tian ya ke audio drama thinks it can hurt me......and it's absolutely correct it has me colossally messed up.
someone subbed the first 2 free episodes on maoer fm so once again. if you, unlike me, are capable of listening to podcasts/audio dramas, please check it out it’s a really good production. the team behind it deserves all the support they can get.
here’s an audio drama mtl-ing guide for getting understandable english subtitles for all of the episodes.
ok so what is tai sui about. any primer you wanna redirect me to or should i just go in blind, with the expectation that it'll destroy me
i went into it blind and had a pretty good time settling in because priest does her exposition in a meticulous but fairly languid manner, but for a book written in third person i think the og synopsis describes it best:
If I had a choice, I would only want to be a little insect in the mundane dust, born in confusion, dying in mediocrity, never seeing the light of day beneath the fog of Jinping City.
Better than taking this wrong road to heaven.
think the things you should know about tai sui before you go in are
despite the synopsis being what it is, tai sui is extremely funny, miss priest you get away with so much just because you can make me laugh when i feel like crying. does being this powerful not get to your head. it should.
it’s an exploration of the socio-economic consequences of trying to attain godhood (also if you’ve liked tgcf and wanted this aspect of cultivation as a product in there explored even more fastidiously then you came to the right place!) when you have had a very mutilated version of it thrust upon you out of nowhere & were just minding your own business in being the wastrel crossdressing musician you were raised to be
it talks about class divides, worker and labor exploitation and wealth redistribution through using the xianxia genre’s cornerstones in a very novel way and is definitely reflective of the post-capitalist world’s anxieties during the age of globalization as the steampunk tech in it that’s built from using a fictional resource makes way for the actual man-made age of steam. the long term process of dismantling corrupt power structures is something that can be so heartbreaking, tai sui says, but the mundane, the useless and the ostracized are the backbone of this book. it’s always ants (affectionate) and that shakes you to your core, sometimes. at many points, mortals end up being the most dangerous ones to have crossed and it warms your cold black heart.
it’s also a book about environmental injustice (a LOT of problems that are high in complexity can be solved through planting trees and animal conservation, believe it or not), the long lasting consequences of forced industrialization brought about due to a resource monopoly created by state sponsored & organized religion. it also focuses on how xianxia as a genre writes women out of its stories by placing them at its own’s forefront at every given opportunity & using their presence to dismantle genre stereotypes in loads of places quite inventively. also it’s very gender, in general. the fights are good.
a prominent theme in this is the futility of cutting your own foot to fit the shoe. [john steinbeck voice] all great and precious things are lonely. how does the struggle to retain your individuality (or capacity for innovation) even work when you’ve thrown immortality into the equation as a variable, and immortality itself is a very elaborate metaphor for talking about consumption? oh the apotheosis messes you up man.
despite the way i talk about it... there is no romance in it that ends well. i think it’s incredibly funny that the Love sneaks in as a clearly indelible part of the story regardless of what you ship, and you will (which is unfortunate. none of it ends well on this front), but priest tried SO HARD not to make you go there. i think fandom’s quite rightfully called it her social experiment that one time asdhfjgjd
this story is built around loving xi ping, the wastrel in question, and the most important relationship in this is that between siblings who constantly tether each other to the land of the living. you would not BELIEVE how manipulative these twenty something rascals are.
it’s my personal belief that priest hasn’t tried writing an ensemble cast seriously after liu yao, but you grow immensely fond of everyone in tai sui. from trolling xi ping for his good looks to catching him when he falls from heights they can’t ever aspire to reach—these people stick with him through thick and thin. and can you really have a arch-nemesis if you don’t read rpf of them in your spare time for the sole purpose of gathering more ammunition to make fun of them?
it’s really long but tightly plotted, so the effort that goes into reading it definitely pays off. the ending is bittersweet, but i doubt that there could have been a more fitting one after what took place lol. be prepared to laugh a lot but also keep an eye out for the crushing existential dread <3
if you’re a powerpoint person then i believe this one by twitter user blackwatervial works as a good intro too! there’s also a handy map for you to consult as you read along. have fun !!!
