Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Mentoring the unwilling or unsure is dangerous. Mentoring them in dangerous areas is even more dangerous.

I was listening to "Wrapped Around My Finger" earlier today and then wandered into the living room, where Susan is watching Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

This is a pair of depressing tales about the training of folks in one's art. CTHD, in particular, takes what could have been a set of promising, love-filled lives, and sets them turn to mist and despair.

She cannot bow to her true teacher/master, cannot accept that for all she has done, he is still beyond her.

He is seduced by her youth and potential - not seduced sexually, though it might as well have been so. He relaxes just enough, just too much.

*shakes head*

Too close? Not close enough? And, when her life has been redeemed, by external measure, perhaps, she determines that it has not.

A part of me wants to treat it in the same way that I wanted to treat the end of Brazil. Our hero escapes. He goes beyond the bounds of where harm can befall him.

Here, I want to believe in Zoltan: "Wish comes true." Matter of factly, it is so.

But we know it is not, that that legend is false. All our hopes for the future dissolve into mist.

All from putting too much trust in one who cannot yet be trsuted, who may never be able to be trusted, but certainly not yet.

Yet, without that trust, would there have been a chance of her reclamation? Would another have been able to do what the Wudan master could not?

Yet, he had to do it that way, for to do otherwise would have been untrue to his self, his chi.

*sigh*

Alas, Obi-wan. It is ever the way.