How To Be A More Interesting Character Than The Main Hero (Pt.3)

Some characters portraited by Adam Driver

Mixed media doll out of air-dry clay. Made with the help of tutorial by Chertoh.

Li Lun, a villain I feel for (Pt. 2/4)

So, by the beginning of the drama LL says that he wants to kill all of ZYZ’s new friends. In fact, he just likes talking. He says: “Let’s kill ZYZ’s friends starting with Baize Goddess, like the previous time” so the viewer thinks he killed previous goddess off, but later we learn that he didn't do it. Even if he has a perfect opportunity to kill someone of ZYZ’s new friends without ruining his own schemings, he does pretty nothing to achieve it. He just stands and talks. Because he doesn’t really want to kill anyone, including ZYZ. He wants to attract ZYZ’s attention and to make ZYZ stop ghosting him.

Li Lun speaks to Big Bad in Mask while possessing a courtesan. Meanwhile, he lends Truth Eye to Ao Ying so she could see his true self.

LL joins hands with Big Bad in Mask, not knowing he was the one who tortured demons in that bloody dungeon (yeah, LL is not the smartest guy of the Universe). By doing it he tries to achieve his own goals. First, he wants to break free from his custody, and second, he wants to get attention from ZYZ, who ignores him.

In order to break his chains LL works as matchmaker for ZYZ and his girlfriend, so they could fall in love with each other and find and unite pieces of Baize token, because only if the token is intact, it can be broken and its spells can be dissipated. He is not a saint, so he kills some folks (by possessing them or just because) and tricks other demons into helping him, although he is said to value his own kind more than anything. It means he goes through break-up with ZYZ so badly, that even his principles fade into the background for his anger and pain. Or it’s just another script flaw.

Li Lun behaves himself very much as a ghosted ex-boyfriend (in fact, he is), and I understand him well. He goes through stages of acceptance: throws himself from denial (ZYZ is no better than me, why don't you treat him the way he treated me?) through anger (ZYZ, I’ll kill your friends and make you suffer!) to bargaining (Why does he find you better than me? What if you would be like me, would he still love you?).

To talk about his feelings with someone, he uses the only way to leave his dark lifeless place of imprisonment, which is possessing others. At first, this ability and an omnipotence of it looks intimidating, but later we learn that he cuts his lifespan by a half each time he does it, so his need to talk to someone is very desperate. (Later, LL says that it was his way to enjoy the world and freedom but GJM never showed us such a use of this LL's ability). ZYZ knows that destroying LL’s leaves (through which he possesses bodies) will hurt Li Lun, yet he does it anyway, and LL kinda... enjoys it bitterly. As if the fact of him being not ignored by ZYZ is more important that his wellbeing. It's miserable and pathetic, but understandable.

And anytime LL tries to get some answers for his questions, ZYZ and his friends say something like “You don’t understand a thing, I won’t bother to explain, though.” or “We have friends and ZYZ is our boyfriend, and you are a lonely loser!”. How it supposes to help LL understand his wrongs? I have no idea.

Ghosting your ex is the sure way to make him a villain.

LL breaks free from his jail and destroys a “support beam” of the “wall” around demon ghetto. An accent on “I’m destroying the wall” is strange, because I can’t understand the gain demons will have when they aren't in their ghetto anymore (and it obviously should be). Would Great Demons even the scores of victims if not only humans would catch and torture demons but demons would also catch and torture humans, or what? However, it sounds pretty fair, as long as said Baize Goddess’ and ZYZ’s protection of demons consist in only preventing them from going outside their ghetto without passport, LOL.

Although LL is free from the seal, he is still dying from the fatal wound causing by ZYZ 8 years ago. His true body is smoldering slowly, so he has got not so much time left.

For plot purposes, the main heroes need to visit LL’s birthplace to get the last cup of magic water to fix Baize token and to restore a “support beam” of ghetto’s wall. What would a normal villain do, knowing about it? Yes, he would spill it. What does LL do? He, in fact, hands it over to the main heroes. Yes, stained, but LL was a student of Mountain God, too, so he could know that there is a way to restore the pureness of magic water, and the best way to destroy the token for good is to spill this water.

During their visit LL kidnaps ZYZ’s girlfriend (it is funny that the main heroes don’t notice it for something like first five minutes 😅) and has a phycologist session with her (in which she is a psychologist). They have a superstrange conversation, something like: LL: “ZYZ supposed to be my friend but ghosted me for no obvious for me reason and I’m hurt!”. WX: “Oh, it’s because you are a loser with no friends, ZYZ did everything right!”.

Then ZYZ and his current boyfriend come and LL tries once more to tell ZYZ that he is hurt, but ZYZ has absolutely no desire to talk to him or to explain to him something and acts like they were never boyfriends and LL is his archenemy.

