24
This review may contain spoilers
“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.
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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