grapejuice

Actually will you mind if I rant just a bit? I'm so sick of discussing romance this and romance that and romance romance romance. I told a friend of mine about this comment section and he looked at it long enough to roll his eyes at me being a part of these conversations when I had been telling him that the story and the insights and the overall quality were the thing to note. So, now I'm getting royally teased and I'm just sick of the ... romance discussions. Sigh. It was nice to talk about the spitting up blood and fighting thing for awhile. haha.

Agreed. But can I quote you to my partner ? haha

I didn't actually know that there was such a genre as fantasy romance. I just liked the way it sounded. So, I'll go look that up and learn something. :-) TY

I think we noticed but still it would be a stretch. They were only feet from the blast and the soldier wasn't between him and the blast for the whole time that it was happening.

He was lucky to be wearing his ML plot armor.

It was quite nice how they backed off so fast. His whole plan was quite amazing. In every way brilliant.

No I got it. I was just adding a thought of my own to yours.

It's getting close to two years ... not YEARS. And doesn't it feel different this time? Making the most of whatever her situation is ... is her greatest skill I think. But, before, she was with her equals and now she's supposed to survive and be happy as a wealthy person. It's taking her a while to get used to the air up there. And maybe she never really will because she doesn't have so much respect for people of that class. Even if they're nice, they're so unaware about what poor people deal with.
So, yeah, I think JQ's marriage means living in a way that she would never choose ... while he is so easy and comfortable in it. Plus ... he's gone from distant scary controlling master to supposed-to-be-intimate husband. That's a huge leap to get used to. So, it's not just getting to know each other. He used to own her and she was so happy to escape that, Basically, I think you should cut her some more slack because she's stuck in a whirlwind of uncomfortable change.

She didn't know that Scholar Han was going to place so high in the exam and end up in the capital and the court so quickly.

Given that, her situation with him would have been more similar to her situation in the Lin family that she could ever have known.

With the Lin family, she has so many responsibilities and so much risk to contend with when I'm pretty sure she just wants to spend her time learning and writing plays ... to make a name for herself and to earn some cash.

The name and the cash are important because they give her personal power to be on a more equal footing with the ML. She didn't want power over him from ZXTs gift, she wants it to stem from her own talents. With Scholar Han it would have been relatively easy for her to feel equal in her marriage.

This drastic power differential is one of the barriers she was talking about, I think.

Everyone talked about the slap but I was most impressed with her not bowing to him even though the matchmaker forced her to do it after a very long and awkward pause. Good on her though., right. The inlaws needed to be shown, unequivocally, how she felt as well as LJQ knowing it in a tangible way ... and so she made her feelings known very well to everyone. :-)

I'm liking the fight scenes too. We were talking here, some episodes ago ... about the fight choreography being different in this drama. A directorial decision maybe.

When second master spit up blood I remember thinking it was the first realistic spitting of blood that I've ever seen in a c-drama. If it was true that he had TB. But then I wondered about that. Because he has a heart problem, right? And TB is contagious ... so it was the right illness to claim to the looters ...

But, if he doesn't actually have it ... we're back to another example of spitting up blood that isn't realistic.

there will never be a divorce no matter how many years go by because the king decreed it and kings don't go back on their decrees. At most, I'm guessing, they could separate to different homes for more of the time than not.

She was agreeing to marry Scholar Han just because it would make her parents happy and maybe she thought they were good enough friends that they would be compatible over time. They might have fallen in love but, then again, maybe not. Would they sleep together, probably but the bed might have gone cold quickly if they remained more of friends than lovers. I think they were both taking that risk. And I'm sure that he knew she would be good for his career as well as being fun to sing with. The deal was especially good for him. But her parents wanted it and she wants her parents to be happy.

OP was making the point that it's a good thing for them to finally be having a conversation like the one that they just had. A lot of marriages don't have that kind of mature communication with such honesty on a hard subject. I think she sees that as a good sign for their future. But you've seized on her wording and are arguing that she's wrong because she used the word healthy marriage in the way that we modern people tend to do.

