Masters2019Lilies

FL character development arc - stunted much?

The male lead is phenomenal as he always has been, the suporting actors around his storyline are incredible.. and his performance and development almost leaves the female lead in a stunted character development that mounts frustration with each episode.

The emotional intensity rises, but there is fundamental conflict that seems irreconcilable and it's not about his toxic character but her character's positionality. She discovers another aspect of his character and we do not even get to see it through her world view, its through his eyes that we see her new experience of him, but always shortlived that one cannot begin to construct how she views him or what position he holds in her world, its all lucid and intagible but the cycle is the same - Changxuan intervenes in Pingjun's life. Pingjun resists him - he results to oppression until he realises he cannot hold it out any longer, he lets go, she gets in trouble, he rescues her, she reieves the asssitance while rejecting him, it loops back.

And because Changxuan is such a forceful character, his actions makes each repetition feel different, even when the underlying dynamic has barely changed. A rescue reveals his vulnerability; another, his desperation; another, the lengths to which he will go for her. The events vary, but the relationship continues to revolve around the same question and dynamic: how much will he do (good or bad) for a woman who does not want to be possessed by him?

Meanwhile, Pingjun's position remains remarkably static. Her central objection is that his behaviour threatens her autonomy, and that objection is valid. But the problem is not that she resists him. It is that her choices never seem to accumulate into a sufficiently developed character arc.

She resists him when his behaviour threatens her autonomy, needs his intervention when circumstances become unbearable, and is grateful when he helps her. Yet that gratitude does not necessarily change her position on their relationship. She continues to accept the benefits of his power without confronting the contradictions of living within it. She objects to his methods without rejecting their benefits, yet somehow remains morally unsullied.

This is where her characterisation becomes frustrating for me. When retelling her time at Red Leaf, she repeatedly reiterates that nothing happened, that he did not touch her. I did not interpret this as her clearing his name or refuting abuse to put her family at ease. Rather, I saw her reverting to her constitutional principles without accounting for her own situationally dependent morality.

She is righteous and strong-willed until she finds herself in a position where she needs to be rescued by his power. She may reject him but she never rejects his power when she needs it, nor does she acknowledge that she is taking advantage of it. As long as she maintains her principles, she remains unsullied. But that gap between her moral convictions and her choices is precisely why her character does not develop. Instead, she revolves around Changxuan's growth and the opposite position she has to maintain, the wall between them is thick and almost difficult to imagine it coming down, yet when it serves her, it becomes invisible to her for that moment.

I am not arguing that she owes him love because he helps her. There is a difference between refusing to treat assistance as a romantic debt and refusing to recognise the significance of another person's repeated involvement in your life through a romantic lens.

The reason Changxuan entertains her in the first place is that he is making romantic advances. She knows this. It therefore becomes difficult to understand why she keeps returning to him through the same door, whether to express gratitude or to ask for help or to leave, it's the same door she uses. A normal person would never get to meet an army commander simply by waiting by the gate, yet she meets him because there is a door she knows, knowing very well what she will be presented with when it opens.

When she is arrested by the Japanese and Changxuan resorts to extreme exercise of his power, she is not repulsed instead upon his arrival, it is clear she waited for him based on her response, "you've arrived". When she is held at knifepoint, it is to him that she looks, recognising once again that he is the person who will rescue her because there is a door in him she knows.

She is smart enough to knows his rescues come with an expectation. She knows he wants something from her that she is unwilling to give. Somehow, her self righteousness is situational, never allowing her to suffer the consequences of his absence but vehemently strong enough to reject him once the coast is clear, but she never confronts her contradiction and this is what I find perplexing and missing from her story, there is never a moment of reflexivity or recognition of herself as a flawed person- after all she was not touched, although she in fact was touched, where is the grief or disengagement- there is no response from her over the psychological consequences of her own choices or his on hers, just reactivity.

If she cannot reciprocate his feelings, that is entirely her right. Assistance does not entitle anyone to love. But for someone who maintains such high moral standards, why does she repeatedly place herself in this position without ever meaningfully confronting the contradiction?

Her choices become narratively interesting when we ask whether she recognises the gap between her dependence on him and her moral judgment of him. Does she acknowledge her own motives? Does she recognise that she is repeatedly choosing to engage with someone whose methods she condemns because his power serves a purpose in her life? Does she ever examine what this says about her?

I am not asking her to be more vulnerable, more strong-willed, or more willing to give in to his advances. I am asking why her choices do not have the same psychological consequences as those of the ML.

Changxuan is not just toxic; he has a compelling story that makes him human. And that is the unfortunate reality: even abusers have stories and we only get to see their relationship through his world view because her story is too fragmented to reconcile with his on an equal footing.

