![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Story of Minglan Rewatch - Episode 1
I'm still getting back in the habit of regularly checking my flist, but nevertheless I'm posting something (something beyond "I'm still alive") for the first time in ages.
I’m doing a rewatch of The Story of Minglan, which is one of my favorite dramas of all time. This is my umpteenth rewatch, and I will theoretically be doing writeups of my thoughts at the end of each episode (although I have historically lacked the discipline to complete projects that I start, so we’ll see).
An Introduction: If anyone is reading these, please be warned that they will be very spoilery and I intend to make reference to future episodes so do not read if you have not seen the drama yet (and go forth and watch the drama! I think it’s very good!).
I will also be making reference to the Story of Minglan novel. For those who aren’t aware, The Story of Minglan is based on a Chinese webnovel. I was so obsessed with the drama that after I finished, I read the webnovel — which, considering the translation was still in process (and may as of yet not be complete), meant I had to read the novel in Chinese.
I would love to be able to underscore this and tell you that this is the first novel I have ever read in Chinese from start to finish — that what going to Chinese Saturday School & minoring in Chinese & studying abroad in China & trying to maintain a connection with my heritage never motivated me to do, outright obsession with a drama got me to do for the first time. However, that would a mistruth. The first Chinese novel I read was the webnovel of Love O2O (which, again, I read because I was utterly obsessed after watching the drama). However, The Story of Minglan is MUCH longer than Love O2O and reading a contemporary romance novel with terms and language that people use in everyday life is very different from the language skills involved in reading a period Chinese novel (with way more chengyu and turns of phrase people do NOT use day-to-day) so it is not a lie to say that my obsession with The Story of Minglan unlocked a level of Chinese reading skill in me that was heretofore unachieved and has led me to read a truly surprising amount (for me!) of Chinese novels since, many of which were not “quality” novels (in fact, many of which I would describe as “incredibly trashy”) but all of which were incredibly tropey catnip.
Anyways, The Story of Minglan is not a great novel and is inferior to the drama in most respects (an opinion I’ve generally seen echoed across Anglophone Minglan fandom; my Chinese is not good enough to look for opinions in Sinophone Minglan fandom) though the novel does provide a lot of backstory for all of the characters that I find very interesting and may share as we go through the drama.
One of the biggest differences between the novel and the drama is that the novel is actually a transmigration story. In the novel, a modern day lawyer (I think — TBH, it was not really clear to me what her modern-day job was because it is barely mentioned in the plot) wakes up in the body of 6-year-old Minglan in the past. Transmigration is one of the tropes the Chinese government has for some reason seen fit to censor so the drama just is a normal historical romance.
It works better that way — the “transmigration” backstory of Minglan in the novel barely ever gets brought up, does not impact the plot at all, and the drama is stronger for leaving it out entirely. I think that’s true for a number of Chinese webnovels, actually — some do interesting things with the transmigration trope but I often feel like others capitalize on the popularity of the trope (to draw in potential readers) but the novels function better as a straight historical story rather than a transmigration story.
An additional note about the title — the English title is “The Story of Ming Lan”, which is pretty useful and descriptive for a title compared to other dramas’ titles. The Chinese title is “知否？知否？应是绿肥红瘦”, which is the last line of a famous poem by Li Qingzhao. The full text of the poem happens to be the chorus of Minglan’s ending theme song. The poem is about a woman waking up after a long night of drinking, and a conversation she has with her servant about whether the storm last night has blown all of the crabapple blossoms off the tree. AvenueX has a video on the meaning of the poem here as well as some additional backstory behind the poet. I have memorized this poem (because I’m obsessed with the show and also because it’s pretty easy to memorize a poem when it’s the chorus of a song that plays anytime any dramatic moment happens in the show) but I don’t really get why it’s famous, TBH. On tumblr, youtiaoshutiao shared the author’s note about why the author chose this poem for the novel’s title, and had interesting observations on how this plays into the drama thematically. I found her post really interesting but don’t have anything of value to add so I won’t repeat her observations here.
In any case, that’s enough navel-gazing. Onto the drama!
Episode 1
(Note re: any observations I make on English subtitles — I’m watching episode 1 on iQiYi.)
Before I start, I should note that while I have rewatched my favorite parts of Minglan a million times, I rarely rewatch the first 7-10 episodes. I feel like the first segment of Minglan is when everything kind of sucks and I much prefer to start watching when Minglan starts “winning” (a trait that is true for my rewatches of multiple shows). My friend frequently makes fun of me for this …
For Minglan in particular, I watched the first episode once, thought it seemed kind of depressing, made a mental note to continue watching when I had time, and then … just … ignored it for a good year before someone (I think dangermousie) mentioned how good it was and I picked it up again from episode 2. Once I picked it up again, I was hooked and barely put it down until I finished — I finished the last episode one night at 4am, when I definitely had work the next day, because I couldn’t stop. This show was worth sacrificing my sleep.
