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sombredancer · 1 year ago

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How to be a more interesting character than the Main Hero (Pt.4)

Shangjue and his fiancée

Shangjue has an interesting yet complicated relationship not only with his didi, but also with his fiancée, who happens to be an assassin. The girl aims him from the beginning and plays a cruel game to win his attention, because her mission is to get the secret weapon of Gong clan (the Sutra), to which Shangjue has an access. She is a liar and he knows it, so he decides to choose her as his bride in order to keep his enemy even closer than his friend. So, in the beginning they both play their roles. But Shangjue has a critical vulnerability: he looks like Mr. Danger, but inside of him is a heart of silk. It`s not that hard to tear it apart if you can sneak beneath his ribs.

Their relationship unfolds in an interesting way: an assassin tries hard to find a tiny crack in Shangjue’s nutshell and to guess his thoughts by doing some stuff (cooking meal he doesn`t like, planting flowers he doesn`t want to be planted and bringing havoc into his well-ordered world), and he ends up kinda liking it. He badly needs someone who will dig into his inner core and find there what he truly wants, because he thinks of himself just as of a function and barely knows his own desires. The blankness of his residence is like one of a service apartment – everything is only for work, nothing is for soul.

But bit by bit she learns more about him and finds out that he is not that person she thought he is. At the beginning of the story she says to the female lead that Shangjue likes no one but himself. But in reality, he hardly likes himself either. There is no «himself» at all. There is a sharp saber against clan`s enemies, a legendary martial artist who brings wealth and prosperity to his clan, a wise father figure for didi but there isn`t a man who is called Gong Shangjue. Her thought of Shangjue as of someone who doesn`t love anyone beautifully echoes with herself. Her tutor said that she loves only herself, but at the end of the story she ends up feeling something (not love, but not nothing at least) towards said tutor and Shangjue as well.

Bay flowers are Shangjue's favorite. Btw, their conversation about these flowers is very eloquent, too. An assassin says that Shangjue's favorite bay flowers mean something dangerous yet beautiful and bewitching. Just like her by his side. And he says that they represent victory and prosperity, which are his goals as a Gong clan member (but maybe not what his heart truly wants).

Paying the last respect for the tutor. While an assassin is toying with Shangjue, he is toying with her. He always pulls her closer and immediately pushes her away, gives her approval of her actions and the next moment punishes her for the same actions. He knows that she is dangerous and got closer to him on purpose, but he ends up liking her anyway.

Along his toying with her, nevertheless, he treats her as his real future wife and indulges her to change something chaotically in his realm of order in front of his servants and, I suppose, starts believing himself that she will be his wife.

Meanwhile, an assassin uses the knowledge she received very skillfully: she learns about death of Shangjue’s mother and talks about her mom in order to worm her path out into his shell, later she uses the information given her by Yuanzhi (about Gong clan above everything for Shangjue) to make Shangjue believe she knows his heart.

It looked like he would kiss her. But he didn't.

Their conversation in this scene is heartbreaking: she tells him, that the Main Hero puts Gong clan in danger because he knows there is an assassin in the residence and does nothing about it, and Shangjue has got no evidence that could help to catch her red handed. And by the time she is speaking Shangjue already knows - it is HIM who knows that an assassin is by his side and voluntary puts his clan in danger (and, as we know, will proceed to do it till the end of the story). When Shangjue catches his fiancée as a suspect, his moral trial begins.

Watching the drama for the first time, I was very surprised that he did almost nothing to interrogate her (pushing at the wound can't be considered as a torture). His duty is to expose and to kill a Wufeng assassin, but he ends up eagerly believing any lie his fiancée tells him because he likes her and WANTS to believe her. Then he is about to touch her but doesn't dare to do so, and it's a significant sign, too. He hadn't problems with touching Yuanzhi (at least, when they were younger), so, I suppose, this lack of touching between Shangjue and his fiancée represents his inner struggle. He wants to be tender with her because he likes her, but tenderness is a weakness and shouldn`t be shown to an enemy.

Speaking of intimacy and touching, a lack of it between them is so palpable that I felt very uncomfortable when, a few episodes later, that pool sex scene happened. Many people didn`t understand either, have they banged or not, because even them touching each other is already something unbelievable in this drama. I spent a lot of time thinking about how they banged considering Shangjue’s problems with touching her and allowing her to touch him 😁😁😁.

