Waking Life

2. FASHION!

I am a giant sucker for the Republican-Era Shanghai aesthetic, and Couple of Mirrors leans very cutely into it. It's not a big production, and it clearly did not have an overabundance of money, but it does a good job with what it has.

Many of the characters are wealthy, but they're a very understated kind of wealthy. They look nice but not ostentatious. Sometimes the style is not my preference -- particularly when the men's trousers are the size of circus tents -- but the outfits are always quality representations of that style regardless.

They're also all very Westernized, to the point where some of the characters are textually Christian, and they hold both weddings and funerals in Christian churches. It reminds me a lot of the My Roommate is a Detective aesthetic, where westernization and modernity are used as a mark of (high) class. Nearly everything in Couple of Mirrors, from clothing to technology to decor, has a very European look to it.

One of the things I find charming is that Youyi wears the same clothes multiple times. I suspect this is related to production budgetary concerns, but honestly, it reads like a great intentional character choice. The whole show takes place over the course of almost two years, and no matter how wealthy you are, two years' worth of daily dressing will see some repeats. Obviously she's got her fancy one-off pieces, like her special-occasion gowns, but pretty much everything else shows up in multiple scenes.

Also, Youyi may be rich now, but she grew up poor. Sure, she's gotten a taste for high-quality things since marrying into money, but not such that it's ever occurred to her not to be seen in the same outfit twice.

It's played off mostly as a joke, but there is legitimate acknowledgment of how much money and effort are involved in performing femininity, especially to high-class social standards. Youyi is spoiled and vain, but she has to be, given how her personal and professional existence depends on her ability to play a rich man's wife flawlessly. She got to where she is by being pretty and desirable, so how the hell is she supposed to stop now? She's achieved a level of celebrity where she has to greet the delivery boy in a full face of makeup. (Then you get to the point where it's revealed she sleeps thirteen hours a day, and it's like, woo, the sunshiney one has got the depression!)

Because of the meta-standards of beauty in Chinese dramas, it's hard to say how much (if at all) Youyi unlearns these strict beauty lessons in the course of the narrative. It's not like the actor herself becomes less made-up as Youyi becomes less dependent on her awful husband, so whatever your interpretation is, it's valid. But I do find it notable that the show never really discusses if she likes looking pretty. It's expectation and accomplishment. Just like femininity always is.

Meanwhile, Yan Wei's earth-toned pageboy aesthetic is so cute. It's not particularly masculine so much as it's not feminine, especially when put next to girly-girl Youyi. Yan Wei likes to be covered, with multiple layers and pieces of clothing that obscure the shape of her body. She prefers pants and sturdy boots. The fanciest thing she does with her long hair is tie it into a braid. One look at her and you can tell that she wants to be normal and fit in, but it's so much work and also she doesn't actually care.

And she never gets a makeover! We're never going to take her out and show her that she really wants to be a pretty pretty princess! Youyi is going to tease her gently about how she looks and accuse Yan Wei of dressing like a granny, but there's never a stunning reveal where our drab little mouse becomes a high femme. Wow, I didn't even really realize until I started writing this paragraph how much I'd been expecting the show to pull that shit. And it never does! Hooray!

3. AMAB (All Men Are Bastards)

Who's up for some delightful misandry?

Every major male character in this show at least mildly fucking sucks, but in a way where the show knows they suck. You are meant to dislike these guys. Even the ones that seem like they're being good guys, give them an inch and they'll turn right back to bastardry.

I've seen people complain about how, when you get a story about lesbians or lesbian-adjacent women, odds are high that all the male characters are going to turn out to be giant fucking dicks. While I agree that that's not an entirely fair representation of the world (#notallmen), I do think it's true that a lot of men do not know how to behave about women who are not there to belong to men. They're not used to thinking of women as people; they're used to thinking of them as either the current or the potential property of men (who are the actual people) and then relating to said women through the lens of their current or potential relationships to said men.

It gets even worse if those women are supposed to belong to men, but are malfunctioning! Xu Youyi is malfunctioning a lot. She is supposed to be standing by her shitweasel husband and enduring his mistreatment with a kind and wifely smile. She is not doing this. Expect a lot of the men around her to short-circuit.

It is at this point I must give a shout out to Liu Zhiyang, who plays Zhou Heng, Youyi's husband, who is such a fucking yutz that we did not stop roasting him the entire time he was onscreen. The actor seems like a fine, regular guy. The character wears ascots that swallow his entire neck and pants that could house three of him, and that's even before we get to his shitweasel tendencies.

