Ice Fantasy E39 (2016)
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| The sets for the Ice Kingdom in Ice Fantasy are almost as pretty as this. |
It’s been a long time since I fell in love
with a fictional world as drastically and distractingly as I find myself having
fallen in love with the world of Ice Fantasy.1 The named is a
Chinese epic-fantasy drama serial that my housemates and I started watching as
a fun and companionable means for one of them to work on her Chinese for an
upcoming exam – and then kept watching because it turned out to be both
hilarious (which I suspect the creators didn’t generally intend) and extremely
exciting and emotionally engaging (which I suspect they did). On the first
point: the action sequences tend to be ludicrously overdramatic; the special
effects are frequently appalling (though the costumes and sets are
incongruously gorgeous); seemingly every episode is peppered with superfluous
relationship montages; there is an extravagant ubiquity of overused fantasy
tropes like the introduction of some random magical relic or legendary location
that nobody had heard of until five seconds ago but will somehow provide a
perfect solution to the problem at hand; and the English subtitles are
sometimes a few marks short of first class in the naturalness of their rendering
(chortle-worthy quotations include “I didn’t know you were such an insane
person” and “I didn’t expect the magic cube to be so amazing”). On the second
point: it’s just such a good, fun, enjoyable story. Despite all the peripheral
daftness of the programme – and it is plentiful – I care about these characters
so much. Not one of the main ones is poorly drawn. They don’t do stupid things
without any plausible motive for the sake of driving the plot forward. Even
their bad decisions make sense, and they’re by and large virtuous enough that I
can really root for them. In short, I’m really invested in what happens, which
means that Episode 39, easily the most soul-stirringly dramatic of the series
as far as I’ve currently seen it, has been playing on my mind so determinedly
that I pretty much had to write a blog post about it.
I’ll slot a spoiler warning in here: I
suspect that not a great many of my darling readers watch Ice Fantasy,
and part of me wants to insist that you go away and watch all thirty-nine
relevant episodes before reading any further, so that you might enjoy the plot
twists properly, but I’m aware that’s a bit much to burden you with and may not
represent the most responsible recommendation as to how you ought to use your
time. It’s just that I never saw the climax of Episode 39 coming, and indeed
that’s kind of my point.
The episode in questions sees a
confrontation between brothers Ka Suo and Ying Kong Shi (Shi for short), both
princes of the Ice Clan with flawed claims to its throne. Ka Suo was always the
favoured heir, but lost his ‘spiritual power’ (the essence of his being more
than a mere mortal; that which enabled him to live for thousands of years and
cast magic spells, like everyone else in the Ice Clan) in a previous
confrontation with the king of the Fire Clan (the bad guys, to keep things
simple). Shi, on the other hand, is extraordinarily supercharged on the
spiritual power front, and actually beat Ka Suo in a contest they fought for
the throne and was subsequently crowned, but is secretly not actually the Ice
King’s son or even from the Ice Clan at all, a fact that he was attempting to
cover up until the body count got too high and he fled to the Fire Clan for
refuge. So everyone in the Ice Clan thinks Shi is a traitor, and to be fair he’s
behaving like one. He helps the Fire King attack the Ice Clan’s capital city,
uses his magic against Ka Suo in order to track down a special sword capable of
killing an immortal, and declares his intention to use it to kill the Ice King
(together with a whole bunch of other statements of the “I will have my
revenge!” type). The last thing I was expecting, then, was for Shi to use the
special sword to kill himself in order to transfer his spiritual power
to Ka Suo.
It was well dramatic. I was gaping at the
TV screen for minutes on end.
And it might just be because I’m a bit slow
on the uptake – as is often true of me when it comes to spotting plot twists;
Captain Oblivious strikes again2 – but I did at least have the
reassurance that none of the other characters within the world of the programme
saw it coming either. Even Xing Gui, whose help Shi commissioned in putting
together a dream-message for Ka Suo to explain his actions after the fact, hadn’t
twigged what the contents of the dream might be. Even Ka Suo, incredulous as he
was that the brother whose character he thought he knew had apparently fallen
in step with the bad guys, could believe that more easily than he could
believe what Shi was really up to. Everyone was totally thrown that the most
powerful guy they’d ever met was all this time planning to die for the sake of
saving someone he loved whose spirit had been destroyed.
Yep, Ying Kong Shi is my proposed fictional
Christ-type for this week. Nevertheless, as entertaining a time as I’m sure we
could have were I to spend the rest of this post expounding similarities between
the two (the whole legal-father-not-being-the-same-as-biological-father thing
would do for a start), I’m not sure that would be enormously edifying for
either of us. Rather, what I’d like to point out is that nobody saw Jesus’
death coming either.
