Tears on Command: How Against the Current and Royal Nirvana Stage Tragedy
Against the Current puts staying alive ahead of revenge, yet its opening massacre tells viewers exactly when to cry. Royal Nirvana, often accused of cruelty, builds its pain from structure instead.
Spoiler note: this piece discusses the first episode of Against the Current, including the deaths of the Shen household's women, and the overall arc of Royal Nirvana.
Against the Current (兰香如故, Lanxiang Rugu), a period drama on Tencent Video, has just finished its run, and most of the conversation is about the ending. This piece goes back to the opening instead, because that is where something felt off. Chinese viewers have a slang word for melodrama piled on past the point of taste: sa gouxue (撒狗血, "splashing dog blood"). What separates it from tragedy that is actually beautiful?
A revenge story that isn't
Shen Jialan is the eldest granddaughter of a grand secretary's household. On the threshold of adulthood she receives a letter breaking off her engagement from the Lin family. Her grandfather is convicted, the Shens are wiped out, and the women of the house are to be sent to the jiaofangsi (教坊司, the court's entertainment bureau). She survives because Xu Wanquan and his wife, who were once helped by the Shens, swap her for their own daughter, Xu Lanxiang, who has just died of illness. She wakes on a boat wanting to follow her family into death. Xu hands her a slip of yellow paper: her mother bit her finger and wrote a single character on it, huo (活, "live").
Six years later, under the dead girl's name, she is picked by the Lin household as its lowest-ranked maid.
Everything about this setup says revenge is coming: the heiress who lost everything, hiding under a false name in the house of her enemies, with scheming, counterstrikes and a reversed verdict still ahead. The show does not go there. Director Huang Yingxiang has said the team kept stressing the idea of putting survival ahead of struggle. A review in Beijing Youth Daily describes a heroine who follows her adoptive mother's instruction to stay out of the contest and simply hide her edge; once inside the Lin house she plans to buy her way out of servitude.
That does not mean she has given up on vengeance. She is meant, in the end, to clear the Shen name. But revenge is not what drives this drama. Staying alive is.
It is a distinctive choice. In period drama, "family destroyed, so vengeance" has become an automatic formula. Ink Rain in the Clouds (墨雨云间, Moyu Yunjian) uses its first episode to push the audience's anger to the maximum and then releases it bit by bit.
Against the Current instead stops and lets one person worry about how to eat, how to avoid a beating, how to keep her adoptive parents safe. Viewers took to it; a Douban (豆瓣, China's main review site) commenter joked that it could be retitled Huozhe (活着, "To Live").
Two familiar roads
The path itself is not new. In The Story of Ming Lan (知否知否应是绿肥红瘦, Zhi Fou Zhi Fou Ying Shi Lü Fei Hong Shou), a household-intrigue drama, the heroine's mother, the concubine Wei, dies in childbirth in episode three, and the last thing she leaves her daughter is the message that staying alive comes first. Ming Lan then keeps her talents hidden, stays out of the spotlight, and inches her way forward inside the Sheng family.
A piece on the news site The Paper (澎湃) this September traced the genre's evolution over fifteen years or so. It argues that Ming Lan turned zhaidou (宅斗, "household fighting") into a philosophy of survival within family ethics, and that Against the Current goes in the direction opposite to shuangwen (爽文, "satisfaction fiction", where the hero wins one thrilling victory after another).
The two openings come down to nearly the same sentence: a dying mother hands her child the word "live."
The other comparison is Legend of Zang Hai (藏海传, Zang Hai Zhuan), another recent costume drama. The Kuai family is wiped out; the small boy Zhinu (稚奴) hides in a passage he built himself, is carried off by a masked man, and wakes to kneel and swear he will kill the people responsible. Then come ten years of waiting. It shares the skeleton of Against the Current, a destroyed household and a child who slips through, but points the other way: Zhinu lives in order to avenge, while Jialan is urged to live for the sake of living. The show eventually recasts the avenger as a protector, and it lets its hero reach adulthood only in the second episode, spending two episodes laying down his character first.
The trouble is how the first tragedy is filmed
In the first episode of Against the Current, the women of the Shen household choose to die together to protect their honor, and the first to go is a child.
Milan Kundera, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, defined kitsch (媚俗, meisu, now popularly called keqi, 刻奇) through two tears. The first tear is for something real you see: children running on a lawn, how lovely. The second is for yourself: how lovely to be moved by children on a lawn, together with all mankind. Only the second tear, he says, makes kitsch.
This scene is preparing that second tear.
