When Daien was sixteen, she was hit by a car.
She’d been biking home after cram school; the collision had broken several of her bones and rendered her bedridden. About a week into recovery, bored out of her mind and antsy about missing exams (made worse by her mother’s scolding about the aforementioned missing exams), she’d stumbled across A Court of Silk and Flowers.
She’d caught glimpses here and there of soap operas, but hadn’t ever watched one—especially not one as over-the-top and flowery. Caiyi ‘I hate it when my daughter has fun’ Zheng especially found soap operas to be a black hole of stupidity and asininity meant for morons with time to waste. Uncharacteristically spiteful, Daien secretly watched the first episode.
It was terrible. Overdramatic, utterly lacking in logic, filled to the brim with truly cringeworthy dialogue and cheap costumes and shoddy set pieces. Completely terrible. Absurdly, Daien found herself binge-watching until she caught up to the last aired episode, number four hundred and forty six, in under a month.
Truly she could not comprehend how such a sprawling, godawful series came to be, and even more confusing was how she couldn’t stop watching it. The sheer amount of time she’d wasted on this slop would’ve made her grandmother turn in her grave. But somehow it didn’t end there; somehow Daien kept up with every single episode for over a decade, determined to see it through to the bitter end. Or, rather, every single episode besides the very last one.
Daien spends the next few moments stumbling around on legs she’s not used to, patting down random bits of decor and the walls. She concludes that unfortunately, they are tangible and materially consistent. Even the smears of blood she leaves everywhere look real enough, and feel it too.
Is she having a final fever dream right before her death? Did she get injected with some insane hallucinogenics? Surely VR technology is not advanced enough for this. Is this some sort of Truman Show social experiment? This is too absurd to genuinely be the afterlife, and she’s not irrational enough to start thinking she’s suddenly possessing the body of a fictional character.
Because really: Dayan Uzun?
A Court of Silk and Flowers is a melodramatic, cheesy romance fantasy that goes like this:
The innocent, lively youngest daughter of a baron, the female lead, meets the Imperial Crown Prince, the male lead, by chance. At a banquet, she falls into a pond and he saves her, then he becomes enchanted by and falls in love with her.
What follows is a very long series of romance drama and contrived setups, with the most inane subplots that seek to prevent the Crown Prince and the female lead from being together. Of course by the end, it finishes off with a wedding and the leads becoming the Emperor and Empress respectively.
Somehow the producers and scriptwriters have stretched this to over one thousand episodes, thanks to: miscommunication after miscommunication, convoluted B plots, copious flashbacks, slow mo, repeat camera shots from different angles, countless side love interests, and villainesses to face slap and ultimately kill.
Villainesses like Dayan Uzun.
Introduced in the first arc as a violent, cold-blooded butcher who helped with the tyrant Emperor’s dirty work, Dayan Uzun was meant to be yet another powerful nobleman who falls in love with the female lead.
However, after incredibly poor audience reception, he was rewritten as a petty antagonist; apparently the drama had too many love interests who fell into the possessive-strong-dark-cynical-violent-aloof archetype, most notably being the main male lead. Obviously a mere duke could not compare, so the Cold Duke of the North started to get shoehorned into increasingly stupid villain of the week plots. This led the original actor to quit, citing breach of contract.
In the wake of that, a new actor was hastily hired—the director's daughter, who elbowed her way into the role because she thought it would be fun to play an unabashed villain—and the character was retconned to have been a masculine woman all along.
The costume design and styling was kept the same for consistency and budget reasons, but they swapped the actor and updated the lore; the term duke became gender neutral in the worldbuilding. Since the Duke wasn’t that important, most audiences couldn’t have cared less.
And that was pretty much the most interesting thing about Dayan Uzun. Instead of exploring any of the implications that could come with having such an unorthodox woman in a historical(ish) fantasy society, the producers just used her as a one dimensional fodder antagonist whenever the female lead needed a convenient, multi-use obstacle. This was a character who technically (if not mildly awkwardly) fit both the villainess and Cold Duke narrative roles, after all.
And of course, this type of character was easy pickings for the chopping block. After a pathetic rebellion, she was unceremoniously offscreened by the second male lead.
Daien pushes aside the annoying bangs and peers at the face in the reflection of the dagger again. A Court of Silk and Flowers, really? Of all the possible characters and all the possible fictional universes. Granted, as someone who can count the number of dramas she’s watched on one hand, she supposes she should consider herself lucky that this… location is one she (unfortunately) invested a great deal of time into learning.
She tilts her head, and the reflection tilts its head with her. This face is recognizably the Cold Duke of the North, certainly, but now that she’s getting a closer look, the face doesn’t resemble the actress fully. It’s more like a really good cosplay.
The one eye, intense and with a harsh brow that gives her a permanently angry expression; the other eye covered, scar tissue that’s old and bumpy, the slightly crooked nose that had clearly been broken before and didn’t heal straight. A cosplay that looks even more realistic than the original work.
