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So I'm kinda bad at remembering faces and putting names to them. I suspect aphantasia is involved. Not having a visual memory makes it hard to remember visual things without additional information/context.
The characters on the Untamed are mostly a group of young men, roughly the same age, wearing identical or near-identical clothing, with identical hairstyles, speaking a language I don't understand, and they're all Chinese.
It gets worse: they all have 3-4 names. I don't mean long names, I mean different names. Which were used variably according to a system I did not initially understand at all.
Here's the process I went through:
Episodes 1-3: Wei WuXian is the smiley one who's often wearing a different outfit. He is also the YiLing Patriarch, and I think he is Wei Ying because there's no other Weis, I THINK? Lan Wangji or Lan Zhan - not sure which? - is the one who is deadpan at all times, even when somehow also conveying "barely-contained homicidal rage" and "I want to stab you in your stupid, attractive face" and "your unseemly display of emotion causes me physical pain". Jiang Cheng is the one with the Hapsburg chin. The Lan minions are Sweet Soft Boy and Sassy Boy. I can't tell the rest apart.
At this point, ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) velithya had a long and busy working week, and we took a break from watching. In the interim, I read a guide on how the names work and also read a number of translated chapters of the book the series is based on.
Which means that between episodes 3 and 4, I learned how the names work/in what situation each name is applied, which group of names attaches to which character, and who the other characters are, and some sense of the role the play in the story.
Episodes 4-6: None of these people look remotely similar. I know exactly who everyone is, and can remember all their names. These are very different individuals who happen to be wearing similar clothing and matching hairstyles. Lan SiZhui remains delightful, and Lan JinYing remains sassy.
Mostly what it's brought home to me is the level to which I rely on *really broad* distinguishing features like hair colour/style to tell people apart.
There'd been indicators before this, I did kinda know it, but until I watched a group of people who matched in age, ethnicity, hairstyle, and dress, I didn't realise that I wouldn't be able to tell them apart.
Like, if there were two characters on screen, obviously they looked different from each other? But unless they were using names in that scene, I was struggling to identify who they were and place them relative to the story. And names were only so helpful because the names weren't consistent so if they were using a completely different name from prior appearances, I was like, "I am sure this guy has appeared previously but I am not completely certain where."
The moral of this story is, for people who know me personally:
If you change your hairstyle I will hate it for a while even if it looks good, because even if I know you well and love you, when I see you, it will take me a moment to verify to myself who the hell you are.
Maybe that's why in fiction I tend to like the shows where characters wear uniforms or something that means their outfits are thoroughly consistent. Because even if the outfits match each other, then that becomes background information I can ignore when identifying people.
And so they're some of the most recognisable people I've ever seen on TV. Like, there's a brief shot in the closing credits of a guy with a goatee and I'm pretty sure I can actually tell which character that's the older version of, despite makeup differences and facial hair, and usually I am terrible at that. But because all the broader categories of distinguishing features have been eliminated - hair style, hair colour, dress styles, age, ethnicity, even build (they're all slender-but-fit) - I have never identified faces so well in my life.
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