#i feel like we need a non-wwx pov of this for full effect

[shanastoryteller]

Happy Holidays Shana! Fem!MXY!WWX has infected my brain! More of that, please?

a continuation of 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Wei Wuxian has the deafening talisman on his chest and a blindfold wrapped tightly around his face and held together with a different talisman so he doesn’t have to worry about it slipping. He leaves his sword sheathed for now – it wouldn’t do well to start out too strong.

He stands, loose and easy, but nothing happens. He huffs. “I really will punish you if you refuse to help me. I am your superior. Don’t overthink it, just do as you’re told.”

Rich advice, coming from him, but they don’t know that.

He feels the air move to his left and he lifts his hand, grabbing a slim wrist and twisting it so she has to let go of her sword. He yanks her forward, thinking of the moves he used to drill Shijie in, and pulls her over his shoulder and slams her to the ground.

He pops upright, bracing himself for the next attacks, but none come.

This is getting annoying.

“I’ll tell you when to stop,” he says. “Until I say otherwise, keep coming up at me. I’ll tell you when I’ve had enough.”

This time he feels their footsteps through the ground. Lazy. What, are they stomping? That has to be a funny image at least. He raises his sheathed sword to stop one attack, while kicking out his leg towards his other attacker. He aims too high, hitting meaty thigh instead of fragile knees, and has to throw himself on the ground to avoid the next attack. That does mean he’s low enough to yank their feet out from under them and then he rolls around just in time to avoid the attack that he’s pretty sure was coming from behind, which means his two opponents should have just taken themselves out.

“Someone remind me to assign footwork lessons after this,” he says. He’s just going to assume someone answers in the affirmative. They are Lans.

More come, two more sets of two before they figure out that’s not going to work, and then they’re attacking in groups of three and four. That’s when he stops being able to dodge every hit, but it’s also when his mind quiets. Everything slows down and he feels his lung expand, the sweaty grip he has on his sword sheath, and the growing collection of throbbing wounds across his body. He almost unsheathes his sword a dozen times, but this is good, he can almost feel his core straining and fighting against the confines of his body.

Finally. This is what he wanted. It’s not about thinking, fighting like this, just reacting, just trusting his borrowed body to notice things in time to react to them. It’s been close to an hour, his breaths are coming out more as wheezes, he’s at least twisted an ankle and possibly broken a rib, and he has some sort of head wound that’s causing blood to soak into his blindfold. It’s miserable and painful and not something this body is trained to handle, but he’s endured worse for longer. At last none of the Lans are trying to eat him.

Suddenly it all stops. He widens his stance, holding up his sword sheathe defensively, but nothing happens. “I didn’t stay stop,” he croaks. “Do as you’re told. Attack.”

The moment stretches on long enough that he’s getting genuinely annoyed about it when he’s throwing himself to the side, only realizing why when he feels the reverberation of a powerful cultivation blade hitting the ground next to him.

They’ve called in reinforcements, it seems. Maybe one of the elders? Fair enough, honestly.

Wei Wuxian unsheathes his sword, meeting the next blow more on a guess than anything else. The strength behind it is enough to send him skittering back several feet, but he doesn’t let his grip slip an inch. Then they’re pushing away from each other and he’s meeting the next blow based on what he would do, which probably isn’t fair to this random Lan elder, but oddly enough it works.

Every blow is powerful enough to make his bones shake and his opponent is skilled enough that Wei Wuxian can barely sense the air moving until it’s almost too late. His few minutes fighting this person are harder than the past hour of standing against disciples, but Wei Wuxian learned a long time ago how to compartmentalize his pain to keep fighting.

Doing this is making him stronger. He needs to be stronger to figure out what Mo Xuanyu wanted him to do. Mo Xuanyu killed herself to get his help. He can’t disappoint her.

He can’t give in.

New energy surges through him, bright and searing, painful even in its usefulness. He doesn’t let himself think about it, instead he pushes through, uses it to put his opponent on the defensive for once. Their fight is flowing faster, almost as if it’s a pattern, like they’re dancing instead of fighting.

Wei Wuxian feels a cool blade against his throat right as rests the edge of his sword on his opponent’s shoulder, flush against their neck.

A draw. Better than he’d expected, given his current physical condition.

His opponent doesn’t lower their sword, so he doesn’t either, but he does release the talismans with a burst of cultivation energy. At first he thinks it doesn’t work because everything is still so silent, but then he can hear the harshness of his own breathing and his blindfold slips off his face.

Lan Zhan is standing there, his sword at his throat, and his face pale and eyes wide. He’s hit with a dizzying sense of déjà vu. It’s like they’re fifteen again, on that rooftop with two bottles of Emperor’s smile dangling between them and the bright, fat moon hanging above.

“Wei Ying?” Lan Zhan asks, his voice coming out too high and strangled.

This can’t be happening. He can’t know. He’ll hate him and throw him out if he doesn’t kill him outright and then Mo Xuanyu will have died for nothing and Sizhui will be so said and he won’t understand – and what if his siblings find out, that’s the last thing he wants –

He keeps his voice steady and face even as he asks, “Who is Wei Ying?”

Lan Zhan’s face shuts down. “I – please excuse me, Xuanyu.” He lowers his sword, turning and doing the closest thing to running away that Wei Wuxian has seen him do since they were teenagers.