So, they fight and ZYZ hurts LL with Everburning Wood once more, now deliberately. LL dies, and although ZYZ has red eyes at this moment he never thinks of LL again. So, LL is right: ZYZ is a hypocrite with double standards. It is such a contrast with the stories of the main heroes and ancient dragon gods, in which killing your friend for Higher Goals is a tragedy.

But there is a plot twist ahead!

Here is Part 1 Here is Part 3 Here is Part 4

“New moon, lay your mercy on me tonight...” (с) Swallow the Sun I wanted to draw this a long time. The font is designed by Taras Makar. 

Swooning over a secondary character (again), Pt. 2/3

The evil vice-prime minister promised Moo-yeon (aka Yoon Sok-ha) that he can be relieved from his servitude and safely reunite with his sister if he fulfills the last and the most difficult task: to kills the Crown Prince. But Moo-yeon failed to do it during the organized by Kim Cha-eon attack and is forced now to finish this task by his own means.

Eventually, Moo-yeon finds the prince amnesiac and, moreover, wedded to Moo-yeon's sister, who happened to hide all this time in a nearby village as a peasant.

His sister seem to genuinely like the amnesiac prince, so, after some moral sufferings, Moo-yeon dares to deceive Kim Cha-eon making him believe the Crown Prince is dead. And then he gets his long-longed freedom.

And he could live freely and happily ever after with his sister (and her husband) if not for one thing.

Namely: he has an affair with the Crown Princess (the Crown Prince's wife and also Kim Cha-eon's daughter, whom he threated with the blade as he was a kid). Going out of Kim Cha-eon's mansion, Moo-yeon accidentally hears that his lover is pregnant, so he also decides to bid farewell to her before finding his sister and disappearing with her for good.

His lover, Kim So-Hye, is a very miserable woman, too. Her father used her from her childhood on to reach his political goals and arranged her marriage with the Crown Prince who hated her from the bottom of his heart as a daughter of the murderer of his childhood love Yoon Yi-seo (which is VERY ironic). She was very lonely in the palace so she couldn`t stand her lover leaving her, too, and hired one of father's assassins to hurt Moo-yeon and make him stay (even if only for the time of his recovering).

The Crown Prince never ever got laid with his wife, so she is obviously pregnant by someone else and Kim Cha-eon tried to kill the prince in order to cover for his daughter (because adultery of the princess should be punished by death of the whole cheater's family). He told her to kill the biological father of her child by herself in order to eliminate the witness, believing it was one of a noblemen of the palace. Later he learned she killed a son of an official and felt relieved. But the situation over Moo-yeon being shot in order to prevent him from leaving makes Kim Cha-eon rethink the adultery of his daughter. And from now on he starts being suspicious of Moo-yeon.

Meanwhile, there are rumors spreading that the Crown Prince is alive and it forces severely wounded Moo-yeon to try to make him disappear for good (because if Kim Cha-eon learns that Moo-yeon lied to him, the little liar won`t be able to escape and reunite with his sister). But he predictably fails and stays lying on the ground, unconscientious and bleeding.

Fortunately, he has good subordinates who find him and bring him back. The Crown Princess is very anxious, she never wanted to hurt him so seriously, so she takes a good care for him.

But the situation over the Crown Prince's fake death becomes more and more dangerous, Moo-yeon‘s life and freedom as well as his sister's is hung by a thread, so his subordinates help him to run away.

He sends back to his lover a bracelet she once gifted him and bids his farewell to her, planning to start a new life with his sister far away from Jeoson. Unlike the Crown Prince, who hated Kim So-hye for who her father is, Moo-yeon is in love with her even despite her being a daughter of his father's murderer. But he understands that their relationship is doomed as far as she is a nobility and (an unloved, but still) Crown Prince's wife and he is a mere slave of her father, unable to protect even himself. So he thinks it`ll be better for them to just forget each other. (And he is so goddamn right! But love is love. *sighs*)

Here is Part 1 Here is Part 3

Fangs of Fortune and Li Lun

GJM is really great in terms of visuals: young and beautiful actors and actresses, their acting, decorations, frame building, coloring, costumes – I’ve never seen such a beautiful thing in whole my drama-viewing career! But GJM is like Chinese J.J. Abrams: everything in his work should impress viewer with visuals and plot twists, even if it harms the plot and the link between viewers and characters, and I can’t say that it’s something good (although FoF was VERY good looking). If I need to explain to someone what to expect from FoF in one GIF, it would be this one 😅:

"WTF is going on?" you may ask. "I don't know either" I will answer.

