i love the princess's immediate response to finding out that xie zheng has gotten hitched to some country butcher girl is THIS IS FRAUD. xie zheng has deFRAUDed (and probably definitely and most importantly deFLOWERed) this poor girl who don't know nothing about the scheming philandering ways of noblemen, even though this specific nobleman has never philandered a second in his life ever.
silence girls, mama is fighting (and could have killed us long ago but she has fed us and given us work we are truly blessed and didn't know, let's follow her to death)
Because it was confusing in the novel and somehow more confusing in the drama, this is what happened in Pursuit of Jade (spoilers, obviously):
Wei Yan was in love with a childhood friend and was supposed to marry her. She suddenly married into the palace as a consort (Novel: this was because her cousin, the empress, was losing power to another consort so they sent her a cousin to help). He never had an affair with her, but this is the only woman he ever loved.
Wei Yan and his brother-in-law, Xie Zheng's father, were friends with the crown prince. The crown prince already had a son, Qi Min, and because of this the line of succession goes Crown Prince - Qi Min - go back up the tree for other sons of the emperor. However, the emperor has been favouring another prince recently and he can always switch crown princes. So Wei Yan, when drunk, says, "Why not just replace the emperor?" This is treason, so bad idea.
Because of this threat, the former emperor frames Wei Yan. He drugs Wei Yan with an aphrodisiac first. It seems like Wei Yan slept with a maid instead of his One True Love, but the emperor still pretends the consort is pregnant. The emperor starts interrogating the consort.
Wei Yan and Xie Zheng's father are supposed to defend a city from another attacking nation. General Xie is already there with the crown prince, Wei Yan is bringing food/reinforcements. Wei Yan hears about what is happening with the consort and turns back, but he gives Fan Changyu's father, Wei Qilin, the tiger tally so that the troops and food will still arrive.
The Sui family claims the tally is fake. The city falls, General Xie dies along with the crown prince, all the blame is pinned on Wei Qilin. Back at the capital, Wei Yan realizes this is all a plot to kill/impeach him. The consort lets herself die in a fire in an attempt to save Wei Yan. Wei Yan goes scorched earth and kills everyone, deposes the emperor, and installs a puppet baby emperor, Qi Sheng.
In the chaos, the crown princess, afraid that Wei Yan will kill her son too, sets the palace on fire and burns Qi Min's face and then hides him in the Sui family. The real Sui kid is dead.
At this point, Wei Yan's #1 priority, besides having All the Power, is keeping the consort free from blame. So he lets all the blame fall on Wei Qilin, who fakes his death and takes the identity of the dead Fan son. Wei Yan's sister, Xie Zheng's mom, realizes that she knows too much, so to save Xie Zheng, she commits suicide. Now she's not a threat and she hopes Wei Yan will keep her son alive (he does).
Wei Yan marries his already-pregnant wife and claims Wei Xuan as his own, but he's not his child and he prefers his nephew, Xie Zheng (though this preference doesn't mean he's nice at all. In the novel he lets Wei Xuan torment Xie Zheng pretty severely, probably to "toughen him up" or whatever, we see this in a flashback in the drama.)
Everything is basically chill for 17 years.
Xie Zheng takes back the city his father lost and kills all the citizens of the other country within it. This is 1:1 revenge, it's what the other country did to them, but that is why his reputation is so bad and why he's surprised that Fan Changyu praises him at his fake funeral.
The Sui family wants to rebel, and Qi Min, hidden within them, wants to use their rebellion to claim the throne for himself. The Li family also wants this so they can finally get rid of Wei Yan. The Sui family leak information to Xie Zheng in an attempt to drive a wedge between the two of them.
Xie Zheng starts to investigate the truth. Now this is where the drama was so strange and blamed Wei Xuan for the assassination attempt. It was Wei Yan in the novel. Let's just pretend he did it in the drama too because that makes more sense. Wei Yan is so desperate to keep his secret that he tries to kill his own nephew to bury the truth.
Wei Yan, fearing the truth will finally get out, tries to kill the entire Wei/Fan family, as they are the last real witnesses. This is why assassins come for Fan Changyu. General He, who has been in very sneaky contact with the Wei/Fan family, receives the Letter of Evidence and they commit suicide in front of him to save their two daughters.
And I think that explains everything. So the Biggest Bad was the former emperor, who tried to frame Wei Yan. Wei Yan still sucks because he killed many, many people to keep his secret. Wei Qilin, Fan Changyu's father, was innocent. The Li & Sui families are guilty of attempted rebellion. Qi Min was the true heir to the throne.
