Apparently there’s this whole “debate” on whether Xiao Yan Zi or Zi Wei is supposed to be the protagonist of HZGG, because in a recent Qiong Yao memorial event or something, CCTV showed images of Ruby Lin and Alec Su when talking about HZGG, causing people to speculate that CCTV was trying to send some sort of message.
Of course they were, and the message is Zhao Wei is still blacklisted.
There was a time in the 2000s when CCTV would probably combust rather than promote two Taiwanese artists as the faces of such a huge IP but I guess they don’t have much choice now.
And the idea that Zi Wei and Yong Qi are the protagonists of HZGG (together) is hilarious.
If you read the novel, the protagonist is very obviously Zi Wei. Despite the novel still being called Huan Zhu Ge Ge, writing is very much centred around Zi Wei and her quest to find her father. Er Kang is so very obviously written as the male lead/main love interest. Qian Long, Yong Qi and Er Tai are all secondary characters in the novel. Both Zi Wei and Er Kang are also much better fits for Qiong Yao’s usual mould of protagonists.
This is also why Zi Wei suffers so much whump while Xiao Yan Zi was probably supposed to play the same type of role as Du Fei in Romance in the Rain.
In the drama, you get more of a dual protagonists situation with Zi Wei and Xiao Yan Zi, but part of that is because Xiao Yan Zi as played by Zhao Wei was such a new approach to a female character that subverted so much of the expectation of the time that the audience totally just fell in love with her.
The thing is, though, HZGG is different from Qiong Yao’s earlier works, where the novel was written first and then the drama was the adaptation. With HZGG, Qiong Yao wrote the screenplay first and then the novel was the adaptation. So clearly she made a conscious choice when writing the novel to focus more on Zi Wei which again fits her usual MO. Xiao Yan Zi was probably the character that ran away from her in terms of popularity and outside of her comfort zone, which probably explains why Xiao Yan Zi’s antics/non-conformity became more over the top in season 2, before she just went right back to the usual Qiong Yao suffering for love type in season 3.
But anyway, no one who was ever alive during the HZGG craze would argue with the idea that Xiao Yan Zi is the protagonist. Why is this even a question 🤣
