Dreams of a peach blossom sanctuary. A war-free secluded paradise born in the tumultuous era of the Six Dynasties in the mind of author Tao Yuanming, populated only by contented, hospitable peasants. His outsider narrator is unable to locate this land of refugee descendants again after returning home to report his discovery. Yu Wanyin gets a touch of the textbook fairyland in her cloistered palace garden in the tale she lives within a tale in How Dare You!? in the halcyon days before she has to swap her diaphanous princessy robes for combat armor. Shrimp Encounter's warring factions have the crustacean-blessed fortune to revisit it, though it never literally blossoms for them and the peasants they meet are homely but also sardonic and passive aggressive, all "Have a lovely look at the devastating trouble you've foisted on us. BUT—we're such super nice folks we won't trouble you with clearing it up. Oh god, we'll just humbly go to great lengths to trouble ourselves!"
Props for a crowd with brains and some psychological complexity in a low-budget slapstick comedy. A question that occurs to H, on the other claw: Is the mental warfare unrealistic for people habituated to niceties and simple living? Hypothetical answer: These other peasants are not as geographically far removed from mainstream society as Tao Yuanming's peasants. Even so, are the mental warfare scenes acted out too smoothly by everyone when this is overall still a population who distance themselves from the outside world? It depends.
How realistic are Tao Yuanming's one-dimensional peasants in the first place? Unlike what some filmmakers imply, politics is not some frivolous invention engaged in by power players with nothing better to do. This irksome exercise is borne out of scarcity. Can any paradise be eternally untouched by turbulent geological history or meteorological threats? Competition for limited resources, along with Nature's fondness for genetic experimentation, beget psychological diversity. However uniformly virtuous his starter population might have been, cheaters and schemers can emerge in the long run and look for openings to get their way.
The idealism-soaked snapshot delivered through the Tao short essay "Record of a Peach Blossom Spring" is a goal. We may never arrive at perfect peachiness, only hopefully venture closer and closer. For that, we need Yu Wanyin's role versatility and pragmatic courage to face the irksome, not reject all political talk.