All the Lans are staring at him and gaping. The adrenaline leaves him all at once and he collapses to the ground, his legs refusing to support him.

He groans and then several dozen Lans converge on him, multiple concerned shouts of, “Madame Lan!” nearly deafening him all over again.

It’s kind of nice, actually.

[olderthannetfic]

Could you rant a little about the way films could convey different POV/relative time? This is interesting to me as I cannot figure how that would work.

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Oh man... Okay, I'll try to come up with something relatively coherent and concise, but no promises.

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POV in film

This isn't quite as concrete as it is in writing. The film version is sometimes called "narrative perspective" instead. Sometimes "emotional perspective". When someone talks about whom we're "with" in a scene, it's often this same concept.

Unlike in most writing, film can shift whom we're with pretty frequently and still be seen as artistically good. Some films don't make very good use of visual/editing cues about whom we're with too, which makes it extra non-obvious.

How we tell who's the POV character or more the subject or more important is from things like who has the most closeups or the closer closeups. More closeups = more emotional intimacy with the character.

Who looks closest to the camera lens vs. being seen from the side or some more observation-y angle? More full-face view = more emotional intimacy. Can't see full face with full emotions = less intimacy

Who drives the cuts? Driving the cut means like:

There's a noise.

Character A turns to look.

Character B turns to look.

We cut to the thing they're looking at.

B is driving the cut there. B's interest is what tells the audience where to look and what's important. Character B making a decision and that ending the scene or character B's eyes leaving frame and that ending the scene are also examples of driving the cut.

I'm not saying every scene from every sitcom with a million characters will make this obvious, but if you go watch a scene from one of those films like The Godfather that film bros cream themselves over, you'll see a lot of meticulous, carefully-planned cinematography and editing like this.

I have some video meta on AO3 trying to demonstrate this type of thing if you need some examples.

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Temporality & Reality in Film

I have less of a canned lecture for this one. One of the early realizations by film editors was how humans interpret cuts. It's why montage works. If you stick thing A next to thing B, we assume that they're related. If they're two normal-seeming scenes, we assume that B closely follows A in time (if they're the same characters/location) or that they're concurrent (if not).

This is why i was so irritated with The Witcher S1 and all that "Ooh, we never tooooold you it was all happening at the same tiiime!!!"

Actually, you did, assholes. A straight cut means that.

If you did not mean that, then you would have used a transition of some kind, a sound cue, a radically different color grade, or some text on screen indicating when and where we are.

If A and B aren't just two normal scenes that are going to have a temporal relationship, we'll assume a metaphorical one. Like, if you edit a video of a politician and cut in clips of a pig rolling in mud, you can't go "Oh, I didn't meaaaan anything by it!" Everyone knows you were saying politician=pig and that whatever he's bloviating about = him rolling in the political muck.

See the Kuleshov effect for more on montage.

TBH, part of my problem with The Untamed is that I didn't feel they lingered on LWJ's impassiveness enough for me to get a sense of what lay under it. I wanted more of him looking blank, then WWX, then him looking blank. As it was, he felt blank to me.

Anyway, if you're trying to show that time or levels of reality are skipping around in film, you have various options. Often, a film will set up a pattern early on in a relatively clear way so that the audience understands that's the cue for Thing X later on.

The most typical cues are things you're familiar with: flashbacks are sepia toned, flashbacks are over-exposed and full of glowing white light, dream sequences are weird colors, characters who are on drugs can see distorted versions of reality but it sounds like everyone is shouting from a million miles away, etc.

Subtler sound cues are things like which mic was chosen. Most regular dialogue is recorded on a boom mic with support from lavs on individual actors. It sounds like it was recorded on set in a relatively open space, probably.

If you want to record the voices in the protagonist's head, you might choose some other mic in the studio, right next to the actor's mouth, so it sounds like a podcaster speaking directly into their microphone or something.

The voice is too pristine and too close. It doesn't sound like it's in the scene, so we can more easily buy it as being inside someone's head.

You could also achieve an unreal effect by adding some unnatural reverb.

I was teaching editing this morning, and my student showed me this scene from Dune. (It's the one with the guy and his mom around 3:50 if the link doesn't pop to the right spot.)

Pay attention to how the unnaturalness of the sounds builds. We start out with naturalistic sound design and return to it after. In the middle, there's an increase of tension music, wind chimes that shouldn't be that loud, etc. Then the time delay on his words. Then a subtle visual effect on her hand reaching for the glass.

Pay attention to how they cue 'back to reality'. We see her sort of waking up, the sound changes back, and we immediately cut to an insert shot showing the water in its original spot to make it clear we saw something that was not real before.

That's the kind of thing film can do to move from real to unreal to real again.

The way the editing jumps between insert shots of other things in the scene is perhaps mimicking how human concentration works or maybe heightening the unreal feel, or both. The windchimes could be that too: hyper-focusing guy hears a real noise as way more prominent than it would really be.

Film can convey what it's like to have your attention jump from thing to thing.

So can writing, but differently. Film is exceptionally good at depicting things like emotions we aren't sure how to describe and the eye being caught by movement and light. Novels are often better at capturing intellectual flights of fancy where your brain is relating 10 things you read to each other. (I know, I know, I just said "Books are good at verbal things". Very deep.)