I should be clear: Liu Zhiyang is a perfectly television-handsome actor-man. Zhou Heng is an evil cartoon turtle. This transformation is accomplished entirely through styling and acting choices, and it is uncanny. What fucking slimeball of a character. Just a sniveling, pathetic rich boy who lets his insecurities destroy his whole life. Please enjoy watching him eat shit repeatedly.

Zhou Heng is so awful that at first Xie Yifan, Youyi's ex, seems great by contrast! And he's not great at all! At best he's sort of passively bad, instead of actively bad. He comes off as sweet and thoughtful, but ultimately he also thinks of Youyi not as a person, but as a possessable object. He expects to roll back into her life years later and pick up again right where they left off. So what if she's married now? A white knight like him won't let a little thing like that slow him down!

Really, both men are just variations on the same guy. They both think primarily of themselves and see Youyi as a neat accessory to their own accomplishments. Their interest in her inner life is less than their interest in what utility she has to them. They're honestly both willing to discard her right up until it comes time for them to fight one another over her. Zhou Heng is a dashing trust fund baby about it, and Xie Yifan is a charming working-class journalist about it, but the outcome is basically the same.

Honestly, the men in the show that are on the whole the least awful are the cops, and the cops still are no friend to lesbians! But sometimes they can be convinced to be the opponents of the opponents of lesbians, and that's useful. Even so, they're still power-abusing dickbags who just happen to sometimes also be serving justice. Jiang Bin thinks he's Inspector Zenigata, when really he's merely a medium-skilled detective who's unnecessarily invested in making a girl pay for crimes he thinks but cannot prove she committed. (This is a place where the manhua is an improvement on the show; more on that later.)

So yeah! The dudes here do not rock! They suck as individuals, and more importantly, they suck by exploiting systemic power and privilege over the marginalized and powerless. When that happens, you can't be too surprised when someone decides to take matters into her own hands, now, can you?

4. ...Of course, the women aren't much better.

Despite what I earlier jokingly called misandry, this is not a show that believes women are pure and perfect defenseless creatures struggling uniquely under the harsh phallic rule of male oppressors. No, this is a show that realizes (correctly) that some of the worst things that happen to women are done by other women.

This is largely a show about upper-class women, the majority of whom are playing a horrible zero-sum game where all friendship is fake and anyone will shank anyone else for the slightest advantage. Poor Youyi has no natural immunity to this mean-girl bullshit, which means it's not going to go well for her.

I enjoy the context that 1930s Shanghai is not too far away from legal polygyny, which absolutely colors a lot of characters' reactions to cheating men and their mistresses. Youyi gets yelled at by her mother-in-law, who comes from a generation of women expected to shut up and take it. The show never says this outright, but you can just imagine the things she's shut up and taken. Instead of being happy for the liberation of her son's generation from the stifling awfulness that has no doubt defined her life, though, she has taken up the battle standard of 'if I suffered, you have to suffer too'.

As in the case with Story of Yanxi Palace, the underlying tragedy is that even a small amount of sincere female solidarity could solve a lot of this garbage. These ladies could all support one another! They could be honest with one another! They could protect one another from the dangerous men in their lives! Or at the very least, they could definitely refrain from sabotaging one another's marriages. That one's easy.

But no, under patriarchy, the only way for a woman to reach the top is by climbing atop the corpses of every other woman around her. All the Yanxi Palace women are too trapped by their circumstances to ever challenge that there-can-be-only-one system. Some of the Couple of Mirrors women are as well! But some are starting to find other ways of existing in the world. Which of course means it's Lesbian Time~

5. How To Be The Best Husband, By Yan Wei, Age 20

Yan Wei, bless her heart, is not very good at either being a person or interacting with people. Because of how she was raised, she's bad at knowing what she wants or needs, but she's spectacular at completing assignments. The beautiful woman she likes has a shitty husband? Fine. She's the husband now.

Now: Does she have any idea what a husband does? No, but she's going to learn on the job. Husbands are protective? She's going to be more protective. Husbands buy things? She's going to buy better things. Yan Wei is going to defeat Youyi's shitty husband in one-on-one husband combat or die trying.

