I was idly going through a few Ultimate Note episodes and then I landed at the scene in the cave with Xiao Hua and Wu Xie after they had been attacked by the bugs trapped in the corpses. And Wu Xie is sitting on the ground with a gaping wound on his elbow, where we can still see a large worm sticking out.
The conversation at this point is purely to allow Xiao Hua to pull the bug out with his tweezers and Wu Xie being an absolute wuss about it, which, let's be fair, is harrowing enough for anyone who is new to the tomb raiding world. Now, Wu Xie's not exactly new to this, but he's not so used to it as to be completely desensitised to the gross aspects of it, and pain is always a powerful motivator. So, Wu Xie has all the right in the world to flinch and look away as Xiao Hua tricks him into answering a question as he yanks the bug out of the wound.
But what struck me suddenly was that an almost parallel of this scene exists in Tomb of the Sea episodes 12-3, where Wu Xie is cavalierly dissecting corpses and being a little too knife-happy (or should I say, cleaver-happy, since he was wielding a cleaver for the autopsy and then proceeded to wipe it off on his sleeve and use that same blade on Li Cu's arm, RIP Li Cu). He shows no response to either the matter of the death or slicing up human bodies to find out the cause behind their deaths. If someone's only introduction to Wu Xie is during this moment in Tomb of the Sea, then they would absolutely not be able to imagine that a man who flinched at the sight of bugs sticking out of an open wound is the same man who is coldly conducting these ad hoc autopsies in the desert and has no qualms about using the same blade on himself when Li Cu finds himself unable to cut Wu Xie open the way he's asking him to.
This is what I find utterly fascinating about this franchise. It treats character growth and transformation in such a wonderfully real way, which is not always linear; and instead of plotting a straight line of a character's trajectory, it has these little rest stops in the middle of adaptations where it's possible to take stock of what we already know about these characters and work them into what is currently happening to them.
If you think about it, it's a proper multiverse franchise, almost a garden of forking paths if you will, where each adaptation traces what happens to a character once they step into a certain passageway, with completely different possibilities stretching out in front of them with respect to their individual character arcs and actions (not unlike fanworks, but I won't digress here).
Coming back to the two scenes: it offers such a nice little parallel with Xiao Hua and Wu Xie, and then Wu Xie and Li Cu, with their positions vis a vis each other, and also ties in the whole narrative of tomb raiding being an inherently inherited business. I say, inherited, because not unlike closed cliques where proteges are trained to master the skills of their mentors, the tomb raiding world transmits knowledge only through hands-on experience and tutelage.
While Xiao Hua and Wu Xie are technically the same age when they met in UN, Xiao Hua's experience as leader of the Xie clan marks him out to be the field senior, and despite not being part of active field missions, Xiao Hua still has more experience than Wu Xie at this point, which is apparent in the first scene.
From there to the stone-cold Wu Xie of Tomb of the Sea is certainly a trip, and to fans of the franchise, it opens up the weight of what Wu Xie has had to go through in order to become this person, while to casual viewers, makes Wu Xie appear a riveting enough character who fills in the proverbial 'hot cold boss' role with panache.
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