AH

As you can see, the fandom is divided in its opinions on this topic. Your best bet is probably to read the novel to form your own opinion.

But here are a few thoughts:

In chapter 47, XY notes that she opened her heart to CX first (“Xiao Yao said her heart had turned cold into stone, but he remained the most precious treasure that Xiao Yao kept deep in her heart, in the softest most secure place. When Jing said he would give first and trust first to try and win Xiao Yao’s heart, Xiao Yao had already done the same for [CX].”) and he had been, up to that point, her closest person (“In Xiao Yao’s heart, [CX] was the closest person to her, so much so that she didn’t differentiate between him and her. If he wanted something then she would give her life to help him achieve it… whatever she had [CX] could have it, including her life.”) But she was not willing to marry CX (despite her childhood promise to do so) and was horrified when she found out about his romantic feelings for her. After she found out that CX was responsible for TSJ’s "death", she could not bring herself to kill CX. She could only give him a non-lethal dose of poison. After CX was also involved in XL’s death, XY chose to disappear to a place that was outside of his control without saying goodbye to him.

The Lovers Bugs resided inside XY and XL for over 100 years with no issues / without turning into Heartbreak Bugs. XY sent the ice crystal ball to XL before her wedding with Feng Long and waited on the shore of Five Gods Mountain for his response for seven days. XL is the one who chose not to respond (and to crash her wedding instead). After XL killed Feng Long and nearly killed CX, XY could not bring herself to kill XL. She could only injure him, threaten his adoptive father, and cut ties with him (after XL intentionally pushed her to do so).

XY didn’t answer when asked in chapter 32 if she was willing to marry TSJ, but was quick to say that she was willing to marry YSQ when asked about him. But her mind refused to think about which person she most wanted to spend the rest of her life with. (I personally read that scene as suggesting that the person she most wanted to spend the rest of her life with was definitely not YSQ, since she wouldn't have any qualms about thinking of him, probably wasn't TSJ either since she always wanted to be with YSQ more than she wanted to be with TSJ, and probably was XL or FFB.) In that chapter, XL once again pushes her away + towards TSJ. When XY and TSJ get engaged, she chooses to put off setting a wedding date in order to focus on a medical project that takes 40+ years to complete. After TSJ “dies”, XY holds a wedding anyways and considers herself to be TSJ’s wife. She declares that she would rather be in pain than forget him, and there is a point where she accepts being murdered if it means that she will join TSJ in death. In the end, she marries TSJ when he is basically YSQ again, after she had cut ties with XL (despite still caring about XL and begging CX not to kill him).

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg for each of them. All in all, there’s plenty of evidence to support the idea that she loved CX, XL, and TSJ/YSQ in different ways. But it’s hard to pinpoint who she loved “most”.

But at least we can all agree that she didn’t love Feng Long.

Note that the drama treats many of these details differently from the novel, so the analysis for the drama will inevitably be different.

Thank you lux73. The story is so complex, any attempt to summarize it feels inadequate. A summary just can't capture every character relationship dynamic and story element that feels important. But hopefully those broad strokes can give a new potential viewer some idea of the set up!

Cheers to that!（ ^_^）o自自o（^_^ ）

Hi AnastasiaWun. No worries about mentioning a pet peeve. I can sympathize. However, the text from chapter 16 in my comment above is not my translation. It is taken from Koala's full fan translation of the novel (possibly the translation you would have read, if you read the novel in English?). She chose to separate most surnames and place names. When I quote her translation, I don't go through the quote to change her approach. In other circumstances (like the synopsis for this drama) I do not separate surnames and place names the way Koala does in her translation.

You're welcome!

For what it's worth, I personally watched it for the romance and didn't care all that much about the clan and kingdom politics. But I get that this type of reverse-harem romance isn't for everyone.

The least spoilery answer: It's a bit mixed.

A much more spoilery answer:

At the end of S1:

(1) Tushan Jing has been tricked and forced into marriage (with someone other than the female lead) and has a baby. He and the female lead are thoroughly miserable about it.

(2) Xiang Liu has been pushing the female lead away for some time and that creates unhappiness and tension for him and the female lead.

(3) Cang Xuan has become king unexpectedly quickly, which he's mostly happy about and the female lead is pretty happy about. But he also entered into a political marriage to someone other than the female lead, which makes the female lead a little sad and makes Cang Xuan quite sad.

(4) The female lead is engaged to marry a man she does not love, and isn't happy about it (and the other male leads are also not happy about it).

So S1 ends with a bit of happiness related to Cang Xuan becoming king, but quite a lot of unhappiness in everyone's love lives.

At the end of S2:

(1) Tushan Jing will be badly wounded by his brother in a way that seriously diminishes his power, health and lifespan and he will choose not to return to his clan (including Tushan Zhen, who he's raised as his son for 50+ years), but he gets to marry the female lead. Not a perfectly happy ending, but probably more happy than not.