Minglan is a show that benefits from rewatch — the first 2-3 episodes in particular are way more meaningful after you know who everyone is. Otherwise, your first watch (or at least my first watch) is spent trying to remember who is talking, whether they are different from the person who was on screen five minutes before, how they relate to each other — and, after the timeskip, which adult actors correspond to which child actors.
Scene - Xiaodie retrieves some coal!
Scene - Big Madam is upset about the engagement ceremony!
Scene - Smoke everywhere!
Scene - Wedding procession!
Interlude
One thing that interests me is how the Sheng children are ordered:
This is the order that the drama presents them, and their numbering combines both boys and girls in one sequence. So they call Changbai 二哥 (er-ge) (second older brother) and Minglan 六妹妹 (liu-meimei) (sixth little sister) or 小六 (xiao-liu) (little six). Other dramas (and, for example, my parents and their siblings) sequence the “number” people are referred to separately between boys and girls (i.e., if you have 5 kids, you might have boys 1 and 2 and girls 1, 2 and 3, instead of assigning everyone a number from 1 to 5).
I don’t know how common or uncommon it is to combine everyone in one sequence but if webnovels are to be believed, you kind of do whatever you want.
Weirdly enough, the Minglan novel gives Minglan a younger brother. (Papa Sheng has another concubine that is written out of the drama entirely, and that concubine gives birth to one son who’s probably about 2 years younger than Minglan. She may give birth to another kid at the very end of the novel but if so I don’t remember, she is largely a nonentity in my recollection.) That younger brother is referred to as 四弟 (si-di) (fourth younger brother). That would lead me to believe that they didn’t combine the boys and girls in one numerical sequence, since this #4 comes out of nowhere.
If there are separate numbering sequences, this implies that there is an “oldest brother” missing and a “second sister” and “third sister” missing. I’ve been wondering for a while if those were siblings that were born and died young (in historical times, lots of young children died of all kind of reasons; my grandmother had 8 siblings that died before the age of 10). Now that I’m thinking about it some more, I’m wondering if the Shengs combined Papa Sheng’s kids’ numbering with the other Shengs from their hometown — when Minglan goes back to her hometown, I think we meet one male cousin (whose name I don’t recall) and two female cousins (Shulan and Pinglan), which might fill in the gap. Still, that also seems weird to me and I can’t believe that the entire Sheng family only had this handful of kids.
I don’t think the novel explains this issue of the missing numbered children (the author may have had a vested interest in keeping the numbering streamlined for readers so chose to keep the numbering for the main sibling characters easier to follow), but I am curious.
In any case, the drama makes it all moot because there is no 四弟. (He didn’t show up that much in the novel, either — I mostly remember scenes of him very cutely toddling after bb!Minglan, who tried to surreptitiously teach him calligraphy so he wouldn’t fall too far behind his older brothers.)
One final note before I move on — one of the things that I think gets “lost” in translation (specifically, I think the meaning gets translated but the ~vibes~ don’t get properly conveyed) is the intimacy that I associate with calling someone by their number/familial connection. 二哥 is very warm and homey, while “Second Older Brother” or “Second Brother” just sounds so stiff in comparison.
Scene - Epic touhu game!
Scene - Touhu aftermath!
Not much to say about this scene. Concubine Lin is very good at what she does. Papa Sheng’s face and Big Madam’s attempt to seem nonchalant when Concubine Lin offers to have Changfeng flogged 20 times is kind of hilarious. Dongrong looks so shifty. No other observations.
And episode 1 is over! This is an awful lot of words for just one episode. I don’t think I’m going to write this much for future episodes, I don’t think I could keep it up. One final note — none of this is in the novel. The novel begins after Minglan transmigrates, which is after Concubine Wei dies. But then, the novel also doesn’t place much emphasis on Concubine Wei’s death, one of many reasons I like the drama better.
.
I’m doing a rewatch of The Story of Minglan, which is one of my favorite dramas of all time. This is my umpteenth rewatch, and I will theoretically be doing writeups of my thoughts at the end of each episode (although I have historically lacked the discipline to complete projects that I start, so we’ll see).
An Introduction: If anyone is reading these, please be warned that they will be very spoilery and I intend to make reference to future episodes so do not read if you have not seen the drama yet (and go forth and watch the drama! I think it’s very good!).
