The Untamed - Nickname Edition

[rheasilvia]

It took a surprisingly long time, but solo and I finally finished watching The Untamed. I really enjoyed it! So of course, there is a pressing issue I must adress: NICKNAMES.

For the purposes of clever (?) commentary, solo and I came up with a number of nicknames while watching. We replaced some with actual names in due course, but others stuck around till the very end. ;-) (I should add that few of them are complimentary - but my surprise fave is among those with a really bad nickname, so...)

• Stoneface


• Jin Douche


• Canary Guy


• Sulkmeister


• Pretty Evil Guy, or PEG for short - also known as Cray Evil Guy by solo (who failed to appreciate his charms)


• Jin Douche.2, or JD2


• Slimeface, also Slimedude or Slimer


• Cute Baby Cultivator, or CBC


• Jim, also known as Golden Guy - named Jim because of solo's passionate non-spellchecked outbursts of "I really hate jim"


• Bonus nickname I came up with too late, but that I wish I had though of in time: Soup Girl

I now have a number of burning questions for all of you. Namely:

1. Can you tell who these people are?*

2. Do you have nicknames for The Untamed characters?

3. Why does nobody appreciate my darling properly?

So many qestions!


*If anyone guesses all of the nicknames, I will write a drabble for them. ;-)

ETA: Unsurprisingly, there are spoilers in the comments! Just in case anyone is even slower than I in watching this. ;-)

Comments

[ariunderscore]

I spent some time on Friday at work thinking about this (between head-desking about ... well, people at work), because on one hand, I do agree with you re. there's no way to "fix" both of them if I apply any shred of RL reasoning.

But I really have a ... kink/button/power fantasy of love being able to redeem people. It's fairly specific - there are very few characters who manage to hit it. MY does in a big way. XY sorta, but not as directly. (Seishirou hit it big time, too)

Which, I mean, ok, is not a world shaking revelation, but I've never thought about why I like some villain redemption.

Gosh, no, what a surprise you like Jin Ling :) and gnnnn, I have to take such care that I don't write Lin Jing instead

I've not come across any junior fic that make me to "oooh, I love it" - which makes me sad. I should do a focused deep dive into the pairing tags.

This is the story I thought of - and now I realize it's an unfinished WIP, which is why it took forever to find: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20823821

I also came across 2 other stories that focus on JL - neither of them made me "save for later" list, tho:
https://archiveofourown.org/works/21665524
https://archiveofourown.org/works/21550396

redemption through love and liking evil characters

[rheasilvia]

(Sorry for the late reply, the holidays are really taking me offline this year...)

Oooh, I did not know about your love redemption button. Interesting! I can definitely see the attraction, and would actually be interested in knowing the specifics. I don't think I have the exact same button, but I do definitely enjoy a good redemption, and it crosses over into what I love about dark characters.

I actually need to think about this a lot more myself...

As you know, I do often love characters who are dark, as long as they are interesting - and frequently I find them far more interesting than heroes, simply because they can be more multi-faceted and provide more narrative potential. I don't think I can call my interest redemption, exactly... although it's not entirely unlike it, either. ;-) I generally want to explore those characters and their strengths and weaknesses, how they became what they are and made the choices they made. The person they are... and the person they can become, how they can / could have been different, all of that. And because I am a sucker for a happy ending (where "happy" can be pretty darkly happy depending on the situation, but you know, still happy *g*), that does often end up involving redemption, too.

But in terms of the character, I do need a basis to work with, some kind of glimpse of a baseline personality that I find not only interesting, but potentially relatable in some way (I hesitate to use "likable" - but it is that, too, even if it only applies to some traits rather than the entire person).

For examply, I love Seishirou as a character (though not as a person) because to me, he is very interesting to explore. He has an alien way of viewing the world and relating to people that I find fascinating, and he has traits that I can appreciate despite his everything. His relationship with Subaru is fascinating to me because of what it says about him, how it changes him and how (in my view) he traps himself in his own snare, and in the end surrenders to it with characteristic cruel flair. And it all works for me because I do see a baseline character that I find relatable, for reasons I'd have to think about longer to properly put into words.

In the case of Slimer and PEG, I dont see anything interesting there... a very slight glimmer in PEG, perhaps, because of his obsession for the blind cultivator whose name I can't remember, and the twisted mockery of affection it is. But it's so twisted, and what he reveals of his childhood is so off-putting (in terms of how his personality is evidently structured for him to react the way he did, when he did), that I have no interest in exploring it further - this is a person I do not find relatable, and I don't want to spend a lot of time in his head because I will not be able to identify with him, and will probably just feel nauseated. For me it's even more extreme with Slimer, who (in my view of the character) appears to have gone down his path on the basis of personality traits that I find actively off-putting even in characters that never commit a single crime. So, yeah, even if he grows up in circumstances that never have him do more than spread gossip about school rivals behind their back and gaslight his partners about why he cheats on them, he will still be someone I have absolutely no wish to read about. But of course there is lot of interpretation involved there!

Thank you very much for the links, I will check them out as soon as regular service is resumed! ;-)

Jin Ling and Lin Jing - yeah. Same problem. ,-)

Re: redemption through love and liking evil characters

[ariunderscore]

I saw this reply come in early this morning, but I had to spend some time thinking about specifics, too. I think I have 3 things that influence me re. redemption:

The first character that hit my "I want redemption"-button was Vader. I saw all 3 SW movies in one go when I was around 12. I can't really say why I liked Vader back then, but I know I did. And while I was happy there was a redemption moment at the end, I was also unhappy that he died.

