#is it possible to feel nostalgic for something that's 3 months old lmfao

[featherlouise]

How does PK react to Hollow's death in the HFD au??

POORLY, to say the least

Like, we already know how WL and PK deal with grief in canon, with WL shutting herself in her gardens and PK fucking off to the dream realm with his palace in tow, and that's after the infection presumably slows down for a bit bc of the sealing.

In the Hollow Fkin Dies au (which is what I'm now calling it if I post any more about it so ty for that lmao) I doubt they'd really get the chance to properly react bc Radi just kinda goes apeshit.

I think maybe with the realisation that Hollow wasn't actually hollow would probably bring PK and WL together in their grief, at least enough for WL to end up staying in the palace, which ends up being a terrible fking idea.

At least her gardens were secluded, but the city is densely populated, and by the time she realises that pretty much everyone is infected, it's too late to make her way to her gardens, so she's effectively stuck. PK would be absolutely RACKED with guilt, and would probably shut himself in his workshop for days at a time, feeling every time one of his people's minds is ripped away from them (hc that he's the god of the mind I figure he can tell when his gift is torn away from one of his people).

He'd be constantly fending off assassination attempts from infected citizens, and it doesn't take long for him to be paranoid enough to bring a small squad of kingsmoulds with him everywhere he goes. With this in mind, I'm gonna retcon him being killed by a random infected person.

After Hollow's death, I figure he'd be haunted by the question of 'if the pure vessel wasn't hollow, who's to say any of them were,' and eventually would find himself venturing into the abyss for the first time since the pure vessel emerged.

By this point, any surviving vessels have either escaped or died, and all he finds at the bottom is thousands of children's corpses, and a bunch of very angry shades. Idk maybe he throws himself into the void sea or something, refusing to allow the Radiance the satisfaction of killing him herself. Maybe he's just a coward. Maybe the guilt becomes too much.

Radi doesn't really have any quarrel with WL, so leaves her to her grief, and she roots herself down inside the palace.

As for Hollow's body?? PK makes a fkin shrine snow white style, where their body is preserved. PK spends a lot of time just sitting in there, staring at them, trying to memorise their face, recontextualising all the little moments during their childhood where they let a sliver of their personality shine through, bc PK never really knew his child, and now he never will.

Alternatively: seeing his child succumb to infection could be the last straw for PK, and after centuries of burying his past as a Wyrm, he shows her what it really means to be an angry god. No I won't elaborate on the alt ending bc I've put exactly zero thought into it and have no clue where to take it lmfao

[pekorosu]

sticking all my rambly notes about the wu xia bits under the cut.

warning for spoilers and all.

- they spent 3 months filming in tengchong, yunnan province. it's a highland area, about 2000 metres above sea level. kenji initially expressed some doubt at whether they could even pull off action scenes in such a place (bc breathing became quicker than usual).

- the movie was originally titled "同謀者" (the accomplice?)

(※ i think it refers to the conversation between liu jinxi and xu baijiu... "when one man sins, we all share his sin. we are all accomplices"? maybe that would've been too on the nose haha)

- the most consistent keywords in the early stages were [kung fu], [rashomon] and [discovery channel]

- they used shaw brothers movies as reference, with the intention of reviving "kung fu movies" in a way that would suit the 21st century.

- he talks a bit about the research that went into developing the action. stuff like how it wasn’t possible to half-ass the fight scenes when it comes to Real Kung Fu Movies(tm) unlike modern action flicks. so they drew inspiration from lau kar-leung's "classic, old school" kung fu. they watched his movies, copied the moves + camera angles exactly and studied them to figure out how to capture the right look and all.

- there's a lot of specifics re: martial arts styles that i don't know how to translate, but anyway donnie uses hung ga kuen for this movie.

(※ there are actually some videos on youtube breaking down his moves. it's p cool haha).

- kenji thinks it doesn’t feel right to call the movie "wu xia" bc everything that goes into the action speaks more of a "kung fu movie" as opposed to a "wu xia movie"

- he also jokes that they probably couldn’t name the movie "kung fu" since there's already a "kung fu hustle" out there. 

(※ that movie's actually named "功夫 (kung fu)" in chinese lmao i totally didn't know that)

- [rashomon] refers to how they wanted to infuse a similar concept of "the truth will look different from different POVs" into the action scenes. it was difficult to work out but kenji feels like they’ve achieved something fresh and new from an action perspective.

- [discovery channel] refers to how director peter chan came across a programme, smth like "the science of martial arts" on discovery channel, which led to the idea of showing viewers through CGI what goes on inside the body.

- kenji had been assigned the role of action choreographer** for this movie. he also had a minor acting role. additionally, he had no stunt double so he p much had to do everything by himself. donnie, who knew exactly where kenji’s limits were, would push him to the very edge. kenji mentions that he'd get minor injuries almost every day just trying to meet such high demands. he’d often catch himself thinking (jokingly) "i'm gonna murder this guy" lmao...