I will also be making reference to the Story of Minglan novel. For those who aren’t aware, The Story of Minglan is based on a Chinese webnovel. I was so obsessed with the drama that after I finished, I read the webnovel — which, considering the translation was still in process (and may as of yet not be complete), meant I had to read the novel in Chinese.
I would love to be able to underscore this and tell you that this is the first novel I have ever read in Chinese from start to finish — that what going to Chinese Saturday School & minoring in Chinese & studying abroad in China & trying to maintain a connection with my heritage never motivated me to do, outright obsession with a drama got me to do for the first time. However, that would a mistruth. The first Chinese novel I read was the webnovel of Love O2O (which, again, I read because I was utterly obsessed after watching the drama). However, The Story of Minglan is MUCH longer than Love O2O and reading a contemporary romance novel with terms and language that people use in everyday life is very different from the language skills involved in reading a period Chinese novel (with way more chengyu and turns of phrase people do NOT use day-to-day) so it is not a lie to say that my obsession with The Story of Minglan unlocked a level of Chinese reading skill in me that was heretofore unachieved and has led me to read a truly surprising amount (for me!) of Chinese novels since, many of which were not “quality” novels (in fact, many of which I would describe as “incredibly trashy”) but all of which were incredibly tropey catnip.
Anyways, The Story of Minglan is not a great novel and is inferior to the drama in most respects (an opinion I’ve generally seen echoed across Anglophone Minglan fandom; my Chinese is not good enough to look for opinions in Sinophone Minglan fandom) though the novel does provide a lot of backstory for all of the characters that I find very interesting and may share as we go through the drama.
One of the biggest differences between the novel and the drama is that the novel is actually a transmigration story. In the novel, a modern day lawyer (I think — TBH, it was not really clear to me what her modern-day job was because it is barely mentioned in the plot) wakes up in the body of 6-year-old Minglan in the past. Transmigration is one of the tropes the Chinese government has for some reason seen fit to censor so the drama just is a normal historical romance.
It works better that way — the “transmigration” backstory of Minglan in the novel barely ever gets brought up, does not impact the plot at all, and the drama is stronger for leaving it out entirely. I think that’s true for a number of Chinese webnovels, actually — some do interesting things with the transmigration trope but I often feel like others capitalize on the popularity of the trope (to draw in potential readers) but the novels function better as a straight historical story rather than a transmigration story.
An additional note about the title — the English title is “The Story of Ming Lan”, which is pretty useful and descriptive for a title compared to other dramas’ titles. The Chinese title is “知否？知否？应是绿肥红瘦”, which is the last line of a famous poem by Li Qingzhao. The full text of the poem happens to be the chorus of Minglan’s ending theme song. The poem is about a woman waking up after a long night of drinking, and a conversation she has with her servant about whether the storm last night has blown all of the crabapple blossoms off the tree. AvenueX has a video on the meaning of the poem here as well as some additional backstory behind the poet. I have memorized this poem (because I’m obsessed with the show and also because it’s pretty easy to memorize a poem when it’s the chorus of a song that plays anytime any dramatic moment happens in the show) but I don’t really get why it’s famous, TBH. On tumblr, youtiaoshutiao shared the author’s note about why the author chose this poem for the novel’s title, and had interesting observations on how this plays into the drama thematically. I found her post really interesting but don’t have anything of value to add so I won’t repeat her observations here.
In any case, that’s enough navel-gazing. Onto the drama!
Episode 1
(Note re: any observations I make on English subtitles — I’m watching episode 1 on iQiYi.)
Before I start, I should note that while I have rewatched my favorite parts of Minglan a million times, I rarely rewatch the first 7-10 episodes. I feel like the first segment of Minglan is when everything kind of sucks and I much prefer to start watching when Minglan starts “winning” (a trait that is true for my rewatches of multiple shows). My friend frequently makes fun of me for this …
For Minglan in particular, I watched the first episode once, thought it seemed kind of depressing, made a mental note to continue watching when I had time, and then … just … ignored it for a good year before someone (I think dangermousie) mentioned how good it was and I picked it up again from episode 2. Once I picked it up again, I was hooked and barely put it down until I finished — I finished the last episode one night at 4am, when I definitely had work the next day, because I couldn’t stop. This show was worth sacrificing my sleep.
Minglan is a show that benefits from rewatch — the first 2-3 episodes in particular are way more meaningful after you know who everyone is. Otherwise, your first watch (or at least my first watch) is spent trying to remember who is talking, whether they are different from the person who was on screen five minutes before, how they relate to each other — and, after the timeskip, which adult actors correspond to which child actors.