This, more than anything else, is what keeps this relationship firmly out of just-gals-being-pals territory. Even censorship cannot hide the fact that Yan Wei is battling every day to win at husbanding. She doesn't need Youyi to be her wife -- in fact, Youyi's not particularly wifey, especially by the standards of the time period. Yan Wei just needs to be king of the husbands. It's very simple.

I'm going to say that if you are a woman with any kind of lesbian leanings, and you have a close female friend with a shitty husband -- and statistically you do -- you know exactly this reaction. It doesn't even have to be romantic (though you know it's a little romantic). That fuckhead tells her she shouldn't waste her money on a dress, so you go out shopping with her and get her five dresses. He didn't bother to say that she looks nice tonight, so you are not going to shut up about how gorgeous she is. He won't take her to see the movie she wants to see, so you go see it with her and go out to dinner with her afterwards. Either Fuckhead is going to figure out what's going on and step up his game, or your friend is going to realize that better things are possible and kick his sorry ass to the curb, and her life will improve regardless.

I mean, that's the fantasy, isn't it? And Yan Wei gets to live it out. So let's all go live it vicariously with her.

And look how well she succeeds! I should note that these images are not stills from the show -- they are posed publicity photos. As I alluded to earlier, there is a serious tension between what the show wants to get away with and what it can get away with. Still, you should know that Yan Wei's eventual mastery of the Husband Arts is at the center of the narrative. Look at what an excellent husband she becomes! Look how happy she makes Youyi! We should all be so lucky.

caveat: Are you familiar with lesbian pulp novels?

I mean, are you specifically familiar with how they end? The ones with titles like Lust With a Lady Tonight or Wicked Innocence or Lusty Lady Lovers, where the final chapter will inevitably see the tender little femmes returned to the warm embrace of penis-pleasing heterosexuality while the nasty dykes that seduced them into their forbidden sapphic pleasures wind up in jail or dead?

I'm going to suggest that you stop watching somewhere in the middle of the last episode, maybe around the time they finish typewriter-shopping. Everything after that is 50% teasing a second season that will never happen, 50% reassuring the viewer that existing outside of social norms will never be sustainable behavior.

I mean, I guess there could be a second season someday. I've seen plenty of people talking back then about how there's a second season coming. But this aired almost exactly five years ago, and so far as I can tell, there has not been a single more recent noise made about continuing it, so I am going to consider the matter closed. The last ~10 minutes of the show are confusing and unsatisfying, and they set up a mystery that is probably never going to get solved, and that's that.

However! If you still feel compelled to watch the whole thing to its conclusion, I've got good news about how to make it suck less:

This show gets the "Censored Adaptation Of Same-sex Original Work" tag, but that isn't accurate -- the manhua is an adaptation of the show, and it takes the opportunity to be overt about things that would never have passed television censorship. You can try reading it here, but it's often very badly translated and hosted on a bunch of sites so sketchy they keep disappearing and redirecting me to Google, so I can't recommend the experience.

Alternately, this site covers all 56 chapters, but doesn't host all of the pages. Instead, it includes some of the images, mostly with the original text still in the speech bubbles, and then translates/summarizes everything else. If you don't mind the back-and-forth of it, it's a much more coherent way to read. (Definitely be careful you don't spoil yourself with the chapter titles, though.)

Anyway, whether you brave the shitty scanlations or read the summaries, you should at least jump to the last ten chapters. They contextualize the whole last episode much better, so it doesn't feel quite so abrupt and ROCKS FALL EVERYONE DIES about everything.

I have no idea if the manhua is pulling from the original show script or if it's just really astute fanfic. It doesn't change any of the major beats of the ending, but it fills in the gaps much better and just overall makes more sense. You know I support women's wrongs, and even I have to see the wisdom in how things turned out -- but only when given additional information that wasn't anywhere in the show! At least we have the two of these working together in tandem.

Let's go, lesbians?

You can watch the whole thing for free on YouTube! And you can also pick it up on Prime, if that's your thing.

The YouTube playlist has at the bottom a link to all the episodes cut together as a single movie that's about eight and a half hours long. So yeah, you could lock in and watch the whole thing in a single lazy lesbian Saturday. I've absolutely spent longer writing this post than I did watching the actual show. What is wrong with me. Send help. Preferably in the form of lesbians.

P.S.: Did you catch the part earlier where I said Yan Wei has a cat? This is Lucky! Lucky is great! We love you, Lucky! Lucky would also like you to know that he has never been fed before in his entire life. Ever.