Restless Rewatch: The Untamed, Episode 39 part 2
(Masterpost) (Pinboard) (whole thing on AO3)
Warning! Spoilers for all 50 Episodes!
Tumblr's godawful new editor has a hard limit of 30 images in a post, so I'm splitting this episode into 3 posts instead of 2. There's a lot of important gazing in this part of the episode and 30 images isn't going to cut it. (To be fair, the old editor would start to die after about 35 images)
Funeral Time
We start off at A-Qing's funeral. The gang has found a spot right next to the road to bury her, and has managed to pull together an impressive set of funeral accoutrements.
A well-prepared cultivator always travels with apples, oranges, peaches, ceramic bowls, incense sticks, sand for holding the incense sticks, candles, a sanded & finished board for carving names into, and paper money.
It's nice of them to make sure A-Qing has a proper grave with proper offerings. You know who they don't bury properly? Shishu Xiao Fucking Xingchen, that's who. Do better, Wei Wuxian.
Jingyi and Ouyang Zichen ugly-cry while Jin Ling threatens the already-dead Xue Yang with being bitten by his dog, to Wei Wuxian's discomfort.
The three adults on the scene don't cry at the grave or even look distressed, really; after the shit they've been through, they probably don't have a lot of feelings to spare for a stranger, even Wei Wuxian, who feels for everybody.
And Lan Wangji is busy with some important gazing.
Lan Wangji is having feelings; feelings about how it's a lot better to be Lan Wangji than it is to be Song Lan. He looks earnestly and intensely at Wei Wuxian and says "fortunately" or "how fortunate" (幸好, xìnghǎo), and then gazes even more earnestly at him.
(More after the cut!)
Wei Wuxian can be forgiven for not getting what Lan Wangji is saying here, because Lan Wangji isn't actually saying most of it. From WWX's perspective, a fresh grave is probably an unlikely place for a confession of love or anything like it, although by Lan Wangji's standards this is a romantic idyll compared to the various caves where they've had most of their dates.
Wei Wuxian asks him to explain, but the qiankun bag of cock blocking suddenly distracts Lan Wangji, and that's the end of that conversation. They tell everyone to wait while they go back to the coffin house.
Wen Ning watches them go, wondering what the fuck it is going to take for these guys to get together, for fuck's sake.
It's a Sad Sad Situation
Back at the coffin house, Song Lan is dejectedly caressing Xiao Xingchen's coffin.
This scene is poignant but it's also a reminder of what nice hands everybody in this show has.
It's also an opportunity to appreciate the details of Song Lan's costume. All the costumes have such variety in the fabrics, even an all black or black/grey outfit like this has a lot of textural variation.
Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian each have something important to return to Song Lan. Wei Wuxian gives him the spirit trapping bag that contains what's left of Xiao Xingchen's consciousness.
Xiao Zhan and Li Bowen each make a valiant attempt to pretend this bag is not empty and about to collapse if they hold it too firmly.
Lan Wangi watches him receiving it, with a deep and painful understanding of Song Lan's feelings in this moment.
So, I assume that Lan Wangji is probably mainly feeling grateful that he has all of Wei Wuxian (well, minus his old body, which doesn't really matter to LWJ) returned to him. But I also can't help thinking about what the Lan Wangji of ~10 years ago would have given to have a scrap of Wei Wuxian's soul that he could carry with him. I wonder if Lan Wangji is thinking about that too.
Song Lan tells them, by writing in the dirt with his sword, that he plans to travel the world to fight evil in company with what's left of Xiao Xingchen. Essentially returning to the life journey that they shared, all those years ago. Lan Wangji responds by presenting Xiao Xingchen's sword to him.
Song Lan hits the road with both swords on his back, while Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji watch him go.
We don't hear Lan Wangji's thoughts, but his expression is, I think, a reflection of the grief he carried for so many years.
We do hear Wei Wuxian's thoughts, wondering if Song Lan and Xiao Xichen will ever meet again.
I'm not sure how reincarnation works when one of you has part of his soul trapped in a bag and one of you is a possibly-immortal walking corpse, but maybe they'll manage to be reborn together in spite of all that.
When WWX and LWJ are done contemplating how shitty the world can be, they reboot by having an intense gaze at each other.
Then it's back to mystery solving.
Wei Wuxian smacks the lid off of Xiao Xingchen's coffin....which is now empty?
Maybe they buried him between this scene and the last one. Without using his coffin. *shrug*
Lan Wangji lets the sword spirit out of the bag, and watches it sink through the open coffin and down underneath it. He shoves the coffin out of the way and finds another underneath it. Bunk coffins!
This one is covered with magic shit, which Wei Wuxian uncovers so we can see the heap of talismans on top of it.
Hand enthusiasts, this really is the episode for you.
Lan Wangji, who never does anything halfway, splits the lid in half with Bichen rather than, like, opening the lid in some normal way.
The sword spirit turns into Baxia, which is a big clue that the headless corpse in the coffin is Nie Mingjue.
Note that in traditional Chinese death...stuff, it's important to have a complete corpse, so separating a corpse into parts and keeping its head in your linen closet is a big fuckyou to the dead person in question.
Side note: Wei Wuxian continues to sense resentful energy directly, in his new body; once you open the doors of perception there is no going back, I guess.
Lan Wangji still seems to depend on his eyeballs and the presence of black smoke to tell him what's up, despite probably being pretty familiar with the feel of it, by now.
Additional side note since I can fit one more image into this post before Tumblr stops me: Lan Wangji continues to be impossibly pretty.
Continued in part 3!
