#invisible-mirror

[amedetoiles]

Not to barge in on your conversation, but for some unknowable reason (lol I know the reason), I read your post about an imaginary Untamed musical and my brain promptly started coming up with song titles. For example, the Core Change song that WWX sings (and JC later reprises) is called "What Good Am I?" JGY's solo (first sung while leaving the Unclean Realm, later reprised in the temple) is "I Never Asked For Much." Act I goes to intermission on the big ensemble number "Shoot Down The Sun."

(continuing mdzs the musical ask series, from this and this)

PLEASE BARGE IN. I approve of all of these song names. WHAT GOOD AM I? I’m screaming. It’s perfect and melodramatic and appropriately Jiang.

I’m not very good at naming, but I still adore No One Mourns The Wicked for the introduction. Also, the iconic lines make such good song names too. Like “Attempt The Impossible” for rebuilding of Lotus Pier, WWX defecting to the Wens, JC and WWX walking away from each other. Or “I’m Sorry and Thank You” as Wen Qing and Wen Ning leave with the Wens. Maybe Wei Wuxian reprises later in the Ancestral Hall scene? </3 Or “Don’t You Have Anything To Say To Me?” when JC confronts a resurrected WWX in QingHe.

Do I just want Jiang Cheng to angrily cry his feelings in song? Yes. Yes, I do. And I think between all of your genius galaxy brains and my rambling nonsense, we can absolutely spearhead and create MDZS The Musical - coming soon to a stage near you!

[stormlyht]

invisible-mirror replied to your post: So I feel the need to MENTION, that I have started...

This show’s relationship with secondhand embarrassment is the weirdest I’ve ever seen. By all rights I should be cringing constantly, but you just can’t be secondhand embarrassed when you *know* the MC is thinking to himself “Y'know what would be tons of fun? Doing an embarrassing thing and watching people cringe!”

OMG! Yes!  That’s exactly what it’s like.  Watching WuWu in that first episode I was like, “this is gonna be bad, I’m going to hate it so much!” but then... it’s jut hilarious?  He hears someone say he has a mental disorder and he’s like, “I can *use* this!” and then proceeds to fall to the ground and say he won’t be moved.  And it’s funny, and I kinda love it.

I also think part of it is that he’s being a scamp, but in the lovable and cute way, instead of the cruel or malicious way.  He’s not really trying to hurt anyone, he’s just being playful.  I find that I’m okay with this.

[lesserjoke]

The modern MCU Hydra may not be overtly antisemitic, but I’d argue that’s in large part because Marvel has continually erased Jewish identity. Jewish characters from the comics are routinely either left out of the recent adaptations altogether (e.g. Izzy Cohen), or included but stripped of their connection to Judaism (e.g. the Maximoff twins). There’s no antisemitism in the Marvel Cinematic Universe because there don’t appear to be any Jews there in the first place.

But as frustrating as it is for me as a Jewish person to see us left out of these adaptations, it’s even more uncomfortable to see the Nazi associations stripped from Hydra. In the real world, Hydra was originally conceived of as a Nazi organization for Captain America to fight. Their villainy was inextricably linked to the Nazi ideologies of white supremacy, eugenics, and antisemitism. Any subsequent revelation about their existence before World War II is a retcon, and one that’s hurtful when it dilutes their threat into generic scheming baddies. So I love when characters on Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. explicitly reject the watering-down of Hydra and insist on labeling them as the Nazis they are, even if I do have to wryly wonder what they have against Naziism in a world without Jews.

tl;dr Hydra isn’t just an example of “things that aren’t good”. They are always and forever Nazis.

[amedetoiles]

My thought for "Attempt The Impossible" was that Jiang Cheng sings it while searching for WWX, because it's the first time he's on his own and finding WWX seems impossible, but he's determined to succeed. It's interwoven with a song by LWJ called "Never Forget" (did I yoink this from the character album? Yes. Do I care? No.) about how much WWX means to him. "Never Forget" gets a reprise at the beginning of Act III, stage still dark and curtain down, just before "16 years later" begins.

(more in the mdzs the musical ask series)

I think LWJ would have quite a few songs, but I do think in conjunction with his character being very concise and speaking what he needs to speak in as few words as possible, it would fall along the same lines for his musical numbers. :D It does flow thematically though if in the second life, and his second chance, he freely sings because he is no longer hesitating to speak or act. He spent a decade and a half regretting his own inaction and is absolutely not going to make the same mistakes now that he has his Wei Ying back.

I really enjoy the idea of “Attempt The Impossible” spanning multiple scenes because both during and after Sunshot era, it’s the motto and theme that leads to all the upheavals of the Yunmeng siblings as we know and love them. <3

[wingyen]

invisible-mirror replied to your post “Hmm something I wish I could change about The Untamed is how they...”

IMO there's only one scene they need to remove -- the one where WQ asks WWX "what if Jiang Cheng figures out the truth"? They could keep him finding out about core transfers, but then SL shows up and mentions BSSR and it APPEARS that WWX changes his mind, scraps the risky plan and switches to the safer one of asking BSSR. Viewers are left with – “So BSSR fixed it all? That’s anticlimactic. Unless… was WWX lying about BSSR? It would be like him…” They wouldn’t know, and they’d KNOW they didn’t know, and it’d drive them crazy until more plot happened and distracted them. For the record, I’m in the “wait, that was a reveal?” camp, but I’m currently watching with two first-timers who are confident WWX did SOMETHING self-sacrificial, they just don’t know the exact details. I’m unsure to what extent they’ll actually care about the reveal, because I feel like their reaction might just be “yep, we were right, it was Something Self-Sacrificial.”    

@invisible-mirror  i like that idea too! I like toeing the line of keeping the viewer in the dark vs giving them enough to figure out what happened, but either way I think what we got in the show was wayyyy too much of the second. and yeah, when watching it with first-timers I'm torn between trying to lie so they can have the show's intended first viewing experience, or just going "yeah he gave up his core you're right" cause everyone I've talked to figured it out immediately/had massive suspicions.

[that-greek-gold-rush]

invisible-mirror replied to your post: “i introduced my friend to the untamed and now he has introduced it to...”:

A friend of mine has been joking that the show is contagious. @arxiver87 I think we found a super-spreader here.

it kind of is though everyone i know who's watched it was introduced by someone else without expecting much and like 5 episodes in automatically stopped tlaking about anything but the untamed

[belswans]

invisible-mirror replied to your post: Am I the only person who doesn’t care about Missy...

I liked the idea, but I didn’t buy Missy’s change of heart. It didn’t seem well-motivated enough. Up until the end I always half suspected she was acting, playing a long game. So… maybe “It’s time to stand with the Doctor” was part of the long game after all? I’ll go with that.

yeah, would’ve been fun to explore a team-up situation a bit more but there’s still always time to do that in the future. i’d see it as a magneto teaming up with xmen thing, where a larger threat forces an alliance - that way the character could always go back because a full redemption from the master is something i don’t think would last, and would leave limited room for the character to really appear again. in any case, i never took the events of ‘the doctor falls’ as gospel and i’m surprised so many people do!

[hufflepuffswag]

@invisible-mirror 

Wait, you don’t think he made it before?

No, I do! It was just a very common response to a post I made earlier lol.