You Should Watch - Pursuit of Jade (逐玉)
Bit of a weird one from me.
Romantic C-Dramas aren't my usual media, but I've watched a handful in recent years due to my partner's love of them - she grew up with them in Hong Kong and she has a lot of fun pausing to explain translation errors in the subtitles or clever in-jokes.
Total aside, but C-Dramas really need their subtitle/translation/localisation team to include an extra option that goes full "nakama is a word that means..." because a lot goes unsaid in these shows. Reasonably so, I wouldn't expect a show about the British Monarchy to explain the difference between a Lord and a Duke or why they have different names, but to a foreign viewer it would be immensely useful. My partner serves that purpose in C-Dramas, smoothing out courtesy names, terms of address, and hierarchies that otherwise go unspoken. I'm not going to solve that for you in this post, but if you have a friend who knows about this stuff, I even stronglier recommend watching Pursuit of Jade with them - it's a great show for watch parties.
A very basic primer on names to minimise confusion if you do watch one of these shows:
- Chinese names are Surname Forename - Fan Erniu's daughter is Fan Changyu, family name is Fan
- People often have other names, like a courtesy name (A name you're given as an adult to be a more formal representation of you, less familiar than your given/forename) or a title - the Marquis of Wu'an might be called Marquis Wu'an or just Wu'an, similar to how the Duke of Edinburgh might get called "Edinburgh."
- People often give others familiar nicknames ending in brother (di for younger, ge for older), sister (mei for younger, jie for older), other references to age, or a simple "A-" prefix to a single syllable. The subtitles often skip this nicknaming stuff, but there's a lot of character and gives a sense of relationships - it also implies a sort of down-to-earthness to immediately disregard family names and titles as it's rude to presume to do so among nobility.
All of that is just what I've picked up from conversations with Chinese people in English though - I've never been in a position to apply any of these rules in social situations.
Pursuit of Jade is a breath of fresh air - you watch enough of these shows and you start to detect the "we got 40 episodes to fill" bullshit. Love triangles, conflicts borne of bizarre inabilities to communicate, random kidnappings, and arbitrary fallings-out that all serve to kill 3-5 episodes before we move on with the real plot. Pursuit of Jade does these things, but it resolves them FAST.
The basic setup is thus - Fan Changyu is a young woman whose parents have recently died - as a butcher family they're fairly low in the social hierarchy (connections with death and whatnot) so she's conflicted about continuing the family business to support her 6 year-old sister Fan Changning (incredibly cute actor). On a snowy day she comes across a body in the road that turns out to be a heavily wounded but breathing hot boy. She takes him home to her home in the very poor Xigu Alley in Lin'an. Once awake, he introduces himself as Yan Zheng, but the audience very quickly learn that he's actually Xie Zheng - Marquis of Wu'an, noble of a border county - a leader known to be ruthlessly effective in battle and currently thought dead.
The show revolves and propels around the consequences of this chance meeting, with the two protagonists drawn to trust and care for one another, while the circumstances around them change. An early episode has them decide to marry matrilocally (i.e. he marries into her family, as women typically would) to solve their mutual problems - Fan Changyu is dealing with an inheritance issue while it enables Xie Zheng to cement his false identity more cleanly.
All of this is happening under the shadow of an oncoming war waged by a rebel Prince and manipulated by Imperial Court factions, and while it's fun to unravel the conspiracies underlying the story, it's not why I love this drama.
This is a show about two people with mutual love and respect and are constantly learning how to be good to each other and, as time goes on, to be selfish in their love. From very early on, the camera is screaming at you that they love each other - whenever one comes into a room the motion slows, they're beautifully backlit with golden light, and nothing else in the room matters. Just generally, the director is throwing every technique at the wall in this show and it's great fun. I have so much respect for taking big swings that don't connect if it means we get these lavishly incongruous insights into the minds of the characters - it means we don't have to worry about "do they love each other yet???" because they definitely do from very early on.
It helps that the casting is just luscious - everyone's gorgeous and giving every scene their all. Fan Changyu is adorably earnest but stalwart and capable in the action scenes, Xie Zheng is statuesque and poised while also giving some extreme Bruce Willis "god I love this woman" eyes, Gongsun Yin (Xie Zheng's friend and ally) is a delightfully foppish scholar, the Crown Princess is a lovely counterpoint with her sense of noble obligation, and Sui Yuanhai and Sui Yuanqing give two delightfully different versions of the psychotic noble creep. This is genuinely a fraction of the excellent performances in this show, the cast are all doing great work.
I just want to keep talking about characters. The big villains are interesting and hard to pin down because they act based on their emotions as well as their schemes. Changyu's friends are full characters with their own wants, petty bitches have internality and heroes have egos, the whole of Xigu Alley is a character in its own right. When Changyu finds herself among the military, there's none of the usual "5 episodes of proving herself before they respect a woman" - they don't care, she seems nice and they want to help her find what she's looking for. It's just nice to have a show where people are broadly decent folk.
The show obviously has to go places, and that's generally a change borne of bad times - there is a lot of murder and threat in this show, the villains are either explicitly or implicitly sex pests in that way that nobility don't get called rapists. Thus far (episode 32 of 40) there's no explicit sexual violence, but it's definitely a (sub)text hanging over some scenes and the sexual politics of Imperial China is often pretty skeevy.
I could sit and outline reasons to watch, but honestly it comes down to some simple things - the main couple like each other, the director is working with light and framing to tell the story when the subtitles might not, and story beats are dealt with long before they become tedious.
I'm loving this show, and I think you might as well. It's one of those "one episode a day" release schedules but it's available on Netflix and the finale will be put up on Sunday 29th March.