The Untamed - name guide?

[marycrawford]

Okay, so I tripped and accidentally fell into 50 episodes of The Untamed on Youtube, and reader, I watched ALL of them. Quoting some of my reactions from fannish chat:

wei ying is reminding me more and more of Miles Vorkosigan
locked up in a cave with a mob who wants to kill him
and now they’re sheepishly asking him what to do next
it’s fabulous

wei ying is pontificating in front of the previously murderous mob
and one of them is saying “stop this nonsense, just kill me now”
he is SO miles

 still getting such vorkosigan vibes from our hero:
 “you set him up!”
“if I set him up he wouldn’t just have a wounded arm..”

“stop bluffing to intimidate us!” yells the guy holding a sword at his jugular
<3

I do love Wei Ying a LOT, and Lan Zhan slowly started growing on me, also the very VERY fraught and blink-you'll-miss-it secondary pairing I'm not sure is book canon (but probably is? Lan Zhan's adorable shipper big brother and the little :koff: innocent in the big hat?)

I don't think I want to write fanfic for it or stare endlessly at pics of the main actor(s) the way I do with Guardian, but I would still like to watch it again now that I know What Will Happen and also possibly have some slightly better chance of telling everyone apart. Though I will also probably skip a lot of the really harrowing moments, because, just fyi if you're considering watching it, this show is like GoT in brutality and that's not even counting the zombies.

So, before I rewatch, is there a name guide or person guide or something to The Untamed, for hapless non-Chinese-speaking fans, that a kind soul could link me to, that shows me how everyone is related to everyone else and what all their names are? Or something like that twitter thread from Pru, that explains a lot of naming nuance as well as cracking me up?

I feel like I only JUST got the hang of how it works in modern shows like Guardian, what the -lao and -ge suffixes can mean, etc, but this is something else again: everyone has like five names and then they CHANGE them or get adopted by a different clan and IDEFK. Help?

Comments

[bonibaru]

I don't think I want to write fanfic for it or stare endlessly at pics of the main actor(s) the way I do with Guardian, but I would still like to watch it again now that I know What Will Happen and also possibly have some slightly better chance of telling everyone apart.

This is exactly me. I'm reading the occasional really adorable fic my friends link to, much as I have been doing for Good Omens, which I also enjoyed but felt very little need to pursue alternative stories for.

Come sit by me and let's talk about how much I adore the dimpled angel in the big hat and the man he loves and all the AUs where they both make better choices and overcome obstacles to become the second best power couple in all the lands.

[marycrawford]

Yeah, I feel the same way about GO, too: fun but not something I'm obsessing over. It's been ages since I obsessed about any fandom, though, so this is quite the rebirth for me. XD

Dimpled angel <3 I do love him, and I love to watch him - seeing his whole arc unfold was--I don't want to spoiler anyone reading these comments too much--it was QUITE A THING.

[bonibaru]

It was a thing indeed and possibly the one thing I would want to rewrite into an AU - BUT - it would have to be a sprawling complex 450k word AU in order (akin to the original source novel) to do full justice to it and I would be dead long before it finished, lol.

[marycrawford]

Oh man, yeah, I can imagine - I would LOVE to read that but it feels like it would be very selfish to encourage you to write yourself to death like the Lord of Dixing in Guardian.

(I am hoarding all the XXL Guardian fic for the holidays, and speaking of things I would love to read, I'm really looking forward to the Crimson Lotus. <3)

[bonibaru]

I really look forward to your thoughts!