Bonus Podcast (with Transcript) 2022 November: The Untamed for the Uninitiated

This month the team is trying out something new! Vrai and Dee try to explain the premise and appeal of megahit Chinese drama The Untamed to complete newcomer Alex. 

Want to hear more episodes of the team giving bite-sized explanations of stuff they're passionate about? We wanna hear your feedback!

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ALEX: All right! Hello, everyone, and welcome to our exciting November bonus episode of Chatty AF. I am Alex, your sort-of host today. And with me I have good friends Vrai and Dee. And before we begin (none of you have any way to confirm this, as this is not a visual medium, but you’ll just have to trust me), I am wearing my Chatty AF T-shirt today from our merch store.

DEE: [crosstalk] Hell yeah.

ANNIE: And it is so comfy, [Chuckles] it is so soft, and the print looks really nice, and of course, it came all the way to Australia in a healthy… about five weeks, so international shipping works very nicely.

We have some new exciting holiday things for the holiday season up in our merch store, so, hey, have a check on that while you’re listening today.

Today, I am going to be listening to Vrai and Dee telling me about the exciting world of The Untamed and its novelizations, which have a different name, I think. This is how little I know. [Chuckles]

VRAI: All right. Yeah, I was about to… So, my—

DEE: We’re just gonna be selling you on this. And yeah, it’ll be fun.

VRAI: Hard. Selling hard!

ALEX: I’m excited. Take it away.

VRAI: I’ve been pushing for this for months. Yeah. So, one of the things that I always thought would be fun about these bonus episodes, because they’re a little bit more looser format is… Y’all may have noticed that the recommendations have a little bit broader umbrella than our actual site content, where we include stuff from other East Asian media and Western content that has a direct inspiration from anime, or, in the case of animation, is like a co-production, that kind of thing.

And so, I have been begging for months and months and months, “Oh, please. Oh, please. Can we talk about The Untamed/Mo Dao Zu Shi?” And so here we are!

All right, so, Alex, I guess, before I explain things, what do you know about this?

ALEX: It is a Chinese historical fantasy series based on some books. It has a lot of very pretty men with luscious, flowing hair and luscious, flowing robes. There’s magic, I think, and maybe some of them are gay. That’s kind of the extent of it. So I’m excited to know the specifics, because as you can tell, that’s pretty broad and could probably apply to a whole genre of C-dramas.

DEE: I mean, Alex, pretty much, you summed it up. If I was going to quick-pitch this to somebody, what you just said is basically what I would tell them, so you got it!

ALEX: I’m gonna get a good grade in The Untamed. [Chuckles]

DEE: That’s right.

ALEX: It’s possible to want and achieve. So, what are the details? If you want to give me more than that elevator pitch, where would you begin?

VRAI: All right, so let’s see. Let’s do it this way. I will do a little bit of the general background and then, Dee, you as a person with a less poisoned brain who did recently watch the drama can tell the folks how you felt about it.

All right, so it’s based on a web novel that was then published as a series of five light novels called Mo Dao Zu Shi, which is variably translated. Seven Seas’ official translation is The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation. Tencent’s release of the donghua is called The Founder of Diabolism. That’s why people largely tend to refer to it by its original Chinese name. And The Untamed is yet a third title—in Chinese, is known as Chen Qing Ling, which is a pun on the main character’s weapon, because this is a series with very important weapon names, as well as, I believe, “to give an account.”

My God, I want people to correct me in the comments because I am a newbie baby to the world of C-dramas, danmei, and donghua.

So, the original novel started being published in October 2015, and it ran until March 2016. The drama came out in 2019, and it had an animated adaptation that ran for three seasons that ended pretty recently. The third season ran in 2021.

The version history is variably gay because of censorship reasons, dependent upon which version you get. So, the novels are explicitly queer. They feature a romance between the main couple.

DEE: And some supporting romances, right?