Scene - Xiaodie retrieves some coal!
- This scene sets up that Concubine Wei is pregnant but her household lacks power; that Concubine Lin is managing the household but Big Madam is the ultimate arbiter (that Xiaodie threatens to appeal to); that there is an engagement ceremony going on that Big Madam is preoccupied with; and that Xiaodie has a spirited personality (which ultimately puts her on Concubine Lin’s hitlist).
- We start out meeting Xiaodie and Xiaotao. bb!Xiaotao is so cute! I love her little buns.
- We see Concubine Lin is currently managing the household — definitely something that was not significant to me on my first watch. This means that the shortchanging of coal is not just an issue of servants embezzling coal from Concubine Wei’s allotment and bullying Concubine Wei because she lacks power (though it is that too) but this is also probably part of Concubine Lin’s subtle assassination plot — if she can make Concubine Wei miserable enough to miscarry, Concubine Lin’d be ecstatic.
- Interesting that they translate “胚子” as “thieves” — it’s more of an old-timey generic insult (Pleco translates it as “bad egg”), but I guess thieves is as good as anything in context.
- I have mixed feelings about translating 大娘子 as Big Madam. It’s as good a translation as any, but it comes off weird in English — I think it’s because 大 is a good thing but in English, “big” when describing a person always refers to physical size and never metaphorical status (and, presumably because of fatphobia, rarely has positive connotations) so Big Madam just has the wrong vibes to me.
- Xiaodie says “A grievance is something you can bang the drum outside the officials’ door to air” — I want to claim this is foreshadowing Minglan doing just that in front of the Emperor at the end of the drama but that’s a bit of a reach. This is a historical right that theoretically everyone had (at all stages of history, maybe? At least, in every dynasty that they’ve made a drama about that I’ve watched) so I don't think it’s being particularly called out for a special reason here. Still, on rewatch, I can go “Heee! This comes up later!” and feel happy.
- It’s interesting that one of the other servants says to Xiaodie “何苦?” / “Why bother?” and looks a little sympathetically at her when she leaves — this is probably just generally trying to convey a servant telling her she’s making a fuss, but I do wonder Watsonianly if that servant more generally has a sense that Xiaodie sticking her head out will only get her noticed by the wrong people.
- Xiaodie’s “Whatever belongs to me, I will take it all, whatever doesn’t, I won’t take a single cent” is so badass against the jaunty background music. It’s also very consistent with Minglan’s philosophy throughout the drama. Too bad in this case, the coal is the wrong kind and Xiaodie herself is not long for this household, precisely because she sticks up for Concubine Wei.
- Aww — so cute, Xiaodie looks so happy at the end of this scene.
Scene - Big Madam is upset about the engagement ceremony!
- We are introduced to Big Madam and Papa Sheng. We establish that Big Madam is easily upset, and that Hualan’s in-laws kind of suck.
- This scene really foreshadows how much trouble Hualan is going to face in the future for her good match. It’s not clear to me how much disrespect there actually is in the fact that her parents-in-law didn’t come in person but it does seem like there was an explicit agreement to do so that they reneged on.
- The subtitle says Hualan’s husband is from a ducal household, and this title is referenced a lot in this scene. Hualan’s from a smaller household, and so she enters her marriage from a position of inferiority. That’s why, regardless of how much Big Madam and Papa Sheng vow in this scene to stand up for Hualan if she is bullied by her in-laws, they don’t actually do much when the time comes. They don’t have the ability to do so, and have to be subtle about what they can. Hualan’s in-laws truly suck for a long time before she gets her happy ending (which is elaborated on more in the novel than they have room for in the drama).
- Side note — it’s unclear to me who decided which Chinese titles correspond to which English titles for translation purposes but I don’t know the relative importance of dukes, counts, earls, etc., in English either, much less in Chinese. I do think that this gets translated later, or translated in other platforms’ subtitles, as earl/count rather than duke, because I’m pretty sure Gu Tingye’s family is a ducal household and ranked higher than Hualan’s in-laws or Molan’s in-laws.
- During their argument, Big Madam says this is a marriage that Papa Sheng pushed for. In the novel, I think there was a whole long scene where Papa Sheng laid out the pros and cons of Hualan’s match and why this was a good match for her. (In fact, it may have been Grandmother who set out pros and cons for Papa Sheng?) I do not recall any particulars from this conversation but setting aside the fact that marrying into a titled household is very prestigious, I think I recall him explicitly noting that he thought highly of the son-in-law’s character (and that he knew in advance that the rest of the in-laws were not as great but he thought the particular individual’s character more important).
