Welcome to SID Guardian!

[trobadora]

Hi, and welcome to SID Guardian!

sid_guardian is a noticeboard/community for:

• linking Guardian fanworks of all kinds


• linking to Guardian-related news (incl. info about the actors and their other roles) and meta (incl. serious meta, squee, picspams, episode reactions, writing-meta)


• making Guardian recs, and


• making fanworks-finder/rec-finder posts.


• ETA: You can also post content directly to the comm.

Which is to say, it's for letting Guardian fans find each other on Dreamwidth. :)

Please link your Guardian-related posts here! Whether novel or drama, this is the place for it. Don't be shy, and please encourage other Guardian posters to link as well. You can also link to/rec things that have been posted by others.

As the comm develops, we hope to introduce social, discussion and/or prompt posts, but given it's December, we thought we'd start small and manageable.

To kick things off, if you feel like it, tell us a bit about how you ended up in Guardian fandom! Or let us know your favourite character or scene from Guardian, or what your power would be if you were Dixingren.

And remember, there's no tension that can’t be relieved with a lollipop. And if there is, try two lollipops.

Comments

[trobadora]

now I want fic about SW & ZYL traversing literal non-orientable surfaces to try and find each other at the end of the drama. 8)

Hee! :D

Yeah, everything you say about the difference between drama!Shen Wei and novel!Shen Wei is exactly why it becomes very obvious very fast when a fic uses novel characterisation. (Also, I hadn't read enough of the novel to know, so I'm really sad to hear novel!Shen Wei doesn't care about Mianmian. Well, put that down as another drama thing I prefer! Ye Zun is a delight, and I loved the ending he got.)

I've heard a lot of people complaining about ZYL being downgraded to a normal human, but that's part of what makes him so great in the drama? I was just saying that somewhere else - did you see someone just linked a novel-vs.-drama post on the comm? Anyway, as you say:

but he reaches out to those from Dixing, he talks about how they're like humans, he comes to sympathize with them and understand their plight in a vaguely X-Men mutant kind of position--but in the novel the point is that the ghosts etc. most assuredly are N O T like humans, and novel!ZYL is not about sympathizing with the entities he's faced but about setting the nature of things right and keeping the world stable.

And here's where I really, really appreciate the drama's thematic focus, and the way they really heavily lean into that! So given that theme of "the villains of the week are mostly just looking for a better life, and ultimately everyone's just normal people", it fits really well that Shen Wei and Zhao Yunlan are no exception, but rather exemplify the same thing. And all the Haixingren/Dixingren relationships among minor characters are in some ways mirrors of theirs. All the love - for all that the worldbuilding has its holes, thematically the drama is really consistent. ♥

I think it's telling that for these lines the drama changed the focus from (novel) keeping the peace among spirits/stability across the realms to (drama) doing good and suppressing evil.

That's really fascinating! It's really interesting to me, the way the drama uses (some of) the novel's building blocks and builds something new out of them. Probably very frustrating to novel-verse fans, but a delight for me!

(Feel free to tl;dr at me any day, so long as you don't mind me tl;dr-ing right back at you. *g*)

[dayadhvam_triad]

To be fair, the relationship b/w SW and Mianmian in the novel is intrinsically different. There's no such "we grew up together" phase; they came into existence /backstory/ & then SW struck out on his own right away, without attachment to the other ghosts. Mianmian does call SW "brother" at certain pts in the novel, not really meaning the traditional familial sense but "we are the only two of our kind" sense. He's bitter about how SW is the Ghost Slayer and he's the one imprisoned under the Seal, when as far as he's concerned they're no different at their core. That said, he's more invested in SW than SW is invested in him, and I came out of the novel feeling sympathetic to him. YZ in the drama... er, I confess I didn't really buy the setup for him going bad (fell off a cliff & then believed he was abandoned, etc.) so I felt there was a lot of potential with his character but was dissatisfied by the execution. Basically, imo novel!Mianmian needed more time on the page that drama!YZ did get on screen, and I genuinely like novel!Mianmian while drama!YZ fell flat. (That said, Zhu Yilong rly does a great job playing YZ and YZ-pretending-to-be-SW.)

I don't mind ZYL being downgraded to normal human in the drama since that makes sense in-universe. (Though I would've liked to see ZYL using those powers purely just for the visuals. XD) & thanks for the heads up, I saw that post! will be popping over to tl;dr elsewhere soon... >___>

Yes! I love that thematic focus. The mirroring in the cases is great & ZYL's speech about how Dixingren are just like humans is Exhibit A of the theme, haha. :D

[trobadora]

Heh. I thought the set-up for Ye Zun worked really well in the drama - he was essentially kidnapped, abused and radicalised by the bad guys. And when he got out from under his abuser's thumb, he had something like five minutes to act on his own, during which he had a confrontation with the brother he'd been told all his life was responsible for the situation he was in. And then he got dumped into a pillar and left to stew in his resentments for 10,000 years. I feel for him a lot.

[dayadhvam_triad]

I think it's just a case of ymmv, personally I wasn't emotionally moved by the bad guys' treatment, confrontation w/ SW, & the following 10k yrs of non-communication. But I also have a strong bias toward the early eps 20+ of case arcs + the timetravel loop factor in itself, vs. the rest of the late 20s-to-end plot.

[trobadora]

That makes sense! Personally I love the ending, but I know a lot of people don't, and there's definitely something special about the earlier episodes.