Blazing Elegance

Apparent default of consent in a good quality forbidden love story.

Story: The poor teacher Zhao Xing Rou falls for the rich warlord Yi Qiu Ting. All seems to be going well until the Male Leads family knows about it.

This is a beautiful and high quality drama. I started watching it and I appreciated it. However the use of violence by the domineering warlord Male Lead to stay with the teacher Female Lead was sometimes hard to stand.
Although I understand that the two of them love each other so basically they would like to remain together. Circumstances make that hard to happen and Male Lead domineering as he is, used all his power to stay with his beloved at any cost, despite their family wishes and even Female Lead's requests at some point.
This is why I was not so happy about seeing him forcing her. But the story line was great and I could understand the dangers they had to face together so I kept watching.
However, When I saw how later in the show, Female Lead behaves toward Male Lead . That was too much for me. She became despicable and to me they destroyed her persona.

But to be fair the drama is beautiful and as much as I was annoyed about those two forcing themself onto each other. It was still a visually beautiful watch.

The plot is simple soI will not indulge in descriptions. I liked everything in this drama except the last part when Female Lead retaliates. She could have done it in a different way.

The two Second Male Leads have what looks like an hidden BL romance.

So, if it doesn't disturb you to see Male Lead forcefully bed Female Lead all the time. Despite her being in love with him. You could appreciate this drama.


Pros :
- Great cinematography and good quality mini drama.
- Good story.
- Fighting scenes are well shot and executed.
- Great acting. They managed to make me cry at some point.
- BL so-called bromance between the two Sooecond Male Lead.
- Fast pacing was pleasing.
- Great character development for Male Lead and Female Lead. They others stay pretty much the same.


Cons :
- Forced love : Male Lead forcefully bedding Female Lead is a little disturbing. Despite the fact that we know that she is in love with him. Is it or not a defaut of consent. I let you judge of that. I don't say more not to spoil.
- A lot of twists and turns, despite the general storyline being simple.

Overall : It woths the watch because of the quality of the drama and the retribution at the end.
I could only recommend this drama if you understand the concept of forbidden love. And Male Lead forcefully bedding Female Lead doesnt shock you.
Watching the drama I understood why Male Lead did all he did and I also understood why Female Lead never really tried to escape him.

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Dark romance in turbulent time

This drama is a typical dark romance that takes place in a turbulent period, the Republican Era in China. It belongs to the slap kissed genre . All kinds of violence are to be expected.

We can't use today's lense to judge the past. We can only accept that things are different back then and this drama gives us a glimpse into that world.

Overall, the production did a great job with the set, the lighting, it has the right mood. All the actors gave it their all. The emotions can be felt across the screen.

The hardest part is the genre itself. Once we accept and get passed this, what happened in the drama becomes more real. One sure thing is the main couple's deep love for each other. His love can be too much sometimes. He suffocated her with his love. It's sad and touching at the same time.

The main actor Wanyan Luo Rong is relatively new. He did a great job this time. He had to cry in so many scenes. It must take a toll on him but he did great. It's time like this that you appreciate what a good actor can do to a role. He becomes the character and we can feel the hurt, the pain.

Initially, I wasn't too impressed with actress Zhong Li Li but she grew on me towards the end. Maybe it's her character or something else, I didn't feel a strong draw. Her chemistry with her costar is just alright. It could be better. I never truly feel her love for him in the drama. Something is missing.

The supporting cast are all great. I like them all. They really elevated the drama. I enjoy watching their scenes. The brotherly bonds are charming. Either way, they left a deep lasting impression.

Even some of the "villains", we can see their true hearts and feel bad for them. Sometimes people just make the wrong choices and had to face consequences.

Even though this is a good drama, it has low re watch value. It's the type that you only watch once. You witness their stories but hope to move on because it's too dark, too painful.

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The angst, the depressing undertone...the darkness!

This was a trainwreck,wow!!China has really nailed the romantic angst when it comes to the storylines and the execution in their dramas. Blazing Elegance will definitely make you uncomfortable, set in the republic historical setting of China, just as the tensions and the war brew out between Japan and China, we have a forbidden love-story between two sweethearts (or yeah it doesn`t get that sweet later on) The only heir of the Grand Warlord Yi Qiuting and the school teacher Xingrou. Yi Qiuting is a dominating force, stubborn in everything he does and does not take no for an answer. His family was against his desicion in marrying Xingrou, so he did very immoral stuff to keep her with him. It was terrible the stuff he did and the way she desperately tried to escape his so called Cage of Love. His love suffocated her eventually. But in her heart she always understood his actions, she had that understanding for him. Even if it took her so long to forgive him, she also gave him a great deal of his own medicine by the way. Hehe! This story made me anxious, sad and giddy at the same time. I binge-watched it in one go.