VRAI: No, actually! So, the funny thing about Mo Xiang Tong Xiu is that after her first novel, The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System, which frankly I could and would love to talk about for ages and ages… It’s a lot.

DEE: Another podcast maybe.

VRAI: Yeah. So, she reported that she really had a lot of trouble writing the B-couple for that series, so she really only writes one explicit romance with the main couple per series. And she’s got that Jun Mochizuki thing where her side characters have a lot of vibes but she’s not really good at writing secondary overt romance, which is why Jin Zixuan and Yanli are Like That.

DEE: Okay.

VRAI: Yeah. And so, the drama is not allowed to be explicitly queer because it aired on television. But there is a lot of stuff of the production team doing everything they can with visual metaphors and symbolism, and they even did a special recut of the extremely long 50-episode series that put a little more focus on the main couple, including recutting the ending to be a little bit more explicitly romantic.

ALEX: Hm. Interesting.

VRAI: It is hugely popular. She has three finished series. Scum Villain, which is sort of a parody in the vein of My Next Life as a Villainess; this one; and then The Heaven Official’s Blessing, which is also getting a drama coming up soon. It’s in post-production.

She is allegedly working on a fourth series, but there was a lot of speculation that she might have been arrested for a charge of publishing obscene works. And what we know about that is that if the person that might have been her in the arrest records was her, she has been released now. But because of the nature of things, there’s not really any more than a good guess of an answer.

ALEX: That’s rough. I mean, that’s a fascinating and very important context, to the… The classic case, of course, is someone might have a complaint, just “Ah! It’s so much less gay in the TV show! It’s obviously queerbaiting.” It’s like, there’s a lot to unpack about the surroundings around this. So, that’s really interesting and good to know and to highlight.

DEE: Yeah, the cultural and political context surrounding her works is… I feel like you have to foreground a lot of stuff with that.

ALEX: Yeah, for sure.

DEE: In the same way you do… Well, God, I mean, I’m not up to speed on what the actual legal situation is like in China. Is it as bad as Russia, where you can be actually thrown into prison for being gay, or…?

VRAI: So, it’s not technically illegal to portray queer content, but it is illegal to portray “obscene” (quote-unquote) content, and that gets used a lot to silence queer content and queer artists.

DEE: Okay, so, kind of like the obscene rule on YouTube that gets used to silence a lot of queer content.

VRAI: Yeah, not dissimilar. Yeah. And, boy, do I… I have tried my best to start dipping into studying, but I am still a babe, a baby babe.

DEE: No, that’s fair. I mean, getting into new genres, especially ones that have the kind of history that things like wuxia do… yeah, that takes a while. And you do have a job, so there’s only so much time in the day.

VRAI: So, I will turn it over to Dee, but before I do, here is the potted pl— plot summary. I got there! Because I feel like people get so caught up in pitching Mo Dao Zu Shi, or The Untamed, as “Oh my God, it’s so feelings! You don’t understand! They’re in love!” that people forget to relate what the actual plot beats are.

[Chuckling]

ALEX: Ah, my favorite thing. Just… “Okay, that’s great! What’s it about? What genre is it in? Is it actually good?”

VRAI: Uh-huh.

ALEX: [Chuckles]

VRAI: All right. Well, first of all, it’s a xianxia story, which is like wuxia except it involves explicitly Taoist themes and magic. And the story begins with our protagonist, Wei Wuxian, dying. And everyone’s like, “Wow, this is great! He was a bastard, aye?”

And then, several years after that, Wei Wuxian wakes up in somebody else’s body, and it is a teenager who has been cast out of his shitty father’s house and decided, “I’m going to do this forbidden ritual that will tear apart my soul, but it will summon the biggest, baddest asshole who ever lived and he will be required to do vengeance for me.”

And so, Wei Wuxian, who was known as the founder of demonic cultivation, which is… it has a long history, but for our purposes quickly here, it’s kinda like necromancy. It’s dark arts. And so, he got known for that. But as we meet him, we’re like, “Oh, this guy can’t possibly be so evil. What happened?” And then, immediately upon waking up in this new body, he runs into this guy who he clearly has a history with.