(2) Xiang Liu will die with his fellow soldiers in battle after doing all the things he wanted to do for the female lead, including taking certain painful steps (e.g., pushing her to cut ties with him and erasing the memories of him that she had saved in her mirror).

(3) Cang Xuan will still be king and will have successfully united the three kingdoms, but he loses the female lead.

(4) The female lead will leave Cang Xuan and her family behind, mourn Xiang Liu and marry Tushan Jing, who is willing to leave everything behind to be her life-long companion.

For Xiang Liu, Cang Xuan and the female lead, I feel like their endings involve too much loss to call them happy, but the author noted that they each got what they wanted most. So in that sense their endings are also not completely tragic.

TSJ confirmed in chapter 16 of the novel that that particular nine-tailed fox (or rather, eight-tailed fox after Chi You cut its ninth tail off) was probably one of his distant relatives. But TSJ didn't seem to have any sympathy for that fox given what he did to XY.

-----

Chapter 16:

Jing asked, “Have you ever been to Qing Qiu?”

“No, for a while I hated the Nine-tailed fox and legend has it the Nine-tailed fox came from Qing Qiu so I hated Qing Qiu as well. Twice I bypassed it.” Xiao Yao suddenly was very worried. “The Nine-tailed fox I killed, it wasn’t one of your relatives?”

“He probably was.” The Nine-tailed fox was very rare, and the few existing ones really were all relatives of the Tu Shan clan.

“What?” Xiao Yao’s mouth dropped open.

Jing couldn’t help but burst out laughing. “Relative or no relative, he had it coming based on what he did to you. Even if someone told my grandmother about it, you’re still in the right.”

Xiao Yao patted her chest. “You scared the daylights out of me!”

Jing gently said, “Actually, Qing Qiu is a lot of fun. After you reach Sheng Nong Mountain, I’ll take you to Qing Qiu to play.”

shiyan666's comment is half right. She ends up with one of them rather than none of them, but one of them does die.

The female lead marries Tushan Jing (one of the three main male leads) at the end of S2. There is a period of time where he is missing and presumed dead, but he comes back.

One of the other three main male leads dies in battle.

As for the plot... it's a bit difficult to summarize.

There were three kingdoms: A, B, and C. Kingdom A invaded Kingdom B and they were at war for a while. The female lead's mother was from Kingdom A and married the man who became king of Kingdom C but later divorced him and returned to Kingdom A. There, she left her daughter (the female lead) behind and led Kingdom A's army against Kingdom B. She died in battle, but Kingdom B was conquered with only a small remnant of its army surviving and refusing to surrender.

All of the main characters go through different traumas before the end of the first episode, and the female lead's main trauma is being abandoned by her mother and other loved ones. The female lead is a deity with the ability to transform herself, and roughly 100 years after her mother's death she chooses to transform herself into a man and uses a fake name.

After living as a man for almost 200 years, she meets (or re-meets) each of the male leads in that form. One of the male leads (Cang Xuan) is her "gege" (the details are complicated) who she was very close with in childhood. He's a prince from Kingdom A and he lived in Kingdom C for a while. His goal is to become King so that he has enough power to protect his loved ones. Another male lead (Xiang Liu) is a demon who fights with the remnant army from Kingdom B. So Cang Xuan and Xiang Liu are enemies on different sides of a war. The female lead saves the life of the other male lead (Ye Shi Qi / Tushan Jing), a deity who was tortured and left for dead. He asks the female lead to give him a name and wants to stay with her instead of returning to his clan. The drama follows her interactions with those three men (and their alternate identities), the King of Kingdom C, and the King of Kingdom A for a little over 100 years. Those interactions are driven by the characters' individual traumas, by war, by clan and family politics, by loyalty, and by love.

In the end (major, major spoilers ahead) Cang Xuan is King and has united Kingdom A, Kingdom B and Kingdom C. Xang Liu dies with the remnant army of Kingdom B. The female lead marries Tushan Jing but loses, in different ways, Cang Xuan and Xiang Liu.

Kokuto! Fancy meeting you here. ^^

That all makes sense. Thanks for providing details from the novel. It feels like a role reversal. ^^

I’d love to know what it says about the translations when you get to that part!

I'm not confused by how they've handled spoken languages (with most of the English dialogue actually being Portuguese or, occasionally, other languages like Dutch, Spanish and Latin). My questions were only about the written records from Blackthorne's ship, who was able to read them, and how they were translated.

I find the idea that both Rodrigues and Father Martin would be able to read and translate English (in addition to speaking Portuguese, Spanish, Latin and Japanese) a little surprising (given where they were stationed and the small likelihood that they would ever have a need for it), but not impossible.

Mariko specifically mentioned Blackthorne's orders (which would not have been in Portuguese - so not on that one page that was originally in Portuguese), so my impression was that those orders must have been translated as well, along with that page that was in Portuguese with Blackthorne's notes in English.

