Liri's Archive @lyricalaurea - Tumblr Blog

Prince Ding kicking the Vice Governor like the football while he was left flabbergasted was utterly satisfying I want to see him do it to more people please and thank you

#the first jasmine #mo li #cdrama #lirirambles #the OST for this scene was also fantastic #it felt like a high stakes game

well, i think we all agree that Prince Li is definitely not dead (unlike everyone at Lishan Academy). i am really curious why he thought staging his death will help at this point.

also, how is Ye Li planning to take "help" from Master Xian Kun? although, arguably, Qingshuang has been so helpful to her so far so what's one more helpful ghost... :D

the politics aside, what's more interesting is that as Mo Xiuyao and Ye Li become closer, they are also growing farther apart. Xiuyao is improving both physically and mentally and is also falling for Li. She, however, seems to be falling deeper into a daze because she has already accomplished the goal of helping Xiuyao and now all thats left is the "debt repayment" by getting the decree back (hence less things to distract her from her severe trauma)

She also seems to be someone who feels uneasy the moment something doesn't go exactly as she predicted, which is why Xiuyao's concern for her is unsettling her and making her more distant (as she doesn't even know there is something deeply wrong with her, so she cannot comprehend why he would be worried in the first place)

I hope they address these struggles sooner rather than later, so our couple can join hands to mete out retributive justice

#the first jasmine #mo li #cdrama #chinese drama #spoilers #i also really liked that How Dare You reference #when Feng Zhi Yao told Xiu Yao #that he is like a tyrant who has lost his mind due to a demon consort #he really is lol

irtbat

Halfway through ep 18 and MXY is like, winning my wife's No. 1 Companion spot against the hallucination of her dead maid is something that's normal to want and possible to achieve

#the first jasmine #mo li #cdrama

watermelonmountaindew

i need to know every language immediately

dangermousie

Love that even he can stand and walk small distances now, he still uses a wheelchair on the reg because he's far from fully recovered.

This narrative getting that this is a gradual process, like physical therapy or rehab, is amazing.

fake-married-my-dead-fiance

I need to go rewatch the scene where the husband convinces his wife not to murder her treacherous grandmother in a fugue state... said no one before ever

#the first jasmine #spoilers #mo li #romance is coaxing your wife not to murder her grandmother #romance is also pretending this is completely normal

lyricalaurea

So okay. Episode 15. First of all, this was definitely the most intense episode so far. I have to laude the cinematic storytelling here, because it kept me on the edge of my seat throughout (including the fantastic use of OST)

I think the entire sequence was so well-done, especially with Ye Li and her father. When we were shown that empty paper in Ye Li's hands, I think my heart broke too. Because after ALL of her efforts, it was proof he didn't really care about her mother and her (at least not as much as Ye family), and remained a coward.

Then, well. I did NOT expect a murderous granny who was pretending to have dementia to be the one behind her mother's death. I guess it tracks with how selfish her sons are... but I digress. Poor Ye Li got another severe shock, no wonder she completely lost it.

The scene with Xiuyao desperately calling out to her.. it says so much about Ye Li that what finally snapped her out of it was Xiuyao asking her for help. That entire sequence deserves long essays dedicated to it.

But that aside, the big question is: are we Not going to address the elephant in the room? The next morning sequence was Bizarre, to say the least. Ye Li acted as if Xiuyao didn't physically stop her from sending her grandma to hell herself the night before!

I thought she would at least offer an explanation, however false, but.. it seems like maybe she does not want to lie to him anymore? especially after their fight for this very reason, so maybe she resolved to not say anything at all..?

Also what was up with the scene with Ye Li's brother and the toad? There is definitely some significance there which I am missing.

On a side note, we found out that the decree went to Consort Dowager Qin but with everything else that went on in this episode, it was virtually ignored lol. I wonder what method Ye Li will choose to extract information from the Consort Dowager next.

sol1056

The next morning didn't feel like she decided to not mention anything. It felt like if he'd said, so why were you with your grandmother in the garden by the burning tree?, she would've started at him like he'd grown a second head. As if the entire scene simply did not exist for her. There have been other hints, times when she was a little cooler for school than you might expect, but here it was right there for the audience. Whatever she's been through, she's clearly survived it using two specific coping mechanisms.

One, she's willed herself into seeing something scary enough to distract her from whatever was the real terror (ie monkeys). Or to see a presence wonderful enough to distract her from the truth of an absence (ie her little maid). And the other is to compartmentalize so thoroughly and totally that a memory or event simply never happened.

I tend to drop the cdramas that turn super makjang so maybe I've missed others, but this might be the first time I've seen not just a strong disassociation but one done so matter-of-fact. Though I guess at barely a third of the way, there's still time for some good scenery chewing.

lyricalaurea

you're right, I did feel that too that maybe she was so thoroughly retraumatized that maybe she suppressed the memory entirely.

But then we see Xiuyao informing her of her grandmother's death and the first thing that occurs to her is the tree and how it led to her demise. It was then I started to consider that maybe she did remember what happened, but doesn't want to acknowledge it.

Do you perhaps think she suppressed only some parts as opposed to the entire sequence? Like with her maid, she remembers her maid but not her death. So perhaps she remembers only that her grandmother was hit, not what followed.

Its actually very impressive how they have portayed our unreliable narrator through creative storytelling, I still have a lot of questions about Ye Li and what exactly is true or false for her.

#the first jasmine #mo li