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This was intriguing enough to get me to look it up on Netflix, and of course it's not available in Austria. Netflix Austria sucks. It does, however, have Skins, which my children were obsessed with when they were younger. Bexi was a young teenager at the time and Tashi very much not a teenager yet. She rewatched some episodes recently and told me that while it generated a nostalgic glow, now that she's a fully-fledged social worker, she was AMAZED at how much of the awfulness of the characters' lives she'd overlooked. She'd just seen them as cool older kids, not the product of abuse and neglect, all of which now snaps into very clear focus.

I've watched two episodes of "Ming Lan" now, enough that I think I'm going to stay the course. It's by the NiF studio, but it's very different - I hesitate to say "gritty" about a drama set in Ancient China, but it focuses on the lives of the underprivileged, predominantly women, where NiF does that classical drama thing of only caring about nobles with lofty ideals. I feel a bit the way 19th century theatre-goers must have felt on watching their first Ibsen after a lifetime of Shakespeare, a "This is so much more real life than I want to cope with!" sort of feeling. The mother of the heroine, for instance, is a concubine who was sold by her family to a magistrate, who bought her because his primary wife wanted to up her status by increasing the size of the household and ended up regretting it and is hence being cruel to her rival. There is a great deal of manoeuvring and social climbing going on, and etiquette around engagament gifts and which family has more prestige, but it's all amongst gentlefolk rather than the nobility, so there's more of a sense of these being existential issues with potential ruin one misstep away. Bad charcoal smokes horribly, children are beaten worse than Commander Meng (and at their parents' instigation), and when someone is fished out of a river, their corpse is so disgusting that those present can barely refrain from gagging, which is not what corpses are like in NiF (the corpse appears to be the eldest son of a Marquis, a teenager who came along with the wedding party as a sort of jolly outing, and the terror of the host when he first realises he's missing, followed by his far greater terror when the corpse is discovered, is an object lesson in what it means to be lower down on the rungs of a hierarchical society - no one in this world is safe, even if the female servants of concubines have it a lot worse than the males heads of manors). I'm a bit nervous about how much of this sort of sheer crushing awfulness I can take, but our heroine (who is currently only 8 years old) is clearly the kind of person who is going to fight back, and I understand that it's a revenge drama, so I'm hopeful things have to be awful for a while in order to motivate the revenge and will then get more bearable, at least until the revenge happens.

The moral is, make sure, if you are ever transported to Ancient China, that you not only avoid the palace, but also go disguised as a boy. Possibly equipped with a Go Girl so you can pee standing up, thereby putting everyone's suspicions to rest at an early stage.

And I am now absolutely convinced that reincarnation works on a switch-genders-at-every-incarnation basis, otherwise no Chinese woman would ever bother to come back to the earthly plane (I also have a theory that in the case of Prince Jing something went wrong and he was accidentally reincarnated twice in the same timeline, so both Jingyan and Consort Jing are incarnations of the same soul, the superficial differences in their personalities being the result of different environmental forces working on male and female bodies). It does help a lot to imagine the shock of eg. Xie Yue on discovering that in his next life he's likely to be on the receiving end of the sort of treatment he dished out to Liyang. And I can just imagine Nihuang's glee at discovering she will no longer have to worry about suitors or purity or any of that crap.