What kind of saber is baxia anyway?
I love my bloodthirsty princess of a cursed blade, and in my heart of hearts i am nothing but a sword nerd, so i've been extremely fascinated by Baxia and how we know frustratingly little about what she actually looks like!
I mean, look at bichen, right?
Bichen in the donghua:
Bichen in the drama:
They're clearly not exactly the same. The scabbards are different, and the guards have a different shape. But these are recognizably different iterations on one theme, right? Thin jian with a white grip silver guard, light blue tassel and silver mounting accents on the scabbard.
Now this is baxia in the donghua:
And baxia in the drama:
????????
THAT'S A COMPLTELY DIFFERENT WEAPON
it doesn't stop there either, the audio drama is kind enough to give us ANOTHER COMPLETELY DIFFERENT BAXIA
pretty! But how is that he same sword??
And when we go back to the novel, we get very little information on her appearance other than the fact that her blade is tinted red with all the blood she's absorbed. Which none of these designs incorporate.
This is not a dig on the designs itself, they're all quite gorgeous in their own right and i'm going to spend a while discussing all of them! Because isn't it fascinating how, since we know little about novel baxia beyond "saber" all of these designs ended up so different? What kinds of sabers are these, anyway?
So, a chinese aber, aka a "dao" (刀) just means a sword that has only one cutting side. As opposed to a jian, which has two.
You can see how that leaves a LOT of room for variaton.
I've actually seen some people get confused because Huaisang's saber in the untsmed is thin and quite straight, making it superficially resemble the jian more than drama!baxia, but it is still clearly a saber!
See? only one cutting blade!
This, to me looks a lot like a tang dynasty hengdao
credit to this blog for providing his image and being a great source for all this going forward.
TANGENT: during all this I found out the english wikipedia page for dao is WRONG! Ths is what they about the tang hengdao!
So that sounds like the hengdao was called that during the sui dynasty, but then, after that, started being called a peidao, right?
WRONG
I LOOKED AT THE SOURCE THEY USED AND IT SAYS THIS:
IT WAS CALLED THE PEIDOU UNTIL THE SUI DYNASTY, AT WHICH POINT IT WAS CALLED A HENGDAO. Which would carry over to the Tang dynasty. This was the source wikipedia linked! and it says something else than they say it does!
Anyone know how to edit a wikipedia article?
ANYWAY
BACK TO BAXIA
Since we're already at the drama, let's look at drama baxia: She's also straight! the general term for straight-backed saber is Zhibeidao, but that's a modern collector's term, and doesn't really say anything about which historical kind of saber baxia could be based on. Another meta i found on the drama nie sabers already went on some detail here.
I'm gonna expand on that a little: The kinds of historical straight-backed sabers we see resemble the hengdao a lot more than they do baxia. They don't go to their point as harsly as she does (she's basically a cleaver!) and they're all way skinnier.
No, my personal theory is that instead of being based on any kind of historical sword, drama!baxia is based on a Nandao.
I mean, come on, look at it!
Baxia!
The Nandao... isn't actually a historical sword. It was invented for Wushu forms. There's a really fascinating article about its conception, but that's why the swords in the images look a little thin and flimsy. Wushu swords are very flexible and light, they're dance props, not weapons to fight with. There are actual steel versions of Nandao, but they're recreations of the prop, not the other way around.
So That's one way in which Baxia differes from the Nandao: she's actually a real weapon. The other is that, as you can see above, the nandao has an S-shaped guard. Baxia doesn't. She's also much more elaborately decorated, of course. Because she's a princess.
Now: audio drama baxia!
This is much easier. with that flare at the tip?
Oh baby that's a niuweidao, all the way!
There are more sabers with that kind of curved handle, but the broad tip is really charcteristic of the niuweidao. The Niuweidao is also incredibly poplar in modern media, often portrayed as a historical sword, but it originated i nthe 19th century! And it was actually never used by the military!
That's right, the Niuweidao was pretty much exclusively a civilian weapon! That makes its use here anachronistic, but so is the nandao, and considering that the origin story of the Nie is that they use Dao intead of Jian because their ancestors were butchers, portraying them with a weapon historically reserved for rebels and common people instead of the imperial military is actually very on theme!
Finally, Donghua/Manhua baxia. These two designs are so similar I'm going to treat them as one and the same for now.
Unlike both previous baxias, The long handle makes it clear this baxia is a two-handed weapon, though Nie Mingjue is absolutely strong enough to wield her with one hand anyway. Normal rules don't count for cultivators.