- It’s also interesting that Big Madam says Papa Sheng claimed “there’s great chaos over the appointment of the royal heir in the capital these days so it’s best not to mix with those involved” — I hadn’t realized that the royal succession plotline to come in 35 episodes was seeded this early.
- It’s funny that Big Madam refers to how Concubine Lin would pitch a fit if Molan were disrespected — I want to say this is foreshadowing but it’s really more just establishing Concubine Lin’s personality and position in the household. I am likely to claim everything is foreshadowing when they’re probably more just recurring themes.
- Finally, I note that the argument is won partially by hoodwinking Big Madam and partially by referring to “face”.
Scene - Smoke everywhere!
- Concubine Wei! You show up so rarely that I will 100% forget your face if it’s not in context.
- And bb!Minglan! She’s so cute! She’s got the tiny buns too! I have to say, the child actress who plays young Minglan is fantastic. More on that later.
- It’s a little weird to me that Xiaodie didn’t know the difference between stove charcoal and room charcoal. I mean, I personally don’t know the difference but I would have thought an old-timey servant would? The kitchen servants literally said they were going to get the coal from the stove.
- And we see Minglan’s 不甘 — not quite sure how best to translate that to English, but it’s the way that she’s not resigned to her circumstances and desperately wants to change things, a feeling that Gu Tingye specifically calls out later on because it’s something she feels so strongly throughout her life but has to muffle and hide away.
- We also see how smart she is, coming up with a stopgap solution that nobody else around her has come with, but she hasn’t yet acquired the EQ to realize why her mom tries so hard to stay lowkey.
Scene - Wedding procession!
- The camera just showed a closeup of three guys riding horses and I recognized not a single one of them but I assume one is young!Gu Tingye and one is young!Changbai? And the third is the older brother of Hualan’s future husband, I guess? Does the future husband not show up to the engagement ceremony? I feel like I’ve read so many webnovels I should know but most of the webnovels are very upfront about taking place in a made-up dynasty where they pick and choose customs they think sound cool. (Comparatively, Minglan’s author provided citations in her author’s notes once or twice to historical records she referred to, IIRC.)
- And we get a closeup of the goose (geese?) that cause so much kerfuffle later.
- Awww, there’s a moment right after Papa Sheng and Big Madam say “Permitted” as part of some engagement ritual, where bb!Xiaotao and bb!Minglan grin at each other, that’s super cute.
- I don’t get why these wild geese are so special — the matchmaker announced that they were from outside the Great Wall, but does that make them any more delicious or something? [Note from later in the episode — apparently the husband-to-be hunted them? Still don’t get it.]
- bb!Minglan and bb!Xiaotao sneaking around to get food and share snacks with each other is adorable and also something they will continue to do throughout the rest of their lives, haha.
Interlude
One thing that interests me is how the Sheng children are ordered:
- Hualan
- Changbai
- Changfeng
- Molan
- Rulan
- Minglan
This is the order that the drama presents them, and their numbering combines both boys and girls in one sequence. So they call Changbai 二哥 (er-ge) (second older brother) and Minglan 六妹妹 (liu-meimei) (sixth little sister) or 小六 (xiao-liu) (little six). Other dramas (and, for example, my parents and their siblings) sequence the “number” people are referred to separately between boys and girls (i.e., if you have 5 kids, you might have boys 1 and 2 and girls 1, 2 and 3, instead of assigning everyone a number from 1 to 5).
I don’t know how common or uncommon it is to combine everyone in one sequence but if webnovels are to be believed, you kind of do whatever you want.
Weirdly enough, the Minglan novel gives Minglan a younger brother. (Papa Sheng has another concubine that is written out of the drama entirely, and that concubine gives birth to one son who’s probably about 2 years younger than Minglan. She may give birth to another kid at the very end of the novel but if so I don’t remember, she is largely a nonentity in my recollection.) That younger brother is referred to as 四弟 (si-di) (fourth younger brother). That would lead me to believe that they didn’t combine the boys and girls in one numerical sequence, since this #4 comes out of nowhere.
If there are separate numbering sequences, this implies that there is an “oldest brother” missing and a “second sister” and “third sister” missing. I’ve been wondering for a while if those were siblings that were born and died young (in historical times, lots of young children died of all kind of reasons; my grandmother had 8 siblings that died before the age of 10). Now that I’m thinking about it some more, I’m wondering if the Shengs combined Papa Sheng’s kids’ numbering with the other Shengs from their hometown — when Minglan goes back to her hometown, I think we meet one male cousin (whose name I don’t recall) and two female cousins (Shulan and Pinglan), which might fill in the gap. Still, that also seems weird to me and I can’t believe that the entire Sheng family only had this handful of kids.