(※ here’s a video of him doing the same stunt 13 times.)

**specifically [ 動作指導 ]. donnie’s the action director [ 動作導演 ] and action designer [ 動作設計 ]. tbh they all sound the same to me but i think the choreographer does more... guiding? on a smaller scale? while donnie’s job is more in terms of the bigger picture? IDEK i’m just guessing.

- he also goes "it's difficult to breathe even when we’re just walking! i swear, at this rate, i'll be able to run a full marathon when i get back to japan..."

- kenji thinks kara hui (plays the badass murder lady) is scary bc when he tried giving her some direction, she retorted rather curtly with "i know that!" x_x

- there were plans to cast older, more nostalgic (male) martial arts stars for kara hui's part but someone (probably donnie?) suggested "a woman would be good" and so it ended up being kara. 

- kenji tho. “why did it have to be this scary lady...”

- at some point while they were location scouting by a cliff, kenji slipped and fell about 8 metres into the river! his life was seriously on the line there bc RAPID CURRENTS but luckily he’d managed to grab onto a protruding boulder and climb out somehow.

it was a pretty rocky area so he was grazed all over. literally no one knew where he had disappeared to so when he showed up covered in blood, everyone started freaking out. in the middle of all that, donnie just pulled out his personal phone and took pictures lol.

(※ documented in this bts clip)

- the scenery on the way to the hospital was so beautiful that at one point kenji wondered "what if... i'm actually dead right now??"

- when kaneshiro takeshi got a look at his injury-covered back, for some reason he yelled "unbelieeevaablllee!!" in osaka-ben and asked, "hey hey kenji, can i take a picture? i wanna send it to my mom, scare her a little by making it seem like i was the one who got injured."

- kenji: “i laughed because it was pretty much the same reaction as donnie.”

- he mentions that the staff gathered on set were of various nationalities so you would hear a mix of mandarin, cantonese, english, thai and japanese being spoken.

- because there were multilingual ppl on set (ESP takeshi), kenji couldn't carelessly curse in japanese anymore. usually when he's feeling extremely stressed out he'd be yelling things like "just die everyone!" in jp lmao

- he says takeshi is a rly interesting person. talks about how he went around suggesting eccentric ideas and asking people "hey, wouldn't it be more interesting if i did this?"

- the sichuanese thing was takeshi’s idea. 

- the little finger swipe here was also an ad lib lol 

- those cows in the scene where kara hui's character gets stampeded on? there were stunt people inside the cows moving them manually!

- they didn't want to resort to CGI, thinking there would be a risk of it coming across as fake. like even if just ONE small part looked fake, the audience will start wondering if the rest of the fight scene they'd painstakingly worked on was fake too and they didn't want that.

- "no! cows don't run like that!!" - donnie, taking his job directing stuntmen in extremely realistic cow costumes /very/ seriously.

- meanwhile kenji: “the situation was too surreal. how a cow runs... we never learned that in stunt school!”

- 

"please observe this enthusiastic performance of a cow by a team of two stuntmen!"

- director peter chan never really meddled with the action parts of the movie. when asked for his opinion, he'd just say "i don't know anything about that. i'd be satisfied with the first take itself. after that, i'd just look at everything as a whole." so they were kinda given free rein to film whatever they wanted and edit the scenes however they wanted.

- tsui hark once visited the set. tang wei (plays ayu, jinxi’s wife) who already wasn’t familiar with many of the hong kong cast and crew, had asked innocently "who was that old man?" lol

- the arm-cutting scene wasn’t in the original plans, it was more of a final resort. they actually planned to have jinxi be attacked by those goons when he got "revived" and he'd escape into a small cramped space where they'd do a 1 vs 5 fight scene. but it would've taken them another month to shoot that, so they had to scrap it. after some brainstorming they decided to replace it with "jinxi cuts off his arm!" this was decided like the day before they had to start shooting it (ﾟｰﾟ;;

- they had to decide which arm to "cut off" and thought it would be cool to have it be the same as jimmy wang's one-armed swordsman. so they asked jimmy which arm it was and he told them it was the left arm. so they went with that.

...turned out when they checked the original it was actually the right arm.

(※ truth is, in the original one-armed swordsman series, it'd switch between the two arms and wasn't consistent lmfao)

- kenji really liked the final product, but it didn't do so well in china and hong kong. kenji wonders if it's bc of the discrepancy between what people expected from the title "wu xia" and the actual content of the movie. apparently people were also really disappointed by the ending.

- eventually the movie started getting attention at film festivals and stuff in the west. but director peter chan just said pessimistically, "that's precisely why there's no changing the fact that this movie is a failure, entertainment-wise."

- kenji kinda wishes people would give this movie a second chance.