In the little extra scene at the end: Wei Yan gets to try again, he marries his one true love and everything turns out better. In this version, Fan Changyu and Xie Zheng are jokingly betrothed from birth and end up together as before. I think the point of this extra was actually for the author to assure us that even if Xie Zheng had a happy childhood, he'd still be weird and intense.
I'm still so fucking hung up on the whole thing of Changyu mistaking the princess using the ben gong form of address for herself for Bengong being her name...
Not only do I love it and find it fascinating and funny from a linguistic standpoint... and I adore this kind of linguistic/translation quandry... like howwww do you translate a joke like this that is essentially untranslatable because the forms of address on which the joke relies don't exist in other languages?
But also... I love that it again highlights the so very different life that Changyu has lead... the chasm in knowledge and experience between a commoner of the time and those in government/in the palace.
Because of course she would never before have heard someone referring to themselves as ben gong. Why would she? That form is used exclusively by royalty. When would she ever have come into contact with royalty.
She when she hears someone saying "You saved ben gong. Ben gong thanks you." of course she's going to think the person is referring to themselves in the 3rd person and that their name is Bengong.
Why would it even remotely occur to her that they are actually saying (effectively) "You saved this princess. This princess thanks you."
I love Gongsun Yin’s second introduction because the moment he steps into the Fan/Zhao household he consistently has his world views rocked. It’s so funny comparing his previous introduction where Qi Shu saw him as ethereal almost, poised and controlled, instead we got introduced to Xie Zheng’s friend and military advisor who initially thinks Fan Changyu is a big rough women who punches pigs to death and basically tied up his friend to force him into a marriage.
His imagination is top tier.
But, also, how else does a butcher woman convince Xie Zheng of all people to marry him when he wouldn’t even take a princess. And when he discovers his friend isn’t impaired or being blackmailed, he also realises his friend won’t leave her. Even when he should.
And then Changning delivers the kill shot by being super cute and adorable while telling him about raising her pet rabbits to feed to the stupid imperial messenger bird in the basket.
Poor educated man. Nothing makes sense to him.
he is also the only scholar we accept in this show.
there is no discourse between gen z and millenials. we are siblings. come on lil bro, ill take you to amc. yeah we can go there early and play the arcade games before the movie starts.
Why do the two reblogs read like a soldier dying in their friends arms and talking about when they’ll get back home to give them a bit of comfort before they die
More than "here in the Southern Hemisphere we have inverted seasons :)" thing, which is TECHNICALLY true, I would go a step further and encourage to think about that "much of the world does not exactly has a spring-summer-fall-winter season sequence as they show in cartoons"
I will scream about this to anyone who listens forever. AUSTRALIA DOES NOT HAVE "ENGLISH SEASONS BUT BACKWARDS" and the insistence that it does creates a massive layer of alienation from the natural world.
I never really realised how much difference it makes until I went to England and realised that here the change of seasons is an obvious, visible, physical change in the world. Like, everything REALLY IS orange and foggy in autumn! In spring there are flowers EVERYWHERE, so much more than any other season, and the trees really do have all blossom and no leaves. Even if it doesn't snow, in winter there's frost all the time and the trees are bare and the sky is visibly greyer all the time. You don't need to be told "this date is the first day of spring", you can SEE IT (although this is getting way messier and less precise due to climate change).
By contrast, most places in Australia the seasons we're taught feel like arbitrary categories - and is it any surprise considering they're colonial constructs? Orange-leaved autumn and blossom-covered spring is a cartoon stereotype with no relevance on a continent where ALL NATIVE TREES ARE EVERGREEN!! Snowy winters are a joke in the desert, and even sunny summers don't ring particularly true considering that much of the country is in the tropics, where summer means monsoons - not that I've ever seen the concept that WE HAVE A MONSOON SEASON taught at an Australian school.
Most Indigenous nations around Australia had six or more seasons, revolving around wet and dry times as much as hot and cold, and marked by the appearances of certain native animals and flowers. Schools need to start teaching the real seasons, and explaining that climate cycles are too complex to generalise globally, or else we will keep raising generations who view the natural world as hostile and unpredictable and climate predictions as generally irrelevent and frequently wrong - and I'm sure I don't need to spell out why that's a problem in the era of climate crisis.
i want to add that 40% of the world's population lives in the tropics, and the 4 season model just doesn't make much sense for a lot of places in there. usually it's just the wet season/monsoon season and the dry season. it's often hot year round.
the 4 season model as you and i know it is a european invention, though 4 season models aren't unique to europe! most notably china has the same type of season subdivision.
in general the way humans define seasons is largely subjective and varies across cultures. the one you were taught is not at all universal!
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