#huancheng

Ice Fantasy, or Huànchéng, is a pretty wild ride. I saw it the first time while it was airing in Taiwan and I was sitting in a clinic in Taoyuan, and I instantly found it super interesting and has to see more. I forgot about it for awhile after I got back to the US, but then we got Netflix and it popped up on my recommendations. I was psyched.

It was probably helpful to be able to binge half of it with someone whose first language is Mandarin, as obviously the cultural contexts and linguistic subtleties are going to go over your head if you aren’t from that culture. Of course, then I had to try to watch the rest of it while in-transit to Europe, and that’s when it got really weird. Regardless, I actually got to the end and discussed it, but we had to refer to the Chinese Internet to really understand that ending.

So, to sum it up (spoiler alert), there’s this scene at the beginning and appears throughout the series of a four-winged bird smacking itself into a rock face and bleeding all over the ice while the main character, Ice King (or Prince for most of the series) Ka Suo - who also expresses a desire to be like that bird in the first episode as an expression of his desire for freedom - cried about it causing red ice crystals to sprout up. So through half the series him and his brother Ying Kong Shi start getting out at odds with each other despite loving each other more than anyone else. So, at the end, after Shi has been forced to fight Ka Suo due to his mother and biological father, got himself killed to heal Ka Suo, and got resurrected without his memories and became evil, he ends up stabbing Ka Suo, putting him in a coma. So apparently he finds out that there’s some kind of curse of fate that means he and his brother can never be together in peace, so he finds out about some super wish-granting thing called the Crimson Lotus (as opposed to the Red Lotus which was more like a Monkey’s Paw with its wish-granting). Apparently this requires the blood of his clan to cause to bloom, and he’s the only member left, so he turns into that bird and smacks himself into that rock to summon it. Now, apparently, Ka Suo has meanwhile woken up without his memories of his brother, but has the dream which leads him to the island where his brother is as it shows at the beginning, and the entire rest of the series is basically him remembering everything until that moment. So, the ice crystals are apparently the Crimson Lotus blooming and it seems like Ka Suo ended up using it to start over in a new time/universe which ends up being modern day Earth, and thus begins Ice Fantasy Destiny.