Focus on: the episode 1 intro narration

[trobadora]

Location of scene: episode 1, 2:09 - 4:00

The very first bit of the drama, after the opening credits! It sets the scene, provides basic worldbuilding context for the drama's world, and satisfies censorship, framing the drama explicitly as sci-fi rather than the novel's fantasy from the start.

(It's hard to say at which point this genre switch was decided on, since IIRC when they started working on it the supernatural had not yet been banned. We do know Dixing was named "Dixing" very late in the game, dubbing the name over whatever they used in the original dubbing, and it may have been renamed more than once. Rumour was that it was originally 地府 - Difu, aka Hell - but what's certain is that at this trailer has it as 地界 - Dijie. 地星 "Dixing", with 星 - star, which is a component in all Chinese planet names, is definitely the more sci-fi name. *g*)

At any rate, let's get started!

Haixing, an ancient planet. Tens of thousands of years ago, an alien race came to this planet on a spaceship.
海星，一颗古老的星球。几万年前一群外星异族乘坐天外飞船 来到这个星球上。



( Haixingren, Dixingren, and Yashou, oh my! )

Questions:

• Do you remember what you were thinking the first time you saw this? Did it surprise you, or did you already know about it? And is it just me, or is the narrator speaking very fast? (Why? Could they not spare a few more seconds? :p)


• I have to admit, even though it's censorship-caused I really like what the script did with the sci-fi framing of the drama. I love aliens, and that approach - making Dixingren a different species - opens up some of the themes of the drama which are very important to me. (Everything about refugees and immigration and bigotry, and people being people ...) How do you feel about it?


• What do you think about the ancestors of Dixingren and Yashou? One group or two? Any speculation on why they came to this planet and settled here - or why some of them chose to live underground? (The environment doesn't look all that hospitable!) Or why they were so susceptible to mutation?


• What happened to their spaceship? The visuals suggest it didn't actually land, but instead beamed people down - is it still around somewhere?


• For the war, I wish we'd have seen something more like this in the flashbacks! Something that felt more like there was actual fighting going on. Do you think these fight scenes were what they had planned for originally? (I alwasy wondered if the script for the flashback episodes had to be cut down to bare essentials at the last moment ... they're so condensed!)


• About the inconsistencies about who fought and who won - on the one hand, given that the narrator of this intro explicitly aligns himself with Haixingren, you could take this for the official Haixing narrative. That would account for a lot of discrepancies and also the focus on Haixingren winning! But on the other, Shen Wei definitely knows better, and Fu You is still revered among the Yashou, so you'd think Ying Chun would, too. Is there a way to reconcile this, if only for the purpose of fic? (Help! *g*)


• Conversely, if things had been more like it's suggested here, the flashbacks would have had to be very different. What would Shen Wei's role have been, in a world with no alliance? Any thoughts?

So, let's talk about this scene! Tell me any and all of your thoughts, I would love to hear what everyone thinks!