Look at the order of events. The viewer knows nothing about the Shens yet: what the family is like, why the grandfather would rather die than bow, how the women relate to one another. No attachment has been built, and the cruelty has already arrived. One viewer put it bluntly, saying the writers were "eager to manufacture tears." The score swells, slow motion joins it, and together they tell you that you should now be moved, solemn, tearful, respectful. A Douban review makes the same complaint, saying the production uses music to dress the moment up as tragic grandeur.
That is the structure of the second tear: emotion shows up before the reason for it. You are not moved; you are informed that you ought to be.
Then there is where the camera stands. Zhang Libu, writing on The Paper, put it this way: creators are free to film feudal ritual, but the question is which side the camera takes. Here, death is placed in a position of solemnity and leaves almost no room for doubt. The audience is invited to admire rather than to ask why these people believe this is the only way out. Since mid-September Douban has been arguing over whether the scene shows integrity or feudal rot, and that it still divides viewers suggests the scene never made its own position clear. It simply pushed the emotion as high as it could go.
More important, the scene works against what the show wants to say. The heart of the drama is "live": how a person gets through the mud. Yet the first price paid is a row of women nobody had time to know, and a child. A Douban reviewer wrote that the creators clearly mean to convey how heavy living is, yet human life looks so cheap when it comes to the supporting cast. That sentence lands. Buying a theme about the preciousness of life with cheap deaths does not balance the books.
So the scene is not too brutal. It is too convenient. The weight of a tragedy should be built, bit by bit, out of characters, relationships and cause and effect, not delivered as a tear-jerking set meal prepared in advance.
Luckily the show has Xue Guihua (薛桂花), played by Guo Keyu (郭柯宇), the mother of the daughter who has just died. She is no plot device. The girl who died was her own flesh and blood, raised by her own hands, and she cannot let go. Xue Guihua saves the first episode.
Royal Nirvana: pain with a source
All this made us want to rewatch Royal Nirvana (鹤唳华亭, Heli Huating), the 2019 Youku drama. Its title is itself a metaphor: "the cry of cranes at Huating" is the sigh Lu Ji (陆机) is said to have given as he faced execution.
The first episode begins with the crown prince Xiao Dingquan (萧定权), played by Luo Jin (罗晋), awaiting his capping ceremony (guanli, 冠礼). The ceremony marks a man's coming of age and his right to take part in government, and the emperor keeps putting it off. That single affair produces nearly ten reversals in the series. The prince wins every round, and every win leaves him with a little less around him. Through those repeated victories, the viewer slowly understands that the final defeat is fixed.
The dialogue does the same job. The emperor, Xiao Ruijian (萧睿鉴), played by Huang Zhizhong (黄志忠), tells his son that to him he is first a son, while the crown prince is first a subject. One sentence locks father and son together with ruler and minister.
The heroine Lu Wenxi (陆文昔), played by Li Yitong (李一桐), announces herself with a line that stays in the mind: cranes are, in truth, birds of prey. From the first episode the bird carries a sense of foreboding. It looks elegant, and it can wound.
The scene we love most is the book-airing (shaishu, 晒书), in which the leads meet without meeting. They talk across a screen, unable to see each other's faces, while the wind turns the pages of the spread-out books one by one. It is extraordinarily beautiful, and everything cruel that follows rests on that beauty. Because the beautiful thing existed, losing it carries weight. And whether it existed depends on whether the show has built a real emotional bond with the viewer.
Still, the drama has long been criticized as weiernue (为虐而虐, "torment for torment's sake"). Some viewers say the reversals come so thick that they are exhausting, and the suffering is too dense along the way.
In short, torment needs a source. Each hurt connects to something planted earlier. You are hurt because you have understood this person's position, not because someone is reaching out a hand for your tears. Beauty here is not decoration; it is the road along which the pain reaches you. Torment of that kind is satisfying: when the hurting is done, you want to watch it again.
What lies in between
Back to the question. What separates splashing dog blood from the beauty of tragedy is whether the pain was arranged in advance or grew by itself.
Some pain is decided for you by the director. Other pain you cannot avoid, and even find yourself reaching out to meet. The first relies on music, children, slow motion and extreme plot; the second relies on structure, metaphor in the dialogue, association and image. The point of torment, in the end, is still satisfaction.
The "live well" at the heart of Against the Current is moving. But its opening scene is in too much of a hurry to make people cry, and it uses the "reality" of a pre-modern world to prod modern viewers in the eyes. The effect is not so much satisfying as uncomfortable.
Want to talk about this? Join the conversation on our Discord →
Get the newsletter
New drama guides, news and reviews in your inbox. No spam, unsubscribe any time.
Or subscribe by RSS: feed.xml