On the other side

The story starts with Jing Ruowei, child of an official of Ming Dynasty’s Jianwen Emperor. The Jianwen Emperor’s 4th uncle had rebelled against the authority of the emperor, and he emerged victorious by the end as the Yongle Emperor. Ruowei’s parents are killed during a purge of those who served Jianwen. She and her younger sister are saved by a family friend and luck respectively, but are separated in the process.

First off, super credits to William Chang, the costume designer, who made Ming dynasty costuming look fantastic.

The cast did very well. There is an effort to portray the imperial family (in Ming, the Zhu family) as more human, and not in the usual ways of “they had kids and had parental emotion” or love and hate or typical “respect parents” kind. There is a lot of yelling fights, snide remarks, back smack talking, and general disrespect.

There is a scene where the Yongle emperor’s three sons are departing their father’s palace. Halfway through the yard (and it is an enormous yard), Zhu Gaoxi (2nd son) drops his act and starts bickering with Zhu Gaosui (3rd son). Their older brother, Zhu Gaochi, shushes Gaoxi and tells him their father can still see them. Gaoxi scoffs, but Gaochi says their dad got some badass new telescope so he can definitely spy on them from inside. So the three brothers throw their arms around each others’ shoulders and pretend to be cool buddies until they get out the gate.

Basically, the sense that you want to yell at your siblings, but you don’t want your parents to know you’re fighting. That sort of layered instance occurs a lot in the series, exaggerated to extremes because this family is an Imperial one, and that means even minor fights between family members is possibly life-threatening or a national problem.

And that sort of portrayal is what makes the actors and cast feel so strong, because all the chemistry of a messed up family is there.

The story overall, however, is a tragedy, even though the early parts are comedic, full of dark humor. The family can be close but the individual members have ambitions and desires that destroy each other. It is adapted from a novel, The Chronicle of Six Eras, by Lianjing Zhuyi, and those six eras speak of how in just 40-something years there were 'six’ emperors.

Although, from the name and synopsis of the original novel, the story was much more centered on the female protagonist Sun Ruowei. The production probably intended for the drama to be more in the vein of the “Big Female Protagonist” series like Empress of China and Legend of Miyue. I think the final product as it is now, as an ensemble show, is more unique.

If there is something I feel plagues the drama and makes it less that what it could have been, it’s that the pacing is awkward and poor. I think there are some long scenes that could have used brevity; the spacing of the story suffers also from the usual “the first half is 10 years and the second half is 40″. The first ‘era’ as told in the story is that of the twilight years of Yongle’s reign, but it took him essentially half of the episode count (30-something out of 65 episodes) to die. Historically, the Hongxi Emperor that followed reigned for only 8 months, but his son the Xuande Emperor reigned for 10 years, but they got gone in just about 10 episodes, where almost everything in the first half was closed up and neatly shelved. Yet even with new cast added for the last 25 episodes, their development is somewhat dragged out.

I thought about it suddenly in some random thinking recently, and figured I’d get the details down before I forgot most of it. Unfortunately I don’t remember the name, or the author, so I can’t even find it on pixiv (where I read it (I think it was there)) without digging through a lot.

The fic was much longer than the specific scenes I remember, so needless to say I may have forgotten the broader plot.

Hijikata was rolling about doing his police thing, and he witnesses some sort of altercation where some scumbag dude wanted some poor person arrested for some dumb reason. Because Hijikata was law enforcement, he was stuck between a rock and a hard place. As a result, the conveniently passing by Zurako laid smackdown on Scumbag Dude.

And then Zurako (lol) turned to Hijikata and scolded his ass about justice, protecting the people, and some other stuff. After that, Zurako has to skedaddle because he’s a terrorist and all that.

Unfortunately, Hijikata is in shock and somehow develops a maybe-crush on this mysterious beautiful woman that he has no name and no idea who she is. (Sidenote: let’s be honest, Zurako is easily Katsura’s best disguise, though that might be because the rest of his disguises are terrible.)

Hijikata goes to Yorozuya to ask Gintoki to find this mystery woman so he (Hijikata) can apologize. Because Shinsengumi are real geniuses, the vice commander brings a sketch for Gintoki to use to help find mystery woman.

Gintoki is stuck playing the straight man in this story, so he 100% identifies the person in the sketch instantly. But of course he is not going to tell Hijikata that the police want to apologize to the terrorist they’re hunting. Or that Hijikata might just have a crush on a wanted man.

Having ‘found’ Zurako and arranged a meeting, Gintoki has Katsura in Zurako getup are in Otose’s shop during its closed time of day. Katsura has smudged lipstick and he didn’t put on his obi (the fancy waist sash for a kimono) right, so he’s fiddling with it while Gintoki is trying to get Katsura to get his story straight and behave. Gintoki eventually just figures Katsura is not going to pay attention until the obi gets fixed, so he helps with that.

Right at that moment, Hijikata opens the door to come in the shop. He sees smeared lipstick, disorderly clothing, and Gintoki undoing Zurako’s obi.

lol

So Hijikata has his crush kind of crushed, and worse than that it was the dead fish eyes Yorozuya bum, except—

Gintoki goes, “It’s not what it looks like.”

Katsura goes, “What do you mean, it’s not what it looks like.”

So Gintoki clocks Katsura on the back of the head. Hijikata flips from awkward resentment to “holy shit, domestic violence”. He shouts at Gintoki about how could you treat a woman like this, etcetera.

This being Katsura, means: “I’m not a woman, I’m a man.”