I don’t think the novel explains this issue of the missing numbered children (the author may have had a vested interest in keeping the numbering streamlined for readers so chose to keep the numbering for the main sibling characters easier to follow), but I am curious.
In any case, the drama makes it all moot because there is no 四弟. (He didn’t show up that much in the novel, either — I mostly remember scenes of him very cutely toddling after bb!Minglan, who tried to surreptitiously teach him calligraphy so he wouldn’t fall too far behind his older brothers.)
One final note before I move on — one of the things that I think gets “lost” in translation (specifically, I think the meaning gets translated but the ~vibes~ don’t get properly conveyed) is the intimacy that I associate with calling someone by their number/familial connection. 二哥 is very warm and homey, while “Second Older Brother” or “Second Brother” just sounds so stiff in comparison.
Scene - Epic touhu game!
- First, Hualan and Grandmother have a tete-a-tete!
- I get so happy when I see Grandmother! She’s the best. When I watched Joy of Life where she played the grandmother in the first few eps of that as well, I already had all these ~grandmother~ feels from Minglan so the emotional scenes hit me really hard.
- Grandmother’s headband is very weird to me — we also see Minglan and the General’s wife wear a similar headband at later points in the drama as well. Oh, I just Googled it and apparently it’s a particular thing.
- Considering the same actress plays Hualan throughout the drama, they were very effective in using makeup/costuming to differentiate between her young self now and her older self later. She also acts very differently / has different mannerisms, which help. I do wonder if part of that is me rewatching this drama with rose-colored glasses — I love the drama, so I immediately ascribe ~stellar acting~ to everyone because I’m so predisposed to like everything about it.
- LOL at Big Madam faking drinking when this random relative shows up to toast her.
- And then, the epic touhu fiasco, which does quite a job of establishing everyone’s character/personality.
- Big Madam gets upset as soon as she finds out, and immediately assumes the worst of Papa Sheng.
- Papa Sheng tries to make the problem go away behind the scenes via negotiations with Hualan’s future brother-in-law.
- Hualan’s future brother-in-law and sister-in-law are just annoying.
- While Big Madam and others are running around trying to fix things, we get a shot of carefree Rulan just swinging away with no idea what’s going on (though she joins the commotion eventually as we later get a scene of her celebrating with Minglan when Minglan wins).
- Molan immediately goes to tattle to her mother, but is focused entirely on how embarrassed she personally feels.
- Concubine Lin is focused on how to make the problem go away for her son, not how to make the problem go away for the Sheng Household. She only has one priority.
- Big Madam causes a scene (storming Concubine Lin’s courtyard) instead of constructively fixing anything. In this confrontation, of course, Concubine Lin takes the upper hand by acting innocent, passive-aggressively (and effectively) implying that everything is Big Madam’s fault, and strategizing afterwards how to get her son out of the mess he made.
- Hualan is Socratically interrogated by Grandmother and very cleverly deduces that what matters is familial harmony, the geese are irrelevant. But of course, when have Papa Sheng and Big Madam ever been in harmony? They barely avoid fighting in public.
- Papa Sheng threatens to beat Changfeng to death if he loses — how is that supposed to help? Anyone can tell you that psyching someone out like that right before a critical stressful moment will make things worse and not better. But Papa Sheng doesn’t know how to raise his kids any other way and the best thing that can be said about his parenting style is “Well, at least he’s not as bad as Yuanruo’s parents or Gu Tingye’s parents”.
- Unsurprisingly, Changfeng loses his nerve. (I wonder if you could draw a parallel between this and how he bungles it at his exams.)
- When Minglan steps up to the plate for the touhu game, there are three separate times she could have walked away and everyone would have considered the game a draw — there may have been a little bit of loss of face for the Shengs but they probably could have kept the geese.
- First, when Changfeng’s nerves get the better of him, the crowd looks willing to give up the game entirely and is walking away when Minglan steps in.
- Second, when Gu Tingye recognizes that playing a 6-year-old girl makes him seem like a bully and he’s willing to concede, but Minglan insists he treat her as an equal.
- Third, when Gu Tingye does a really good toss and the gap in points is so large, everyone is kind of willing to leave but Minglan throws her arrow anyways.
