TV SERIES: 刁蛮公主 (My Bratty Princess)

Image from Chinese Wikipedia

At a glance: comedy, historical


From DramaWiki:

Situ Jing, a mischievous free-thinking lady, and her companion, A Lian*, go on a series of adventures. She does not know that she is a princess of the former royal family. To protect her family's reputation outside the home, Situ Jing dresses as a man and calls herself Xiao Long Xia. Concerned about the plight of the refugees which the officials have been ignoring, she comes up with various schemes to help them.

Emperor Zhu Yun has been steadily working on consolidating the empire that his father had left him. A monk once gave him a puzzle, telling him that whoever solves it will help him with the problems of the empire. He escapes from his palace to wander around the city with his companion. He befriends Xiao Long Xia after he realizes that the money she has conned and stolen from others is being spent on the refugees. When Xiao Long Xia solves the puzzle, he decides to maintain closer ties with her.

The Lord of Yunnan's sister was the previous queen who drank poison and died when the last dynasty was attacked. His son, Bai Yun Fei is betrothed to Princess An Ning, sister of Emperor Zhu Yun.

An unlikely friendship develops between the Emperor, Xiao Longxia and Bai Yu Fei, each pretending to the others to be someone else. Palace and court intrigues, rebellion and assasination plots abound.

* Edit made from "A Ling" to "A Lian"


Luna comments

I really liked this show. I also have a lot of problems with it. But I enjoyed it a lot.

The summary above is a pretty good introduction to the three main characters, who basically drive the story. The remainder are about: how a rebel group tries to use Situ Jing to restore the old dynasty; how the Lord of Yunnan tries to get out of his marriage; how the emperor deals with the power-hungry, corrupt, selfish, opportunistic vultures who are his court officials.

So, what I liked about it - it's funny! Comedy almost always guarantees that I like something, as long as it's done in a style of humour I'll laugh at.

& it's not funny just because of visual humour or because of the dialogue & witty remarks. There are those, too, of course, & they're funny, but the funniest parts are where people get entangled in other people's plots. It doesn't sound funny, but it is. There's good use of dramatic irony. =]

The emperor is also very smart, and the scenes with him in them are amongst my favourites. I also think that the actor did a great job in his role - his facial expressions really suit the stuff he's doing. When he's being sneaky, he turns away and smiles. When he's trying to manipulate other people, he can pull off all sorts of performances, pretending to be any/some combination/all of the following: crying, defeated, angry, clueless, frustrated, so on. & no matter what he does to the people, they can't do anything but swallow their defeat and smile at him.

I think I might have watched the show entirely to see how he made everyone dance around him.

The other characters were...alright, I guess. Situ Jing is a pretty cool character - she's independent, smart, adventurous, & she sneaks out of home because she gets bored. Typical for a fictional female, but this series did it well enough. I think what ruined her for me was the way the characters kept praising her - because I like her, but I don't think she's that awesome, even though I guess she actually is, given the time period.

So, the emperor made the plot very interesting. The dynamics between him and the two other main characters are also very good, because at the start they're all concealing their identities & you can see them being wary of each other, trying to figure each other out, but being good friends at the same time (because they were all supporting the refugees).

I felt that once their identities were revealed, though, their dynamics weren't so interesting any more. From that point on, though, the more political side of the plot gets thicker & then you see the emperor pulling off more of his tricks. So that kind of made up for it.

I do have a lot of things I didn't like about it, which can be summarised as: illogical bits, lame bits, anachronisms, & too much praise of the lead female.

Illogical bits are within the plot, so I don't want to go into them. There were a few eyebrow-raising moments, but I'm okay with those because they don't overall ruin the awesomeness of the emperor, whom you may remember is the primary reason I watched this.

Now the anachronisms are a little more interesting. For one, I have no idea what happened with the costumes because, as little as I know about the Chinese costume & its differences throughout time, I swear that a lot of the female costumes are wrong. Why would they do that?! It couldn't be that the costume department was too cheap to get some legitimate-looking hanfu? This grated on me for the whole series.

& the second...there was a prison scene in which the servant brought in snacks, & one of the snacks was...biscuit rolls. Truthfully, I don't know whether they had biscuit rolls 500 years ago, but it...was strange. I think they were the chocolate variety, too. So, umm...

There are lame bits. Really fake laughter. I won't go into that, but that seems like staple in more recent Chinese TV series.

& then there's way too much praise for Situ Jing. It seems that everyone (except her parents, who get into trouble because of her antics) talks about how good she is & how she lives her life to the full. Which I'm okay with, for the first few times, but not after fifteen episodes. The way they praised her made it more unconvincing, in the way of - if you really believe that she's so cool, then don't you think you'd have convinced me by now?

Anyway. Aside from those things, I quite enjoyed it. Because of the emperor. He's too cool. Yes, he's in an all-powerful position & everyone has to obey him, but that doesn't necessarily secure his rule. So it's very interesting to see how he sets the field up for himself. The only thing I can imagine being even cooler is if there were two people like him in the same show, & they were pitting themselves against each other.


Closing

I highly recommend this, because I highly recommend watching the emperor at work, & he comes with the rest of the show.