And these are closing credits. They were different almost each next ep, strange, but somewhat comforting. At least actors had fun filming it. Yan An is so nice here. I need to feel related to the characters and to understand the rules of the fictional world to dive fully into the story, but I gave up on my pathetic attempts to understand how this world works very quickly, because the whole story was the one huge Deus Ex Machina. I swear, I have never seen such a series in my life, in which you can meet deus ex machina not just a couple of times per story, but the couple of times per EPISODE. EACH EPISODE. The logic of main heroes’ actions also remained a mystery for me (maybe their mindset was too divine for me, I’m an earthly person after all), so I couldn’t feel related to any of the mains, and their problems were absolutely uninteresting for me.

But suddenly I felt related to Li Lun. He was the only one in this story who didn’t have a plot twist up his sleeve, and his actions were pretty understandable (unlike ones of the mains).

BTS. Yan An and Hou Minghao are having fun. There are two ways to tell the story: either you create characters and let them tell the story by themselves, or you create a story and bend your characters to fit it in. Unfortunately, FoF is the second variant: I understood what type of a story GJM wanted to tell through Li Lun’s character, but he chose two tropes (getting over an obsession and prejudice overcoming) and didn’t work out any of them in a valid way. However, I’m a professional in loving characters whose stories weren’t constructed in a satisfying way and am fond of LL anyway (I cut something like 80 GIFs, so I will post 3-part-recap with my thoughts on LL soon).

BTS. Yan An with Hou Minghao, Tian Jiarui and Lin Ziye. Btw, I ‘ve never heard of Yan An before this drama, but he acted so good in FoF, I would like to see more of his actor works.

Yan An is shivering from cold. How this man was supposed to play a villain? Look at him, he is a cinnamon roll! However, he did it well 💙

Thoughts on TtEotM

Well... I didn't like it. LYX was marvelous, CGI, too, plot elements were pretty good changed to tie the story up (and the part with Ming Ye was better tied to the main plot than in the book), but still... I didn't like it. In the book it was the story about man without abilities to feel something, his "love" in the first part of the story was wicked and twisted, so the contrast with the second part was huge and palpable. TTJ was a monster and became a man, he turned from egoist who only wanted to survive no matter what to person who was ready to give away the most precious thing for him (his life) to make his beloved happy (it happened that saving the world was the thing that could make his beloved happy, so he sacrificed himself to do it). And his heroic deed was rewarded with resurrection and a normal life with his family and new-found home. The story in the drama has nothing to do with that. There is a poor boy (no monster at all!!!) who constantly suffers and wants to die, falls in love with the first person who treated him well and sacrifices himself for the world that was so unkind to him. It`s awful! I know that Chinese people love the idea that you should die for the greater good, but this philosophy is as far from my heart as Jupiter from the Earth. Maybe DFQC will remain the only one drama "villain" who's got the happy end. And that drama will stay my favorite.

The portrait of my colleague Andrey

How to fight your doom (Pt. 6)

Episodes 27-36 From now on the fearsome and almighty Demon Lord turns to be extremely gentle and soft and it causes in some viewers cognitive dissonance. But is his defence I could say that he is in love for the first time in his life, his love is finally requited so his teenage delight is understandable. Besides, he is like that only when he is tête à tête with the Girl.

The great awkwardness of the moment when you are jealous and at the same time fragile in terms of your love. I like Girl's face expression here. The most part of Silent Moon Palace story arch Girl tries to be worthy of Demon tribe as if she already decided to turn to their side (which is strange) and still tries to persuade Devil not to kill demon and fairy people on the battlefield (which is a really good idea). She even agrees to be tortured if it can ease demons' hatred. At the same time Devil takes his punishment as an atonement for losing opportunity to return his people from stone captivity.

So, Devil and Girl try to find a compromise, that can solve the Romeo and Juliet problem, but at the end of a day there are only two opportunities – to be apart or to solve the main conflict. The story, though, chooses for them both variants at once, which is the sacrifice. If you can't bear your beloved as well as your folk suffering, you can protect them all at cost of your well-being, your life and your pain.

Devil sacrifices himself: if Girl would not love him anymore, she would be safe (because the bracelet could be removed) and his people would be saved as well (demons could use Chidi`s soul from the bracelet to break the spell over 100 000 soldiers). Girl would be sad, yes, but it would be more painful for him as he destroyed his love with his own hands. But this plan doesn`t work so he decides to sacrifice himself in more physical way and to hand himself in the claws of ancient Melkor in order to save his people without killing his beloved.

Girl sacrifices herself as well. She kills herself in order to save Devil`s life but it also miraculously solves the main conflict: resurrected demons and fairies all bow to her divine power and start truce.