And so, the series is sort of this dual narrative of Wei Wuxian trying to unravel the mystery of why he was brought back and what’s happening and also the story of how he became the most reviled person in all of Fantasy China.

ALEX: Hm. Okay, intriguing!

VRAI: Dee?

DEE: Yes?

VRAI: How did you feel about it after I badgered you for months and months and months?

DEE: [Chuckles] It wasn’t months and months and months. It just took me forever to finish it, so it probably feels that way to you. And that was not because I wasn’t enjoying it. It was just that my TV time is limited and these episodes are 50 minutes apiece, so I have to make sure I had some time squirreled aside.

VRAI: It’s also long.

DEE: It is. It’s one of those where you look at it and you go, “Oh, 50 episodes. That’s fine. I mean, that’s like Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood length.” (Or even the original. It’s either one. It’s either Fullmetal Alchemist length.) “That’s doable.” But then you’re like, “Oh, wait. Every episode is an hour long. So it’s really more like committing to five seasons of Game of Thrones.”

Yeah, when you put it in that context, you’re like, “Oh, that’s a long series.” And it’s like, “Yeah. Yeah, it is.” [Chuckles] In the US, it would’ve run five years on HBO.

VRAI: But at the same time, it’s filmed like a soap opera, where instead of each episode feeling self-contained, it’s like, “And here is our amount of 50 minutes of the story this week. And now it cuts off at the point where we’re out of time, even if it’s not necessarily the point where it wraps up neatly in a bow,” so it’s extremely addicting and easy to binge.

DEE: It is. Yeah, the episode, sometimes it feels like it ends in the middle of a conversation. You’re like, “Um, why is the ending theme running now?” So, having it on Netflix was nice because I could just go into the next episode, and then when the scene was over, I could go, “Okay, that was the end of the episode,” and turn it off and go to bed.

[Chuckling]

DEE: So, I would watch an episode and then ten minutes of the next episode, on the regular. Those tricky writers.

No, I enjoyed it. The translation is rough. I feel like I have to start with that because the translation is rough, the official one on Netflix. Obviously, I don’t speak Chinese, so I can’t speak to the finer nuances of the word selection and the translation choices for this or that thing. Just in terms of: sometimes the sentences grammatically don’t really make sense. Any time they started to get really deep into the politicking or the plot point stuff, I think that that made the show a little harder for me to follow during those stretches.

When it was a character drama, then it was great and the slightly stiff translations weren’t really a problem because it wasn’t like they were having to convey a lot of complex thoughts, and the actors are really good, so the emotions came across in the scene even if the exact word choice is a little wonky. So, I really enjoyed it as a character drama. I enjoyed the central cast.

The TV show is framed a little strangely. So, my understanding is the books are framed in such a way that there are frequent time cuts, like you’re in the present day and then when you get to a point where it’s relevant to flashback to something that connects to what’s happening in the present day, you flashback. Is that a correct understanding, Vrai?

VRAI: Yes, it is sort of more intercut, where, as we get to points where Wei Wuxian is being haunted by the fuckups of his past, we will spend some time in the past getting a bite of that story.

DEE: Yeah. And it’s funny because the way the TV show does it is you get a couple episodes in the present day and then it smash-cuts you back to the past. And you stay in the past for like 30 episodes. And then you come back to the present day for the last 15, 20? Most of the show takes place in the past, I feel like. It’s close to an even split but not exactly.

And it was funny watching it because in the present-day sections, I could feel the narrative where it would have been like, “Oh, and this is where I explained and introduced these characters to you,” like those touchstones that would have chronologically gone in parallel with the first half of the story. So, the TV show splits it down the center. Which, I get why they did it that way because I think trying to bounce back and forth in a television format, especially since they’re using the same actors, would have been very confusing and not in a way that would have been fun for the story. So I get why they did it that way.

