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Tonight we finished watching the first season (second not yet filmed) of Joy of Life, a transmigration cdrama about a bright young man who dies of a long terminal illness and awakens as a bright young baby, with all his past-life memories, in a pseudohistorical Chinese empire.
Having spent much of his previous life in chronic pain, our hero Fan Xian determines very early on that he does not wish to endanger his second chance by chasing ambition or power, and would simply like to pursue enough wealth to enjoy an easy, comfortable, stress-free life. