halloween, or as it's also known, msa rewatch day,

Ship ask: Xie-wang/Wen Kexing

1. What made you ship it?

this moment. just this. i don't typically give an excess amount of thought to shipping on my first watchthrough of something, especially something i'm so captivated by. but this moment popped on my screen and i was like "HELLO?!"

i'm still entirely lukewarm about the necessity of the scene but i am all here for over the top unnecessary dramatic tension between these two murder babies villains.

2. What are your favourite things about the ship?

the contrast between the things they don't have in common and the things they do.

they're both orphans, they were both raised to be killers, they're both very good at what they do, they both desperately need to be genuinely loved and both have the capacity for intense and terrifying and consuming devotion. they're both leaders in their own right.

but for one, their lives were so different. wen kexing grew up in hell, with no one to take care of him--he had no one to really rely on, even luo-yi. we know about the beatings and we can guess about more. xie'er ostensibly grew up in luxury, with servants and his yifu. with the way he reacts to yifu slapping him, it feels likely that's never happened before. but it's also like--whew, is that a fucked up relationship. manipulative and horrifying. two entirely different types of fucked up, one because of isolation and one because of, well, zhao jing. which puts all their hard and sharp and soft edges in different places, all their hurts in a different order, all their expectations for relationships and concepts of self and their needs.

they both have style, education, an appreciation for refinement and fashion and such. xie'er's grew out of having been raised around luxury and his deep and abiding desire to simply be furen, i swear, and to be seen and accepted and enough and Pleasing. and kexing's grew from obsessively learning about the outside world, about other kinds of people and life and plunging himself into these constructs of importance that had no bearing on any of his lived experience but creating a self that fit into them regardless because he needed something.

and in spite of xie'er growing up more pampered and with access to more people, i think wen kexing has the advantage of him when it comes to caring for someone else. he had a-xiang, after all, and part of the point was that they kept each other human even in a place of ghosts. i think xie'er still has a bit of a journey ahead of him where that's concerned. wen kexing did, too, when he came out of gui gu, but i think he had the advantage.

their motives/purpose also differ considerably in a lot of ways. wen kexing has been consumed with revenge his whole life, with his own plans--and xie'er with his yifu's plans. xie'er has always deferred to yifu, while kexing made a point of becoming gui gu guzhu so he would not be accountable to anyone. they have kind of opposite journeys they need to take where that's concerned. xie'er needed to figure out how to value himself outside of zhao jing, how to see himself as a complete person, how to figure out what he wanted out of his life and where his own ambitions would take him and what kind of leader he was without a leash. kexing needed to figure out how to rely on someone, how to see himself as a human at all, how to accept what he actually wanted out of life and allow himself to have it, even to the point of learning a different kind of leadership as a partner and a subordinate.

these things could lead to such an interesting ship dynamic. it could be chaos and fire and explosions or it could be soft. thinking about where in their stories do they meet, what struggles are they currently having and how do they clash or overlap? in what ways can they help each other or hurt each other? xie'er could be expecting yifu and instead he gets someone who is so straightforward when he's mean and genuine when he's soft and who doesn't hide his sarcasm behind sweet lies or turn any moment of concern or care into a subtle transaction. kexing could, to his complete bafflement, experience the full weight of someone's obsessive jealous devotion. they could make each other so much worse. we just don't know.

3. Is there an unpopular opinion you have on your ship?

i don't know any opinions about this ship at all. that seems to be a general thing with me. my opinion is that they should kiss.

Final thoughts on the prequel trilogy:

Basically, I don’t hate it. In fact, I think Revenge of the Sith is a good movie. It’s (mostly) well paced, it hits the emotional points, and it does a pretty good job of showing Anakin’s descent into Vader. 