Because in Shi’s case, it made sense that
his death was a shock to everyone. He had been deliberately concealing the fact
and leading them all astray. Even when he told the truth, it was obscured: for
instance, his declaration that he needed the special sword to kill the Ice King
was true in a sense, since he himself had technically previously been crowned
into that role – but the context strongly suggested that the Ice King he was
planning to kill was the one he had formerly believed was his father. Shi had
lied and tricked and altogether behaved in a very unscrupulous manner for one
about to do something so self-sacrificial. Jesus, by contrast, could not have
been more explicit about the fact that he was planning to die. Mark’s account
of his life and works records three separate occasions – coincidentally in
successive chapters according to the standard system of division – on which he
told this to his disciples in no uncertain terms at all:3
And he began to teach them that the Son of
Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests
and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again. And he said
this plainly.
And again:
They went on from there and passed through
Galilee. And he did not want anyone to know, for he was teaching his disciples,
saying to them, “The Son of Man is going to be delivered into the hands of men,
and they will kill him. And when he is killed, after three days he will rise.”
And finally:
And they were on the road, going up to
Jerusalem, and Jesus was walking ahead of them. And they were amazed, and those
who followed were afraid. And taking the twelve again, he began to tell them
what was to happen to him, saying, “See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the
Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and the scribes, and
they will condemn him to death and deliver him over to the Gentiles. And they
will mock him and spit on him, and flog him and kill him. And after three days
he will rise.”
So why, when the time came and Jesus went
to the cross, didn’t all his disciples nod to the effect that they had known
this was going to happen, and stick with him to wait out the requisite three
days because they also knew what was going to happen next? Why were they as
nonplussed by Jesus’ death as the cast of Ice Fantasy by Shi’s?
Well, happily for us, Mark tells us that
too:
And Peter took him aside and began to
rebuke him. But turning and seeing his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get
behind me, Satan! For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but
on the things of man.” And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said
to them, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his
cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever
loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.
And again:
But they did not understand the saying, and
were afraid to ask him. And they came to Capernaum. And when he was in the
house he asked them, “What were you discussing on the way?” But they kept
silent, for on the way they had argued with one another about who was the
greatest. And he sat down and called the twelve. And he said to them, “If
anyone would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all.”
And finally:
And James and John, the sons of Zebedee,
came up to him and said to him, “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we
ask of you.” And he said to them, “What do you want me to do for you?” And they
said to him, “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in
your glory.” Jesus said to them, “You do not know what you are asking. Are you
able to drink the cup that I drink, or to be baptized with the baptism with
which I am baptized? … You know that those who are considered rulers of the
Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them.
But it shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be
your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. For
even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as
a ransom for many.”
After every instance of Jesus explicitly
informing his disciples of his impending death for their sake (incidentally,
note that what prompts Jesus to rebuke Peter’s rebuke is taking a look at his
disciples, the implication being that for their sake he is determined to go to
the cross – nice little heart-melting detail from Mark there), the disciples
immediately demonstrate that they haven’t understood a word of it. They’ve got
their minds set on the things of man. They’re interested in security and importance
and prestige. They’re nursing false, human conceptions of what it is to be
great, conceptions that certainly don’t fit with being delivered over and
killed. It’s clear that this was their obstacle to getting what Jesus was on
about, because he responds to their lack of understanding every time by
impressing upon them that true greatness is to deny oneself and make oneself
last and behave as a slave to others, following the example he himself sets by
giving his life as a ransom. What Jesus was saying about his impending death
was as plain as day, but the disciples couldn’t get their heads round it
because it contradicted the worldly assumptions they were bringing to the
table.
I think we often open our Bibles and think
God’s being cryptic with us – obscuring the truth like Shi with his Ice King
double entendre. We reason that if what God says is hard for us to understand,
it must be because the message itself is abstruse. But Jesus wasn’t being at
all cryptic with his disciples when he informed them of his impending death,
and yet it was still a total surprise to them when it happened exactly as he
said. So doesn’t it seem likely that our own lack of understanding of what God
says to us is, like theirs, a result of our bringing worldly assumptions to the
table before we even hear what he has to say? We might be better placed than
the disciples in that we already know the end of the story, whereas they had to
live through it for themselves – but are we really going to understand Jesus’
death any better than they did if we’re nursing the same false, human
conceptions of greatness?
Our false conceptions aren’t a problem we
can address in ourselves: one can’t fight worldly thinking with more worldly
thinking. But God grants us a renewal of our mind, so that we might be
conformed to Christ rather than to the world.4 Let’s pray for that
renewal next time we’re tempted to think God’s obscuring the truth from us
rather than revealing it plainly. That’s the way we’ll gain a fuller
understanding of and so a more wholehearted love for the one who purposed to
give his life in order that we whose spirits were dead might be saved.
Footnotes
1 The whole series is available on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/watch/80128696?trackId=200257859.
Because I’m sure you needed another excuse to while away the hours in front of
a screen.
2 I here reference a post I uploaded in May of this year; I’m
sure you’re au fait with finding things in the box on the right by now.
3 I’ll give you chapter 8, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark+8&version=ESVUK,
and then you can click the arrow to take you to the next two chapters.
4 As it says in Romans 12: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+12&version=ESVUK.
I don’t pluck this stuff out of thin air, you know. (And if I ever should, you
have my permission to have a right go at me.)
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