Fresh Morning in a Broken World

As I was telling a mutual, a part of him is permanently living in that moment in jail with YJX and his taunts and his view of the world that only power matters (and that every time someone wins someone else loses) and with Yucheng and the 16th head and that box.

But the thing is, leaving aside the risk, this is not something that can ever be satisfied. It’s a lot like YJX’s inner feeling of inadequacy (or Miss Fan’s) - it’s an irrational pit that will never be filled unless he heals somehow. No matter how much power he amasses, even if he becomes the Grand Secretary or w/e, he will not feel safe and like it’s enough unless he processes and works through things in his head, whatever form this might take.

He had so much bad stuff happen and he processed none of it and instead got more horror going straight from torture/loss of friend to years of brutal war.

And some of it HAS to be trusting Tingyan to be someone who doesn’t need constant anxious protection; who is safe because she’s capable but also insofar as she’s not safe it’s because every life path has risk and he should accept that and be happy with her instead of trying to protect her (and in the process creating distance.) He clearly fixated on her as a meaning during the five years the way a truly healthy happy person might not (the line in the letter about her being his anchor is romantic but also…well) but it’s that anxiety and need for safety/perfection (mixed with inferiority he’s felt about being good enough) that is also creating issues.

Luckily for him, Tingyan is both loving and very very heart whole (her big trauma/change happened way earlier - with the chastity scandal - and she’s healed and grown from that by now) so it can all work out eventually hopefully.

The most jarring (but in a good writing way) moment for me in ep 20 was Zhao Ling kicking that ear guy whose name I should remember but don’t.

Because it’s calculated to intimidate the merchants yes. It’s still, somewhere, the man who playacted as a rich doting merchant or that salt bandit king.

But the fact remains, this is something only someone with power can do to a lesser, a sign of “I am everything you are nothing.” It’s casual, almost offhand in its routine moment of contemptuous violence, a powerful man lashing out because he can. Yes yes it’s calculated theatrics but the mere fact that he can do that and so unhesitatingly and then just move on, to a man who used to be his bro and who he had such a fraught relationship with and who he redeemed from exile and all that tells its own story about how high up he is now but also how much of himself he’s given away to go that high.

The new Zhao Ling is very powerful. But I cannot say I like him as much as I did the powerless good hearted one.

(this might be a translation thing, but it's not slander if it's true, sorry girl)

Even without me your days ahead will never be smooth.

And Yake knows it's true!

#kdramawomensweek (2023)  and - day eight, timeslip [what if two female characters from different dramas…could meet?]

one of the ways fiction fails women is with its failure of imagination for what our lives can be. this failure comes in many ways:

our social roles limited to being mothers, wives, and daughters

a lack of subjectivity, as in stories are not told so that the reader or viewer is invited into the experience of them through point of view of a woman; or a woman’s experience is not a legitimate or accessible or interesting mode of storytelling

our experiences limited to being fuck-able, rape-able, beautiful, cisgendered, but not in a way that affords subjectivity (see above)

and more

one of the things i’ve always enjoyed about kdramas is their preoccupation with modes of living. they ask the questions:

how do people live?

why do they live this way?

what is hard about living?

what threatens how people choose to live?

how do you live alongside others?

last night i browsed through part 2 of the glory and one minor character, the old lady landlord, reminded me of another from a very different drama, age of youth—the old lady landlord. 

[image cr: lil98s]

the glory is a soapy, improbable revenge drama, while age of youth is a coming of age slice of life. i think the breadth between the two shows illustrates what i’m trying to understand about why i’m so charmed by both these women. they’re both old, unmarried or otherwise partner-free, without children (the one from the glory lost her child), financially independent, and able to offer housing and safety to younger women. my favorite thing, though, is that they both grow gardens on the rooftops of their homes. how lovely is that? to imagine an old woman not only as someone’s grandmother, or living with illness, or confined to a home, or as someone’s caretaker, but as a free person with her own place, with the leisure to garden and the power to offer homes to younger people. and both of these women are able to exist in such vastly different stories.

Then she burns all the letters to get Zhao Ling back. She destroys her chance to return to her old life. Now she's starting over as Xie Tingyun, her former life totally burned to ash. Love the symbolism.

lots of really intentional choices hammer the point in

his first words to her, "are you done being upset?", are as if he's general mo and she's his concubine throwing tantrums

at ganlin town after he escaped the maze, when fu tingyun told zhao ling she does want a true marriage, that she loves him, you could see the affection and hope surge in him, and though he stood to come near her, he bent to kiss her

now: their first physical closeness since reuniting is when, after she says she wishes to help, to share his burdens, he walks up to her as she sits, and cradles her head against his stomach. it's affectionate but unequal. and he's wearing his official robes!

and what he says is, "understood", which we must note is not a promise that he will change his behavior (like he promised in ganlin town)

and then he asks after their proxy child, truly a returning patriarch. when a'sen does not approach, he speaks as the upper class do: with a metaphor. he has changed, deeply

zhao ling is now the man fu tingyun envisioned him becoming, a man of influence and power, a 4th rank official. he pulls on gloves meticulously before torturing, knows how to talk in pretty metaphors about flowers and trees. dozens of men follow his every word

but the cost is that he's lost all the innocence and spark of life from before. do i think perhaps he might have led a happier life if he had never agreed to walking beside her? i hate to say it, but yes. (though i hope the addendum to that is, for now.) to simply marry his girl and protect her, has proved a long, arduous road

But also, her walking away, understandably angry at the shit he’s pulled and him following and then the recreation of that early scene when they were pretending to be a wealthy doting couple and he knelt to make a footstool for her has made me lose my entire mind!

I love when a scene that was playacting before repeats as a desperately real thing later on (Aamir Khan’s confession at the end of Dil Chahta Hai got me back into Bollywood back way when) and this was such ah epic example of it! Before they were pretending - they were comrades at arms but far from madly in love, he was not desperate to please her (though enjoyed making her gasp), he was not the powerful man he was pretending to be, they were not long and desperately in love etc etc.

But here, all of this is true! An enormously powerful man (he’s just come from both being promoted and given a courtesy name by the emperor himself), his long-waiting, steadfast lover, and his humbling himself to be her literal footstool (and this time her soles are dirty - she marched through the rain) as an apology and a callback to make her recall their start and to show nothing has changed feeling wise.

It is significant that Tingyun, who was brought up upper class despite her stint as poor for those five or so years - is the one advocating to retreat and leave room for survival and Zhao Ling, brought in the gutter and who’s gone through hell, cannot and will not stop - as Grand Secretary read him, the very drive and monomania that allowed him to rise from nobody can now be used to doom him.

(And I love the narrative for not framing his taking salt administration as pure selfless idealism or even a gloriously right idea he should jump at from the principle of high risk/high reward. Both Papa Yu and Tingyun point out all the issues and nobody except the emperor whose job it is to do so is driven primarily by desire to strengthen the country. And it is so clear that Zhao Ling is, on some level, not just permanently altered by his experiences but (hopefully temporarily) rather broken by them. His drive and his ambition and his insistence on this and gamble are all tinged by mania of trauma.)

Holy shit, the whole drama with Minister Gu, Shen Zhili and Captain Di in the show was orchestrated by Meng Ting Hui in the novel!!!