I was deeply, deeply into all the backstory stuff, and once we got to the present day, I was a little bit more checked out. But that could also be because they mur— Sorry, am I allowed to spoil?

VRAI: Um…

DEE: I’ll put it like this: the road to the end of The Untamed is paved with doomed women. How’s that?

VRAI: Yes, I think we can say that this show has… This series has like a 95% death rate for its female characters, which is mostly unique to this work.

And I think it’s an awkward sophomore work–type thing, because Scum Villain has a lot of really interesting female characters that are a lot of fun because it’s a parody of a wish-fulfillment harem novel. So, in twisting that, it can have a lot of fun with the girls that are already embedded in the plot. And Heaven Official’s Blessing, I am in the process of reading, but it has more naturally ingratiated some women in its big epic plot to do stuff.

But yeah, Mo Dao Zu Shi is… all of its women are ghosts.

DEE: Basically. I was excited when one of them didn’t die. I was like, “Oh, good for you, girl! You beat the system!” Well, I was impressed.

And I think if you were reading it and it cut back and forth, then the sudden dearth of female characters halfway through would maybe have been less noticeable.

I feel like I should mention that to the AniFem audience, that if you’re looking for a story with… The frustrating part is I think two of the female characters are quite well-written. And I think the actresses put a lot of oomph into fairly minimal roles, because this story is very much a boys’ club–type BL story, I feel like. But they were good characters, so losing them was like, “Well, that sucks!” [Chuckles]

VRAI: Well, and also The Untamed, to both its credit and then sort of a double-edged sword once it has to come back around to the fact that all of them die, gave its female characters a lot more to do than the novel. Yanli, I think, is sort of just this generic too-good-for-this-sinful-earth older sibling, who is the representative of all of Wei Wuxian ruining everything he touches. And Wen Qing is sort of just Wen Ning’s older sister.

DEE: Yeah. Well, the TV show did a lot more with them, so I missed them a lot when they were gone. They’re great! They’re great! Justice for Wen Qing.

But that having been said… No, I really enjoyed this. Honestly, the show… Some of the twists and turns at the end are very fun, even though it’s a little incomprehensible at parts—again, which might be the translation, or it could be that they were just kind of rushing through some plot points. Who knows? People who speak Chinese know! I don’t know. But some of the plot twists towards the end are really fun. So it did pull me back in at the end.

It has some very, very enjoyable villains, and in that way you’re like, “Oh, you suck so bad, but I really enjoy it when you’re on screen because you’re very magnetic” kind of characters. There’s a guy who I nicknamed… his name is Yang, so I nicknamed him the Yang-dere early in the story, like three episodes in.

VRAI: [Chuckles]

DEE: Which, it turned out, was like the best nickname I could have given this guy as the story continued.

VRAI: [crosstalk] I love him so much! He’s the funniest character in the whole series!

DEE: Oh, yeah, he’s a trash bag. He’s great. Yeah, there’s some very enjoyable villains. And then the central… It’s a love story. Yeah, it’s implicit in the TV show for censorship reasons, but those boys are so clearly in love! They’re so clearly in love! I liked to joke that it was a magic school rom-com wearing an epic war fantasy as a hat, and I still maintain that was basically true all the way through.

VRAI: Yeah.

DEE: And when it was a magic school rom-com, it was really, really fun! And honestly, I enjoyed the epic war fantasy stuff, too, for the most part. Again, the time cut… I would say, folks at home, if you want to get into this… And I finished it, and overall, I did enjoy it and I would recommend it to people who enjoy, again, epic… You need to enjoy epic fantasy series; otherwise, there’s not going to be really anything here for you. But if you like that style of storytelling, then I think you would enjoy this a lot.