qian qiu: romance is stored in the rock AND the heart as a rock metaphors. (i am not kidding some of the most moving lines in this involve shit like (paraphrasing) ‘he was the heaviest weight on my heart (that was previously unburdened to the point of being vacuous/the world was already a heavy enough weight on it but this new one’s heavier & i like it that way.)’ you can find the parallel if you look. and in order to be punny about this one of the extras will have shen qiao inviting yan wushi to go and visit rocks with him. they’re gonna be IN on the joke & flirt like old people are wont to do.
wushuang, in the year of 2022: see for yourself. like really. see for yourself
this is probably not my weirdest take so throwing it out into the void. consider reading sha po lang before you read can ci pin because you get to chronologically map out shared themes such as
fundamental ideological divides & how a reconciliation could work (it’s love it’s always love)
building countries & causing their downfalls
living in a turbulent era vs. living in the aftermath of its carnage. simultaneously building better things and combing through the debris
TECHNOLOGY & all the ways in which it goes wrong (or horrendously right) + science & religion getting to coexist.
prophet characters. genre awareness can be something that is so traumatizing
how setting—revisionist feudal politics (spl) or post space exploration age (c2p)—limits our capacity to be human & can you manage to be good to others without losing your own identity/the people you care about under its borderline unbearable strain?
you expect to be dead by the time you’re thirty at the latest but miraculously. you wind up hitting your sixties. wack.
If food was left over, it’d mold in three days. If fruit fell into the fields, it’d rot in two days. If tea was left out overnight, it’d become undrinkable.
If a person left their heart in their stomach for decades, would it also decay, go bad… or even need to be thrown out?
official art for the audio drama of panguan (判官) by mu su li (木苏里)
There once existed an honorable founder of this panguan school of cultivation. His reputation was illustrious, but nowadays nobody dared to mention him. Even if they did, all they said was, “He met a miserable end.”
Only Wen Shi still abided by the rules. Every day, he would pay respects to the founder’s ferocious, colorful portrait, but because of that he ended up summoning a sickly tenant.
The tenant stood in front of the portrait and asked, “Who drew this?”
Wen Shi: “Me.”
Don’t ask. If you do, you’ll just end up feeling touched.
the translator’s tl;dr
Panguan is a modern cultivation!AU featuring thousand-year pining and soul-ferrying supernatural shenanigans, topped off with a dash of horror/mystery and master/disciple dynamics.
diversity win! you and your beloved impersonate each other in order to stabilize not only the strife pertaining to your secret identity in the jianghu but also the bubbling cauldron of political unrest about to spill over three separate countries including your own!
Did you know Kaleidoscope of Death has an amazing audio drama? While not fully subtitled in English, here’s a quick breakdown of episodes and their corresponding doors (not including the interim drama):
Scarecrow: 16-18
(*Note* this is the Slenderman door, but Slenderman was swapped out for copyright reasons)
Waverly Hills Sanatorium: 19-22
Mirrors: 23-25
River God: 26-28
(Ep 29 is like a bonus Li Dongyuan episode?? I know there’s a LDY stan out there, go off king)
Teru Teru Bōzu: 30-32
Sculptures: 34-36
The Hair Woman: 38-42
(*Note* this is the Hako Onna door, but the Hako Onna was swapped out for copyright reasons)
Kingdom: 43
(*Note* this is the twins’ tenth door played out in full, which was not depicted in the novel; content from the twins’ extras are also in here)
Last Door: 44-47
(*Note* this includes content from the extra)
Don’t worry, I was born in a difficult world amidst travesties, it’s a miracle that I can even live to this age today. I value my own life like no other; even if I seek death it will only be a lover’s suicide, not a heroic one.
