beach bum

Happy Friday the 13th! I’m happy to report I’m not homeless, at least for another month. I’m working as much as I can to hopefully make sure that remains true until my lease is up in December. That’s also the month I turn 55, and I’ve already been doing some research into resident-owned 55+ manufactured housing communities in the area. But I will talk all about that another time, probably in a locked post.

Right now, I want to talk about The Untamed. I started my latest rewatch last night, and rather than do in-depth recaps like I have in the past, my plan for this go-round is to get into some topics I’ve been meaning to talk about as the show reminds me (and as I refresh myself on aspects of the topics from the show). Which means that even though I just watched episode 3, which is one of my favorites because we get Lan Zhan and Wei Ying sparring in the moonlight in their pretty white robes, I’m actually going to natter a bit about the functional unsustainability of the jianghu as presented in the show.

Now, I know this has actually been the topic of at least a couple of stories; I just finished a really interesting one at the beginning of the week. The thing is, I get when you’re working with a limited budget how that limits the number of background actors you can bring in, but—and this is something I always take note of in American shows, too—if a certain number of the background actors and side characters you do have aren’t women, it gets me thinking about the implications for your population. In the case of The Untamed, I feel like the betrothal between Jiang Yanli and Jin Zixuan is like a giant floodlight on the problem, but also, it kind of blows my mind that in any version of this story, Jin Guangshan has an attitude about Jiang Yanli that his son picks up on because, and I cannot stress this enough, she is narratively the only legitimate daughter of a Great Sect. As such, it doesn’t matter how weak she is, physically or spiritually, it doesn’t matter how plain she is (in every version but the drama, because you just can’t ugly up Xuan Lu, and they didn’t try), she is still the Peak as far as cultivator aristocracy is concerned when it comes to eligible young women, and I really can’t see Jin Guangshan settling for anything less for his son. This is one of those things I think works better in the drama, in which there is no evidence Jin Guangshan doesn’t think Jiang Yanli is good enough, and in fact he both objects when Jiang Fengmian first decides to break the betrothal and immediately starts pushing to reinstate it the minute he’s dealing with her brother as her sect leader and not her father.

We do get shown that the Jiang, Lan, and Jin, at least, all have female disciples, though disciples don’t have to be family members, and frequently aren’t. For all the time we spend at the Unclean Realm, we don’t really see enough of the Nie disciples to know if there are women or not. There are no women among the disciples either Wen Xu or Wen Chao command when sacking the various other clans, and the only woman we see at Nightless City is Wen Qing. We’re told Wen Chao is married, though we never see his wife, just Wang Lingjiao, his mistress. We have no information on whether Wen Xu is married, and it would appear that neither of them have any legitimate children, at least. None of the other sect heirs, of course, are married, nor are the two youngest sect leaders, though Nie Mingjue, at least, appears to be of marriageable age (there’s a fair amount of debate about what age both Lan Wangji and Lan Xichen are meant to be, and how close it is to the novel).

As for the minor clans, the main thing we know about them is that Xue Yang wipes out at least two of them all by himself, and the Wen wipe out a bunch more, after they’ve spent at least a few decades absorbing others. And then the rest of the cultivation sects wipe out the Wen, including the clans they absorbed and forced to take their name. This is all in conjunction with the Wen killing all but three of the Jiang sect (I know a lot of us like to throw outer disciples into fic, or even inner disciples who were off night hunting when Lotus Pier was attacked, but what the drama showed was three survivors), slaughtering a fair percentage of the Lan sect (how many people could realistically fit on that spit of land in the Cold Pond Cave?), and torturing to death any Nie they could get their hands on. I mean, we know both that Jin Guangshan has illegitimate children up to his eyeballs and also the Jin are the only Great Sect clan that seem to have cousins, which is weird, but the Jin can’t maintain the cultivation world all by themselves, whatever they think.

When you know how cultivation works in this world, you get why the furen of these sects, who are usually cultivators themselves, don’t have a lot of kids, but then it raises the question of why not multiple wives, which is historically a thing, though again this is very much a fantasy version of historical China, so historicity is never the most compelling argument. Even though women can be renowned cultivators, this is still very much a patriarchal world, but it may well be that male sect leaders decided it wasn’t worth the risk of having that many female cultivators in their household, and nobody wanted to marry non-cultivators and risk that their children might not be able to cultivate. Even with all that, though, they’re sect leaders looking ahead to passing down the reins, and they’ve got to be thinking through the implications of the low birth rate and lack of daughters.

And again, I am forced to return to the topic of Jiang Yanli. Seriously, the moment her betrothal with Jin Zixuan was ended, she would have been flooded with other offers. She’s the daughter of a Great Sect leader and the Violet Spider, aside from being, again, the only legitimate Great Sect daughter. Every single sect with a son at the Lan Sect lectures would have been negotiating for her hand. Things might have been slightly different if Wen Ruohan were a halfway reasonable person, but all that would have meant was that there would have been two daughters available instead of one. That still ain’t great odds when you’re talking about the survival of the whole cultivation way of life.

This is honestly why Eliza and I load up Ouyang Zizhen with a whole passel of older sisters, and why I think the idea of the Meishan Yu being mostly women appeals to me (making them matriarchal assassins appeals to me even more, but that probably goes without saying). There are a lot of ways to address the issue in fic, to balance things out better than they’re presented in the show so cultivators don’t go extinct in a generation or so. And, of course, cultivators do have a longer lifespan than most people, provided somebody doesn’t decide to kill them, so presumably they have more fertile years, which would certainly explain Zizhen. I sure hope so, because it’s not like Wei Wuxian’s generation is doing their part. Of the Great Sects, only four of them got married, two of whom died after having one kid, and one of whom killed his kid and manipulated his sister-wife to kill herself before ending up dead. True, Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji have Lan Sizhui, though that’s less of a thing in the drama than other adaptations. I think it’s in the novel that Jiang Cheng’s been blacklisted by the female cultivators/the matchmakers, but then you’ve got Lan Xichen, ranked first among eligible male cultivators, and apparently the eternal bachelor, which doesn’t make us not ship him with Nie Mingue and/or Jin Guangyao. As for Nie Huaisang, we know he’s secretly too busy for a wedding, but you’d think the other sects would be throwing their daughters at him. At Lan Xichen, too. And at Jiang Cheng, because regardless of blacklisting, Jiang Yanli’s comments about marrying for the good of the sect and her choice not being her own would indicate that minor sect leaders looking for family ties to the Great Sect that holds power over river trade and the dye industry would override their daughters’ objections to gain Sandu Shengshou as their son-in-law.

All of which is a rather odd topic for yours truly to be pondering, given that I am happily asexual and childless, but then, I also considered a double Bachelor’s in Anthropology (I just didn’t have the funding), so I approach it from that angle. And really, I have to agree with the authors who come to the conclusion that time travel to save the sects the Wen wiped out/absorbed is the only way to fix it.

This, by the way, is exactly the kind of meta you can expect from me if you bid for me at Fandom Trumps Hate and choose meta. Just letting you know what you're getting yourself into there.