It hits its emotional beats very well. And sometimes it’s just frickin’ beautiful. Cinematography-wise? Gorgeous! The set design? In the early episodes, I had to keep jumping back, rewinding and rewatching scenes, because I started to look at set design and forget to read the subtitles, and I was like, “Ah, damn it! I don’t know what’s happening. Just a second.”

[Chuckling]

VRAI: There is… And obviously I don’t speak Chinese either to any extent, but I have heard it reported that the set of subtitles over on Viki, which is a drama-specific streaming service and is free with ads for most of their content, has better subtitles than the Netflix ones.

DEE: That is good to know. Yeah. So maybe watch it over on Viki. Is that V-I-K-I?

VRAI: It is.

DEE: Okay, cool.

VRAI: Yeah. The series is so interesting, as somebody who is familiar with multiple versions of the story, because… well, because I’m a nerd, but also because in addition to having to tone down the main romance, it makes some changes to the plot that I am not clear on how much might have had to do with Hays Code–type requirements for television, but it does a lot… It invents… So, you know the big plot MacGuffin, the Yin Iron? Not a thing.

DEE: Huh!

VRAI: Yeah, it’s just this Tiger Tally that Wei Wuxian has invented and is an extremely powerful magic amplifier that everybody is kind of fighting over. And his increasing hubris makes everything worse and puts a giant target on his back, and then he gets too overconfident in his powers and slips up and things go real, real bad.

The TV series invents both this inherently corrupting Ring of Power–type object to pass around and for people to go after and invents a lot of reasons for him to be… It’s still basically the same character, and in some ways I really like the characterization from this show, but it’s definitely trying to make him more unambiguously heroic as the lead of this drama.

And it also… How can I say this as spoiler free as possible? It does a lot to make the villain more flatly evil, as well, where it cuts out a lot of relevant information, including a point that makes the last couple episodes really confusing, and also just doesn’t mention extenuating things or things that complicate some of his more fucked-up actions or just erase some genuinely good things that he did while being evil. So, it’s interesting.

DEE: Yeah, my general thought with the primary antagonist at the end—who I did see coming 8,000 miles away, but that’s part of the fun…

VRAI: Yeah, it’s very obvious!

DEE: I think you’re supposed to know, and it’s kind of that sense of “Come on, guys! Why is nobody paying attention to this little guy? Come on!”

VRAI: Because he’s just a little guy!

DEE: Because he’s just a little guy! It’s dramatic irony, right? Everybody knows but the characters. But I did definitely hit a point with him at the end where it was very much “Cool story! Still murder,” for me.

But Vrai, I feel like the conclusion that you’re sending is that people should read the novels. We started this as “Watch the TV show” and now I feel like you’re saying, “But read the books, actually!”

VRAI: No, I love the TV series! I think it is a great thing. I think the actors are amazing.

DEE: [crosstalk] They’re so good.

VRAI: I think it’s a lot of fun. And honestly, the novels can be a little bit of a slog. Not quite a slog, but they… So, the translator of the novels made some Twitter threads that they were under a lot of pressure and a very tight timeline at Seven Seas and also kind of pushed to retain this or that fan translation, such that I think it hampered what they were able to do.

And, just reading the translation, I think there is also an element of both: this was done under a lot of pressure, and also it has some of the stiffness of a sophomore writing effort where she’s clearly going from writing this breezy genre parody that also occasionally decides to rip your heart out into doing a sincere epic. And so, the writing can feel a little bit stiff and repetitive at times.

I think it can be really, really beautiful. But of her three books, I enjoy reading the actual prose the least.

DEE: Hm, that’s interesting. Okay.

ALEX: Do either of you have…? You said there was an animated series, as well. Do either of you have experience with that? Just to give us the three-for-three of the adaptations or versions?

DEE: Real quick here, yeah.

VRAI: The donghua is not what you should start with. It should be a supplement to either the novel or The Untamed, because it’s basically like… You know when you watch an OVA just to watch your favorite scene look really pretty?