«I promise you to stay with you forever». So they are truly heroes in this story. In the hero`s journey a true hero is a person, who is ready after all hardships and inner development to sacrifice everything, even his own life, for the greater good/well-being of all people/his country etc. In Chinese culture The Folk is much more important than one person, so self-sacrifice is the right way to portray the real hero in there.

Btw, patricide is an unforgivable sin in Chinese (as well as European) culture, but authors of this story craftily turned it into «father`s suicide for the greater good and out of parental love», so it was the hint that Devil will be alive in the end of the story).

I don't think Devil did to Girl so many bad deeds during the story that he needed to punish himself for that at the end(and to allow Siming to beat him up). Maybe it is something that is left from the novel, in which Devil was not so fluffy and nice. His misbehave at the beginning of the story couldn't shake Girl's good attitude towards him so it barely pained her. Kidnapping her can't handle as his bad deed – he saved her and she really couldn't go back without dying under the hand of Heavenly Emperor. A wish of destroying Fairy Realm was not a crime against Girl specifically and at the end Girl understood his reasons (although she didn't want it to happen). Her suffering in Fuju Cave was willingly. The only moment when he really hurted her was the moment he lied to her before war, but it wasn`t cause of her death. If he said to her the truth, she would sacrifice herself as well in order to save him. So I think that this huge bunch of sufferings and punishments for Devil is the part of his redemption. If you are a villain (even if you are soft and fluffy and empathic in your soul) you should die or atone.

I like that story coils itself like Ouroboros, biting its tail: at the beginning of the story Devil unwillingly made nice things to Girl and she liked it – at the end of it he pretty willingly makes the same nice things to her with no effect; before, he was disgusted thinking he can be Girl's servant and by the end he WANTS to serve for her but she doesn't need him anymore. It shows that nothing can be started over again. Love gives you only one chance to build it in a right way.

Then he is ready to let her go and confesses his love for the last time: «Everyone feared, hated, relied on or respected me and only you loved me with no reason and accepted me with all my thorns and dickery but I haven`t got an opportunity anymore to say to you that I`m no more that thorny jerk». And (the power of accidents!) it is the reason why resurrected Goddess gives him a hint that he was heard.

It`s funny but only because resurrected Girl is THE girl he wanted to get back he finally looks into her Book of Fate and decides to change her fate.

Farewell kiss feels bittersweet. Devil never prefers duty over love throughout the story. He chooses to punish himself and to kill himself instead. He makes impossible for Girl, goes against Heavenly rules and gets his punishment for that, which is death. And a really hard choice, hero's choice is up to Girl. She needs to shatter the primordial spirit of her beloved one in order to save the world (a shattered spirit can't reincarnate and can't be put together again, as it was in case of Chidi's and her Student's, who are gone for good). And she does it.

It`s funny: fairies say that Goddess` sealed abilities can be revealed only with marriage with GoW but we can see them in their full power when she protects her loved one Devil (in the Mortal Realm and in the Final Battle too).

Devil`s demon army coming to help in the name of Three Realms and his ability to get the Glazed Fire although he is a demon wraps the conflict between demons and fairies up for good. Even Heavenly Emperor admits that he was wrong thinking that demons (read: inferior, wicked and cruel beings) are not capable of doing something like that.

Our heroes are indeed cheaters (THE POWER OF ACCIDENT!): it turnes out that at their first meeting their souls were intertwined and Girl's primordial spirit filled everything inside of Devil. And it was the reason why he has an opportunity to resurrect her. And, honestly speaking, at these circumstances, did he ever have a chance NOT to fall in love with her? If it isn't a fate, what is it then?

And the main cheat is his comeback at the very end of a story (I read it on tumblr in someone else's meta, but I think it is pretty logical to be true): she places her curse on his body once more (the previous curse disapreared when she died), tying him to her and ORDERS him not to go when he starts dissipate. So his Blood of Heart, a piece of primordial spirit, can't disobey and puts itself into her arm.

An interesting thought: as I remember, the heart-hidden hairpin was used by the Moon Tribe Founder so her Fairy-ex-BF couldn't see her heart. Does it mean that the same curse connected them too? Could it be that Xishan curse had always something to do with love relationships? And then, if your Girlfriend IS the powerful Goddess, who can resurrect hundred of thousands people at once, it is only matter of time when she resurrects you.

It is a beautiful story which represents ideal «enemies to lovers» relationships development (but in a fairytale way, because, as you could see, THE POWER OF ACCIDENT reigns here). It has got everything that you need to believe in their relationships: unusual methods to get close, painful unresolved romantic tension, ABSOLUTELY ADORABLE salvation of this romantic tension, sufferings and parting that only build their final union more joyful for viewers. I`m under impression. Wow!

Episodes 1-7 Episode 8 Episodes 9-13 Episodes 13-19 Episodes 20-26