#sid upstairs

[dragoncityinteriordesign]

SID has such a great little upstairs lounge; I’m saddened we don’t get to have more scenes with folk hanging out up there.

Of note:

Foosball table. FOOSBALL TABLE. We were robbed of the opportunity to see several enthusiastic games of foosball, complete with smack talk. I demand you all incorporate this into your fan fictions immediately.

Statues on the shelves. There are a lot of these that appear in other places: The gold kissing couple and golfer are from Mirror Girl’s apartment; the tiny radio and shushing face are from Shen Wei’s apartment; the fish, owl, and upright wooden circle are from Zhao Yunlan’s apartment, etc. But there’s a couple things I haven’t seen elsewhere, like the multicolored ABCD drawers and the ... crouching person with their arms outstretched? I can’t make out what that is, and it’s creepy. (There are books too, but the only title I can remotely make out is EDINBURGH.)

Coffee and tea. At least, I think that’s an electric teakettle. It’s important to stay hydrated (and caffeinated) when you’re doing research.

Treadmills. Whoever put this workplace together decided that it needed treadmills in the first place, that there would be sufficient demand to justify three of them, and that any SID member taking a run would really want to stare down at the main room while they did it. ...Wait a minute, we see Zhao Yunlan and Da Qing out for a jog later, and they’re just on the street outside their apartment building. Are these treadmills going completely usused? Is this your Dragon City tax dollars at work?

The two identical side tables pretending together to be a coffee table. I don’t even know.

[dragoncityinteriordesign]

The Guardian Lantern was always going to be found in SID storage -- that’s where it is in the novel, after all -- but I’m not sure the show was always sure where in headquarters it was going to be.

The spot where the boxes are eventually found is back behind the library, on the railing that surrounds the opening over the lab. However, during most of the very few earlier shots where that spot is visible, the boxes just plain aren’t there. The only time they appear before the scene where the lantern gets found is in the episode immediately preceding it; Xiao Guo is crying about how great the Black Cloak Envoy is, and suddenly, there those boxes are, lurking in the background.

Production-wise, I figure that either they didn’t know that was going to be the final location for the boxes, or they did know but they were just being pokey about actually hauling the boxes into place. But maybe being the Master of the Guardians also gives Zhao Yunlan the incredible power of being able to ignore clutter so hard it disappears from everyone else’s view too.

[dragoncityinteriordesign]

I figured out why the armchairs in Zhao Yunlan’s office look familiar! It’s because one of them is in Shen Wei’s office too. I’d say he’s really hitting hard on the matching decor thing but no, those chairs are there before he ever sees Shen Wei’s office. That’s just fate, baby.

Then I thought briefly the couch in Shen Wei’s office might be the same one upstairs in the SID loft -- but no, the upstairs couch is the same couch Zhao Yunlan has in his apartment.

I did a little more digging around ot find that Li Qian and Cong Bo appear to have the same white couch, while the hospital and the record shop share a blue one. That Dragon City Ikea does good business.

[dragoncityinteriordesign]

Another great piece of inexplicable SID decor is the stack of huge off-white gears at the very back of the library, right in front of the railing around the top of the lab. It definitely looks imposing, like the clock they seem to be forming is some important feature of the building, but when you look at it from the back, you can see that it’s purely decorative. Despite how certain elements on the back of the big clock face look like they could run if given the proper incentive, they’re not moving.

I almost wonder if this wasn’t originally meant to be some counterpart to the giant Dixing clock behind the regent’s chair -- and possibly also with the clock tower in all the Dragon City establishing shots -- but the production just never followed through with it. If so, I can see why it didn’t really stick, since the SID clock guts are clearly nonfunctional by design, and the Dixing clock has been around a whole lot longer than they have. Likewise, we’re never given a reason to believe that clock tower is attached to any particular building (probably because it’s not attached to a building, it’s a CG render); it’d make more of a case for a connection if it were on top of the Haixing offices, but there’s no reason to say it is or isn’t.

Nonetheless, the Dixing clock is stuck at midnight, the clock tower is stopped around 3:02, and the SID clock only has a single hand that appears to be pointed right at the 11. I don’t think it means anything, but now you know.