Finished Veil of Shadows and I have some very mixed feeling about the ending.
It’s technically a happy ending but it’s the kind of a happy ending that I specifically dislike. The one where characters end up replaced by some kind of an AU versions of themselves. I especially dislike it when this situation messes with a ship – when in the end one person has all the memories and experience and the other one doesn’t. And they didn’t just lose the memories, no, they’re an entirely different version of themselves from another world/timeline. Like, the original character I spend the whole time cheering for is gone. It’s not them anymore. It’s their twin, a look-alike, that I don’t know anything about and have no attachment to.
And in VoS it happens x2. To both couples.
Wu Shi Guang is the only one who remembers everything. He acts like, despite all the timey wimey stuff, he did experience everything himself. Meanwhile Wu Wang Yan just had some vague dream and doesn’t even know why the bracelet has her hair in it.
And it’s even worse with Ji Ling and Lu Wu Yi. In the ‘original’ world/timeline, during their last ‘reunion’ in the Formless Moon Sect she doesn’t even know him. She doesn’t love him, doesn’t know that he loves her, didn’t go through life and death with him and for him. She’s not LWY I came to like, and not the LWY that JL loved either. Then, I guess, as the Star Stone said, they fall/get lost in another dimension or whatever and become completely different people altogether. They both have no memories of anything and aren’t even demons anymore. That’s not the characters I grew to love and not a ship that I shipped for 29 episodes, that’s two strangers.
I usually wouldn’t be so nitpicky about reincarnations, but it’s especially jarring in this drama. The drama that repeatedly iterated that you’re not your destiny and that it doesn’t matter how and why you were born/created. You are you based on your own choices and feelings and decisions and experiences in this lifetime. That’s literally what the first story (Xiao Wei’s) in the drama is about. That the reincarnation is no longer the ‘original’ person, even if they may share some similarities. So by the drama’s own logic the two people we see in the final scene are not Ji Ling and Lu Wu Yi. At least not the Ji Ling and Lu Wu Yi we spent watching the whole 29 episodes about.
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