A Broken Promise: HIStory 3 Make Our Days Count Finale
SPOILER WARNING: This post is going to be full of spoilers for the finale of HIStory 3: Make Our Days Count (as well as My Country: The New Age), and no little bit of upset.
While this installment of the HIStory franchise didn’t connect with me immediately, the characters did grow on me and I found myself cheering for the two couples. And I wanted to wrap Xi Gu in bubble wrap to protect him from the world that had hurt him so much already. So when he finally learned to open up and accept an unexpected but genuine love from Haoting, my heart was happy.
Today my heart is broken. As a writer and a viewer, I’m not someone who eschews all sad endings because sometimes that’s what the story calls for. For instance, the recent ending of My Country: The New Age, while heartbreaking and also requiring tissues, made perfect sense because of those characters’ journeys and we’d been gradually prepared for it. Not so with this ending of Make Our Days Count. Yes, I know, one could argue that the ending was right there in the title. But was it? Any number of things could have happened to have that title make sense, but to kill Xi Gu and rob him and Haoting (and viewers) of a happy ending they’d fought hard to achieve was just wrong. With Xi Gu’s forgetfulness in Episode 9, I’d pondered that perhaps something was medically wrong with him, something like a brain tumor – but something he could recover from, and thus the title would have also made sense. But no, we got a death off screen that felt gratuitous, put in merely for shock value. Xi Gu’s existence in the story, his tragically short life that had been full of pain and loss until he and Haoting fell in love, was reduced to a plot device to take Haoting from the teenage goof-off to a top student in college. It robbed him of one of the main things about his personality, his effervescence.
That time leap felt like a cheat as well. Xi Gu’s death and how it affected everyone who knew him in the immediate aftermath got zero screen time. Yes, it’s very powerful to see how brokenhearted Haoting is even after six years (which isn’t fair to the off-screen girlfriend Phoebe; don’t get me started on how his family is right back to pushing him to be with a girl), and Song Wei En did a wonderful job with his performance in this episode. I sat here crying my eyes out right along with Haoting. Even typing this, I’m tearing up again. That shows how much those characters became real to me, the fact I’m crying over a fictional person’s death and another’s heartbreak.
I also found the existence of the Xi Gu lookalike in this episode cruel. At first, I was a bit confused, thinking Haoting was just imagining Xi Gu being there with him. Then it dawned on me that this is either a younger student who looks remarkably like Xi Gu or perhaps he looks just enough like him that Xi Gu is who Haoting sees when he looks at him. Whichever it is, it’s just another stab in the heart.
There is also the implicit promise that HIStory viewers have come to accept: that while there might be sad endings in other BL stories, HIStory was a safe place to find happy endings for gay couples. That promise has now been broken. It would be different if sad endings had been peppered into the series along the way, but they hadn’t. No matter what the characters had to go through, at the end of each season they were together and happy. Even with the ending of HIStory 3: Trapped, while Tang Yi and Shao Fei were going to be temporarily separated, you just knew that it was exactly that – temporary.
I am happy that Sun Bo Xiang and Lu Zhi Gang are still together and happy, but even with Haoting saying he’s over his heartbreak at the end, it didn’t feel like the truth. It feels much more like he’s being punished for loving someone with his whole heart, accepting his attraction to someone of the same sex, fighting his own family to be with that person, and finally finding happiness with Xi Gu only to have him ripped away. This ending felt like a big middle finger to the fans of the HIStory series, especially the ones who have been with it from the beginning.
