ExtraPenguin

30. Favorite unanswered question (and what you want the answer to be)
I spent a few days pondering this on the backburner, as I sort of went up against some unanswered questions ("What is the Hallows' deal?") earlier in this meme. I actually had a bit of trouble coming up with an unanswered question! *g*

That said: the expedition to the surface that Wu Tian'en was part of and was led by mirror girl's dad. Why did almost all of them die immediately? Why did the expedition leader go all evil (and later kill Shen Xi)? How did Wu Xiaojun and mirror girl end up on the surface, and what happened to their mothers?

...as for what I want the answers to be, well, um. The wives sneaked out to Haixing to find out WTF was going on, had to bring the kids because there was no childcare available for them, found out what happened and split ways to find their respective husbands. Wu Tian'en's wife found him but came to some tragic end (idk, traffic accident? something that wouldn't get on Zhao Xinci's radar) so he became a single dad; the expedition leader's wife found him, but he'd gone evil and they spent a few years raising their daughter together before the pressure rose too much. Expedition leader's wife stashes the kid in a mirror and gets shot by Zhao Xinci, who may or may not realize the connection to expedition leader, and then expedition leader retaliates by taking Shen Xi hostage and poofing them both out of existence when Zhao Xinci's willing to sacrifice his wife for the sake of taking down one guy from Dixing. And the expedition leader went evil because he saw Haixing's plethora of everything compared to Dixing's squalor, found the Guardian Lantern, and was corrupted by the Hallows. This would also explain why the SID has the Lantern!

This is the end of my 30 Days of Guardian. I hope you've enjoyed it! The regular more irregular content will resume soonish, though a bunch of stuff has been dumped on my plate for the rest of October.

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26. What Dixing power do you wish would've existed in the show?
Something hilariously stupid! As cracky as possible! We already got the ability to "harden one's lower body", so why not the ability to compact dirt into snowballs or whatever? Alternatively, something mundanely useful used for not-evil, like the person Ye Zun ate the "de-blood clothing" power from operating a laundry, or Bao Laosan with his soil-composition-altering power going into civil engineering or something. Zhu Jiu operating a taxi service. All the mundane or comedic uses of superpowers!

...in the realm of actually answering the question, I think something touch-based – say, being able to absorb all the information of a book, figure out people's true identities, all just by touch – would've been cool. Or some other sort of power that'd jeopardize Shen Wei's double identity separation. Or another person with Shen Wei's power of learning/study to be a spanner in the works!

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24. The one thing you most wish they'd expanded on because it was a cool idea and needed more details
The fact that Shen Wei slept for 10k years, buried beneath the earth! He's a time traveler into the future! I wanted everything about his early days in modernity and how he adapted. In 10k years the culture must've changed a lot, both topside and in Dixing, so we have Shen Wei with his half-remembered harvest festivals and counting time by full moons stuck either in Dixing with the ... Algae Festival or whatever and zero stars or Moon, or in Haixing another fully unfamiliar set of everythings. They cheated a bit and had everyone speak modern Mandarin and write with modern hanzi, but the cultural setting – from material culture to hairstyles – has changed dramatically.

Shen Wei's adapted admirably well to it, but I want the investigation of the little things that he hasn't had the time or opportunity to perfect and thus screws up with in odd yet consistent ways. I want Shen Wei nostalgic for something from his youth, even if he knows that the modern era is a much better place to live. I want something that acknowledges Shen Wei as alien to both Haixing and Dixing, a relic of yore with no place to go and find home save those he carves out himself. And I want him to find that he has friends who're okay with him being a time-traveling alien who had to learn all of modernity as an adult. I want to give him a little corner of the universe where he doesn't have to pretend.

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22. Favorite science moment
This is more of a Science! moment than an actual science moment, but: every occasion where someone else corrects stuff on Professor Ouyang's whiteboard. Both Li Qian just being a BAMF and correcting the reaction equation thingy or whatever when she was but a test subject, and Shen Wei following the thingy through when he breaks into the lab with Zhao Yunlan and Da Qing.

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But announcements banner first: 1. Once I'm done with the meme, I'll make an index masterpost with links to all the answers. 2. The Guardian icon battle pt 4 deadline went and there are pretty icons there!

20. Most appealing point for a canon divergence AU
Episode 20! (This is a very fittingly numbered question.) You can diverge so that Zhao Yunlan and Shen Wei can stay at the SID and Zhu Jiu stays captive (Zhao Xinci comes to take a look in person?), diverge so that Zhu Jiu succeeds in his Hallows kidnapping, diverge so that Zhu Jiu stays alive, diverge so that Bai Suxia stays alive and we don't get any evil emo Wang Xiangyang, diverge so that Ye Zun and Zhao Yunlan's conversation goes differently and Ye Zun gets hit by the clue bat sooner, etc. So many options! And that was in under 5 minutes of thought.