That much is true for the rest of the room, too. Unlike the backgrounds in the drama, which had always looked mildly set-like even when the budget increased—too clean, too plastic-looking—the vases and wood carvings and tapestry genuinely look like something from another world, not a 3D printed prop.
After struggling with the eyepatch for a full minute, she decides to just deal with it later. Only being able to see out of one eye is really annoying, but wasting time loitering at the spawn point(?) feels less productive than trying to search for more clues.
If she gets more information, she’ll be able to better deduce just what the hell is going on and engineer a decent action plan moving forward. The more she observes the environment and actors(?), the higher probability she has of finding inconsistencies or leads.
She sheathes the dagger with a click. The weight and heft of the blade feels realistic, too, different from holding a kitchen knife. To her relief, the nosebleed has stopped on its own. She balls the bloodsoaked cloth in her fist, thinking of the angel, who probably isn’t actually an angel. The likelihood of him being a paid actor is much higher.
She finds herself filled with an unexpected sense of anticipation as she starts down the hallway. Already she is mulling over new possibilities and solutions. As a child she’d gotten a similar rush when trying to solve a particularly fascinating problem set, but it’d been years since she’d actually wanted anything besides let’s get this over with. But now she’s looking forward to talking to the spawnpoint NPC(?).
She rounds the corner, and there he is: standing still, head lowered, eyes downcast, the perfect posture of a retainer waiting to be commanded or dismissed or struck. Now that she’s had more than three seconds in this new environment, she realizes that he mostly just looks like… a normal person. The glowing effect must have been the backlight.
“My liege,” he lifts clasped hands in a formal salute straight out of any historical drama. “This servant is gladdened to see his liege hale and renewed.”
He looks familiar, but not immediately identifiable, not a character with a lot of screentime. The number of named, on-screen characters is in the thousands, so Daien gives a noncommittal reply, giving him a once over as subtly as she can.
He’s pretty enough to tickle a part of Daien’s animal brain that she wasn’t aware had existed until now, but a normal person. Nothing like an uncanny AI or airbrushed model. The red-purple under and at the corners of his eyes don’t look like makeup at all, nor the dusting of freckles over his nose and cheeks. His hair and eyebrows are as white as snow despite his youthful face.
Damn, Daien thinks. This actor/illusion/hallucination/etc is really good.
The costuming and styling, too. When she watches the original drama, she’s always thrown off by details like weird hairlines or polyester-looking fabric that takes the immersion out. But these clothes look worn and well-loved despite being spotlessly clean. Now she steps closer to get a better look at his face, and even his long eyelashes are perfectly white. No sign of mascara or false lashes.
If the actor is uncomfortable, he doesn’t show it. Daien steps back and decides to play the role of the Cold Duke of the North. She squares her shoulders and marches down the hall, pretending like she knows where she’s going, because asking for directions would be extremely out of character. This hall looks like the palace set the original drama reuses frequently.
“How long has this lord been away from the festivities?” Daien bluffs.
“Not long, my liege. It is near noon, and His Majesty the Emperor has not yet made his formal entrance.” The not-angel follows a few paces behind her, to the left.
His liege. Who is the original Cold Duke the liege of? She had a fair amount of underlings to delegate her evil deeds to, but not too many were named, and even fewer were actually important.
As Daien digs through her brain, she continues to try to get information without making it obvious she has no idea what the hell is going on. “What stage have the festivities gotten to?”
“Begging my liege’s pardon, this servant’s best guess is the eighth course in the spring banquet.”
Hmm. There is in fact a spring banquet in the first arc, but there’s also supposedly a spring banquet every year. She sneaks another look at the not-angel, eyeing his hat, which contrasts sharply with his hair, one of those generic government official hats with the two wings and—
Wait. White-haired official from the North…
A random minor character comes to her. The Cold Duke’s peasant-born scribe.
“You. Scribe,” Daien tests the theory. “Your name is Ludi Sand.”
He answers immediately. “This servant awaits Your Grace’s orders and is honoured to have his insignificant name remembered..”
Considering she used basically the stupidest method, Daien suppresses the stupid urge to celebrate guessing correctly.
The problem is that Ludi Sand is less actual character and more plot device. He’s a low-ranking scholar-official who is onscreen a few times to show how terrible of a boss the Cold Duke is. Then, he’s tortured to death offscreen when he refuses to betray his liege lord during her rebellion. The death needs to be brutal and utterly unjust enough to start the peasant rebellion, which weakens the other factions enough that the male lead can win the ensuing civil war and become emperor.
There’s one short scene where one of the minor love interests, a fellow scholar-official, talks about how Ludi a) placed first in the Imperial Examinations but had his ranking dropped for unfair reasons b) is kind and c) is loyal. That’s the extent of what the audience ever gets out of an extra who’s basically the Franz Ferdinand of this story.
One thousand and eighteen episodes of romantic intrigue, and the most beautiful creature she has ever seen in her miserable twenty-seven years of life exists for exactly one purpose: to die at the right moment for the sake of a plot point.