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This review may contain spoilers
A lowkey and very cute gender-bender
Adorable, funny, and easy to understand once you realize that it follows kdrama rules: very sentimental, quietly ironic, lighthearted, with a heavy reliance on the twisted use of predictable tropes.
Some high points:
The performances of the actors playing the Princes, headed up by Jeremy Xu as the Fifth Prince, are really great.
Cinematography and sound are nicely professional.
Fun bedroom scenes.
A crazy cute kitten.
However at first the show seems predictable and over-explained. Then its fundamental originality creeps up on you, and suddenly you realize that you may have to rewatch the first 5 episodes again.
Let me help with the basics.
The FL is undergoing a soul-merge ala Alchemy of Souls. The ML, dying from an incurable poison, is hiding his capabilities under a mask of frivolity and false identities. He falls for her at first sight. She really, really does not love him, but neither does she dislike him.
The ML, the Crown Prince, is on his way back to the capital city after many years away. His plan, carefully nurtured during that time and secretly supported by his private faction at court, is to expose who poisoned him as a child, and then to spend his remaining time cheerfully, until the poison inevitably kills him.
And this is the hidden structure of the plot. HE CHANGES HIS PLAN. The trick is to figure out when he decides to, and what the new plan is.
Enter a County Princess, daughter of the General of the Northwest, coming to the court to be granted marriage to one of the royal Princes. She is murdered, drowned en route by a member of her fathers' city household. As she drifts down through the water/into the underworld, her body is captured by another soul lurking on the bridge at the entrance on the off-chance of rebirth.
This new inhabitant of the County Princess' body is a heartless Royal Princess, a cold patrician suicide, who disguised her own death as a murder in order to implicate the clan which exterminated her own clan. The twist is, she doesnt want to be reborn to seek revenge. She got her revenge in the life she has already lived. She had had no feelings at all for her now ex-husband, the Fifth Prince. She has no grudges.
What the new County Princess wants is the power to control others. Thus the title, Blossoms of POWER. She wants a different life than the one she had, at the mercy of her family's needs.
Back on the road to the capital, then. The Crown Prince falls in love with the County Princess from afar. He is smitten with
1. her beauty
2. her bloodthirsty ruthlessness
3. her capacity for...well, manipulating others to gain power.
But also
He can somehow see the County Princess is in there too. Love has eyes that see...
1. a girl who likes kittens and kids,
2. who was brought up surrounded by love.
He explains the change in his plans to his henchman as something that happened in steps.
At first he just wanted to use her as a screen, part of his deception of others. Then he realized he could marry her and that she could protect him from others' plans. Then he began to hope for love. And then he began to hope for the possibility of a fundamental desire -- to be a husband and a father.
As it turns out, HE REALLY WANTS BABIES!
He spends endless time slowly convincing her to agree to a marriage of convenience, and then, as her husband, much more time utterly shamelessly flirting with her. He is screamingly funny. He finally gets her to fall in love with him and he really deserves it after all that!
One of the nicest things about his love is that after it becomes a real issue that the County Princess has some connection with the Fifth's Royal Princess, the ML tells her that she was Shen XiHe when he fell in love with her and that will never change. He knows that she is a dual personality but in his eyes she is whole.
I will leave the mechanics of the plot up to you.
One very weird thing, though, given that He YiQian, the ML, has a background in wuxia action, is that his action sequences are tongue-in-cheek ridiculous-on-purpose. He climbs an icy mountain without gear, falls thousands of feet onto his back in the snow...and so forth.
Oh, and also there are a lot of unhappy princesses who tend to look the same. Someday there will be a cdrama in which both sets will be easily differentiated characters, but lately if the Princes are cool, the Princesses arent and vice versa.
I really love this show, and like many others, have already rewatched it several times. Give it a try!
Some high points:
The performances of the actors playing the Princes, headed up by Jeremy Xu as the Fifth Prince, are really great.
Cinematography and sound are nicely professional.
Fun bedroom scenes.
A crazy cute kitten.
However at first the show seems predictable and over-explained. Then its fundamental originality creeps up on you, and suddenly you realize that you may have to rewatch the first 5 episodes again.
Let me help with the basics.
The FL is undergoing a soul-merge ala Alchemy of Souls. The ML, dying from an incurable poison, is hiding his capabilities under a mask of frivolity and false identities. He falls for her at first sight. She really, really does not love him, but neither does she dislike him.
The ML, the Crown Prince, is on his way back to the capital city after many years away. His plan, carefully nurtured during that time and secretly supported by his private faction at court, is to expose who poisoned him as a child, and then to spend his remaining time cheerfully, until the poison inevitably kills him.
And this is the hidden structure of the plot. HE CHANGES HIS PLAN. The trick is to figure out when he decides to, and what the new plan is.
Enter a County Princess, daughter of the General of the Northwest, coming to the court to be granted marriage to one of the royal Princes. She is murdered, drowned en route by a member of her fathers' city household. As she drifts down through the water/into the underworld, her body is captured by another soul lurking on the bridge at the entrance on the off-chance of rebirth.
This new inhabitant of the County Princess' body is a heartless Royal Princess, a cold patrician suicide, who disguised her own death as a murder in order to implicate the clan which exterminated her own clan. The twist is, she doesnt want to be reborn to seek revenge. She got her revenge in the life she has already lived. She had had no feelings at all for her now ex-husband, the Fifth Prince. She has no grudges.
What the new County Princess wants is the power to control others. Thus the title, Blossoms of POWER. She wants a different life than the one she had, at the mercy of her family's needs.
Back on the road to the capital, then. The Crown Prince falls in love with the County Princess from afar. He is smitten with
1. her beauty
2. her bloodthirsty ruthlessness
3. her capacity for...well, manipulating others to gain power.
But also
He can somehow see the County Princess is in there too. Love has eyes that see...
1. a girl who likes kittens and kids,
2. who was brought up surrounded by love.
He explains the change in his plans to his henchman as something that happened in steps.
At first he just wanted to use her as a screen, part of his deception of others. Then he realized he could marry her and that she could protect him from others' plans. Then he began to hope for love. And then he began to hope for the possibility of a fundamental desire -- to be a husband and a father.
As it turns out, HE REALLY WANTS BABIES!
He spends endless time slowly convincing her to agree to a marriage of convenience, and then, as her husband, much more time utterly shamelessly flirting with her. He is screamingly funny. He finally gets her to fall in love with him and he really deserves it after all that!
One of the nicest things about his love is that after it becomes a real issue that the County Princess has some connection with the Fifth's Royal Princess, the ML tells her that she was Shen XiHe when he fell in love with her and that will never change. He knows that she is a dual personality but in his eyes she is whole.
I will leave the mechanics of the plot up to you.
One very weird thing, though, given that He YiQian, the ML, has a background in wuxia action, is that his action sequences are tongue-in-cheek ridiculous-on-purpose. He climbs an icy mountain without gear, falls thousands of feet onto his back in the snow...and so forth.
Oh, and also there are a lot of unhappy princesses who tend to look the same. Someday there will be a cdrama in which both sets will be easily differentiated characters, but lately if the Princes are cool, the Princesses arent and vice versa.
I really love this show, and like many others, have already rewatched it several times. Give it a try!
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