The Lament of Autumn Killed Its Hero, and Viewers Say That Settled His Account

This piece discusses the ending of The Lament of Autumn (玉簟秋). Mango TV members have had all 40 episodes since November 1; Hunan TV's nightly broadcast was still on episode 39 on November 3. Quotations from Chinese comments are our translations.

Just after midnight on November 2, Beijing time, the official Weibo account of The Lament of Autumn posted a letter. It was written in the voice of Ye Pingjun (叶平君) and dated "the twenty-second year of the Republic of China", which is 1933. It was addressed to her husband, Yu Changxuan (虞昶轩), who by then was dead. "Since parting with you," it begins, she has moved to the southwest with the family. She planted a sapling with their son, Xiaoyu (小鱼儿), and told him that when its leaves turned red, his father would come home.

The letter ran under a column the account calls "Past this village there is no such mat" (过了这村没这簟). The title puns on guole zhe cun mei zhe dian, a saying about a chance that will not come again, with the mat (dian, 簟) of the show's name in place of "inn". Nearly every post on the account since late October carries a column title built on the same pun, and on October 24 this column ran in what reads as Changxuan's own voice. The account sold the show in puns to the end. It also let the pun carry a widow's letter.

What happened

Changxuan dies in the final battle. One of the two hosts of the r/CDrama episode threads posted a timeline of the couple: he was 22 and she 18 when they met in 1919, and in 1933 he "sacrificed his life fighting for the country", aged 36. The same host wrote that a rumour on Chinese social media, in which Changxuan survives the war with a missing leg, turned out to be false. Viewers' summaries agree on the rest: the Yu army is wiped out, his parents die as well, and Pingjun survives with the family's women and their son. A few call the ending open: the finale shows him fall, and ends on Pingjun and their son planting a maple sapling for his return. A verified Weibo user, in a post with 781 likes, wrote that the last stand was modelled on the Battle of Gubeikou, a defence of the Great Wall against Japan, and pointed to the close-up of a breach in a wall. The production has not said so.

What follows is about how viewers took this. It rests on the 165 comments in our library, collected from October 12 to November 4, and on a few large Weibo, Douban and Reddit threads we read by hand. It shows what commenters said, not what all viewers thought.

What he had to be forgiven for

The show opened on a bargain: Pingjun, suspected in an assassination attempt, wagers the young marshal that she can find the culprit within ten days. The opening-day verdicts on Douban, China's main review site, were about what the bargain turned into. The most-voted short review, with about 1,300 votes, counted a scene in each of the first four episodes of the heroine humiliated while the hero watched from above. Another, from October 15, five stars and 418 votes, found his chase of her "too satisfying to watch". Both describe the same behaviour and read it with opposite signs.

On Reddit the question became whether he could change. A week in, a viewer with 14 upvotes wrote that Changxuan "has always toed the line", that "the thing with obsessive love is the other person is reduced to a possession to be had", and then: "With strong Cheng Lei goggles on, I look forward to a hopefully satisfying redemption arc." Another, with 10, found his care for her during her coma "so sweet if it weren't so deranged". On October 29 a viewer with 9 wrote that even before the war he was "hard to love because of his extreme entitlement and twisted idea of love".

The war was where repair was expected to begin. In the October 22 thread, after he returns from the front, a viewer with 6 upvotes wrote: "It seems war has really humanized him."

The death as settlement

Once he died, commenters in China and abroad described the death as the payment, in different words.

Under a Weibo post about the ending that drew 2,620 likes, the second most-liked reply, with 70 likes, said that only this ending lets the male lead's renshe (人设, the persona a character is built to carry) stand: he was such a scoundrel early on, and the ending's theme is "loftier", family and country. Under an actor's post that drew 24,551 comments, a reply with 1,315 likes said that after "eighty-one torments" of romance (a play on the eighty-one trials of Journey to the West), the family-and-country feeling later lifted the whole show. A reply with 2 likes, under another post, argued that because it is a BE (a bad ending, in fan shorthand), the show was "elevated", and that a happy ending would have had the whole internet complaining that it rewrote history.

