The Story of Minglan : comments.
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The Story of Minglan
I've watched most of it (what I mean is, I skipped over some episodes or raced through them when the pacing started getting weird, as these dramas sometimes do)and thoroughly enjoyed it, after I got over not liking Gu Tingye as much as Yuan Ro (Zu Yi Long), he of the amazing cheekbones and equally amazing inability to get off the fence as per his liking for MingLan. This was quite a fandom controversy when it first aired - if you go through the youtube comments, there's so many of the 'how the hell is Gu Tingye the male lead?' type.
Also, have you read the book? I found a site where chapters were being translated - and boy was this adaptation different! I wouldn't mind discussing the changes brought about by the Chinese censorship authority once you're ready.
Re: The Story of Minglan
I haven't read the book, although I read somewhere that one of the differences is that adult!Minglan travels back in time and inhabits the body of her younger self? That sounds like a very intriguing take. I don't think I'll ever get round to reading it, though, so would you be willing to talk about the impact of censorship even if I'm ignorant of the source material? Because it would interest me greatly.
Re: The Story of Minglan
Re. the book - don't worry, I haven't finished the entire book either - I had to stop at a certain point (for my sanity), but I think I got enough to be able to compare.
As you said, the main framing device of the book is that Ming Lan was actually a Communist Party official in modern-ish China, who dies in an accident and is reborn in a baby from ?-era China. See, even though the book/show setting isn't given a real historical setting, the mix of clothes from one era and hair from the other suggests the eras we're talking about; vaguely medieval.
The thing is, in the book it has a lot of importance - Ming Lan (I've forgotten what her name is in modern times) keeps thinking about what a terrible, terrible deal women have in the era she found herself in - and a lot of aspects of her character make sense when you see it through the lens of 'modern woman reborn into medieval society'. Even though the whole episode with Ming Lan being in the palace during the revolt and taking the message out to the next emperor (who happens to be Gu Tingye's good buddy) is pure show, not in the book, it once again emphasises that Ming Lan is different from the other women there - but without the book's framing device, it just looks like she's 'cooler than the others, not like other girls'!
So that bit of censorship I didn't really like - even though it would have made the series much more complicated than it already was (I've just finished another series which could have been subtitled: "But wait, there's more!"), it would have gone towards character development in Ming Lan. But of course, there's no way the censorship authority would have allowed (a)time travel, which (b) doesn't end in tragedy or (c) with the time traveller returning to the present or dying.
But then there's something else in the book, and, for the first time since I've embarked on this journey through all sorts of Chinese web-series, I am grateful for the censors.
Please treat this as a CONTENT WARNING for SEXUAL VIOLENCE
Because there's so much rape in the novel. So much. It's not that it's explicit, it's just there, in so many ways which IDK, I saw as unnecessary? I mean, I read somewhere that non-con is a trope in this kind of book, and I've certainly seen it in more than one c-drama (for which I can furnish warnings if needed - I wish someone would have warned me!).
So I was grateful for the censors who cut all that nonsense down to one mention during the palace revolt.
I don't usually say this - I'm usually frustrated that we often have couples who are ostensibly in love but don't even kiss once over 50 episodes, and in that respect The Story of MingLan was pretty racy with the wedding night and all (and can I say how much I loved that Gu Tingye was all: these are my financials, and now they're yours too! that wasn't even in the book!), but here I was so thankful.
Re: The Story of Minglan
I've watched it to the end now and was disappointed by the finale. I thought the Emperor's plan was exceptionally crappy - SO MUCH could have gone wrong, and so many people died as it was - I thought GYT not telling Minglan was EPICALLY crappy (I'd have accepted it from Yanruo, who is extremely bad at putting himself in other people's shoes, but for GYT to do it is completely out of character and undermines all the things I'd gradually come to like about him), and I was SO disappointed that Minglan didn't finally get to rescue her husband instead of the other way around. We do get a grudging sort of half-admission that he can't keep his promise to always protect her (and therefore, by implication, she'll have to protect herself), but it's really not enough.
One thing I did like, though, was that we get to see other women rising to the occasion, especially General Shen's wife (whose name I forget), but also GYT's nanny, and even the evil m-i-law stops simpering for once and gives extremely clear and sensible instructions for the defence of her manor. There's definitely an implication there that Minglan isn't the only women capable of doing far more than her society normally allows.
Re: The Story of Minglan
I would say it's seen as 'anti-communist' except there are times when I'm watching one of these and I find myself yelling at the screen "what kind of Communists are you?"
