fairandfatalasfair

Watching The Untamed and it’s honestly kind of fucking me up thinking about how young they all were.

The ages are kind of papered over by the fact that they’re played by the same set of 20-something actors across a supposed 16 year timespan. But it’s stated that most of them were teenagers when all this started.

Accomplished teenagers! Talented teenagers! But still teenagers.

They were expected to take risks, to fight monsters, to face challenges. They were prepared for that.

They weren’t prepared for a world that descended into war when nobody was looking, where armed troops show up at your door and threaten the lives of everyone you love if you don’t give yourself up as a hostage.

How old was Lan Wangji when he returned from his important mission to find his home in flames? When instead of grieving, he had to leap into desperate battle to give his family a chance to escape. When he gave himself up to save a man who later betrayed him, and walked for days on a broken leg with his jaw clenched and a knife always at his back, showing no weakness, giving his captors no satisfaction from his pain. When he went to war behind his brother, and earned himself a reputation to make even the strongest step carefully - a beautiful, luminous title earned in blood and pain and desperate exhausted struggle. (Wars are not light-filled, no matter who fights them)

How old was Wei Wuxian when he lay on the floor of his childhood home, and tried to convince himself his right hand was a small price to pay for his family’s safety? When he fled through the night from the bloodsoaked scene of his clan’s destruction, heart pounding and tears stinging his eyes, hunted and terrified. When he stood in an inn far too close to Lotus Pier, with the weight of his siblings’ safety on his shoulders, and no idea what to do? When he crouched outside Lotus Pier with no plan, and no hope, and had to entrust his brother’s life to the goodwill of a near-stranger. When he begged a girl who owed him nothing to help him cut out his own heart and offer it to the brother he loved, when he faced death in the burial mounds and found revenge instead.

How old was Jiang Cheng when he drove himself seven days without sleep from Muxi mountain to Lanling, exhausted and terrified? When he collapsed in the wet grass outside his home, crying for the loss of his entire clan. When he stepped out into an open street and gave himself up to his enemies, because there were soldiers closing in on someone he loved. When he went to war in earnest for the first time, with the tattered remains of his clan at his back, and the gnawing uncertainty of what had happened to his brother twisting his soul.

Jin Zixuan walked those seven days and nights too, with no brother waiting for him in danger. Lan Xichen fled into the night with a collection of sacred texts, leaving his uncle behind him, maybe to die, and his brother still missing. Wen Qing took on the burden of dozens of lives when she was still too young to hold a sword or a silver needle, and she drove herself to the breaking point to keep them safe.

The stories about the war and the aftermath call them heroes, and legends, and monsters - Hanguang Jun and Sandu Shengshou and the Yiling Patriarch. And nobody pictures teenagers who were asked to give far too much, far too young.