Btw, this scene is definitely a sex scene. In China there is a very strict censorship in terms of a lot of things, including queere-relationship and sex, but there is also a lot of ways to show it without actually showing something (but even the fact that they were NAKED together in one pool told me everything, as long as in other dramas people had to have sex being dressed in three layers of hanfu). I`m not that deep into Chinese culture, but I have read in comments that the strange phrase of Shangjue «These buds will bloom soon, then you will know if I like you like this (her less obedient and more ambitious self)» refers to a Chinese idiom about a loss of virginity (so if it’s true, Shangjue deliberately invited her to have sex with him if she wanted to know if he liked her and that’s why she came to him without undergarments in the dead of night). The lanterns in the water of a pool refer to the unity of male Yang and female Yin energies (and we could see them in the scene of their first «date», btw). He loosened her hair in the pool: manipulations with girl’s hair it`s something that only husband is allowed do (that’s why you often can see in dramas that a male lead gifts his lover a hairpin or a comb). After everything’s happened, he hovers his cup above a saucer, which means «want to repeat». However, I couldn`t find any proof of these meanings because it seems like Chinese internet doesn`t cross English-speaking one at all and I respectively don`t understand Mandarin. So, if you know something else about it, feel free to correct me in comments. Btw, I`m sure, Yuanzhi's constant speaking about tea in front of Shangguan Qian refers to some kind of idiom, too, but I couldn`t find any information about it. UPD: my fellow @randomingoftherandomness says that it has something to do with a Chinese slang phrase 綠茶婊 (green tea bitch) - "a person who tries to look innocent being in fact calculating".

During the «torture» scene an assassin asks if Shangjue can spare her life and he says «no», because his duty is not to show mercy to Gong clan enemies. This scene echoes with the end of the story, when she asks him again to spare her life and he says he will if she gives him back the Sutra. And he really lets her go, which is strictly opposite to his mission of protecting Gong clan, because she knows everything about their inner residences and Gong clan members, and, what is the most important, the secret of the Sutra. But Shangjue wants to let her leave because she is the first thing he wants for himself, the first longing of a person, not of a function. Only by opposition between his duty and his heart he could find out who the real he is. Letting her go is very VERY irrational decision, but, unlike for the Main Hero, who stole his assassin‘s heart by his incompatible with life naivety, for Shangjue it is a natural point of his character development: being restricted from all his human wishes for a decade, when he gets the opportunity to fulfil them, he gets off his leash and does it fully. Very human behavior, btw.

I was very surprised seeing that Shangjue’s fiancée had time during this mess to change her clothes. Later I understood that she did it on purpose: she had more chances to survive if Shangjue would recall his feelings for her because this pink dress was a gift from him. In their final scene together he says that he would let her go if she gives him the Sutra back, it means she doesn't need to pretend to be pregnant in order to save her life, as soon as Shangjue always keeps his promises. But he lets her know that he doesn't count her as someone from Gong clan (and as his fiancée as well) anymore, and maybe that’s why she says that she bears a child and formulates it's so as if it's a new member of Gong clan, not just a fruit of their passion, because Gong clan does matter for him and his own personality doesn`t (and, btw, remembering the fertility problems, children are very valued in the clan). But I don't understand why preserving of her bond to Gong clan is so important to her. Yes, she couldn't go back to Wufeng because her information caused its collapse but she couldn't stay with the man she just tried to wipe out as well. Maybe her only hope was that she could keep the Sutra as a clan member (a mother of a Gong child), but Shangjue snatched it back. Her story have had some curtain development but kinda not till the final point so I would like to see how their relationship would move further. It is crystal clear by this last scene of them together that Shangjue catastrophically and fully lost to his assassin. When I have watched the drama for the first time I was sure she would use his soft spot on her to kill him, especially when she put his sword down and came to him very closely. At the very end of the story it seems that Shangjue believed everything she said to him in this last conversation, because her information about Wufeng’s boss is spreaded across the Martial World by the Main Hero, which means Shangjue shared it with him.

Azaleas mean "I belong to you forever".

Back in the story, when didi takes the assassin to Shangjue`s residence, he says that the most vulnerable and unpredictable thing is a human heart and that people often don`t want to know the truth. The story itself proves him right: it’s true in terms of Yuanzhi self, whose heart can be and is hurt only by Shangjue, even if his sworn brother doesn`t have a clue about the inner processes that are going on inside didi’s head; it`s also true in terms of an assassin, so far as she starts seeing a handsome man instead of her victim; and, of course, it’s true for Shangjue as well: he deliberately deceives himself believing the assassin isn`t assassin just to have an opportunity to be with her.

It was a pure pleasure to feel for these characters and to watch their stories unfold and I definitely would recommend this drama for watching.

#cdrama #my journey to you #yun zhi yu #云之羽 #cheng lei #gong shangjue #丞磊 #mjty #gong shang jue #宫尚角 #shangguan qian #卢昱晓 #lu yu xiao #上官浅 #enemies to lovers to enemies #SDaboutMJTY

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