I'm so glad they cut out all the violent rape because honestly there's so much structural rape in the book, so many women being bought and sold and stuffed into people's houses as concubines and having to marry men they don't love and who don't love them .
This so much - in a series I've watched and love most of all, The Untamed, the author of the book it was based on (Mó Dào Zǔ Shī) managed to create a fantasy set in ancient China without the system of concubinage, and it's so refreshing. Though there's still the brothel slavery; I guess you can't win them all.
But the concubines: All those women thrown together in the same household and acting like sharks in a feeding frenzy to survive, it really gets depressing. I think I've only seen one example of a c-drama in which a female character has an epiphany about how dire her situation /all women's situation is, and she manages it without being a time-traveller. She tries to explain it to a man, but unfortunately that man is the Emperor, who is kind of incapable of empathy, never having been in a situation where he can't have whatever he wants. The series is called The Story of Yanxi Palace, and I do love it, in spite of the Qing dynasty aesthetics and the last act degenerating into a 'bitches be crazy' denouement - but again, why does this happen? Yup, it's the concubine system again.
Yeah, the Emperor's plan was not good, and I didn't like keeping Ming Lan in the dark either - no idea if this happened in the book, though I might go back to the website I found it on and see if the last chapter has been translated and just read that.
ETA I went back to where I read the first 70 or so chapters, and the whole book is about 200, so it's not finished, lol. I also found out who she used to be - a kind of paralegal for the People's Court called Yao Yiyi.
Re: The Story of Minglan
I'm put off The Untamed because it seems to have solved the problem of not wanting to depict the shittiness of women's lives by just not having women as main characters. Shows that only care about men irritate me. I think ultimately the NiF approach is probably the best that can be achieved - pretend, by omission, that only the Emperor and the Crown Prince have concubines and depict everyone else in monogamous relationships, historical realism be damned. It's not as if the martial arts stuff is remotely realistic either.
Re: The Story of Minglan
Re. the censorship - yup, they're not much for escapism and especially don't want people questioning that there might have been something good about the past, or better than the present.
Re. The Untamed - I get where you're coming from about the scarcity of female characters, and a possible reason for this is that the source material is danmei, the Chinese version of yaoi. You're not going to have a female lead along with the male lead, because the lead character has a male love interest. so yes, you end up with a lot less women, and many of them don't survive till the end of the series (though one does! She is our queen!). But yes, so very few female characters in the story, which is weird as the writer's a woman.
Of course, the censorship authority have an even bigger problem with LGBT than with time travel, so all of a sudden the two are soulmates (no-one tell the censors that's even closer than before) and you find a lot of youtube reactors who've only watched the show and maybe the animated version asking if the boys have a bromance. It's pretty amazing how many hints at their love the director and show runners managed to smuggle past the censors, and one pretty massive anvil of a hint is that a song which one character writes for the other, which he names after a portmanteau of their names, becomes the central love theme of the entire series. But sure, they're just good friends.
I'd love to watch Nirvana in Fire again, to be honest - I've watched a few shows recently which have irritated/infuriated me so much, I need to cleanse my palate. I'm curious, what did you think about the reveal to Jingyan? I expected a bit more discussion between them; and then the reveal that Lin Shu died with the pearl suddenly appearing in the shrine - that was harsh.
Re: The Story of Minglan
Oh dear, I'm going to die laughing!! Chinese fandom, you are so wonderfully fannish!
I totally expected a massively emotional scene between Jingyan and Mei Changsu and was initially very disappointed not to get it (I also felt robbed that I didn't get the scene where Prince Jing convinces Xia Dong to let them into the Xuanjing Bureau). But after much thinking about it I had to admit that it's entirely consistent with his characterisation that MCS basically runs away and hides the moment Jinyang finds out - he really, really didn't want to him to know what Lin Shu had turned into, and he was never able to cope, and everything that happens in the show is consistent with that (I mean, maybe deep, deep down he did want Jingyan to recognise him , but only in a fantasy way in which he could magically go back to being Lin Shu at that moment, but what actually happens when his identity is revealed is that Jingyan says "This person is nothing like Lin Shu, how could you possibly think there was a connection?" And after that MCS never gives Jingyan the opportunity to say "Actually, I did realise it was you, it's just that you and my mother both gaslit me about it so I thought I must be going mad, and then I had to persuade my father that Xia Jiang was lying!"). See, so much to think about! How can I not love it, even if it wasn't what thought I wanted?
Re: The Story of Minglan