Now, this is where things get tricky, because there are a lot of words for long two-handed sabers. And a lot of them are interchangable! This youtube video about the zhanmadao, one of the possible sabers this baxia could be based on, goes a little into just how confusing this can get. This kind of blade WAS actually in military use for many centuries, making it the most historically accurate of all the baxias. But because of that it also has several names and all of those names can also refer to different kinds of blades depending on what century we're in.
So here's our options: i'm going to dismiss the wodao and miandao, because these were explicitly based on japanese sword design, and as we can see manhua baxia has that very broad tip, so that won't work
(Example of a wodao. According to my sources Miaodao is really just the modern common term for the wodao, and the changdao, and certain kinds of zhanmadao... do you see how quickly this gets confusing?)
Next option: Zhanmadao.
Zhanmadao stands for "horse chopping saber" so... yeah they were anti-cavalry weapons. meant to be able to cut the legs and/or necks of horses. That definitely sounds like a weapon Nie Mingjue would wield. But if you watched that youtube video i linked above, you'll know the standardized Qing dinasty Zhanmadao looked very different from earlier versions. It was inspired by the japanese odachi, and more resembles the miandao than its ealrier heftier counteprarts.
Earlier Ming dynasty Zhanmadao on the other hand were... basically polearms. the great ming military blog spot, another wonderful source, says these are essentially a kind of podao/pudao (朴刀) which looked like this
Now that blade looks a lot like baxia, but the handle is honestly too long. Donghua!baxia straddles the line between sword an polearm a little, but while zhanmadao have been used to refer to both long-handled swords and polerarms, this was undeniably a polearm, not a sword.
If you want to know what researching this was like, I found a picture of this blade on pinterest-- labeled as a "two-handed scimitar"-- and the comment section was filled with people arguing about whether this was a Pudao, Wudao, Zhanmadao, Dadao, Guandao, or a japanese Nagita.
So... that's how it was going. This has kept me up until 2 AM multiple times.
However! Thanks to this article on the great ming military blog I found out there have historically been pudao blades with shorter handles!
Specifically, Ming dynasty military writer Cheng Ziyi created a modified version of the pudao to work with the Dan Fao Fa Xuan technixues-- aka technqiues for a two-handed saber, which would alter heavily influence Miaodao swordmanship-- thereby, as the article points out, essentially merging the cleaver-polearm type Zhanmadao with the later two-handed japanese-inspired design.
This is the illustration for the Wu Bei Yao Lue (武備要略) a Ming dynasty military manual
This blade shape in the illustration doesn't match Baxia exactly, but since it's a lengthened Pudao-like blade and we've seen above that those can match Donghua Baxia's shape, i'm gonna say that calling Baxia a Zhanmadao with a two-handed grip isn't all that innacurate!
However, because all of these terms are so intertwined, there are a dozen other things you could call her that would be about equally correct.
To show that, here's a lightning round of other potential Baxia candidates:
Dadao (大刀)
Which are generally one-handed and too short. However!
Another youtube video i found of someone training with a Zhanmadao that resembles baxia a little also calls it a "shuangshoudai dao" (雙手带 刀) shuangshou means two-handed, and while 雙手带 seems to refer to a longer handled weapon, when looking for a shuangshou dao or shuangshou dadao (双手大刀) we find a lot more baxia-resembling blades like here and here
I also found that, while the cleaver-like Dadao is strictly a product of the 20th centuy, since dadao just means big sword or big knife, it has been used to refer to loads of different weapons! Some people could've called the zhanmadao and pudao "dadao" during the Ming dynasty as well.
Another potential baxia candidate that mandarin mansion classifies as similar to the later dadao (though longer, as seen in the illustration below) is the "Kuanren Piandao"
Which piqued my interest because this diagram classifying different tpye of Dao:
Claims that a Kuanrenbiandao (diferent spelling, same sword) is the same as a modern day Zhanmadao.
(So once again, all of these terms are interchangable)
Another opton Is the Chuanmeidao/Chuanweidao (船尾刀) below you can see a diagram, based on the Qing dynasty green standard army regulation, of blades all officially classified as types of "pudao"
The top middle is the Kuanren Piandao, and bottom left is the Chuanweidao.
Both of these have a lot of baxia-like qualities.
So there you go! live action baxia is based on a Nandao, audio drama baxia is based on a Niuweidao, and Manhua/donghua baxia is some kind of two-handed Zhanmadao/Pudao/Dadao depending on how you want to look at it.
I'm honestly surprised no one has made the creative decision to portray Baxia as a Jiuhuandao, aka 9 ringed broadsword yet.
