Woxin 17-21 (spoilers)

[rasetsunyo]

Comments

[flemmings]

But who calls their Mary Sue 'elegant fish'? Love the apposite quote but sorta wish I hadn't seen the name hanzi for these guys.

(Knew a woman who said she was thinking of calling her daughter Ocean. Fine if her husband's name hadn't been Fish. The effect of the combination truly hadn't occurred to her and she wound up calling the kid Emily. Would Mr. Ya had done the same.)

[rasetsunyo]

Hahaha their names are pretty unusual from the modern viewpoint. Some of the military types have these wonderful names, Granite Eagle, Black Wing, Son Leopard, things like that.

[paleaswater]

Oh, Ya Yu is the given name. Back then what we think of as the last name was never part of the name. Her last name would have been the tribal name, which is Ji for the Yue kingdom. But I suppose the Chinese have different feelings for certain characters. Yu, beside being one of the oldest characters in the lexicon, has certain connotations of auspiciousness and feminity which do not exist for the English word fish. Xishi's beauty is describe as 沉鱼，i.e driving the fishes to the deeps. So everyone thought that Ya Yu was a particularly elegant and archaic name.

[paleaswater]

I had to go and watch epi 19 again. Ah, that scene in the palace when Gou Jian goes to surrender to Fu Chai. The look on Fu Chai's face after Gou Jian leaves his sword and walks away is quite indescribable. Talking about erotesis. But really, there's no good explanation for Fu Chai's fasination for Gou Jian, except love at first sight. ^__^ And the more I watch that scene the more I'm convinced. Hehe

[flemmings]

When his family was killed by the Chu king, he joined the Wu king's court, led the king's army to victory over Chu, then dug up the grave of the former Chu King, and stripped and whipped his corpse in public

What does it say that this strikes me as perfectly natural behaviour, not something remotely deserving the label 'vindictive'? The man killed his *family*. He's supposed to go 'shrug- so there you are, Mom and Dad (or whoever). I defeated his kingdom and he's already dead so rest in peace'?

[paleaswater]

I know you would say that. ^__^ Considering that he had all of the Chu king's progenies and extended family killed and all the rest of the court enslaved, and sacked the city while he was at it, that would generally have been considered suitable vengeance to satisfy most people. And no one would have called him vindicative if he stopped there. Desecrating corpus back then was really held to beyond the pale, it's something that would have been seen as only slightly better than cannibalism, if that. People just didn't do it, let alone a nobleman. And he did a few other nasty things to his compatriots at the Wu court, so that wasn't an isolated instance.

[flemmings]

Oh alright. Nasty nasty man. (I have real Issues with 'kill the man I hate and all his generations' thing.) Hope he dies in a fire. This is the guy who reminded rasetsunyo of Hisui? I may cry.