Soundtrack: Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word by Elton John
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S5 Ep 39 Part 2: Baby Pharaoh
My memory is something like tossed coleslaw at the moment with my on-and-off again long covid fatigue, but I’m pretty sure last we left off, Yugi and co were looking for Pharaoh, who as I’ve mentioned several times now, has fallen down a hole and can’t get up.
Alongside the Nile they have stumbled into Mana (man I hope that’s her name, it’s been so long since I’ve done a regular update, if her name is like Arkansas or whatever, I will not know, that’s just where we are. Bro who fact checks and spell check’s this blog was like “I dunno, sounds right? I’m not looking it up.”)
Whatever her name is, Mana is living her best life on this background that is askew just enough to cause me pain.
That horizon is killing me. I don’t recall exactly, but I’m pretty sure the bg was not supposed to be at an angle. Ugh, suffering.
(read more under the cut, assuming that tumblr still uses cuts? Pretty sure it auto-shortens my posts but I’ll still put cuts in for legacy users)
Anyway, this girl is a card as well as a magical person, so unlike all the other NPCs in Egypt, she gets the opportunity to set her eyes on 20th century people and be like “wtf are you assholes wearing?”
Rather than convince Mana that Yugi is the Pharaoh and see where this plot line goes, Joey says, “Isn’t that Pharaohs’ royal purple cloak like right over there? This cloak that probably costs in today’s money like 5 billion dollars because he’s a literal Pharaoh and wears an entire dowry on his ear lobes?” and Mana is like--”Oh shoot. Weird I did not notice that when I was so fixated on the fish.”
And so Mana has decided to join Yugi and Co because she is very much just here for the ride and also any information on how to run into her kind of sort of whatever the hell relationship is between her and Pharaoh. This makes sense to me, honestly, this was how I navigated all of college. You end up at a lot of weird parties doing this, but you’d be surprised how many people will ask you to just join their crew if you happen to be walking the same direction and know one person in common.
Bro came up with that pun and he’s extremely proud of it.
Again, rip the horse from last episode, at some point an alligator must’ve gotten to him (or the fall made him explode into little pieces, don’t worry about it). But we find Pharaoh in this cave, just out of sight of anyone who would actually be able to spot him.
Perhaps he’s doing this to stay out of the heat, but it’s also very likely that he’s just very embarrassed for that huge L he took falling down that hole and would like to just vibe out in a cave for a bit and contemplate his earliest memories.
To go from the man who remembers nothing to remembering yourself as a baby who gets his ass wiped 7 times a day.
Memory is freakin wild to Pharaoh.
I know this is a lot of caps of Pharaoh as a baby but that is a WEIRD ASS BABY. Also kinda cute but the baby is WEIRD.
Peak Renesmee energy, this old ass child.
Covered in tears, a preteen Yami is dragged to a tomb somewhere in Egypt, as if to scope out his future abode that he absolutely will not be buried in because he does, in fact, get smooshed into a puzzle.
And seeing a wonderful opportunity he immediately topples into it.
name a more iconic duo than Yugioh and ledges.
After walking down this long pit, we come to take part in some sort of Ancient Egyptian gods ceremony. Which is fascinating, because it’s not too, too often in this show that we reference the Egyptian gods outside of what is in the cards that Marik plays. But these are like the literal gods, not the fancy cards.
I have no idea if this is referencing an actual ceremony we know about or an actual mural that we have in some tomb in Egypt in real life. but I’m gonna guess this is probably not 100% historically accurate.
I have since been informed it is Kul Elna and not Kel Elna but I am not bothered enough to fix the cap.
Or this one.
Death count according to my google doc is 7,805,847,571 by the way. Originally I thought there were 700 people in Kul Elna. But thousands infer at least 1300 more so lets add another 2K just to round it off.
Says a lot when I’m like “eh give or take 700 deaths it makes like no difference to the number.”
A nice shot for anyone that wants to do an anime panel redraw for that meme (do people still do that meme? I have avoided art twitter rather successfully lately so I’m blessed to no longer have to draw memes. Unfortunately I’m still on webcomic twitter but that’s just a place where people get viral by complaining, so I don’t have to draw nearly as much promotional material. It kinda rocks.)
I really should not have laughed while watching this part of the episode but that realization that Pharaoh was trapped in a necklace anyway, and then this immediately following it was quite a funny jump cut.
And then he was gone.
so like.........
.......no backstory on Hassad, I guess? He’s just a guy who is wearing/is literally a millennium item and is currently depicted in a tablet?
I don’t even know where that backstory would go, it would have to be between Dartz and when the millennium items were forged out of the millennium stone. Or maybe he’s just a card? I dunno. But that guy jumped out of no where, just a brand new millennium item and now he’s gone.
My brother cannot tell the difference between Tahoma and Papyrus so hopefully it’s clear that Tea talks in Tahoma and Mana in Papyrus fonts. Unfortunately, they...have the same font color because I never initially thought they’d be on the same screen.
At this point, they run into Pharaoh, and Mana pretended like she knew that Pharaoh fell down a hole the whole time and that she didn’t spend half her day fishing.
Bro was like “Can you imagine trying to explain America to Mana?” and it sure was food for thought.
So, that’s all for this episode, in the next we shall find out how many more holes we can throw all our characters down. Which honestly is just Writing 101 when you think about it. As in Writing 101 the class, not 101 holes. Sorry I have a hard time reading and writing with long covid, although I still like to do it, so if parts of this are like incomprehensible, I’ll fix it in post. Like that joke just now. No idea if it made sense but we’re going to print it because I want to move on to the next episode.
And as always, to read these in chrono order from the very beginning when I had more than 3 operating brain cells, you can use this link here:
https://steve0discusses.tumblr.com/tagged/yugioh/chrono
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