His possessiveness, capacity for violence, vulnerability and growing attachment create material for a complicated psychological portrait. It is not just obsession. He draws you into wanting to understand his yearning, his social struggles with autonomy and power, and the contradictions within him. He reforms, but the struggle of growth is nonlinear. It is tangled, sometimes ugly, but interesting to examine, might I say I cringed each time he showed up on screen but still watched but his interactions with Pingjun or others builds upon one another, his behaviour has continuity, his complex psychology is not limited to her, we see it in his world.

Pingjun, by contrast, is predictable, reactive and almost abysmal to watch. Even her facial expressions become cryptic when you can already anticipate her response without finding any meaningful depth beneath it. She returns to a familiar position after each encounter. The circumstances change, but her underlying response remains remarkably the same.

She might become more aware of her own compromises or recognise that she has been judging his conduct without adequately examining her own motives. Or she might become more firmly convinced that his actions are wrong, but develop a clearer understanding of why she continues to engage with him despite that conviction and let the viewers in on why she allows and at times inserts herself back into his world after escaping it - either direction would represent a worthy development.

What does not represent much development is returning to the same moral posture after each encounter, without the accumulated experience producing any discernible change in her self-understanding.

The drama even hints at the possibility that Pingjun has some place for Changxuan in her heart, particularly during their parting before the fire. But this is what their relationship has always been: at each point of departure, there is the possibility of something more, some indication that she might feel more than she is willing to acknowledge. Then the cycle begins again.

Changxuan's character develops through the relationships around him, while Pingjun's character appears to be repeatedly reproduced by only his actions towards her, outside of the moral posturing and social activism, there isn't much substance to draw one in to being interested in her psychology.

This becomes even more apparent when Pingjun loses her memory. Her agency is understandably complicated by the loss of her autobiographical memories, yet her responses to Changxuan remain strikingly familiar. He reveals another part of himself, and she occupies the same position of reacting to what he reveals, she can acknowledge the discomfort and the wall between them even with the limited information she has.

Amnesia can disrupt memory without necessarily erasing personality. Her familiar responses could therefore reflect enduring dispositions. I wish the drama had offered more than a repetition of familiar reactions. We should see how those responses emerge without her memories and whether they differ meaningfully from those of the person she was before, where is the doubt in her own feelings after being presented with a different version of him? It doesn't exist, the wall remains, she did not even know her own name, yet she trusted what he told her but cannot question her discomfort with him.

It is as though her primary narrative function has consistently been to react to Changxuan's behaviour, removing her memories does not substantially alter her role. The same dynamic persists because her characterisation has never been sufficiently independent of him. This is the imbalance I find most frustrating.

Changxuan's contradiction is explored as an internal conflict expressed externally into his whole world through different lenses. We are invited to observe how it affects him, how it evolves, and what it reveals about the person he is becoming. The drama allows us to sit with the contradictions, the cruelty and the uncomfortable realities of his character and how others experience him, including Pingjun.

Pingjun's contradiction, on the other hand, appears to be recurring circumstance rather than an internal conflict worthy of the same scrutiny, it feels cyclical and exhausting, even Tao Ziyi is more compelling, her story grows and evolves, its hard to separate Pingjun from the high-school girl she was.

I do not need her to become more submissive or to give in to Changxuan's advances. I need her to become a more fully realised character in her own right. Her principles, compromises, desires and choices should have consequences that shape her understanding of herself, just as his choices shape his.

The tragedy is not that Pingjun refuses to love Changxuan. It is that the drama seems far more interested in exploring what loving her does to him than in exploring what their relationship reveals about her- ironically, as the story begins to sanitize his toxicity, the viewer is propelled to sympathesise with him while being subjected to the cruel rejection and apathetic reactions she offers to him.

Where are the contradictions and cruelty of reality to be explored through her character. Where is the same psychological complexity, the same uncomfortable questions, the same willingness to examine the gap between what a person believes and what they actually do. She dumped Xueting and managed to move on from a lifetime relationship with him as though it was not fresh, yet she gets teary as she says goodbye to Changxuan. How she reconciles the men, the Japanese lady, discovering the truth about her dad, we only see her reaction, but what it does to her, hoe it informs he world view, we don't. Changxuan becomes battle hardened against corruption because of what losing his comrades did to him, we not only see the pain, we see how it now morphes into his ideal and why he will probably not be apologetic over Pingjun seeing him murder a corrupt armsman, one cannot predict his response, but can anticipate his position and understand him because Changxuan is already a compelling character.

The question is why Pingjun, who occupies such a central position in this story, is not afforded the same depth.

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