In Blossom - Tumblr Posts
Liu Xue Yi as Pan Yue In Blossom 花间令 (2024) – Ep. 21
My new obsession
Liu Xue Yi as Pan Yue In Blossom 花间令 (2024) – Ep. 19
In Blossom 花间令 (2024) Dir. Zhong Qing – Ep. 21
In Blossom 花间令 (2024) Dir. Zhong Qing – Ep. 23
Sarah jie jie, In Blossom rec or no?
this is a real tough question to answer hooooo boy where do i start??
i mean, for starters, the premise of the show is actually really fun, and i like it a lot so far!! let's talk a little about this:
(spoilers for the first 2 eps in its entirety which covers the background/setup of the story)
this is yang caiwei. her dad was a minister who was framed for one thing or another, demoted, and subsequently murdered. she was disfigured in the process, and ended up in the city of heyang where she grew up to be a corpse bearer training under a coroner.
yang caiwei has been betrothed since she was a little girl to:
pan yue. this boy is the son of a concubine so his relationship with his dad is very meh. when yang caiwei's family got into trouble, pan yue's dad quickly cut off all ties with them. this led to yang caiwei being turned away at the door p harshly when she came to pan yue for help. pan yue himself though has loved her since he was a boy, and has been looking for her for 10 years!!
ANYWAY these two find each other. he wants to marry her. ofc he does!! she's his 白月光, and he wants to love and protect her!! he's disowned his family so that he can do this, he is ALL IN BABY. he's only found her again for all of 10 minutes and he's already planning their wedding in his head lbr.
she is calm and composed and v sensible because of the way she had to grow up. this whole thing seems too good to be true, and also she might be harbouring some ~feelings over the way he just cut her out of his life when she needed him the most. the yang caiwei she is now just wants to live her life as normal.
the chemistry is 😘 at this point, and i am so invested in their relationship. at this stage, i was still thinking she was the second female lead and was like. huh. this is going to be one of those shows where i'd ship these two more than the official couple i guess??
anyway enter:
shangguan zhi. sister of pan yue's best friend, who is obsessed with pan yue, putting it mildly. she also has this ~thing about her own physical appearance - essentially, she thinks she needs to look and act perfect to be worthy of pan yue's love. this involves a lot of witch doctors and v unhealthy dieting and scrolls on how to smile the perfect way and walk the perfect way. y'all get the gist.
shangguan zhi hears that pan yue is getting married (to someone ugly at that!!!) and loses her shit. she decides the way around this so she can be with her yue-gege forever is-
(you guessed it!!)
-body-swapping with yang caiwei, and pushing yang caiwei (and also the shaman who actually helped her with the swap) off a cliff so that nobody ever finds out.
to her credit, it actually works!! she swaps bodies with yang caiwei, and marries pan yue.
what she didn't account for was being murdered on her wedding day.
ANYWAY. the actual yang caiwei, now in shangguan zhi's body (😭), survives the fall from the cliff, rushes to the wedding with the intent on stopping the wedding and getting her goddamn body back, and reaches just in time to kinda sorta witness shangguan zhi's murder.
cue her thinking that it was pan yue who killed shangguan zhi (she knew the whole wedding thing was too good to be true) and pan yue thinking that shangguan zhi had something to do with yang caiwei's death (after all, she was obsessed with him and had a whole fit over him wanting to marry someone else).
everything about this premise was *chef's kiss*. give me a bucket of popcorn and some comfy pillows, i can watch this all day.
EXCEPT.
except my dudes shangguan zhi (and subsequently yang caiwei-in-shangguan-zhi's body, let's call her shangguan caiwei for now) is played by ju jingyi. 😞 zhhz played yang caiwei TOO WELL my friends, so that when jjy took over, shangguan caiwei felt like a whole different character. it's a bit difficult to reconcile yang caiwei and shangguan caiwei tbh, which made watching the third ep onwards a bit jarring, especially after zhhz set the character up so well.
it's not like......fatal to the show. i mean. i went in expecting nothing from jjy (rightfully i think 😑) and i wouldn't say i am disappointed by it just because i was prepared to be ehhhh about her going in. i'm still watching the show mainly because i like the plot and also, and this is a big factor that i truly cannot stress enough:
liu xueyi looks so good in this show hoooooo boy
look at this!!! is this a face i would suffer 30+ episodes of jjy for??? apparently it is!!
tl;dr: love lxy + like the plot + dislike jjy = still watching and will likely finish the show. is it a rec?? conservatively, i'd say soft yes??? i mean. a huge part of me watching this show is because i'm entertained by the shenanigans, 😍 over lxy, and daydreaming about an alternate universe of the show where we have zhhz instead of jjy as the female lead. it's not something to watch seriously though!!
In Blossom (2024): First Impressions
This is my first Liu Xueyi drama and my body was not prepared. Hot damn. Also, is that his real voice? Because 🫠
Moving on...I'm really digging the cinematography and music.
It's giving gothic romance without being too dark.
In Blossom might finally be the first Cdrama of 2024 that has me hooked.
And the fact I get to see this face for the next 30 hours? I will be seated.
the male lead showing up like 90 minutes late to a painting contest just to artblock his brother in front of the princess he's trying to get with, then getting called out on it:
I give our FL mad props for being able to concentrate on the scar when confronted with that torso.
AHEM.
