firstly, allow me to say:
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO NOT THE MOON AGAIN the bloody moon, the bloody bloody moon and actual blood moons please no....T_T
But Y13 was holding her art hostage for our tgcf fic so...here goes.
I refer you to XZ's collection of four cryptic images posted on 3 May 03:30 CST (screenshot from my phone shows my local time which is 7h behind):
There is a lot to unpack here, but the focus of this candy is on the timing of the Red Moon.
When was this Red Moon photographed?
Note: C-turtles keeeep calling this a blood moon but it is not related to the lunar eclipse, which actually occurred on 3 Mar, but what they're talking about is just a normal full moon that's red.
Very very unlikely it was on 2 Apr when XZ first arrived in Qingdao to start filming Ten Days to End. Because...heh... in a highly portentive manner for this supposed horror-type drama (where the MC also sees a blood moon when he arrives in Qingdao), XZ's arrival was accompanied by the Red Full Moon complete with dense fog, so the pictures we found ended up looking more like an apocalypse-type scene.
Also..why would you wait a whole month before posting such a pic? And then post it at 3:30am a month later?
So, let's rule that out right now. Not from 2 Apr.
The other possibility is that he took this pic on 2 May. HOWEVER. and correct me if i'm wrong. A red moon only appears when the moon is rising or setting, and the light has to pass through a thicker layer of atmosphere, so most of the blue light is refracted away before reaching us. Hence, red moon. But XZ doesn't finish work till super late on 2 May, (~2:30am, essentially 3 May already), so he must have taken the pic during work on 2 May?
OK...BUT there's another problem. Others on the web began noting that the moon wasn't red in Qingdao on 2 May or even 1 May. They claim that the first red moon pics only started appearing around 4 or 5 May.
So...did I go and verify this?
Yes, of course I did. Scoured Weibo and RedNote. The earliest I found was 3 May evening.
Many were on 4th or 5th, and by then the moon was already fairly obvious gibbous and not full.
NOTE that XZ posted his pic at the wee hours of 3 May, which means he essentially took the picture on or before the evening of 2 May.
Remember that people were already buzzing from XZ arriving in Qingdao in the foggy glow of a red moon, and I keep seeing pictures from all over China of red moons, and them saying ooo I caught the red moon too. And if there was a red moon on 2 May, you can BET that it'd be alllll over the web.
SO where did XZ's picture come from?
Hur hur.... firstly, do we know where WYB was during those days?
I rmb rampant unrelated rumours at that time of him being sighted rock climbing in Southern France somewhere, and he did indeed disappear for a while.
Do you know where else the Red Moon appeared?
hur hur.... C-turtles suddenly realised there was also a Red Full Moon in Europe around 1 and 2 May based on tourist pics. And I did try my best to verify this. (I know i know i'm in europe but like it rains so much where I am...can't even see the moon)
See below an Insta pic showing the red moon on 2 May in Nice, France; a RedNote pic saying the red moon was taken on 1 May in Nice, France; and a BBC article about the red full moon, but in Sicily. There were various other pics and places too, but yes, red full moons (flower moons) were sighted around Europe and definitely in France.
All the above were unrelated to turtles.
Unsurprising then the notion that it was WYB who took a pic of the red moon began circulating, and only quite some time after the fact. The timing of XZ's post fits well with this theory. At 3:30am in China, the time is 9:30pm in France, and the moon rises around that time too (~8:45pm). Hence, the hurry to post right after he finished work at that ungodly hour (hubby sent awesome pic!!!).
So then, to me, suddenly the two moons make sense. One was taken by WYB (the red moon) and the other could have been taken by XZ where he was, at around the same time (the yellow moon). Two people apart but looking at the same moon. Note also that the yellow moon actually has a greenish tinge to it which !!!!!! gar... The Symmetry!!
This is further supported by the baffling sizes of the images. Red Moon is 18kb, less than half the size of Yellow Moon (40kb) and Bird Feet (56kb), and way way smaller than Rock in Sea (319kb). Red Moon could have been severely compressed when it was sent via a messaging app.
By someone rock climbing in the south of France perhaps?
And since we're the spelunkers, I would like to propose a further, perhaps outlandish, notion based solely on XZ's liking of symmetry (we know how ocd he gets right?)
What's up with Bird Feet and Rock in Sea? They can't be arbitrary. Given that the two moons seem to suggest that they were doing the same thing at the same time, i.e. looking at the same moon. HAHA...I would like to propose that XZ used the other two pics to suggest the different things they were doing at the same time. So Bird Feet might be a pic he took trapped inside somewhere while filming, coz it appears to me to be a transparent roof of some sort that the bird is standing on. And Rock In Sea might be him saying, YOU SEE, while I'm trapped here, toiling away, earning us money, THAT GUY is out there somewhere having fun, climbing some random rock by the sea! (but maybe in a more loving tone XD)
Wouldn't that be so artistically symmetrical!!! And make this cryptic compilation of images make more sense??!!!
Ah well.......i wish i had real answers, but there you are...suffer in limbo hell with me...blame Y13 she insisted we dive. these speculations are a very high price to pay for one little tweak in her art work she is cruel.
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