#because it's just yanwan and eyinzhu being evil

[mydaylight]

The plot line in Legend of Ruyi about Yongji's kidnapping at the Mulan Hunting Grounds really suffers from a severe case of "we took out stuff from the book but now the result makes no sense". In the book, Yongji's kidnapping was more of an impromptu occurrence, but in the show, they changed it so the entire incident was planned in advance by Eyinzhu (and Yanwan?), except the whole execution seems so messy and hopeless? If the intent was to kill Yongji from the beginning, the assassin should have struck first and then tried to get away as soon as possible, but he sort of lingers on indecisively after he captures Yongji and then when everybody rushes into the scene Eyinzhu immediately goes "well you have no chance surviving now you might as well do it" ... It's as if there was very little thought put into the actual logistics of trying to assassinate a prince in the presence of the Emperor's entourage and how risky and unlikely it would be for it to succeed and even the assassin she hired didn't seem to know what he should be doing. (I know they wanted to pin the blame on the Han tribe for the assassination, but they didn't have to wait for Qianlong to show up to do that)

In the book, Ruyi and Yongji come upon Lanxi (Concubine Xun, who is not in the show) having a secret meeting with a man called Anuoda, who turns out to be Lanxi's former childhood sweetheart. Ruyi is preparing to break them up and forget the whole thing happened, but Eyinzhu shows up and starts shouting that there's an assassin (Eyinzhu has a chip on her shoulder re: Lanxi for political reasons). Only then do Lanxi and Anuoda take Yongji as a hostage because they know they'll be executed since they were found out and want to negotiate with Qianlong to let them go. This makes so much more sense than what we got in the show, Yongji's kidnapping was not premeditated but was an action of the last resort, so of course everything is sloppy and doesn't work out in the end. I feel the show needs the kidnapping to happen to raise Qianlong's suspicions and jealousy towards Ling Yunche, but they took out Lanxi's character so they had to replace her with somebody else... I guess Eyinzhu was the obvious option, but I wish they had adapted it differently, because as it is it just makes Eyinzhu appear dumb all over again.