You're kind of arguing past each other.

But you and I are both being a bit wrong about their marriage. as @chichi nyanza is saying above. It is an arranged marriage and not the kind that we were talking about. An arranged marriage can have such severe restrictions depending on why it was arranged. Perhaps there's sex until there's an heir. Perhaps there's no need to even see one another at all if it's arranged just to bring families together for political purposes. Different rules for different circumstances between people who may not have even met before and may start or end hating each other. Who knows?

We're all hoping that their marriage will be a real and personal one with all the perks like love and sex and intimacy and children. Much more than just living together. Like marriages of today.

But it's good that LJQ hasn't forced more than LX is willing to give him. In those days, a man had a right to force his wife to sleep with him so many would wonder, if they knew, why he hadn't done that. He could also have forced himself on her when she was his maid.

So, I'd say it's not the marriage we're thinking of but at least it doesn't include the socially acceptable (for the time) amount of violence.

It was, unfortunately, much more accurate for wartime and for their time, to show assault and murder. And it's still much too often the case for our time too.

It's not a real marriage yet so it can't be a healthy one until it is one.

Haha. I've been thinking about this all day. And I've decided that this is actually a fantasy romance.

My partner has never done anything as bad as what LJQ has done but neither has he done much work to become my ideal man.

Most women come to the conclusion, with regret, that you can't change a man to be the man that you want him to be. Doesn't work. It's a fantasy.

But it's working for LX. She's getting the fantasy romance where a man really wants to be the man she wants him to be. He's recognizing the points where he's fallen short and now ... he's doing his best to be better and to be better than 99% of the men in his era.

It's definitely a fantasy romance ... that my partner will need to watch ... soon and maybe repeatedly :-)

BTW I love everything that you've written in your comment. Great insights.

It isn't the kind of marriage you want to see yet because she doesn't want to be married and he's not forcing her to sleep with him.

So, should he force her? No. Should she want to be married to him? Obviously she's not there yet.

So we watch to see what might change her mind.

But putting a clock on it doesn't make sense in my mind. Unless you want to see a different set of 'normal' characters. The characters in another popular drama start on opposite sides of a war. He tortures her when he captures her. But their first kiss beats your timeline.

Now, are you sure you want to see this in ATC? These characters are actually the more normal ones ... in a very odd situation. Anyway, it can't be a 'healthy marriage' yet.

We modern day women often wish to change our men so that they understand us better ; so that they understand how hard it is to be a woman. But be forewarned that it's almost impossible to change another person unless they really want to change themselves.

Which is why ATC is almost a fantasy romance. We can't compare LJQ to our ideal modern day man. We can't judge his behaviours against those of a green flag and get angry. We can only compare him to the other men of his status in that period and see that they are even worse.

But he is changing himself to become more like a modern day green flag. LX is changing him by opening his eyes to her experience. And slowly but surely it's working. So we get to witness a miracle in this drama. A man who loves a woman so much that he is actually changing himself to become her ideal man.

Im old enough now to hope that people don't judge me for the things that I did wrong when I didn't know any better. Because I've worked to improve and learn a bit too. So, I hope not to be condemned for the person I was. I hope to be judged for the imperfect but better person that I'm becoming.

And I think we all want that for ourselves. So why not watch a MC become a better person too. The fact that he's trying really does make this a kind of fantasy romance.

Instead of comparing him to your ideal man or the modern day ideal man, compare him to the other men of his day. And then think about how LanXiang is changing him by showing him points of view that he has never even imagined. And now he's changing. In fact, he's becoming more like the prototypical ideal man of the future.

In real life, we tend to want to change people and think we can do it when we can't. It's a bit of a dream, really. So, here we have a ML who is undergoing an education; he's learning to understand what it's like to be a woman; how incredibly hard it is and how unfair the world is. And so, it's almost a fantasy romance situation. S

when women can live independently, do business, inherit and own their own property. that's kind of the baseline.