Pan Yue (from In Blossom)
an archetypical gothic romance male love interest:
✅ Dark, broody, and dangerous
Switches seamlessly between being seductive and being menacing, between flirting and threatening
✅ Rich and isolated
He comes from a wealthy family but is the son of a concubine and has been recently disinherited by his father
✅ Mysterious and misunderstood
His wife died under mysterious circumstances. Word on the street is that he murdered her 🔪 (he didn’t)
Hides his dead wife’s body in a secret location and preserves the corpse in ice 🧊
Involved in vaguely nefarious politicking in high places
✅ Tragic, tormented and driven to madness
He spends ten years searching for the woman he loves only to find her and lose her over the course of a month
Grey streaks appear in his ink black hair overnight after his wife dies
He believes he indirectly killed her by coming into her life and wallows in his grief and guilt
He sees glimpses of his dead wife in another woman’s face and thinks he is going mad
Image from weibo
In Blossom visual analysis (ep. 1-7): How to film a gothic romance
Although I'm not completely convinced about some of the writing choices of In Blossom, I absolutely LOVE the show's production design and cinematography. @mademoiselle-red wrote a great post about how main character Pan Yue fits the gothic romantic lead archetype, and those gothic elements are not only present in the script but also in the show's visual storytelling.
Lighting
A key element of gothic romance is its atmosphere of mystery and suspense.
Something I really like about In Blossom is that despite its dark subject matter, many of its scenes take place during the day. One of the show's main themes is that appearances can be misleading and the cinematography often plays with that notion by linking light to deception and darkness to truth. Note how many of the emotionally honest beats of Yang Caiwei and Pan Yue's relationship happen at night (e.g., their couple escapades at the Li Residence, Ghost Market, and Life and Death gambling house) while fakery, corruption, and evildoing happen in the day. It's with this subversion of our expectations for light that the show creates an unsettling atmosphere.
And these lighting choices also help set up Pan Yue as a classic gothic romance anti-hero, someone the female lead, Yang Caiwei, fears but still finds herself drawn to.
Look at how Pan Yue is lit when shot through Yang Caiwei's subjective point of view. The strong use of light creates a lot of contrast--through her eyes, he is a mixture of light and dark, his morality as inscrutable as his shadowy figure.
Camera Angles and Shot Sizes
The show's use of low angles and close-ups further reinforces the idea that Pan Yue is unpredictable and even dangerous.
In cinematography, low-angle shots tend to make the subject look more powerful and menacing, and the show uses this technique to great effect.
Even in the intimacy of close-up shots, we can sense the threat emanating from Pan Yue. He’s always shot just a smidgeon too close for comfort.
For example, look at how much Liu Xueyi's face fills the frame in an early "romantic" scene. The shot feels almost claustrophobic as if he's so single-minded about his goals that he has no choice but to dominate the frame (and Yang Caiwei). It's an unnerving moment despite the soft words coming out of his mouth.
Side Note: I live for Pan Yue's (vampiric) long shots. The production design team was smart for dressing the character in dark clothes with such a sleek cut and drape--he looks like a sexy bat.
The Nosferatu references in Yang Caiwei's tomb are also perfect.
Composition and Framing
And finally, like any good gothic romance, In Blossom illustrates how love can drive one to despair and even madness.
Because of this, my FAVORITE scene of the show has to be the introduction of Shangguan Zhi. Her obsessive pursuit of beauty in hopes of seducing Pan Yue has left her a shell of a human being, and the scene's composition perfectly encapsulates this with how it focuses on the elegant lines of her body--not her face or personhood.
Shangguan Zhi is trapped by her delusional fantasy of a life with Pan Yue--see how she's boxed in by the vertical lines of the screen panel she admires--and the show regularly uses architectural lines to show how her desperation has trapped Yang Caiwei as well.
The historical inspiration behind In Blossom’s Pan Yue
From Wikipedia (english version):
Pan Yue (Chinese: 潘岳; 247–300), courtesy name "Anren" (安仁), was a prominent Chinese fu poet in the Western Jin dynasty. He is popularly referred to as Pan An (潘安) and was well known for his good looks from a young age. "Pan An" has become the Chinese byword for handsome men.
The drama chose Liu Xueyi, known for his beauty in costume dramas, to play Pan Yue:
From Wikipedia (Chinese version):
三十余岁担任河阳县令，下令全县种桃花，有“河阳一县花”之称。
When he around 30 years old, he became the magistrate of Heyang County, ordered the whole county to plant peach blossoms, and was known as "the flower of Heyang County".
In the drama, Pan Yue buries his wife in a patch of peach blossoms near Heyang:
潘岳是中国历史上有名的美男子，据《世说新语》所载，潘岳每次外出，都会有不少女子手牵手地围着他的车子，又向他的车子投掷水果。成语“掷果盈车”即来自于此典故。
Pan Yue is considered one of the most famous handsome men in Chinese history. According to Shishuo Xinyu (A New Account of the Tales of the World, a 4th century anthology of biographical stories about scholars, musicians, and artists of the 2nd-4th centuries): every time Pan Yue went out, women would surround his carriage and throw fruits at him.
Here is how the drama recreated this famous episode:
妻：杨氏，元康八年（公元298年）去世。潘岳对亡妻甚是怀思，著有《内顾诗二首》、《杨氏七哀诗》、《哀永逝文》、《悼亡诗》等。
Wife: Madam Yang, died in the year 298 AD. To express his grief, Pan Yue wrote [a series of famous mourning poems that I am too lazy to translate].
Here is our fictional Pan Yue reciting an excerpt from one of the mourning poems historical Pan Yue wrote for Madam Yang:
Clearly they knew the drama was ending and this was their last chance to not let all the stage blood they bought to go to waste. MMMM
depth and layers, fundamental ❤️🩹