned buddies. Wei Wuxian pauses to give Jin Ling a little more uncleing.

Jingyi tries the rice, which is absolutely loaded with spice, and asks if Wei Wuxian is trying to poison them some more.

Wei Wuxian has the audacity to think "could it be that I accidentally spilled pepper powder in there?" Bitch, we just watched you dump a whole bowl of red pepper flakes AND a bowl of black pepper AND several whole-ass red chilies in there. Your memory isn't that bad.

Sizhui tries it and does a nice spit-take; then he says that the taste is familiar. I think this is the first instance of him remembering something from his time with Wei Wuxian, and I love that the trigger for his eventual cascade of recovered memory is Wei Wuxian's terrible cooking.

Wei Wuxian makes them eat it anyway, and then laughs to himself about it.

Young Miss Jump-Scare

Wei Wuxian hears A-Qing's stick in the lane outside, and goes to a hole in the wall to look at her. Once he's had a look he says "wow! she's amazing!" to lure the kids into looking.

Jin Ling goes to look and A-Qing obligingly sticks her face right into the camera for a jump scare.

Camera Operator: Damn, warn a guy, will you?

Next Jin Ling lures Sizhui to look, and A-Qing provides another jump scare, this time drooling blood out of her mouth. Then she goes back to walking in circles in the street while the boys all check her out, mostly platonically, except for Ouyang Zizhen, who is in love with literally everybody so can’t do platonic.

Wei Wuxian, fully in Wei-Laoshi mode at this point, tells the kids that they should look at A-Qing precisely because they are scared; as cultivators, they need to look past their fear and be able to identify things correctly.

Sizhui, Jin Ling, and Ouyang Zizhen all take turns looking and all make different observations about her, and receive feedback from Wei Wuxian about the quality of their observations.

Itty-bitty Lan Sizhui, hilariously, says that she’s only as tall as his chest. According to wiki.d-addicts, he is a whopping 7 centimeters taller than she is in real life. He has doomed himself to having to stand on a box any time he is next to her. Which, you know, he mostly won't be, because of all the death.

Conveniently, the window has a whole bunch of strategically-placed rips in it, so several of them can look out at the same time, like the Joke Wall on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-in. No I am not that old, but the reruns were inescapable when I was a child.

Do these knuckleheads think they are hiding? Very subtle, guys.

A-Qing wanders around and bleeds for a bit, but then she hears someone coming and skedaddles. The someone who arrives is Xiao Xingchen, wearing a ribbon/bandage over his eyes, no guan, and dark robes.

Wei Wuxian recognizes him anyway, because Xiao Xingchen is famously pretty no matter how he's styled. Also he has his sword and waves it around conspicuously.

Wei Wuxian immediately decides to rescue him, over the objections of Jin Ling, but has to move quickly to avoid being poisoned by the AfterEffects volumetric fog that covers the street.

He also has to do a hella cool spell, with a mix of light-talisman drawing and poetry reciting, which impresses all of the youngsters.

For some reason it also causes a bunch of mild squib explosions on the outside of the wall. He comes back in, super-quick, with Xiao Xingchen clutched against his side, warning the kids not to come near because "even skin-to-skin contact will poison you."

Dude, we weren't planning on getting naked with your uncle, chill out.

He sets him down and whispers to him, calling him Xiao Shi Shu,小师叔 which is how he would address his father's martial younger brother, not his mother's, according to my deep Google-translated knowledge of Chinese forms of address. I'm going to go ahead and assume that Wei Wuxian knows the subtleties of this sort of thing better than I do.

ANYhoo, Wei Wuxian lets Xiao Xingchen know who he is, without actually saying his name, since some of these kids might have good hearing. He tells Sizhui to get a bowl of congee. Jin Ling objects to helping XXC, because he might be a bad guy, and Jingyi vigorously defends him, saying that he was being attacked by corpses, so is definitely a good guy. That...is not how zombie attacks work, but ok. He also cites Lan rules about helping the dying, which is a rare instance of Jingyi giving a fuck about the rules.

After bringing the congee, Sizhui looks at Xiao Xingchen's sword and immediately recognizes it as Shuanghua, announcing it to the other juniors, who come racing over to look.

The kids instantly figure out that the guy is Xiao Xingchen. They don't recognize him, mind you, just his sword. Sword fans, amirite? All of these kids are active members of the spiritual-sword fandom and can recognize swords they've never seen, but only heard about on Tumblr.

Zombie Stroll

A bunch of zombies start walking down the street at this point in a thoroughly un-menacing fashion, including one disturbingly hot zombie who looks into the window.

This is to prepare us for the arrival of the #1 Hot Zombie, Song Lan.

Before that, though, Wei Wuxian is going to do another spell to lock the door, so he slices his fingers open *before* asking the kids if they have any talisman paper.

This is like when I start cooking the green onions for my protein-obsessed teenage son's omelet that I make every goddamn morning in a bid to always do the exact opposite of my own mother's shitty parenting before I check to see if I have any eggs. Crack the eggs first, Wei Wuxian.

All of the kids offer up their blood, which he doesn't need, but don't have any blank talisman paper. Why does he need paper when he drew the other spell in the middle of the air? Never mind, never mind.

He is unfairly annoyed at this, considering that he didn't bring any paper either. He overwrites an Already-Been-Chewed one that Jin Ling produces and uses it to seal the door, which totally astonishes all of the junior cultivators, like they haven't seen magic before.

Immediately after he seals the door, Song Lan drops in through a hole in the ceiling, that Wei Wuxian really should have thought about when sealing the room up.

Song Lan strikes a sexy pose--oh, who am I kidding, all of his poses are sexy--and stands there being admired for a bit, before half-heartedly swinging a sword toward Wei Wuxian. Wei Wuxian responds by verrrry sloooowly booting up his flute and playing something, while all of the kids lunge toward Song Lan at the same time, and all get deflected and knocked down.

The flute playing does seem to stop Song Lan from actually killing anyone, and they are able to tie him up with their magic shibari rope.

A note about how Wei Wuxian's powers appear to work, for those who find his abilities confusing. As I understand it, any skilled cultivator can make use of ambient energy from the world around them. This allows the use of talismans without needing a golden core. With a golden core, a person can store qi in their body instead of relying on ambient energy.

Wei Wuxian, as the inventor of Demonic cultivation Xue Chonghai? We don’t know him. is able to pull on ambient *resentful* energy from the dead folks around him and use it to do stuff. But he can't store it in his body very well, which is why he creates the Yin Tiger Seal. It's already pre-loaded with Yin energy and he dumps more into it to get it out of his own body. At least, he stops farting big clouds of resentment smoke after he refines the tiger seal.

Episode 21: That’s-a spicy meatball

So, Wei Wuxian in Yi City doesn't have the yin tiger seal to draw on, but the place is chock full of ambient yin energy for him to use. Also the tiger seal 2.0 is in the room with him right now, although he's not aware of that. Is it weird that he can’t sense that his supposed uncle is carrying a giant chunk of yin metal? Never mind, never mind.

When Wei Wuxian sees that Song Lan is wearing the same black contact lenses that Wen Ning had before --well, probably not the same exact ones, the budget wasn't THAT low--he remembers about the nails in Wen Nings head, and pulls a similar nail out of Song Lan's head.

Unfortunately he only remembered one of the two nails he extracted from Wen Ning, because he doesn't check Song Lan for a second nail, and Song Lan's contact lenses remain stubbornly in place.

Soundtrack: 1.Bel Biv Devoe, Poison 2. Coolio, Fantastic Journey

#the untamed #restless rewatch the untamed #the untamed gifs #canary3d-original #no cats were harmed

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