- It’s interesting to me because nobody else (like Papa Sheng) really brings up the fact that Minglan forces the issue a few times when it could have been smoothed over. This could be because there would have been loss of face for leaving when they were losing, this could be because I misunderstood the crowd’s attitude and they were leaving with the full expectation that Gu Tingye was going to keep the geese, this could be because Papa Sheng kind of expected that even if MInglan lost, Gu Tingye would seem like a dick for playing against a 6-year-old girl and things could have been smoothed over, and this could also be because Minglan “won” in the end and that’s all they remember. It does show how proud and spunky Minglan is at age 6, compared to how cautious she becomes later in life.
- Gu Tingye’s “too cool for school” attitude the whole game is just hilarious to me, but consistent with his characterization throughout the drama. I do appreciate that he really does respect Minglan as an opponent.
- Meanwhile, Hualan’s future brother-in-law (I refuse to learn his name) is such a douchebag during the entire thing. Each time the crowd or Gu Tingye seems ready to let it go, he’s egging them on. It’s like dude, how far are you going to take this? What is your goal here?
- Papa Sheng’s very understated fuck you to the brother-in-law at the end, giving him the arrow, is very well deserved.
- Some other observations on the touhu game, more randomly:
- bb!Changfeng actually looks a lot like adult Changfeng.
- Also, I just gotta say, bb!Minglan is so cute.
- It’s still not clear to me why Big Madam calls for Changbai. Doylistically, I guess it’s because they need him and Gu Tingye to be walking in the same direction after the game. Watsonianly, the only thing I can think is that she is really reliant on her son and the fact that she was able to bear a son, or maybe that she needs the emotional support, or is hoping that he’ll have some hail mary solution.
- We are introduced to Dongrong, who I guess shows up now and then like 30 episodes from now and that’s it. It’s still pretty fucked up that whipping a kid until his flesh opens (how Concubine Lin describes how she’s going to appease Big Madam’s ire) is considered like … a reasonable punishment.
- Some of these subtitles are just … unclear / bad English.
- The CGI / cutscene for this touhu game is ridiculous. There is no way bb!Minglan bringing her arm back that far and at that angle would lead to a smooth toss. (But then, I’ve never played, what do I know?)
- I do not understand the scoring rules for this game at all.
- I do think it’s interesting that here and the polo scene later on are games that Minglan won, but per canon, Gu Tingye basically could have won both times but let her win. Part of me is grumpy about that but also, a man who is martially trained is of course going to win over a girl who never leaves a very small courtyard. At the time of this touhu game, she is like 6 and he’s a full-ass teenager. (I think.) It’s reasonable for the show to want realism to trump plot coolness in this instance.
- Then, we get the beginning of the Changbai / Gu Tingye bromance. I do note, of course, that there are quite a number of steamy, Chinese-language Changbai/Gu Tingye fics on AO3.
- I don’t think wee Changbai’s actor is a native Mandarin speaker — his articulation is not quite there.
- I can’t believe Gu Tingye said he didn’t realize his actions would disturb the banquet. I feel like this seemed very obviously like a bad idea. But, this is another sign that he is impulsive, is easily instigated, and doesn’t think ahead. (At least, until he grows up and matures.)
- I noticed on this rewatch that Gu Tingye and Changbai are talking about “snatching back the 16 provinces of Yanyun” — I’m not positive, but is this what the Emperor is referring to in the final episode where he explains to the Dowager Empress that his ultimate goal is to reclaim their lost lands? Did they seed that through-line this early?
- Awww, Gu Tingye looks like such a lost puppy when Changbai won’t play with him.
- Changbai and Gu Tingye solidify their friendship by sharing their other names — Zhonghuai / Zecheng. I gotta say, the historical Chinese thing where people have multiple names is very confusing to me. The first time my dad tried to explain to me that “Well, 名字 (mingzi) means name in modern Chinese but historically, people would have a 名 (ming) and a 字 (zi) and would be known by these different names that different people used in different circumstances and also you could kind of just get new names whenever you felt like it” when he tried to tell me the story of the Three Kingdoms … I didn’t get it then and I don’t get it now. It’s hard enough for me to remember character names (I only remember Minglan characters’ names because I’m so obsessed), you can’t really expect me to remember multiple names for each character. On my first watch-through, when Minglan wakes up in the palace after fainting while beating the drums and the Empress refers to Zhonghuai, it took me a few beats to realize who she was talking about.
- Then we get a post-mortem on the touhu game from Minglan and her mother.
- When Concubine Wei scolds Minglan for sticking her head out and she says “I didn’t”, the petulance in her voice is so cute, so hilarious, and gives me strong flashbacks to when my baby cousins were tiny.
