the number of times I’ve had to explain the “I will strip at you to make you cough up blood which will help heal your leg wound” “i c what u did there, grudging thanks” scene is, actually, based on some logical conventions of the genre that involve qi and Chinese medicine

To be fair to western audiences though, Leg wound > wwx stripping at lwj > lwj coughs blood > wwx hurriedly applies Magic Cultivation Fingers to Not His Leg > lwj grudgingly thanks him
is an utterly incomprehensible series of events if you don’t know what that means lol

JUST IN CASE it needs more explaining:

this is an extremely simplified explanation but in trad chinese medicine, qi is thought to be able to be blocked by blood clots,

and because qi and emotions are also strongly tied together, volatile emotions can cause expulsion of blood clots and allow the qi to flow freely again -- this is why chars 'randomly' cough up blood during fights that don't injure the chest, or bleeding from nose or eyes

This is called a qi or qigong deviation. it only seems random to western audiences that aren't familiar with this trope. i'm not sure but this might also be the origin of the perv nosebleed trope in japan. if you watch much martial arts movies or dramas, you'll see this a lot.

When lwj and wwx are fighting the tortoise of slaughter which has been corrupted by demonic cultivation, and lwj's injury is as much spiritual as physical. he won't let wwx touch him to help, but wwx knows he can ~rile him up~ by being Extra,

so he does what worked for him before to get lwj worked up and starts stripping, and sure enough it upsets lwj's sensibilities enough that he coughs up the blood clot blocking his qi, which he then thanks him for.

I grew up seeing the legacy of this trope in Korean media but bc I grew up with it just accepted it and understood what it meant without understanding the origins, until I tried to explain to a white friend why that scene in the cave made perfect sense to me

but then realized I couldn’t rationalize it, actually, I just knew what it represented, and had to go hunting for sources lol. I don’t remember the things I read and will try to find them and link them later

Adding this today bc I was not being very thorough when typing the up on my phone last night, the concept of qigong deviation is a *real concept* in martial arts and Chinese culture which you can easily research

it’s the visual shorthand of coughing up blood/bleeding from eyes etc to indicate spiritual/emotional volatility or imbalance that’s the trope :)

Uhh this thread is apparently being seen outside the danmei n xianxia sphere lol so for those curious it’s about a scene in The Untamed. Here’s a thread on the various adaptations: https://twitter.com/yibostoe/status/1208286170112765953?s=21 https://twitter.com/yibostoe/status/1208286170112765953