Of course, Hijikata’s brains explode again and he doesn’t believe it.

Katsura’s logical response: “I can show you I have a dick.”

I burst out laughing at this point because it is really an absurd situation but I do think it is in-character for Katsura to volunteer to show his dick to another person (the vice chief of the police!) just to prove his words, and have absolutely no qualms about doing so.

No, it doesn’t go R-rated after this point. Katsura does put his leg up on a chair and try to show his dick, and Hijikata is leaning forward because he won’t believe it until he sees it. Gintoki has to clobber both of them in the head, because he is the unfortunate straight man and no you don’t go around waving your dick at the police.

However, considering the context of the history this story is set in, I can’t help but wonder if this “failed marriage” story would have been better applied to a different emperor and empress pair. A particular examples I can think of off the top of my head are Han Emperor Wu and Empress Wei Zifu.

Like the Step Empress, Wei Zifu was a second empress. Her fall and death was less mysterious than that of the Step Empress, but Wei Zifu was known for being virtuous, and her death truly was due to the machinations of others. The paranoia of the Han Emperor Wu and Wei Zifu’s meager burial were similar to the Qianlong and Ruyi events within the novel.

I suppose the big obstacle is that Wei Zifu already had a well-received drama just a few years ago, so the author probably didn’t want that conflict. The author probably also wanted to build on her Legend of Zhen Huan fame, so billing Ruyi as a sequel is more advantageous financially.

The main reason I find setting Ruyi to the life of the Step Empress is because the history—as it is known—doesn’t favor the hypothetical story that the Step Empress was Qianlong’s true love. The Step Empress did not have a child with Qianlong until after she became empress (a whopping 18 years), an indication that she was not much favored. After death, she was shunted into a corner of a tomb of a consort who was a lower rank than her, and she never received a proper posthumous title, hence why she is known as Step Empress.

Ruyi does provide explanations for these things, but the progress of events doesn’t reasonably explain Qianlong eventually creating Consort Ling Empress before he resigned as emperor. If he knew she was a terrible human being, giving her something she wanted, even after death, seems strangely bizarre.

If there was a moment that Er’qing forgot that she should have remembered, it was when Fuheng came to his comatose sister’s bedside to beg her to wake up and save Yingluo from the emperor. Fuheng, in his haste, tells Empress Fuca that Yingluo was willing to do everything for Empress Fuca, that Yingluo even killed someone for her. Er’qing had a brief moment of shock, but quickly forgot those words as she saw an opportunity to close in on what she wanted.

Historically, this character was known as Noble Consort Hui in the early years of Qianlong’s reign (Hui Guifei), with Gao being her family name. In Yanxi, the writers took the liberty of using her family name for how others addressed her: Noble Consort Gao. While this is probably historically incorrect, I imagine the intent was to use the family name Gao (which means ‘tall’) as a reminder of her high standing.

Tan Zhuo (the actor) spoke of the Noble Consort Gao role as “a simple woman”, who despite all of her arrogance and pride, really only wanted one thing: love. Of course, she being a consort of the emperor living in the Forbidden Palace meant she would never get the love she wanted.

So a lot of Noble Consort Gao’s unhappiness stems from having to share her husband with many other women, particularly in the case of Empress Fuca where Noble Consort Gao has to admit she is not the chief wife of Qianlong on paper. Her extravagance and her love for drama and romance are physical and emotional manifestations of her desire to be bigger and grander than Empress Fuca. Tan Zhuo remarks that the tall hairstyle, which is an unusual look in Qing Dynasty dramas, is a function of Noble Consort Gao’s need to be “taller” than the empress.

Noble Consort Gao as a character isn’t very complicated, but she is a prominent figure in the early part of Yanxi. What is sort of interesting about her character as a villain compared to other villains (and not just Yanxi villains) is that Noble Consort Gao dies gloriously in a manner of her own choosing. To the end, she is prideful and unwilling to submit to the reality she had been confined to. Noble Consort Gao’s personal insistence on freedom is, strangely enough, one of the only two characteristics she has in common with Empress Fuca.

The other is that both she and Empress Fuca wanted Qianlong’s love.

There’s a great many antagonist characters in Story of Yanxi Palace, with a few being annoyingly simple, some clever, others hateful.

The Step Empress (earlier known as Consort Xian) is largely considered the Final Boss, and her villainy stretches long over the series even if her screentime is scarce in the first half. What’s strange is despite her machinations, the Step Empress is an oddly likeable character. I’m not sure if that’s because of the writing for the character, or because of Charmaine Sheh’s portrayal, or both.

She’s very fleshed out not just as a villain, but as an actual character of her own. Compared to your run-of-the-mill palace drama schemes, Yanxi’s Step Empress plans much more strategically, and that method of thinking is matched with patience and an appearance of tranquility. But when no one is looking, the mask drops; yet her true face isn’t one of ugliness, but one of pain.

I wasn’t hyped about Ruyi’s Royal Love in the Palace; when production stills came out, a lot of the styling and costuming for Ruyi I didn’t like very much. The bright coloring scheme is deliberate to match the bright colors of Zhen Huan, but Ruyi’s hair styling seems weird compared to its predecessor.

And of course, there’s the inevitable comparison to Story of Yanxi Palace, where the costuming is very muted and the hair styling very tame. The resulting look in Yanxi actually matched its somber and serious tone well. An aspect I feel the costume team on Yanxi manages to pull off better than Ruyi is the thematic element for the characters.