The Vanishing Beauty: Wife and Mistress on the Same Side

The Vanishing Beauty (Meiren Yu, 美人余) keeps putting the women around Di Liren (Qiao Zhenyu) on the same side, and Chinese viewers cannot agree on what that means.

What the show does

Yu Meng (Li Yitong), a wealthy only daughter, learns her husband is cheating. Instead of the expected showdown with the other woman, Wen Xiaoxiao (Yi Mengling), the story pulls the two closer: Bilibili's most-watched recap video sums up the opening as "teaming up with the mistress to catch a second mistress." Later, around Episodes 17–20, Yu Meng discovers that Lu Hui (Wang Jiajia), Di's first wife, had helped him harm her father. The two slap each other, then sit down to negotiate, and end up allies.

Two readings

Critics of the arc are blunt. The top comment under one Bilibili review video, with 100 likes, asks: "Isn't the mistress just as disgusting as the cheating man? Why insist on making her a best friend?" Another comment calls it "glorifying the mistress."

Supporters are quieter and more scattered. Some on-screen comments simply read "girls help girls." A Douban review titled "She Didn't Fight the Mistress, She Settled the Accounts" praises the show for treating the collapse of a marriage as "a cool-headed liquidation of assets."

What the fight is about

The two sides weigh different things. One cares about position: a wife and a mistress are not interchangeable just because they share an enemy. The other cares about accounts: put the blame, and the effort, where the harm came from. A third camp of critics sidesteps the question, arguing that "revenge on a cheating husband" should not be the only story available to women at all.

Source: The Vanishing Beauty official Weibo account (Oct. 16–17); Bilibili videos and comments (Oct. 11–18); Douban reviews (Oct. 9–21).