It's a major gamechanger episode, so if you adjust the river bend a bit, the ship will sail downstream into a very different direction.

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18. Least favorite villain
WANG XIANGYANG. So annoying! So much incoherent ranting! So much manpain! So boring! I missed Zhu Jiu, at least his rants were a bit more coherent and his Ye Zun stanning was cute occasionally. Fuck, have Wang Xiangyang die so we can have Bai Suxia incoherently ranting due to womanpain with a baby in her arms/while heavily pregnant, which would at least be novel. Argh.

(I just watched episode 29 for the rewatchalong, and I was happy when he died, as it meant an end to his manpain. No more Wang Xiangyang! We can get Ye Zun's constant o.o and :o instead! Yay!)

(Also the whole linchpin of his hatred at Zhao Xinci was stupid. Everyone's heard of blood types, and while blood type personality stuff isn't a common belief in China, surely someone could've explained it to him in small words? Or he might've noticed the rare blood type donor come in? In conclusion: ARGH.) (Yes, yes, grief makes people irrational and he was manipulated, I know, but comparing his reaction upon losing a loved one to even Zhao Xinci's, his is so very OTT.)

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But first: I've bought a pair of Bose noise-canceling headphones; let's see how this goes. The whole control panel app thing is very ??? and I am not sure if I want to move into the future.


16. Favorite conversation between Zhao Yunlan and Shen Wei
Well, depends on how one defines favorite! My current favorite is the one in the hospital, where Zhao Yunlan saves the day with his wire cutters and they have this conversation:
Zhao Yunlan: "I would miss you if you were gone."
Shen Wei: :o

It's also a nice end for their kitchen scene argument, since Shen Wei was in the doghouse and now he's promised he'll tell his secrets eventually. (One can argue whether he fulfilled the promise, but he did promise, and Zhao Yunlan trusts him a lot all the time.)

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14. Favorite case villain
I actually had a debate on who counted as a villain, since I don't really count e.g. Wang Yike as the villain for that case (the true villains are the three rapist dudes). In fact, every suggestion I came up with was met with "but that person's not the real villain, the real villain is this other person you dislike!" (Wang Yike, Zheng Yi, Wu Xiaojun, etc) So I asked for what people would like as a replacement question.

14. Favorite minor character relationship
Oh no, how do I choose?! Restricting my analysis to platonic relationships, as I already talked about rarepairs, I'll say that I love Shen Wei & Li Qian. Shen Wei is very invested in this mentorship thing, and wants the very best for his student (their relationship is very very close and he fusses over her a lot in eps 1-2), and Li Qian keeps sending stuff to Professor Shen via anonymous e-mails, like the blindness cure and the plea for help after Sha Ya electrocutes her.

If it's favorite relationship between two minor characters, then it's either Zhu Hong & Lin Jing for secondary characters, as they have a subtle yet hilarious friendship where Zhu Hong gets to thwap him upside the head, or Professor Zhou & Professor Ouyang, solely for the hilarity of Professor Zhou constantly wishing Shen Wei were there and Professor Ouyang wishing Zhou would STFU about his prize cabbage.

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12. Least favorite headcanon
Using the definition of headcanon as something which is not contradicted by canon: Shen Wei as royalty.

1. Sorry, there is only that much Special I can take in a character. He's already got the most specialest power and was stripped from his native time period to his far future, where he is treated as a returned legend and in some circles worshipped. Tacking on "secret royalty" to the end of the list is officially Too Much.


2. A lot of his issues related to being an effective politician make much more sense if he wasn't raised to rule and didn't expect to be given decisionmaking power over Dixing.


3. A common-born person being thrust to greatness is much more compelling than the whole "royal heir raised on a farm" trope or any variant of it, and has less unfortunate implications about the existence of "better folk".


4. I am at heart a grouchy republicanist who doesn't see the point of royals. Making Shen Wei (or anyone, really) royal-born is a big, big minus in my book.

(If we're talking about "identity headcanons", my least favorite is Shen Wei and/or Zhao Yunlan being ace, since I've experienced ace headcanons as the opening salvo of homophobic purity wankers one time too many and I now want to run the opposite way for my own protection if someone declares a character ace. If we're talking about "blatantly contradicting canon" headcanons, my least favorite is Dixingians not having bodily functions, because we see them use the loo on camera repeatedly when common narrative convention is to leave out everyone's bathroom visits. We see more Dixingians than Haixingians use the loo FFS!)

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