ok ok hyper-specific take which others should approach with a grain of salt but word of honor becomes fascinating as an adaptation because it’s geared toward not only the mainstream consumers of wuxia but also people who have read a lot of priest, so it’s good as like. a homage to a thing you’ve cared deeply about, personal affronts we will not digress into for the purposes of this post aside
qi ye
ok word of honor is basically tian ya ke but written in the style of qi ye. tian ya ke sought to challenge genre while word of honor conformed to it, and censorship induced moral whitewashing aside, if you’ve liked reading qi ye you are much more likely to enjoy it as a standalone show. for example, helian qi and zhang tingyu’s plotline in qi ye -> zhao jing and xie wang’s messed up relationship but inverted at the end, an equally fucked up reclamation of a narrative that qi ye denied the former’s victim. zhou zishu’s narrative parallels in the book (xie wang & liu qianqiao) not getting to parallel him bc of censorship reasons but each other more directly instead. consider su qingluan’s destiny of fading into obscurity & her tragically fated servant against how luo fumeng and liu qianqiao get treated and treat each other in woh, if you will. so many grand gestures in woh just as they’re present in qi ye. lack of communication, making your beloved’s decisions for them, putting a twist of FATE in the love story in a way the source material was. Not About, let’s just say; jing beiyuan and wu xi’s relationship development milestones shadowing woh’s take on zhou zishu & wen kexing’s relationship as well! your main character faces exile (woh’s conclusion much more lacking in nuance in my OBJECTIVE opinion) for both!!
sha po lang
the umbrella scene you know the one. and also the ziliujin mentioned that was used to run the automatons. da wu’s mechanical birds that served as messengers.
mo du
zhen yiguo our to be fridged but beloved pet as a homage to fandom’s ORIGINAL beloved pet, luo yiguo from mo du. may he live and terrorize luo wenzhou for decades to come. luo yiguo is ALSO a pet luo wenzhou receives by proxy of fei du, his eventual love interest, so make of this what you will.
lie huo jiao chou
sheng lingyuan got namedropped at some point folks!
can ci pin
ok this is the one that’s going to sound a bit far fetched since it’s not as. explicit when compared to the rest. its effects are not relationship development oriented either. it’s more about reclaiming a home once lost to you, finding a path back to what should have been rightfully yours. bear with me here, for a second.
so! in can ci pin it’s a big plot point that the protagonists, lin jingheng and lu bixing, have shared generational trauma (that i will not disclose details for because of spoilers and that i want people to read it for themselves, actually. it’s good. highly recommend.) and lu bixing has to acknowledge lin jingheng as his elder in front of other people in the context of returning to a home that was once lost to him due to tragic circumstances, a home lin jingheng would have been an inextricable part of AND a home lu bixing initially rejected upon learning the truth about where it would lead him to. sounds familiar to word of honor’s wen kexing’s moving declaration of being siji pavilion’s second disciple? you betcha!
in conclusion, i DO have a lot of problems with word of honor as an adaptation of tian ya ke in how it treated the book’s core values and just. worldview in general, but it was made with a lot of love and it’s of the sort that blazed in the production. thank you for coming to my ted talk, if you’ve read this post to the end. there might be more that i’ve missed as these are the only ones i’m familiar with, so feel free to add on if you’ve caught others that i missed :)
PSA READ MEI REN JIAN (the beauty’s sword)!!! light-hearted wuxia w badass lesbian cultivators!!! opposites attract!!! the fiery young madam of the righteous cultivators x cool aloof sect leader of the demonic cultivators who is actually v honourable!!! only 3 chapters are translated so far but its alr so fun
mei ren jian just got picked up by another translator and there are now 6 chapters out! it’s about lesbian cultivators and it’s so fun and comedic, read it
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[2. links]
SEASON 1
translation notes by episode
theme song: “此心正年少” (This Heart is Still Young)
- MaoerFM
- twitter translation
- twitter translation (ballad version)
- youtube video (public)
episode 1: 师父 Shifu
- MaoerFM
- youtube video (public)
episode 2: 辰课 Morning Class
- MaoerFM
- youtube video (unlisted)
episode 3: 失踪 Disappearance
- MaoerFM
- youtube video (unlisted)
episode 4: 紫鹏 Zipeng
- MaoerFM
- youtube video (unlisted)
episode 5: 群妖 A Gathering of Yao
- MaoerFM
- youtube video (unlisted)
episode 6: 经楼 Hall of Scriptures
- MaoerFM
- youtube video (unlisted)
