you know how sometimes you’re like, “pain is fun, right? what this cold definitely needed was more tears, right?”
and then you decide to rewatch nirvana in fire.
honestly, I dare every wlw in the entire world to watch the first ep of this show and not come out in love with mu nihuang. like. if you can truthfully state that you don’t want to marry her, you can have $100 and my eternal confusion.
watching ep4 of this show is really just, as an experience, being like this for 45 straight minutes:
I know I’m not usually big into the Noble Hero archetype, but I am here to say that I love Jingyan, the biggest Noble Hero (who also happens to be a cynical, salty, sarcastic little shit with more Feelings than he knows what to do with) with every fiber of my cold dead heart.
one of the things that’s really great about this show is that content set in historical patriarchal societies which doesn’t want to spend significant screen time being About Gender Politics has basically two tactics it can take (okay, there’s also the no female characters option, but that’s a bad option, and I reject it), and nirvana in fire does both of them, and it does them really well:
you have the “we’re ignoring the fact that women probably couldn’t have held these positions and giving them to them anyway” option, which is exemplified by Nihuang and Xia Dong (and also, to a certain extent, Qin Banruo—she’s Prince Yu’s strategist, after all), who are both amazing characters with positions in society they probably wouldn’t have actually been able to have in real life. Nihuang is the leader of an army and the de facto head of a province of the country—sure, technically it’s her little brother now, but everyone knows it’s her, and there’s really no hand-wringing about her gender. Xia Dong is basically an agent of the ancient China FBI. she’s respected, and her missions and skills are never framed as lesser than her male counterparts. the Emperor trusts her and sends her out to do important stuff.
and then you ALSO have the “all right, these female characters are stuck in positions where they might have less overt power, but they have depth, complex inner narratives, and agency within the show’s storyline as they use the power they do have to do amazing things” option, as exemplified by Consort Jing, Princess Liyang, the Empress, Gong Yu, and again, sort of Qin Banruo. these women do AMAZING, fascinating things, and they’re given time and space in the story to have complicated, contradictory feelings about them. yes, fine, they’re often working through or because of the men in their lives, but they’re also frequently NOT—Liyang makes some of the most interesting personal choices of anyone in this entire show, and her being trapped into some pretty shitty situations doesn’t change that.
my point is just that I love that NiF does both these things. only using the first tactic can often feel like, “okay, well, we ignore misogyny because, uhhh, if we pretend it was fine back then, we can all enjoy our fantasies of being born in the wrong time period,” and if it’s just the second, it’s like, “we like making it clear that women are Oppressed, even though we will not address that at all. they just were, okay, lighten up and enjoy it.” and I know both sort of feels like it should be worse, but instead, you get this mix that really just—lifts it up? it’s not too much of anything. it’s the power fantasy for women and the acknowledgement that sometimes stuff was shitty, but women found ways to take control of their lives anyway.
and I just think that’s Neat.
