azdak

Nirvana in Fire spoooiiiileeeers

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Like many people, I have now read Shelley Parker-Chan's She Who Became The Sun. In her foreword, Parker-Chan says the story is based on "wildly addictive Chinese costume dramas" and it really shows. Had I read this two years ago, I would have found it enchantingly exotic, but with two years of wildly addictive Chinese costume dramas under my own belt, what it actually felt like was coming home. There is a even a blink-and-you'll-miss-it reference to Daliang! Unlike all those c-dramas, though, She Who Became The Sun gives female c-drama audiences what they really, really want, namely a heroine who gets to do all the stuff normally reserved for men. Is it a perfect book? Well, I could have done with less sex and an awful lot less epic manpain, but I'm aware that for many readers these will be features and not bugs. More irritatingly (from a reader's pleasure point-of-view) I had a real suspension of disbelief problem when it came to the heroine passing as a man once she reached adolescence. The narrator mentions that she starts "bleeding" but we are given zero information about how, in a monastery surrounded exclusively by men and boys, she manages to wash her stained underclothes and bedclothes or even the rags she presumably uses to mop up the Curse of Eve. This problem must become even more acute when she becomes commander of an army, who would certainly be spotted if he regularly had to sneak out of camp in the middle of the night to wash his own clothes. It is my headcanon that General Mu Nihuang*, when in the field, avails herself of one of the numerous Chinese poisons (probably with a poetic name like the Poison of the Darkened Moon) to avert menstruation, but if this is Zhu Chongba's solution, there is no mention of it in the book.

Periods, with their messiness and ickiness and complete separation from the will of the person experiencing them, would be blindingly unfair as it is without men weaponising them to gatekeep their own superior social status, but men being what they are, this is exactly what they do. It was therefore with a sense of incredulous joy that I read this article in the Guardian about period pants. Dazzled by the prospect of freedom being dangled before me, I rushed online to order some for my daughters (since I am, thank God, no longer in need of them myself), only to discover that Marks and Spencer's was (unsurprisingly) completely out of stock, so I had to order them from Modibodi. If they work as well as the article claims, I shall report back!

*Today I read on the internet that that godawful scene where Nihuang gets jealous of Gong Yu was the brainchild of Hu Ge, who thought it would make Nihuang more "womanly". So now I'm in the sad position of having to hate Hu Ge.

A while back, I watched The Rise of Phoenixes, which has a truly excellent heroine but is severely let down in the plot department. It impelled me to write a very short fic with a suggested improvement to at least one plot strand, but I never posted it because I couldn't remember the name of the minor character who rats the heroine out to the Emperor, and I couldn't be arsed to look through 70 episodes in order to find out . Today I rediscovered the fic and realised that the minor character works perfectly well without his name, so here is the fic. You don't have to know anything at all about The Rise of Phoenixes to understand what's going on, and while technically it's spoilery, the original scene goes quite differently.

Title: Deceiving the Emperor
Fandom: The Rise of Phoenixes
Word Count: 321
Location: AO3

For the first time in goodness knows how many years, I have felt the urge to commit meta. It was "Vincenzo" that drove me to this unusual action and the results can be found on AO3. Spoilers, naturally.

Title: Lord of the Underworld: Metaphor, Metaphysics and the Mafia in "Vincenzo".
Location:AO3

It has taken a post on Tumblr to make me realise that Gu Seung-jun in Crash Landing on You is played by the same actor as King Cheoljong in Mr Queen. In my defence, he looks very different.



Gu Seung-jun




Cheoljong
(that's the titular queen behind him, being her usual ultra-feminine self)

Click on the link for a non-spoilery gifset that nonetheless conveys a lot of the flavour of Mr Queen.

Mr Queen gifset

I'm absolutely loving "Mr Queen" (subtitle "The Joseon Queen Consort Runaway Soul Scandal"), a Korean historical comedy about a celebrity chef, Jang Bong-hwan who transmigrates into the body of a Joseon queen, Cheorin, the night before her wedding and now has to navigate the dangers of the palace as a trans man with only his knowledge of history books (his mother was a history teacher) to help him. He is absolutely terribly at this, but in fairness he's very far from being the only one who isn't what he seems. In this game of masks and intrigue, all the characters have their own individual narratives about what's going on, what ought to be going on, the rightness of their own contribution to events and the motives of those around them, and obviously, when it comes to Queen Cheorin, these narratives are completely and utterly wrong, but at the same time Jang Bong-hwan, relying on a rudimentary knowledge of history and entirely too selfish to consider anyone else's perspective, gets their inner lives just as wrong. At times it's like watching characters from two different films collide, to hilarious effect. While those around him are scheming to gain power/save the country/ off their rivals/save their true love, Jang Bong-hwan's main goal is to return to his old life and get his dick back, and until that happens he has the subsidiary goals of (1) staying alive, (2) getting off with the king's extremely fanciable and virtuous concubine and (3) absolutely, definitely NOT sex with the king, despite having promised the Grand Dowager to conceive an heir within 7 days (see (1)). Shin Hye-sun turns in an amazing performance as Jang-Bong-hwan-in-the-body-of-Queen-Cheorin (if you have ever felt frustrated by the restrictions and passivity imposed on Asian heroines, this performance was created specially for you) and the plot serves up a near endless succession of delightful twists and turns, genuinely funny comic moments, affectionate satire of k-drama genre conventions and a great deal of Schadenfreude as Jang Bong-hwan is gradually forced to come to terms with living as a Joseon-era woman. I'm on episode 6 and so far it comes second only to Nirvana in Fire in terms of sheer enjoyability.

