Recently I’ve started watching a couple xianxia romance dramas and have a few things to say about them. I started with Ashes of Love, which I never got around to watching back when it first came out. I like Yang Zi but hadn’t watched any of her dramas (meaning I liked her cause she’s pretty lol) but I’m a bit hyped for Immortal Samsara (whenever that’s coming out), so I thought I’d watch Ashes of Love first. Then I decided to give The Blue Whisper a chance. I’d seen a lot of tweets about it recently but I’m usually not into these kinds of shows to be honest, so I just went on. Anyway, I did give it a shot and I’m already hooked.
So let me talk about The Blue Whisper first, since I like it a lot more. The acting is too hammy in Ashes of Lovel; not a fan of the cutesy voices and everyone has their acting dialed up to eleven. Especially that celestial realm empress. Looks like her eyes are going to pop out of her head. Back it down a few notches, fellas.
The Blue Whisper is more to my taste. I have no idea where the English title comes from because the Chinese title has nothing to do with that. Maybe it will become clear later. The Chinese title is 驭鲛记之与君初相识, which I would translate as A Tale of Merman Taming: When I first Met You. 驭 (yu) means to control or to drive, as in drive a carriage or control an animal. Ride dragons. Control swords (sword kinesis). In the drama they use the word 馴 (xun) to talk about taming the merman, and tame is precisely what it means. So the “control” in the title to me has a more domineering feel to it than “tame”, which fits the tone of the drama, in my opinion.
So yeah, first off the visuals. I like them. Especially the costume design and the hair & makeup. Dilraba’s black/yellow-green number is really cool, and her other robes so far have been striking too. And that hair at the beginning! Wish she’d kept it later on. Also the character, Siyu’s hair is pretty great too. And the dot marks along her brow. So much more interesting than the usual traditional Chinese hairdos.
Also I really liked the flower petal red carpet for the “Immortal Consort” 仙姬 (xianji). Actually the special effects on the whole are really good. Seems like the production really spent some time on them, the arrays, the floating talismans and floating text.
I like too that the other elementals 妖 (yao, usually translated as demon; these are spirits emanating from natural phenomena, such as rocks, trees, plants, animals, etc., so I translate it as “elemental”) actually look like what they are. They are humanoid, but the costume design emphasizes their unique traits. Like the talon fingers and feathers on the bird elemental at the beginning of episode 1. Those talons remind me of a transcendent from real Chinese legend, the Hemp Maiden 麻姑 (Magu). She was described as having long fingernails like talons as well.
Which brings me to what I really wanted to talk about: mermen. Ren Jialun’s character, Changyi 長意, is a merman. The word used for that is 鮫 (jiao), which also means shark or stingray. But this word is also used interchangeably with another word, 蛟 (jiao), a kind of dragon or dragon-in-training depending what source you read in traditional Chinese literature. There are different myths about this creature from different regions. Wikipedia has a pretty good writeup on it. But there’s a scene in episode 3 that is based on a real legend:
A merfolk weeping tears is attested in a legend/folktale from Gan Bao’s collection In Search of the Supernatural《搜神記》from sometime in the 300s AD. It goes like this:
南海之外有鮫人水居如魚不廢織績其眼泣則能出珠
Beyond the South Sea there are merfolk who dwell in the water like fish1, and they have not neglected weaving and spinning thread. They weep, but it produces pearls.
Which is precisely what Changyi does, forcing himself to shed tears so he can collect pearls for the journey he thinks he is about to go on with Ji Yunhe. Poor guy.
I like the story so far. Changyi is right to be suspicious of everyone, being a prisoner in a foreign land. And he is right to suspect Ji Yunhe, believing Lin Haoqing’s warning that Ji Yunhe had an ulterior motive. Because she does have an ulterior motive. Yet also she sympathizes with Changyi because they are both prisoners in a way. She feels bad about deceiving him about running away together.
In episode 3, after Changyi finally speaks (his first words words are her name), she goes outside and is looking up at the sky, lost in thought. She recalls earlier when he said “Yunhe… dangerous”. I like the multiple layers here. He’s telling her to be careful because going outside is dangerous, but when Ji Yunhe recalls this later, she’s thinking of it differently: that she is a danger to him. And also possibly that getting involved with him, helping him out, will be a danger to them both. Just before that, when Changyi was still unconscious, Ji Yunhe tells him and herself that soon he will learn that she is not worth his sacrifice. I’m looking forward to finding out what her secret is.
So yeah, only three episodes into The Blue Whisper, but I am really liking it so far. Just goes to show you shouldn’t trust trailers or preconceived notions. Glad I gave this one a try. For now I will follow it and put Ashes of Love on hold. I assume the latter gets better later because it’s so popular, but the overracting is really getting to me. The Blue Whisper is more my style. However, there is a couple things I want to mention about Ashes of Love.
I really like the way they travel in that because it is reminiscent of sword light travel in traditional xianxia novels, such as Sword Xia of the Shu Mountains, where adepts merge their body with their sword into a beam of light and shoot off to wherever they’re going. They do that in Ashes of Love as well. I find this much cooler (and more advanced) than just standing on a sword like a skateboard as it moves through the air. That’s the segway of the immortal world: it gets you there, but you look like a dork doing it.
The other thing I want to mention is an allusion I noticed in Ashes of Love. In that drama, the protagonist lives in a flower realm that is being blocked by a water mirror. That made me think of a famous classic Qing dynasty novel, Flowers in the Mirror《鏡花緣》by Li Ruzhen. A flower [reflected] in a mirror is an illusion. So too is the moon reflected in watter. The two are used in the phrase 鏡花水月 (lit. mirror flower water moon). In that novel, Empress Wu Zetian orders all the flowers to be in bloom the next morning. The flower spirits comply because they are afraid of crossing her, but the gods punish them for doing that, and they are forced to go to earth and atone for their sin before being allowed back in the celestial realm. So it seems the setting of Ashes of Love takes some superficial inspiration from this classic novel. I thought that was interesting. The novel, by the way, does have an abridged translation by Lin Tai-yi. You can find it on Archive.org.
Welp, back to writing about wuxia. And watching The Blue Whisper.