- I’m curious if Minglan’s child actress dubbed herself or the show had an adult dub her. (I believe the other actors / actresses dubbed themselves, but shows often have an adult dub children because children aren’t as good at acting plus the Chinese spoken in period dramas is so difficult even adults get dubbed by other people for not being able to deliver lines with the right articulation. When Gu Tingye’s daughter’s first actress — the tiny one — speaks, it’s very obviously dubbed. If bb!Minglan is dubbed here I honestly can’t tell. I don’t think she is.)
- I will say, this whole “Minglan’s sisters have protections in a way that she doesn’t, so they can afford to act in a way that she can’t” is a recurring theme in this show and I love how they hammer that home.
- Final linguistic note, Papa Sheng refers to Hualan’s future brother-in-law as 贤侄 (xianzhi) a bunch of times, which sometimes got translated to “my dear nephew” and other times didn’t really get translated. Pleco tells me this is a dated term for one’s nephew or a friend’s son — it literally translates to “virtuous nephew”. This is obviously one of those terms that don’t get used anymore but I’ve come across it in webnovels and I know it’s primarily a polite way to address someone who is of a younger generation than you but it gives me strong “I’m being polite but also I’m your elder and you should respect me” vibes. I don’t know if those are the vibes the term is supposed to get or if I just think this way because it tends to get used passive-aggressively in webnovels a lot.
Scene - Touhu aftermath!
Not much to say about this scene. Concubine Lin is very good at what she does. Papa Sheng’s face and Big Madam’s attempt to seem nonchalant when Concubine Lin offers to have Changfeng flogged 20 times is kind of hilarious. Dongrong looks so shifty. No other observations.
And episode 1 is over! This is an awful lot of words for just one episode. I don’t think I’m going to write this much for future episodes, I don’t think I could keep it up. One final note — none of this is in the novel. The novel begins after Minglan transmigrates, which is after Concubine Wei dies. But then, the novel also doesn’t place much emphasis on Concubine Wei’s death, one of many reasons I like the drama better.
.
no subject
I think it’s because 大 is a good thing but in English, “big” when describing a person always refers to physical size and never metaphorical status
I connected "Big Madam" with terms like "big boss" where "big" is about status. (In my office, we call my boss's boss the "big boss," for example. *g*)
it’s unclear to me who decided which Chinese titles correspond to which English titles for translation purposes but I don’t know the relative importance of dukes, counts, earls, etc., in English either, much less in Chinese
In English, duke is the highest hereditary rank, then: marquis, earl (or count), viscount, and baron. I wonder if the Chinese titles are always translated to the same English word, or if sometimes certain words were chosen to convey a nuance, like "ducal household" to emphasize the higher status of Hualan's husband?
we get the beginning of the Changbai / Gu Tingye bromance. I do note, of course, that there are quite a number of steamy, Chinese-language Changbai/Gu Tingye fics on AO3
:D I feel better now, knowing it wasn't just me seeing that ship.
no subject
That makes sense! I'm used to friends referring to "bossboss" or "top boss" but I definitely see where "big boss" fits in there!
I wonder if the Chinese titles are always translated to the same English word, or if sometimes certain words were chosen to convey a nuance, like "ducal household" to emphasize the higher status of Hualan's husband?
The dictionary app I use (and Wikipedia) very strictly translates Chinese titles to specific English titles, apparently because Empress Dowager Cixi decided on this like a century ago (?) even though I can't imagine that the titles correlate that well because the two systems of nobility must have worked differently? But as someone who reads a lot of Regency romance novels and period Chinese webnovels, I do feel like they serve the same purpose in both (mainly get brought up to convey a nuance around status, as you point out, and in the especially trashy novels I read in both genres, also to mark which romantic interests are more desirable).
no subject
I also watch Singing all along and learned that this was a transmigration novel where the transmigration got lost in the adaptation. If the Chinese government doesn't like transmigration, i finally get why.
no subject
no subject
I had no idea this is based on a transmigration novel, but it kinda fits. Minglan's personality makes definitely sense in that context.
While I was eager for Zhao Liying to show up (she's my favourite actress and the reason why I watched this drama in the first place), I was very impressed with the child actress for Minglan. She did a really great job!
I think it’s because 大 is a good thing but in English, “big” when describing a person always refers to physical size and never metaphorical status
I didn't have a problem with that, but I'm not an English native speaker.
Concubine Lin is very good at what she does.
Scarily so!
no subject
Yeah, I feel like Minglan's intelligence makes sense in a transmigration context (if she's an adult transmigrated into a child's body, so her wisdom beyond her years make sense) but also makes sense without the transmigration context (because you can see how trauma and her particular childhood shaped her into maturing early).
And yes, the actress who plays bb!Minglan is crazy good! I was going to say "good for a child actor" but I think she's just as good as many adult actors!