Even back then, I was not happy that it was "ok, you had a redeeming moment, how nice, now die, because everything else would be too complicated and not make for a pat happy ending". I'm sure I didn't put it into these words back then, but it is what I feel now. I hate that so often redemption = death, because I would very much like to see someone have a redemptive moment and then have to keep working on it. Even if realistically it would be a "well, you did [evil things], so off to prison with you, and we'll throw away the key". I don't care, I want them to ... not get a happy end, because that's not necessarily it, but ... hm, find a place? I really don't know how exactly to put it into words.

(also: how much do I love that now, 35 years later, fandom has given me quite a number of "Vader lives" stories that give me what 12year old me wanted? Sooooo much. *g*)

Another thing that I'm sure influences this is that I'm rather flexible with characterization. Which I'm pretty sure goes back to when actual canon was hard to get (I remember watching stamp-sized .rm files of Buffy or Fushigi Yuugi with hardly readable subs - they were 25MB and had taken hours to download... and I remember tape trees for US shows). So, I'm very used to picking up both plot and characterization from fanfic (and summaries, etc).

Which means that often, I first get a whole bunch of character interpretations which narrow down over time to the one that fits/works for me most (in some cases after I've seen canon, but I do read in some fandoms where I've only every seen a handful of episodes).

Actually, one of the few fandoms where I've seen everything in recent years is Nirvana in Fire. With Guardian, I saw up to ep 15ish, before I spoiled myself for the ending and also started to read fanfic, and I stalled a long time around ep 26 or so before finishing the show. I had zero interest in Ye Zun at first, and then I read fanfic that made me interested in him, and *then* I saw him in episodes. With Untamed, I gave up and looked up some spoilers after ep 14 or so, and then I also started reading fanfic.

I only saw Thor and Iron Man 1 before diving into Marvel fandom, and while I watched Avengers, Thor Dark World, Winter Soldier and Ragnarök eventually, it was long after they came out and I had been reading fanfic (no interest in the others except Black Panther). I never saw more than 7 or 8 Merlin episodes. I never watched the last Hobbit movie. I only watched the first SW prequel (no, wait, I think I hate-watched ep 2 to mock it). I never watched more than 1,5 seasons of SG:A. I never saw most of X-Files or Highlander outside of Krycek or Methos eps. I feel like I'm doing "fannish confessions of a bad fan" *g*

... what was my point? Oh, yes: I get the feeling from what you're saying that your view of a character is much more canon-based than mine, and that it's fairly fixed, while mine is much more flexible.

The last thing that plays into my button is the disconnect I have between RL and fannish things. In RL, I would agree with your characterizations for 'grübchen and SmirkBoy, wouldn't want Seishirou to have any other ending than the canon one (or actually maybe a worse one and instead Subaru gets saved), wouldn't want Vader redeemed (captainawesome.com actually uses the "I can sense the good in him"-Vader-esque boyfriend as a thing you should run away from).

But if I'm going to be fannish, I get to apply *my* ... not rules, but my fantasy. Which, the older I get, the more boils down to "I want a world where adding more love (in many forms, so also understanding/empathy/etc) is a solution and will save people/the world".

Aside from this, I'm not even sure myself why some characters make me go "I want him redeemed", and others don't.

With Seishirou I know that I was influenced by early fanfic, which gave me the headcanon that Seishirou at least subconsciously knows he's lacking something (empathy/ability to love/all that stuff that makes people not be psychopaths), and is trying to learn it. It's just that TB!Subaru is completely unable to help because he's too innocent. But maybe an older Subaru could (well, ok, that was before the bulk of X was published where it became pretty clear that an older Subaru is way too broken for it).

I am completely 'eww' on the Seishirou-clone from Yami no Matsuei, btw.

Schuldig and Crawford I'm ok with them as they are, I just would like to have seen where they would have gone without SZ. I would have liked Snape to survive and he didn't need redemption as much as to grow up. I would have been more interested in Spike not being typically evil without a soul. I lost interest in X-Files before they killed off Krycek, and before then, I'm not sure how much redemption was needed (at least from my understanding of the meta plot, they were thinking they were doing the right thing. I think? It's been too long).

Seeing some Loki "discourse" on tumblr has given me a "run away screaming" reflex, but my base thought about him is along the lines of "very old and with superpowers, not sure normal human norms apply", plus a. *eyeroll* at him getting killed off, and b. *super-eyeroll* about him getting a show but everything after Avengers gets thrown out. Similar for Methos (but not for Kronos) - because clearly Methos can change, and I don't think Kronos can.

Ye Zun yes, after fannish influence. And in Untamed, I want it for 'grübchen since I saw him greet LXC, and then saw him have the "I'm kicking you out"-meeting with NMJ. I do think the tv show ships him with LXC quite obviously, so maybe I'd have a different opinion if I had read the book first.

(For Untamed, WWX actually also hits the button as the Yiling Patriarch, sometimes)

BTW, thinking about Methos, I just thought of another thing, because I read a metafilter post about memory. And I, same as some people in the comments, don't have any sort of narrative arc to my memories/a story about myself. I don't see myself in my memories, I see them in 1st person ego-shooter perspective. I just know I used to be past!me, and now I am no longer. I wonder if that influences how I view the redeemability of characters (because for redemption, you need change, and maybe not having a narrative-arc self makes it easier for me to believe people can change, including personality traits?)

Gnn, this reply is all over the place, sorry. I don't usually do deep-dives into why I like what I like. I just know I like it. :)