Putting the rest of the post behind a cut, because it got loooong

The Phantom Menace is pretty ubiquitously terrible though. Like, except for the podracing sequence and the last maybe 20 minutes, which were actually interesting (exclusively due to the action sequences) it was just so. badly. paced. I had to watch in 10 to 20 minute increments, taking breaks, because otherwise it just was incredibly boring. And I don’t want to rag on a kid who was most likely just doing his best, but the kid’s performance was kind of awful. Except for the moment where he ran back to Shmi when he was supposed to leave with Qui-Gon, I did not believe a minute of his acting. I don’t expect too much from child actors, because they’re kids, but I can’t help but think that they could have found a better kid to play child Anakin. And then, of course, most egregiously, there’s the veritable list of racist, antisemitic, and especially orientalist stereotypes this movie is rife with. It’s like George Lucas took every negative racial and ethnic stereotype he could find to create the aliens. I almost turned the movie off within the first 15 minutes, when it became apparent that only human characters (and droids) would get to speak without American and English accents, while all the alien characters got vaguely Middle Eastern/South and East Asian/South American accents. Watto was such an antisemitic stereotype and was incredibly uncomfortable to watch. Jar Jar Binks was just... I have no words for how annoying I found Jar Jar Binks. I could go on, but this is not an essay on racism in Star Wars, so I won’t. And I have to mention the CGI. Mostly, I get it, it was a new and exciting technology and they wanted to use it, but it was also 90s CGI and it was fucking terrible and obvious. It was really jarring to see what looked like video game sequences in a live action film.

TBH at this point I don’t remember all the details of Attack of the Clones; I just powered through it without writing anything down or stopping to think about it too much, and right now my brain is mostly full of Revenge of the Sith. Mostly what I remember about AotC is that while the pacing was still kinda bad, I appreciated the way the story unfolded. Going into this watchthrough, I knew only the basic shapes of the Star Wars storylines. I vaguely knew that Palpatine was bad and there would be war at some point, but I had no idea of the specifics. For me, at least, AotC did a really good job of muddling up the motivations for war on both sides, and keeping the truth of the extent of Palpatine’s manipulations until the very end. Throughout the movie there was this increasing sense that both sides had only a very vague idea of what they were afraid of and why they were going to war. It wasn’t exactly clear who the separatists were or why they wanted to separate, or even why that would be a bad thing, except that it would lead to war. Maybe this will become clearer if I ever rewatch this movie, but I like that I was left with the impression that the entire Clone War is absolutely pointless in that both sides really just want peace and the only reason they don’t just sit down and talk it out is that Palpatine is being a manipulative evil fuck.

I also have a lot of muddied feelings (a running theme with this post) about the introduction of the Padme/Anakin romance. Honestly, mostly to me it felt creepy and forced, but I have a tendency to see romance as forced so I’m not sure I trust my feelings in that regard. I do feel I’m justified in being creeped out by Anakin’s fixation on Padme, but that’s coherent as I can get about it right now. I don’t think they’re some kind of epic destined love, except for the part where Anakin is unhealthily fixated on Padme and needs all the therapy in the world.

RotS was definitely the best movie of the bunch, and like I said up top, I (mostly) really enjoyed it. I spent the first half being incredibly frustrated with the way the Jedi Council was treating Anakin and giving him absolutely contradictory and unfollowable advice about how to deal with his feelings, which I already wrote a post about, and then I spent the second half of the movie being progressively more horrified, interspersed with eye-rolling at the unnecessary drama of the big final fight. Like, really guys? you’re swinging on cables over a literal lava pit, and you can’t put down your giant lightning swords for a minute just so you can get to safety? And then that all went away very quickly at the conclusion to that fight. I obviously knew where things were going, but I wasn’t prepared for Anakin/Vader being burned alive. I just wasn’t. 

Probably the worst part of RotS is the wrap-up. It just went on for so. freaking. long. There were about five points where they could have cut it off and it would have been appropriately dramatic.

I think if I ever do rewatch these movies, it will be so I can listen to the music more carefully. I tried, but at the really important parts I was mostly too busy actually watching the movie to think about what the music was doing. There was definitely some interesting development of the main musical themes, though, and I would like to eventually go back and analyze them.