#rong hao

[palehorsemen]

[jaggedcliffs]

I promised I’d show my love for Love Between Fairy and Devil by making some  memes, and I’ve finally made good on it

[ultimateshixiongfuckertournament]

Canonicals Tournament Round 2, Match 4

Match 4 is between Rong Hao from Love Between Fairy and Devil (shizun: Chi Di Nu Zi) and Yuuri Katsuki from Yuri!!! on Ice (shizun/mentor: Viktor Nikiforov)

Propaganda under the cut! (Warning: Propaganda may include spoilers about the characters and their media)

Rong Hao:

This guy tried so hard to destroy three realms and murdered so many people so that his shizun could be alive and well.

#all he wanted was for shizun to come back to him#his anger that nobody “respected bee sacrifice” was so real#vote Tooting Muderer

#ronghao is so fucked up about his shifu and it's delicious

#Ronghao is… intense#so busy thinking about shizunfucker things that he couldn’t spend even a moment learning how to play a second song on his flute#in thirty thousand years

Yuuri Katsuki:

Well, this one is just canon; they literally get engaged and retire to dance duets together. But really, all you truly need to know is that Yuuri canonically papered his entire bedroom in posters of Viktor. You just know he absolutely jerked it in that bedroom while staring at those posters. There's no way that didn't happen.

[joyburble]

The Swords

So I was watching, as you do, some videos by some very charming and passionate martials arts practitioners comparing and contrasting various designs of sword and their usage. And I remembered that I had vaguely, perhaps subconsciously, noticed something strange about the magical swords used in this show.

The first one we see is the Hellfire sword which Dongfang Qingcang materialises as he calls Shangque.

It's straight, with no curve to the blade at all, and both edges appear to be sharp. It's basically cross-shaped, with a large, decorated cross-guard extending parallel with both edges. And it has a fairly large roundish pommel, by which he holds it:

I think I semi-consciously noticed that this looks a lot more like a European longsword, except that it's not all that long. Chinese swords are usually curved, even if only slightly, are usually sharp on one side only, and usually have disc-shaped handguards. [Edit! see reblogs for information on jians, which are straight and double-edged but with tiny crossguards] They sometimes have pommels, but the kind you see in the Wuxia genre generally doesn't.

So I thought, is this one of the subtler ways in which they're setting out to make Dongfang Qingcang and the Moon Tribe seem a little bit foreign and therefore barbarous, "not-Han-coded", as someone on Discord put it?

But then I checked the other swords, and that's not it.

Changheng's is a bit ambiguous. It has a pronounced cross-guard, less elaborate but more fantastical - it seems to be thinking about morphing into a 16th-century European basket hilt, as that downturned curve wouldn't work to catch your opponent's blade, but it isn't quite there yet:

The blade also looks very straight, and we don't see the prop without the CGI for long enough to tell whether it's meant to be sharp on both edges. It might be more of a sabre, a design that pops up in martial arts traditions everywhere.

The third sword we see is Lady Chidi's battle sword, which is the same basic design as Dongfang Qingcang's:

As you can see in the closeup, it's cross-shaped, double-edged, straight, and symmetrical, with a pronounced pommel, a long hilt for two hands, and a large cross-guard parallel to the edges.

This shape is important, because scale is an optional setting for powerful immortal beings, and she will soon turn it into this mountain, with the cross-guard becoming a very convenient platform for conversation and sunbathing:

The other plot-relevant sword, in Episode 31, is the same cross-shape, with a really big cross-guard and a fairly pronounced pommel.

However! Intriguingly, to spar with Ronghao in the illusion-forest in Episode 32, Chidi uses a very simple blade, straight, but with neither cross-guard nor pommel, like a civilised Chinese lady:

It might be double-edged or single-edged, I can't tell, but it has virtually no hand guard at all, not even a round one like a katana:

But when in a later scene Ronghao confesses, it is her own, true sword she drops, as a sign that things are getting simultaneously more magic and more real:

In Ep34, she uses it to kill some unfortunate pikemen:

Meanwhile, back in Ep 16, Yannu's sword was the same plot-relevant shape, like Dongfang Qingcang's, and she holds it like a medieval warrior saint looking down from a Gothic arch:

He held it the same way when Shangque greeted him in Episode 2.

Danyin's sword, when she manifests it, is in a rather modest and perhaps youthful style. Still straight and symmetrical, but with a very small, sharply hooked cross-guard:

When Dieyi's whip-chain-flail-thing turns into a sword, it's even more European - it looks very like a rapier with a basket hilt! Kind of appropriate to her general look, actually, and her street-fighting personality.

When she changes stance we see this bonkers wiggly blade, which looks still rapier-ish (long, pointed, thrust more than cut), only insane. She doesn't use it like a rapier, though.

Ronghao's sword for killing is a curious design, still straight and with a pommel, but this curious sort of vestigial, bulbous thing that isn't really a guard of any kind. I don't know what's going on with this but the shape is a little bit like Theoden's sword in Return of the King. Not quite.