Yesterday I started reading a book, which was prefaced with the lyrics to a song that began "I am a poor wayfaring stranger..." As I read the lines, which I didn't initially recognise, a tune popped into my head, a tune that was clearly the proper tune for these particular lyrics, and for a moment I was thoroughly bewildered as to how I could know the tune when I didn't know the song. And then The Broken Circle Breakdown exploded into my memory and I remembered the songs, I remembered ALL the songs, and I spent most of this morning greedily hunting them down on Youtube and wallowing in them. And I slowly came to the realisation that enough time had passed that I could face watching it again. More than that, I actively wanted to.

The Broken Circle Breakdown is a Belgian film that came out in 2012 and is described by the IMDB as follows: "An intensely moving portrait of a relationship from beginning to end, propelled by a soundtrack of foot-stomping bluegrass, The Broken Circle Breakdown is a romantic melodrama of the highest order." Well, that's one way of putting it. "Of the highest order" is certainly correct - the film was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, but was up against Michael Haneke's Amour - but rather than "intensely moving" I would call it desperately, desperately sad. It's the saddest film I've ever seen. Even sadder than Amour. As Amour is about an old man deciding to kill his beloved wife after she has a stroke, you can see that this is very sad indeed. When we saw The Broken Circle Breakdown at the cinema, we felt entirely unable to recommend it to any of our friends, even though it's extraordinarily good, because it's so bloody sad we were afraid they would never forgive us. I did eventually recommend it to my eldest daughter when it cropped up on Nextflix; she watched it once, wept buckets, said it was wonderful and she would never, ever be able to watch it again.

It started life as a play called The Cover-Ups of Alabama, which isn't a traditional play (having just seen The Boys in the Band, whose theatrical origins as a Well-Made Play are creakily apparent, I feel this is an important point to make) but one that uses narration as well as dialogue and jumps about in time and space, with the songs providing the emotional backbone of the story. It was written by the lead actors (the female lead got dumped for a more photogenic actress when it came to casting the film; the male lead was retained, possibly because the musical input came primarily from him - he DJs a very niche but successful bluegrass radio show - but also because beauty is considered less important in a male lead. An oil painting he ain't) and was performed in odd settings like deconsecrated churches. I say all this to make it clear that, despite the double standards in beauty, this is a story that really matters to the people telling it, and that they are people who care about things like art and truth, and all of this shows in the final product.

So, the story: two Belgians, a tattoo artist and a bluegrass musician with an obsession with the USA, meet, fall in love, are about as successful as a bluegrass band in Belgium can possibly be, and then go through an agonising break-up after (here be SPOILERS)
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I've started watching "The Rise of Phoenixes" (which, as a big plus, is available on Netflix, so not constantly interrupted by annoying ads) and so far it's really, really good. It remains to be seen whether it will give me all the feels of "Nirvana in Fire" but it has top-notch acting, beautiful aesthetics, and finally - finally! - women with real agency who actually get to provide input to all the plotting alongside the men, as well as being dab hands with a sword. The actress who plays Consort Jing is Our Heroine's mother and she must have had a whale of a time in this one, not stuck in a palace brewing medicinal teas but shaping the fate of an empire. So far, the writing is very good, but as I'm only on episode 7 of 70, I shall withhold judgment on that aspect - "The Story of Minglan" let me down very badly in its final episodes, so I've learned to be cautious about enthusing too soon, but thus far the story has been gripping and the pacing very good.

Prince Ning Yi, the youngest son of the Emperor of a usurping dynasty, has been imprisoned in a temple since the age of 18 when he did something Very Bad, or possibly his father did something Very Bad, and certainly his oldest brother, the Crown Prince ("taizi-gege"), did something Very Bad ten years before that. Ning Yi has spent his time in exile becoming an expert in weaving, an art generally looked down on as women's work, and on gaining his release spends a lot of his time in brothels pretending to be a tailor while picking up vital gossip and scheming with friends. His long-term goal is revenge/justice for his murdered older brother, Ning Qiao, who appears to have been collateral damage when the Very Bad things went down, but unlike Prince Jing, he doesn't have a strategist at his side to do the dirty work for him, so he has to do both the strategising and the wetwork himself. Luckily, he has loyal friends and servants to help, but matters are complicated by a love interest who is up to her neck in intrigue, not to a mention a connection to the supposedly dead son of the usurped emperor.



Photo: Qiu Mingying. This is what "Nirvana in Fire" never gave me. Now I can die happy!

I have written an unexpectedly lengthy piece of Nirvana in Fire outsider perspective fic - it isn't at all angsty, because it turns out NiF itself is so good at fulfilling all my angst and pining needs, it doesn't leave space in my head for angsty fic.

Title: Noble Souls
Summary: Lin Shu's family watch the events of Nirvana in Fire from the afterlife
Author: Azdak
Rating: Gen
Length: 10,000 words
Genre: Humour
Location: on AO3.