It seemed to me like Mariko's trust in Father Martin and the Portuguese in general had been shaken, which is why I thought her phrase "in your own words" to describe Father Martin's translation of Blackthorne's notes (and orders) seemed a bit off. But you're right that Blackthorne's lack of protest would have confirmed that Father Martin's translation (or at least the gist of it) was accurate.

Blackthorne speaks English, Dutch, Latin, and Portuguese. He was in possession of rutters (written sailing directions) that enabled his fleet of five ships to sail through the Strait of Magellan (Magellan's Pass) at the southern tip of South America. Rodrigues concluded that those rutters must have been stolen from a Spanish sailor. Blackthorne also kept a list of "Catholic bases" that his fleet burned on their way between Amsterdam (their port of departure in the Netherlands) and Japan, and a record of his orders: to plunder any Spanish territory, to reach the Japans, and to open trade (for the Dutch and the English) in the New World.

When Rodrigues discovered the rutters, the list, and the orders on Blackthorne's ship in episode 1, he was able to read all of them. Rodrigues is a Spaniard who speaks Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese. It's possible that he might also speak Latin, Dutch or English (and/or other languages like French or Italian).

Rodrigues gives the rutters, the list, and the orders to Father Martin and Father Dell'Aqua in episode 2, and it seems that they were both also able to read the records. They speak Portuguese, Latin and Japanese. It's possible that they might also speak Spanish, Dutch or English (and/or other languages like French or Italian).

Father Martin gives the rutters, the list, and the orders to Toranaga in episode 3. By episode 4, those records are in Toda Mariko's possession, and she pulls out the documents that contain the list of burned bases and Blackthorne's orders (but not the rutters) in order to read them. From what the camera shows, it looks like the records were mostly written in English, but there was one loose page tucked into the records that was originally written in Portuguese (e.g., "Ilha Mocha - 600 libras de prata"). Additional notes were written on that page in English (e.g., "burned to hell") and additional translations of those English notes into Portuguese (e.g., "queimado até o inferno") and other languages (e.g., "hele") were also included on the page. Mariko speaks Japanese, Portuguese and Latin. She definitely does not speak English. And yet, the way Mariko's eyes travel across the English pages of the documents, the actress made it look (to me) like Mariko was able to read the English parts. Not like she was just scanning for Portuguese amongst the English text. My assumption is that that is not the intended implication. We know Mariko can't read English. I just think they framed it in a confusing way there. Anyway, moving on, after scanning the English parts of Blackthorne's records, she arrives at the loose page with Portuguese text... Then, the next day, Mariko tells Blackthorne that she has read about his crimes against the Portuguese and that she has read his orders "in his own words".

Based on all of that, I am confused about a few things.

Rodrigues assumed the rutters were stolen from a Spanish sailor. So it seems likely that they would have been written in Spanish or Latin. But I suppose it wouldn't be impossible for the rutters to have been written in Portuguese. However, Rodrigues made it clear in episode one that the rutters from the Spanish sailor were kept separate from the list of Catholic ports that Blackthorne's fleet burned and the orders that Blackthorne received. The list and orders could have been written in Latin, English or Dutch (and as I mentioned above, in episode 4 it looks like they were written in English), but it would make absolutely zero sense for them to be written in Portuguese - the language of the enemy. So what was that loose page that Mariko read that was originally in Portuguese with English notes added by Blackthorne indicating that certain ports were sacked and with Portuguese translations added (presumably by Father Martin) for those English notes?

And if Mariko read the orders that Blackthorne received, does that mean that Father Martin also translated those from English to Portuguese too? Did Mariko understand that Father Martin had translated Blackthorne's English notes and his orders? If so, how could she trust that Father Martin's translations were truly accurate and complete, to the point where she could confidently say that she had read Blackthorne's orders in his own words?

Do the translations from English (and the fact that Rodrigues and Father Martin were able to read the documents in the first place) indicate that Father Martin (and possibly Rodrigues too) can speak / read / translate English?

Has the drama changed how these details are presented in the novel? For example, were all of these documents written in Latin in the novel?

A few questions below. Hoping someone who has read the novel can clarify.

https://kisskh.at/people/2650-lee-kyung-young

If I binge it over two or three days around the time it finishes airing hopefully there will be other fans who are still watching and willing to chat about it.

Good advice. Waiting for new episodes is the worst. I really want to binge this one if I can, so I'm definitely going to try to resist!

Thanks for those details! I'll try to use them to stop myself from jumping the gun and starting to watch it too early. ^^

I'm trying very hard to wait until all the episodes have aired before starting. Based on the rate that the episodes have aired so far, I'm thinking that would probably be April 7?

Since the original scenario was replaced with a different one, it seems like a choice that was made by the script writers rather than a matter of cuts made in post by the editors.

Glad you found it interesting. My guess is that the screen writers thought that all the different countries involved (the Netherlands, England, Portugal, and Spain) might confuse viewers who aren't already familiar with the history, or they thought explaining it would take too much time and take away from the tension, so they decided to go with a simpler situation (Blackthorne vs. the Portuguese in Japan) while retaining parts of the original dialogue where they could.