Sarah jie jie, In Blossom rec or no?
this is a real tough question to answer hooooo boy where do i start??
i mean, for starters, the premise of the show is actually really fun, and i like it a lot so far!! let's talk a little about this:
(spoilers for the first 2 eps in its entirety which covers the background/setup of the story)
this is yang caiwei. her dad was a minister who was framed for one thing or another, demoted, and subsequently murdered. she was disfigured in the process, and ended up in the city of heyang where she grew up to be a corpse bearer training under a coroner.
yang caiwei has been betrothed since she was a little girl to:
pan yue. this boy is the son of a concubine so his relationship with his dad is very meh. when yang caiwei's family got into trouble, pan yue's dad quickly cut off all ties with them. this led to yang caiwei being turned away at the door p harshly when she came to pan yue for help. pan yue himself though has loved her since he was a boy, and has been looking for her for 10 years!!
ANYWAY these two find each other. he wants to marry her. ofc he does!! she's his 白月光, and he wants to love and protect her!! he's disowned his family so that he can do this, he is ALL IN BABY. he's only found her again for all of 10 minutes and he's already planning their wedding in his head lbr.
she is calm and composed and v sensible because of the way she had to grow up. this whole thing seems too good to be true, and also she might be harbouring some ~feelings over the way he just cut her out of his life when she needed him the most. the yang caiwei she is now just wants to live her life as normal.
the chemistry is 😘 at this point, and i am so invested in their relationship. at this stage, i was still thinking she was the second female lead and was like. huh. this is going to be one of those shows where i'd ship these two more than the official couple i guess??
anyway enter:
shangguan zhi. sister of pan yue's best friend, who is obsessed with pan yue, putting it mildly. she also has this ~thing about her own physical appearance - essentially, she thinks she needs to look and act perfect to be worthy of pan yue's love. this involves a lot of witch doctors and v unhealthy dieting and scrolls on how to smile the perfect way and walk the perfect way. y'all get the gist.
shangguan zhi hears that pan yue is getting married (to someone ugly at that!!!) and loses her shit. she decides the way around this so she can be with her yue-gege forever is-
(you guessed it!!)
-body-swapping with yang caiwei, and pushing yang caiwei (and also the shaman who actually helped her with the swap) off a cliff so that nobody ever finds out.
to her credit, it actually works!! she swaps bodies with yang caiwei, and marries pan yue.
what she didn't account for was being murdered on her wedding day.
ANYWAY. the actual yang caiwei, now in shangguan zhi's body (😭), survives the fall from the cliff, rushes to the wedding with the intent on stopping the wedding and getting her goddamn body back, and reaches just in time to kinda sorta witness shangguan zhi's murder.
cue her thinking that it was pan yue who killed shangguan zhi (she knew the whole wedding thing was too good to be true) and pan yue thinking that shangguan zhi had something to do with yang caiwei's death (after all, she was obsessed with him and had a whole fit over him wanting to marry someone else).
everything about this premise was *chef's kiss*. give me a bucket of popcorn and some comfy pillows, i can watch this all day.
EXCEPT.
except my dudes shangguan zhi (and subsequently yang caiwei-in-shangguan-zhi's body, let's call her shangguan caiwei for now) is played by ju jingyi. 😞 zhhz played yang caiwei TOO WELL my friends, so that when jjy took over, shangguan caiwei felt like a whole different character. it's a bit difficult to reconcile yang caiwei and shangguan caiwei tbh, which made watching the third ep onwards a bit jarring, especially after zhhz set the character up so well.
it's not like......fatal to the show. i mean. i went in expecting nothing from jjy (rightfully i think 😑) and i wouldn't say i am disappointed by it just because i was prepared to be ehhhh about her going in. i'm still watching the show mainly because i like the plot and also, and this is a big factor that i truly cannot stress enough:
liu xueyi looks so good in this show hoooooo boy
look at this!!! is this a face i would suffer 30+ episodes of jjy for??? apparently it is!!
tl;dr: love lxy + like the plot + dislike jjy = still watching and will likely finish the show. is it a rec?? conservatively, i'd say soft yes??? i mean. a huge part of me watching this show is because i'm entertained by the shenanigans, 😍 over lxy, and daydreaming about an alternate universe of the show where we have zhhz instead of jjy as the female lead. it's not something to watch seriously though!!
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I still am not over the choice to turn parts of pan yue's hair white. He's menacing, he's merciless, yes yes, it's what he portrays outwardly, but also visible to everyone else are those streaks of white, his grief in full display, and not a single person thinks he is mourning his dead wife. He is cunning and secretive, but not with this. He could've dyed it back to black, but he doesn't, and so displays his greatest heartbreak, and no one sees this vulnerability.
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thinking about li xiangyi and di feisheng living life in crossed timelines, opposites falling backward from one another. di feisheng feels them both fall into the ocean, knows li xiangyi is dead, and when he finds the man with his face again ten years later he's not quite the same, is it? he tries to bring back the spark he remembers in li xiangyi's eyes, at the point that defined their story (di feisheng's beginning, li xiangyi's ending), to push him to wield his sword once more whether it's by companionship or rage. none of it works. this li xiangyi doesn't want to remember, won't remember. and di feisheng is still learning so much, learning to be someone outside of a blade in his hands, outside of being a weapon outside of li xiangyi, but li xiangyi has already found and lived some life he couldn't be there for and now di feisheng has to relearn him too, on top of it all, after he's gone. because the first time he met li xiangyi di feisheng felt him die, and now he's left chasing, reaching for someone he doesn't quite know yet, and who will never get the time to know who he'll become in return
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