I mean look at it! Incredibly imposing. Would make for a great Baxia imo. (@ upcoming mdzs manga and mobile game: take notes!)
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Flight of Icarus lore dump part 2:
Part 1 | Character List
- Wayne has a green thumb. He reads Gardener’s Weekly magazine. It doesn’t say what he grows, but it says he buys vegetables from the store so I’m going to say that gruff old man Wayne has the prettiest petunias in the whole trailer park.
- Eddie sneaks into the Hawk with his best friend Ronnie to watch action movies and thinks Snake Plissken, Han Solo and Conan the Barbarian are cool.
- Eddie talks for hours about the intricacies of Elven politics in Tolkien.
- Eddie read comics as a kid and hid them all over the house "like a little squirrel" under the bed, behind the nightstand, under the rug. Wayne found his Uncanny X-Men in the freezer between stacks of tv dinners. Also, "Hellfire Club" comes from these X-Men comics.
- Floor time! There's a part where Eddie is literally just lying on his back on his bedroom floor counting down from a million. When Wayne comes home, Eddie army crawls on his belly to the doorway to see him.
- Eddie reads Gormenghast paperbacks, gothic fantasy novels. It mentions that Wayne saved them from the house fire along with Eddie’s guitar. It never says how/when Eddie originally got his guitar.
- Eddie says lots of cc’s original songs have D&D references. It's implied that he writes them. One is called “Fire Shroud” after a spell
- Eddie is called Freak King at school and Munson Junior or just Junior around town and he hates all of it
- Eddie talks about having anxiety a lot and it's implied he has had panic attacks in the past
- Eddie is the lead singer and guitarist of cc. He started the band with Ronnie specifically because it was required to participate in the school talent show.
- Neither Wayne or Al graduated high school. When Eddie (temporarily) drops out, Al celebrates.
- Eddie doesn't cook. He doesn't even own a spatula. The smell of cooking in their house actually shocks him and gives him a deep longing for family meals, which Al uses to manipulate him
- Eddie jokes about being into Saturday Night Fever and strikes the pose a couple times.
- Eddie knows how to hotwire and how to pick locks. Al taught him this at the age of ten. Eddie is "disgusted" with himself any time he does either of those things.
- Eddie "drives like a monster" when he's upset about something.
- Eddie smokes cigarettes occasionally. Weed is mentioned a lot in the book but it never says anything about Eddie smoking it or doing any drugs. He either doesn't smoke much or he hasn't tried anything yet in the book. Also, he’s just now meeting Rick. But It’s pretty clear after everything he went through why he would start
- There's lots of mentions of PBR and Bud Light. Though Eddie says he doesn't like to drink after his shifts at the Hideout (where he's a barback). He mostly drinks off-brand Big Buy soda in the book (he calls it "pop")
- Eddie's parents were married on March 12th, 1966. The date is inscribed on the bottle of their wedding wine. Eddie asks what kind it is and Al says they only had 'red or white' kind of money
- Al breaks out the wedding wine (to manipulate Eddie, you guessed it) it's red wine and Eddie really, really likes it
- Eddie went to War Zone with his dad for supplies for the truck heist (spike strips, coveralls, etc)
- Eddie's band played Exciter by Judas Priest at the talent show. The song was only approved because they emphasized the "priest"
- There was another (?) talent show in Winter of 1981 where Eddie's band played "Prowler" and they were kicked off stage halfway through because the song was considered Satanic, and the PTA visited all their parents for trying to convert everyone to Satanism.
- Eddie imagines hitting his dad twice. Once with a glass bottle and once with a metal wrench. (He should've- oops who said that)
- The only hug Eddie gets in the book is when his dad first comes back, Eddie knows it's the first step in his cycle of showing up, using Eddie and leaving, but Eddie still accepts the hug and feels guilty for enjoying it.
- It's implied Eddie gets close to tears a couple times in the book, but the only time they actually spring up is when his mom's favorite song (from Muddy Waters) comes on in the truck radio while Eddie is doing the heist with his dad and feeling awful about it. Eddie has several flashbacks of dancing with her to this song, it seems like his happiest memory that he always returns to.
- Whenever Eddie is doing what his dad wants (hotwiring, charming a person into their plans) he puts on what he calls his "best Al Munson smile" and he's terrified that it will eventually take over his whole face. There's a part at the end where Eddie is sitting in a jail cell and says "All I want to do is tear my face off. If a new one grows in it's place, maybe it'll make me a different person. Someone who isn't such a complete fuckup."
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