On Reddit's finale thread the same idea came in English. A viewer with 8 upvotes: "the ending, albeit sad, is what was best for Changxuan's character redemption." Another, with 7: "a sad love story, with a happy ending", because he "died knowing Pingjun loves him" and she is living the quiet life she chose. The host read the death as honouring the soldiers who fought the invasion, and as the end of a warlord alongside the army he served: "the final chapter of that disappearing world".

The vocabulary differs. At home it is shenghua (升华, "sublimation", the word for being lifted to a higher plane) and jiaguo (家国, "family and country"). Abroad it is redemption and honour. In both, the early cruelty is a debt and a death in battle pays it.

The settlement was not only the hero's. In a Douban group thread titled "The ending is so elevated, the protagonists and the earlier villains all chose to resist Japan", the top reply, with 130 votes, praised a cast with "no absolute good or bad people". Others, with 44 and 42, said "personal joys and sorrows count for nothing before family and nation" and that "everyone was elevated". Another thread, on the finale's overseas reception, drew replies with 99 and 76 votes calling the foreign tears "cultural export".

The same group, known for picking at shows, was less united on whether the death answered the show's critics. One reply with 19 votes asked who would still hang labels on the show now that the whole Yu family had died loyal. Another, with 42, said the people who had accused it before the finale of glorifying a warlord were unhappy again after his death. We could not check the accusation. A reply with 36 votes preferred a death in battle to a living man with a lost leg, since a death spares the show the off-screen quarrelling.

The grief is for a husband

If the death is a settlement, the mourning does not behave like one. Under the post from Cheng Lei, the actor who plays Changxuan, dated November 1, the top reply, with 22,642 likes, said: "Forever missing our Yu Changxuan." The second, with 9,897, joked: "How many ads would I have to watch to bring my Fifth Young Master back?" The third, with 2,957: "I remember we were lovers, and then the war broke out..." Wushao (五少, "Fifth Young Master") is the title the official account itself uses for him.

On that same post, the reply about family and country is the one with 1,315 likes: large, and about one-seventeenth of the top one. Replies saluting the fallen are easy to find under other posts, but in the dozens. The loudest viewers lost a person, and the vocabulary of the war gives the loss somewhere to go. Some refused the place. Under a post with 2,620 likes: "I would rather believe he only fainted," 17 likes; "It's an open ending, he's alive and will come back for Pingjun," 15.

The letter, and the one who is left

The account's last column of letters is Pingjun's. Her second letter, in the Reddit host's translation, says she returned to Nanhuai in autumn and joined the rebuilding. "Of those who made the pact beneath the red maple leaves, I alone have come to keep our appointment." It adds that "the time we truly spent loving each other amounted to no more than a handful of years," and ends: "If there is another life, I hope we can meet again, as different people, at the right time." We have the letters from the account's posts and have not checked whether they appear in the episodes.

Pingjun is also where the show's critics concentrate. On October 22, a viewer with 23 upvotes on r/CDrama called her "a symbol, an allegory made flesh. She is Republican China," and said she has no interior life because that is not her role in the story. After the finale, a Douban long review from November 1 (9 helpful votes) said that the progressive schoolgirl who "ran through the streets shouting for resistance to Japan" was made to lose her memory so that she could love a warlord, and told readers to rewatch Awakening Age (觉醒年代), another Republican-era series, "to clear their heads". Under a Douban-group thread arguing that Pingjun never loved Changxuan much, a reply with 169 likes said that in the scene where their son misses his father after the death, "you can't feel any sadness from the heroine." These are complaints about the writing and the performance, from people who dislike the show. They point at the same figure the account's letters do: the person who is left.

What we do not know

We have not watched episodes 36 to 40 ourselves; they sit behind Mango membership, and the account above rests on summaries that agree with one another. Gubeikou is one viewer's reading. Most of the comments quoted are ones that rise to the top on platforms that sort by likes.

Within those limits, one pattern holds across both languages. The words used in October for the hero, "red flag" and "redemption arc", reappear in November as "elevation" and "best for his redemption". Whether a death in war should be asked to cover that debt, and what it leaves Ye Pingjun to carry, are questions the show's critics are already asking.