Episode 32 — The Earth-Shaking Bride Snatching

Together, onward

After many trials — the guide’s own summary, and thirty-one episodes of evidence for it — Little Dragon Girl and Bajie are finally together, and they set out onward. The couple the story has been assembling since a seaside rescue nine years before its first episode walks out of the mountain arcs as a couple at last: no knots pending, no mirrors unconsulted, no third party between them but the road.

The Nian beast

The road delivers them to a village terrorised by the Nian beast — the legendary monster of the New Year, the creature firecrackers were invented to frighten. Bajie defeats it, and the weapon is the one this series gave him in Episode 10 and has never improved on: his pig-fart skill, the divine flatulence that once emptied a demon’s prison, now deployed against a folk legend. The village receives a saviour. The pig-man who began the story afraid of a roasting is being thanked by crowds, for a victory achieved by the least dignified power in the celestial registry.

In the village he meets Xiaofang and her father — and the father is the inventor of firecrackers. The story is quietly closing its own folklore loop: the man who devised the noise that drives Nian away, in the village where Nian has come anyway, meeting the pig whose body makes a louder one.

The beast unmasked

Then the twist lands, and it is not a folk tale’s twist. The supposed Nian beast turns out to be the East Sea Dragon King — driven mad. The rampaging monster terrorising a human village is Little Dragon Girl’s father: the king who knotted nothing, stole nothing, poisoned no one, but who spent thirty episodes trying to keep his daughter by decree, and has ended as the thing the village fears in the dark, out of his mind.

The mussel

The rescue that follows goes wrong in the family’s own hands. The Dragon Mother, trying to save Little Dragon Girl, is locked together with her inside a thousand-year pearl mussel — mother and daughter sealed in a shell together — to be taken back to the East Sea. The guide closes the episode inside the closing shell: the Dragon Queen and the youngest princess, imprisoned in a pearl mussel a thousand years in the making, bound for the palace the daughter has escaped from her whole life. The home she kept fleeing has found the way to keep her: not a decree this time, but a shell.

Thoughts

The episode’s pleasures are real — the fart joke completes its journey from prison break to public heroism, and the couple finally walks together — but the show plants its old seriousness under the farce within minutes. A father gone mad is the series’ most dangerous beast; the Dragon King has been decaying from monarch to obstacle to patient across the whole story, and his madness reframes every decree he ever issued against his daughter. Note also who is sealed with her. The Dragon Mother has been a name in this story, mostly; now she is locked inside the consequence with her child, having tried to save her. The East Sea’s crisis, whatever has driven its king mad, has begun claiming the whole royal family at once — and the pearl mussel carrying them home is less a rescue vessel than a symptom.

Next

A forced marriage to the South Sea prince, a firecracker fired at the sea, and a Turtle Chancellor turns traitor to his own king — Episode 33.