ALEX: [Chuckles]

VRAI: Because it is going lightning-fast through the stories. Instead of 50 hour-long chunks, it is 39 20-minute episodes.

DEE: So, pacing-wise, it’s kind of just hitting the highlights?

VRAI: Yeah, so it’s more… You know, do you want to see the assault on the Jiang clan with a cast of thousands and they’re flying on magic swords rather than our beautiful set that we can only populate with ten people? You will enjoy the donghua!

DEE: [Chuckles]

VRAI: But yeah, it’s definitely… And also, it still can’t be explicit but it gets away with a little bit more winking in terms of the romance, including a really cute scene involving some plot-pivotal headbands. Because, by the way, the love interest is Spock.

[Laughter]

ALEX: Okay!

VRAI: He’s so intense all the time, but it’s just because he’s so gay inside!

[Laughter]

VRAI: I love Lan Wangji! Lan Wangji is… My partner called him the single best writing of a Lawful Good character that they’ve ever encountered. And I agree heavily.

ALEX: And that’s paired with the character who was agreed to be the worst man in the world, presumably?

VRAI: Yep! Uh-huh!

ALEX: Okay! Interesting! Interesting! Hm!

VRAI: I love them, and I love their love. It’s so good!

DEE: It’s a very good slow burn. And yeah, Lan Wangji is… He is ride-or-die, is that man. Here’s how I will sell it to you. Once, he gets drunk by drinking a single sip of liquor. And one time he did this, and then he gave his boyfriend a chicken.

ALEX: [Laughs]

DEE: Showed his love for him. He was like, “This is for you.”

ALEX: We’ve all been there. [Chuckles]

DEE: Yeah! Who among us…!

VRAI: That is almost a moment where the censorship made the scene better, because the novels do it where he gets drunk off of one sip of liquor, he gets sort of pushy and jealous about another character, and then he sort of drunkenly pulls Wei Wuxian into bed with him. Nothing happens, but it’s just like, closeness and “Oh, my God, the feelings.”

Whereas you can’t do that with the TV series, so they go out wandering and they have Lan Wangji push several items at him that are traditional dowry gifts, which is how he gets a chicken.

DEE: And then he graffitis on a barn. It’s great.

VRAI: It’s good!

DEE: That scene is great. [Chuckles]

VRAI: I love it! [Chuckles]

DEE: Yeah.

VRAI: And… [Sighs appreciatively]

DEE: [Chuckles] So that’s my sell.

VRAI: I don’t even have time to get into Yi City, which is like this complete cul-de-sac of the plot, but also, it’s an incredibly gut-rending, dark, tragic mirror of the main couple and it makes me cry. And I did read a 150,000-word slow-burn fix fic for it.

DEE: Hell yeah. Yeah, there’s also… I mean, just to ping off of that, there’s also some really nice found-family vibes in the series as well, especially later on, because there’s some clans and groups that get sort of shattered and then kind of cobbled back together. And the ending of the TV show is at once a little baffling because they had to kind of keep it vague about the central love story, but also it hits some of its subplot character beats really, really well.

So, overall, a satisfying conclusion. Just, you know, R.I.P. all the lady characters.

VRAI: Yeah. And to take off my squeeing fan hat and to put on my serious critic hat for a second, it really is a series that is doing a lot with… and I am absolutely piggybacking off of some other folks who’ve spoken about this also… but with tensions between traditional Chinese parents and modern Chinese kids and that generational gap of what you want and what you want for yourself out of life. And it’s also doing an absolutely vicious evisceration of the concept of filial piety.

ALEX: Hm! Okay, interesting.

VRAI: That’s a lot to do with a very central tragedy in the story. And there’s some amazing foiling going on with the main character. As we like to joke in our house, “gee, Wei Wuxian, how come you get two foils?”

