Restless Rewatch: The Untamed, Episode 32 part one
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Warning! Spoilers for All 50 Episodes!
Sorry I Missed the Party
Wei Wuxian has run from the Burial Mounds all the way to Jinlintai, where he hides behind a statue hoping to see his sister. In the background, some Jins talk about how the Wens have come to receive punishment, and that if they were in Jin Guangshan’s position, they’d kill them. So would Jin Guangshan, as it happens. The ones who weren’t already undead, anyway.
Jiang Yanli and Madam Jin are sitting with Jin Zixuan’s coffin. Madame Jin is a very nice mother in law, looking after Jiang Yanli and being concerned for her health even as she’s brought low by grief herself. Madame Jin goes out on the porch to cry, and spots Wei Wuxian and starts hollering. Yanli comes running to see him.
He isn’t going to get to actually talk to her, so his face does the apologizing for him.
Jinkies, this scene is excruciating.
After he bails, he finds a comfortable spot in the woods to completely lose his shit. First he gets overwhelmed by resentful energy screams and is surrounded by smoke tentacles, and then he hallucinates for a while.
(more behind the cut!)
In his hallucination, Jiang Yanli appears to him a couple of times, but then disappears before he can touch her, which isn’t very nice of her.
The resentful energy tries to take him over but he yells at it to go away, which actually seems to work.
Pushed to the Edge
A bunch of cultivators are standing outside the gate of Nightless City, according to the sign, anyway, where the bodies of our Wen friends Granny and Uncle Four are displayed, along with other dead Wens. The cultivators say that Wen Ning went out of control and committed mass murder at Jinlintai when he came to accept punishment. I’m pretty sure this means that Jin Guangshan had all of the Wens killed, breaking his promise to spare them, and then lied and blamed it on Wen Ning.
While the cultivators are talking about this, Wei Wuxian takes advantage of the tight camera angle to sneak up on them.
He takes a minute to look at the bodies of his friends, and to let himself feel angry, clenching his fist like Arthur the Aardvark, except more menacingly.
Time for a Little Lie-Down
Wei Wuxian knocks everyone down and out with a short flute blast, and also moves inhumanly fast across the scene to choke this dude. We have seen Wen Ruohan do this same move, which is the resentful version of running, I guess.
Wei Wuxian seems to have leveled up his powers a bit. Maybe it’s not actually smart of the Jins to give Wei Wuxian so many things to feel extra resentful about.
Director to everybody on the ground: Roll back and forth! Roll MOAR!
While this is going on, we later learn, Lan Wangji is going to the Burial Mounds to look for Wei Wuxian, then taking A-Yuan to the doctor and getting started filling out his adoption application. He needs to go find Wei Wuxian ASAP, but if you haven’t adopted a kid you can’t imagine the amount of paperwork; it’s important to get it started early.
Nobody’s Happy
Here we are at Nightless City. This is what 3000 cultivators looks like. Most of them are using an invisibility talisman right now, I guess.
Everyone has gotten together to pour one out for the Wens. Partly because honoring your dead enemies is a way to hopefully keep them from haunting you, and partly because this makes a good kickoff party for Jin Guangshan’s “let’s go kill Wei Wuxian right now” campaign.
They’re all very elegant as they do this ritual honoring of the people they callously railroaded and killed. Fuck all of these guys, seriously.
Then Jin Guangshan uses his powers to explode a box with Wen Qing’s ashes as a way of scattering them. Show-off. I swear one of the many places I've watched this show uses the word "cremains" in the subtitles when referring to human ashes, which is hilariously awful, given that it's a recent marketing term.
Lan Xichen shakes his head unhappily as the assembled cultivators cheer about all the death. Come on, Zewu-Jun. Those are your fucking staff members lined up behind you chanting. If you don't agree with them, tell them to knock it off.
Jiang Cheng is also upset, which is understandable considering he had wanted to marry the person they are now scattering on the wind.
At least he's not a hypocrite--all those times he told Wei Wuxian to let the person he liked die, rather than stick his neck out? Jiang Cheng just did that.
Jump Around
Lan Wangji comes flying in, in one of those sequences where a stunt guy on wires flies in with the camera behind him, and then we cut to a front view of Wang Yibo jumping up in the air and pretending to land.
I came to win, battle me, that’s a sin
He grills the assembled group about where Wei Wuxian went to, and also asks if anyone there is a notary who can stamp some adoption paperwork for him real quick.
Fuck the Patriarchy
After this little get-together, the cultivators are planning to go to the Burial Mounds to kill Wei Wuxian, but he has decided to save them the trouble by showing up a the party, lounging sexily on the rooftop above the plaza.
*finger slap gesture* *sizzle noise*
He proceeds to have a long argument with Jiang Guangshan (with Sect Leader Yao occasionally putting in his oar) about proportionality and his general right to exist. Because they are cultivators and can do magic voice projection or something, they are able to have this argument from like 100 meters apart.
Wei Wuxian’s basic arguments are
if you try to kill me, I get to try to kill you.
it’s not my fault that I’m way better at it than you are
Jin Guanshan’s arguments are
fuck you. No, seriously, fuck you
You are such an awesome scapegoat it would be, like, irresponsible of us not to blame everything on you.
More broadly, this is Wei Wuxian asserting his right to exist regardless of what the cultivation world thinks of him. In this he’s pushing back not just against obviously-bad Jin Guangshan, but also against Nie Mingjue and the other assembled authorities.
Nie Mingjue and others there are like “how dare you be the way that you are,” and that, ultimately is the conflict here. Jins Guangshan and Guangyao want to use Wei Wuxian’s power, and so do many others here.
But the reasons the more virtuous cultivators are against him are his wilfullness, his strangeness, and perhaps his queerness (although the show is blessedly free of overt queerphobia, for the most part). He isn’t what a cultivator is meant to be, and so must be constantly called to account.
Wei Wuxian laughs at their hypocrisy and general suckiness, his laughter shading into tears as he stands up on the center beam of the roof where it’s really easy to aim at him.
Actually Super Powerful, Just FYI
They’ve seen him go up against crowds of zombies, and against Wen Ruohan, but even so his opponents underestimate him. One eager beaver decides to shoot an arrow at him to really get the party started.
Wei Wuxian takes an arrow right in the heart and doesn’t even cough, thanks to the power of the Yin Tiger seal, presumably. Or maybe he’s one of those people whose organ positions are flipped so his heart’s on the right and this arrow is merely puncturing a lung.
Thanks for the arrow, chum...p.
Wei Wuxian thoughtfully cleans the blood off of the arrow before throwing it straight into the heart of the guy who shot him. The dude’s friends and Sect Leader Yao are shocked and horrified. The super-calm Lan guys behind Yao in this shot are like “eh, seems fair.”
My favorite moment of the episode is his smug reaction to that kill shot:
Fuckability meter: maxed out.
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