First time seeing the mainleads and they did by the way AWESOME job of portraying the couple`s complex relationship. Qiuting`s words: "If you die i will eat your ashes"-straight crazy cold line by him. But such a utterly lost, sick and hopeless fool when it comes to his beloved heroine.

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“Dark Romance” whose highs make for a riveting watch

I finished this intriguing “dark romance” drama in days and highly recommend a watch! My review is on the highs and lows of the storytelling techniques, especially on what the Director, Pan Yan Qian is trying to do in a feminist vein, but I’ll just start by saying while I spotted the flaw in several Directorial and narrative choices, I was never bored, considered dropping, or would fail to recommend it as a compelling watch.

Looking at the Director’s other work (My Name Is Zhao Wu Di 2024) female empowerment seems to be her bag, but her liberal political lens is obviously only going to take her part of the way with what she wants to achieve via the main characters’ trajectories. In this drama she gets the importance of redistribution of resources to provide the woman with the power she needs to have leverage in a relationship with a very powerful man who abuses his power, but what she gets wrong is that she assumes sexual equality is when women get to be as terrible as men with power and are able to cruelly force certain outcomes; whereas the real feminist victory would to work to change the nature of the game altogether. Because she doesn’t really have a grasp of this after the extended scenes of emotional torture which have been justly complained about and I totally get it having now watched, the female lead (FL), Zhao Xing Rou re-subordinates herself by returning to gender roles which are necessarily hierarchical - of supporting the male lead (ML) Yi Qiu Ting at home in the family and in the community, while he goes out into the world and changes it - which is literally inequality. She gave up the more equal identity position she had vis a vis her husband to return to the same iniquitous power relations that infantilised, reduced and disempowered her years ago!

Now I feel that I have to point out for people who might not have a full grasp of Chinese political/military history this man is a Warlord, don’t be distracted by the uniform, in what basically was a Fascist period in China before the Communist Revolution that removed the fascists, both the local KMT nationalists to which he originally belonged, and those belonging to the occupying army of Imperial Japan. We open the drama with this woman in a relationship with a fascist, (the non-state, private equivalent would be a Mafia) so already we should be informed what kind of violent world and unethical inter-personal milieu Zhao Xing Rou has entered into by her own consent. This is where their journey starts before Yi Qiu Ting joins the Chinese resistance forces at the very end. As head of the Hao family warlord clan this is moral morass Zhao Xing Rou also willingly if briefly occupies in a leading role. This is the context which underpins their entire journey and on which all character growth and development hinges on.

Now on the multiple rape scenarios:
I get why there was the dubious consent scene at the outset but I think the overkill of the ML’s sexual assault on the FL at her apartment was flagrantly unnecessary as was the FL’s attempt (it was not completed) to facilitate a sexual assault on the ML in the final third of the drama. In the first instance she consents to the sex but not the fertility drugs administered by stealth. The ML’s attempts to protect the FL by ensuring she has a basis (pregnancy with the Yi heir) to be accepted by his powerful family given her poor background, is wrong but the narrative lets us understand why he willfully decides to do that wrong thing and hide the reasoning from her. This makes sense for the narrative in that it substantiates the intimate villainy of the ML that must subsequently be tackled in the narrative - he’s now a villain in his public as well as his private life.

Every other subsequent assault was just gratuitous nonsense, which was supposed to be sexually titillating I imagine, but totally failed to do that and rather just mystified and repulsed the audience on that score. Those scenes did not make sense for either of the characters’ motivations or for their characterisations - two traumatised people who love each other and make terrible choices ostensibly to protect each other and or preserve the relationship for themselves; Major fail.

The BL CP:
The MM CP meanwhile also started with a pronounced power imbalance on many scales (authority, age, masculine presentation, dominant/subordinated, military/intellectual), accentuated by identity mystery and mistrust about the past. However, unlike the main leads the secondary leads in the next most compelling relationship, Peng Wu and Wu Chong Mo, have a journey that recalibrates their power dynamic, in which they rely on and support each other and earn the explicit endorsement for their atypical relationship of the ML in doing so. On this aspect the Director did well (now you see why women invented BL because it’s so hard visioning equal relationships between men and women - who are not social equals, on a permanent basis that’s not frustratingly contingent or illusory.

The BL element is really popular and as a result the Director has promised a special episode featuring that relationship; also one, but sadly not both, of this pair - Zhan Xuan will star in a new BL, “Revenged Love” https://youtu.be/4qmLHpHAyOA?si=8zREY20QxBfoFPuN , coming out on GagaOOLala this week!

Further Recommendation on this theme:
If you’re interested in exploring these themes and want to see a complete feminist subversion of “dark romance” tropes watch Killer and Healer which is a masterclass on the entirely important visioning Director Pan Yan Qian tries to do here but which Sam Ho, who incidentally is the Director of the much anticipated Danmei adaptation Immortality, does much better.

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