[Chuckling]

ALEX: The more, the merrier. So it sounds to me like we got… What do we got here? We got a show that blends romantic comedy with epic supernatural drama. You got good characters, both in terms of central relationship and odd couple that slow-burns all across the series. You got fun villains. You have good ladies, though they are few and they are tragic. And you just have something that’s quite more-ish, again, as Vrai said, in a soap opera sort of way but dealing in more interesting themes, and more flying swords, it sounds like.

DEE: Yes.

VRAI: They can’t afford—

DEE: Yeah. Don’t think too hard about the plot points. Just enjoy it. Just enjoy the ride.

ALEX: I mean, if you have strong enough character writing, it can carry on just the back of that. Okay, interesting. So, yes, don’t go into it for the lore (TM); go into it for those character interactions, is what I’m kinda getting.

DEE: That would be… Yeah, that would be, yeah, my point for sure.

ALEX: Hm! Sounds good. And yeah, if people were to pick a starting point, not the animation but the book? The show? What do you think?

VRAI: I think the show, honestly. I really do. There are things from the book that I miss in the show. But I think if you picked up the book, you might be turned off by some of the BL nonsense that it engages in early on.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, that was the good thing that got cut out of the show, is that the body Wei Wuxian wakes up in is a… Part of the reason he was cast out and bullied, this young man, was that he was known to be queer.

And so, part of Wei Wuxian’s journey waking up is that he decided, “You know what? Trying to be responsible screwed my life over last time. I’m just gonna do what I want.” And that doesn’t last long, but a lot of what he does is sort of trying to get… whenever he wants somebody off his back, he ostentatiously flirts with them to get them to go away. And so, yes, he is weaponizing gay panic.

ALEX: Okay, interesting. Yes. It sounds like it's one of those series that would probably sit quite nicely in our “It’s Complicated” section. [Chuckles]

VRAI: Uh-huh.

DEE: Oh, absolutely it would, yeah.

VRAI: But, so, to finish that thought, yeah, I think start with the show. And if you really like the show, you might pick up the novels because there’s some stuff that fills out well with a couple of key characters. And also, it’s very funny that everybody talks about Yi City and if you watch the show you’re like, “This thing that starts 35 episodes in? You really want me to be excited for that?” Because it takes place [in] the second book of the novels! That’s how much it’s rearranged.

ALEX: Okay. [Chuckles] An interesting adaptation study. Okay, well, thank you for taking me on that journey. That has been some fascinating insights. I know so much more now [chuckles] about what The Untamed is and, indeed, what all of its different [obscured by crosstalk].

VRAI: [crosstalk] I’m so sorry that I’m like this! I’m sorry about my autistic infodumping.

ALEX: [Laughs] Hey, that’s all right. That’s what this is for.

DEE: [crosstalk] You don’t need to apologize for being passionate about something.

VRAI: [Chuckles]

ALEX: That’s what we’re all doing here!

DEE: Yeah.

ALEX: Any closing thoughts before we wrap it up on this adventure? I’m looking for a pun to make, but I don’t quite have…

DEE: I mean, I guess I should make a correction: he gets drunk and steals a chicken. He doesn’t just give him one. It’s a stolen chicken.

VRAI: [Chuckles]

ALEX: Yes, it isn’t his chicken, is it? [Chuckles] He acquires a chicken. [Chuckles]

DEE: He does.

VRAI: Yes!

ALEX: Gettin’ real raggy. [chuckles]

VRAI: If you would like us to do this again, wherein I badger the rest of the team with my knowledge of her other novels, let us know and I will do that.

ALEX: If this is a fun format and you want to hear “Let me tell you about (dot-dot-dot)” from any other member of the team or any other franchise, hey, let us know as well!

VRAI: Yes, because then Dee can tell us about Pandora Hearts.

DEE: …Yeah. I sure can.

[Laughter]

ALEX: A stunned silence. Have we just unleashed something? Maybe. Tune in later to find out.

Thank you for listening, everyone. We’re gonna wrap it up there. Thanks for coming along. Thanks for being a patron. We very much appreciate it. And we will see you in the next one!