Well, this is horrifying. I just realized that the newlywed room Jiao Liqiao had planned to marry Di Feisheng in is the same room she had him kneel at her feet in after crippling him and trying to destroy his martial arts.
Here’s the room in ep. 34 when he’s forced to kneel in front of her (and is in tons of pain and dissociating).
Here’s the newly wed room in ep. 38:
Notice that the bed is now where the chaise longue was. This means that she was planning on forcing the consummation in EXACTLY the same place that she had humiliated him in front of her men earlier (forcing him to kneel and calling him “Furen”). The screen behind the bed is even the same pattern as the screen that was behind her chaise longue, which means she planned to surround him with the same decorations, so there would be nowhere he could look where he wouldn’t be reminded of the earlier trauma and of his powerlessness.
Here’s something even more disturbing: the wedding bed is actually her bed, since it was already in that room, just in an alcove off to the side in ep. 34.
Here’s the bed in episode 34.
And here it is in the newly wed room.
That means she moved it from its normal, more private location, and put it front and center of the room where her surrogate throne was. It’s now the focal point of the room and very deliberately staged, as though she was expecting an audience for the forced consummation, just like she had an audience when she forced him to his knees in front of all her men.
And if that weren’t enough, here’s another disturbing detail: do you see the decorative frame she’s using to hold up the curtain?
Guess where that’s from? Di Feisheng’s BEDROOM.
We saw it once before: in the scene where Jiao Liqiao tried to undress Di Feisheng. He had let her help him with the outer robe and wrist guard and then stopped her, looking furious, when she starts to undo his belt while saying that she will help him shower and change his clothes. She doesn’t listen to his very clear and furious no, and she only stops after he threatens to fire her. The curtain holder is the biggest piece of scenery in the background of the shots where she is reacting to being turned down, so much so that it practically becomes associated with her rejection.
Given this, it’s very telling that she ripped it away from the rest of his bed (which it matched) and put it with her bed; she took something that she’d associated with his rejection of her and put it with her (non-matching) bed, which she turned into their wedding bed, to symbolically destroy that resistance and to be a stark reminder that, now, unlike back then, he’s helpless to stop her.
Everything about that room was designed to (possibly publicly) mock him for his helplessness and to revel in her triumph over him.
So it’s even more powerful (and even more of a relief) that instead of that future, what actually happens in the newly wed room is that Li Lianhua carefully places Di Feisheng in the spot where he had previously been publicly humiliated and was in danger of worse, and heals him instead. Li Lianhua gives him back his power and agency, and even shares the mental codes for Yangzhouman, turning what was supposed to be a symbol of his defeat and helplessness into a symbol of respect, care, of sacrifice for another (because LLH gives him Yangzhouman that he needs to keep himself alive), and the strength that true cooperation and union can bring.
And I’m going to be crying about this forever.
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