However, when Chidi eventually attacks him, they both use their simple sparring blades again:

Anyway! I was surprised to discover how nearly all of the swords used in this particular show visually followed styles I am familiar with both from western drama and from western historical collections, and none of them, except the ones in that last shot, looked at all like the most common styles of sword you see in Chinese dramas.

Obviously the weapons function exactly like the costumes in that they're primarily artistic visual references to various moods and ideas, rather than functional objects, but I think that makes this choice even more interesting. I don't know how usual it is for this genre, or what it means.

I haven't found where, if at all, we see Xunfeng or Shanque use a sword, and it's long past my bedtime so I'm stopping there.

[studiokawaii]

@clj-fanweek Day 5: Lies + Truth

Who could represent today's prompt better than these two?

[evakant]

Changheng. You are my only friend in this world.

[kdram-chjh]

Cdrama: Love Between Fairy and Devil (2022)

Love Between Fairy and Devil lEsther Yux Dylan Wang 苍兰诀 iQlyi

Watch this video on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/z_lcEyTxw7g

[mikhayhu]

I've experienced everything in the world. But I still feel I'm waiting for something missed.

[trippedandmissed]

I humbly offer some nonsense in the hopes I can resist making the thirty thousand memes this show has made me think of.

[bug-catcher-in-viridian-forest]

how to talk to short people

NO ❌

YES ✔️

[tockamybeloved]

I can understand why this scene was cut out of the show. But I really wish they kept it.

[palehorsemen]

[feralplantwife]

I'm watching Love Between Fairy and Devil with my mom and we're 12 episodes in. She does want Dongfang Qingcang and Xiao Lanhua to get together... but is also convinced that Rong Hao and Changheng are in fact lovers on the DL 😂

[ultimateshixiongfuckertournament]

Canonicals Tournament Round 1, Match 7

Match 7 is between Bai Haotian from Reunion: The Sound of the Providence (shizun/mentor: Wu Xie) and Rong Hao from Love Between Fairy and Devil (shizun: Chi Di Nu Zi)

Propaganda under the cut! (Warning: Propaganda may include spoilers about the characters and their media)

Bai Haotian:

Bai Haotian -- Little Bai -- is introduced as a supervisor in the mysterious Warehouse 11 which the protagonist, Wu Xie, is trying to infiltrate. She's tiny, she's chipper, She's A Fan, she has a slightly girlier version of Wu Xie's haircut and Absolutely No Chill. What follows is an interestingly asymmetrical relationship where he is canny, resourceful, indomitable, and she knows so much more than she's telling -- youth, expertise, and adoration in a tiny gamine package. When they are fired from Warehouse 11 she becomes his student in scurrilous antique-dealing and 'how to point the knife away from you when there's danger'. (She's young. She's picking things up as she goes.)

She flirts with Wu Xie throughout (he is politely discouraging and occasionally flustered) and the platonic affection and mutual protectiveness is so strong I could cut it with a butter knife.

Rong Hao:

This guy tried so hard to destroy three realms and murdered so many people so that his shizun could be alive and well.

[nieninque-nyerea]

we are presenting here this silly little meme of ours (@aredhel-erinti)... enjoy

[maxiel-on-a-flower-field-18]

For starters, seeing the title "Love between Fairy and Devil" will definitely let you say and think that it's a love story between a Fairy and an Evil Lord yada yada yada. But as you watched and understood the story as a whole, it conveys more than just the love story of the two protagonists. Remember how the war between the two realms and tribes started because of love that became hate and betrayal? The war also ended because of two star-crossed lovers who sacrificed everything for each other and thus proves how they both love and trust each other amidst the obstacles and the people around them trying to stop them from loving each other... and the fate that tries to break them apart. It started with love and ended with love.

Love between Fairy and Devil also shows how love has its own forms and ways. Love forms to friendship (Xiao Lanhua to Jieli, Shangque to Dongfang Qingcang, Dongfang Qingcang to Changheng, Changheng to Ronghao, Changheng to Danyin), to family (Xunfeng to Dongfang Qingcang, Danyin to Jieli), to leadership (Dongfang Qingcang towards the Moon Tribe, Xiao Lanhua/ Goddess Xi Yun towards the three realms), to your master (Xiao Lanhua to Lord Arbiter, Ronghao to Chidi Woman), and loving and finding yourself (Changheng). It shows how love is beautiful in different ways.

"Cang Lan Jue" literally meant "Parting between the Orchid and Cang" (some translations of the actual title includes Parting of Orchid and Cang / The Farewell of Canglan)in the novel and the drama never failed to show this one. Both Xiao Lanhua and Dongfang Qingcang parted ways for the decisions that they made and the fates that they defied. But even though they parted, they still found their ways to come back to each other. Proving that their love will never be dictated by fate. It'll find its way and they will not part anymore.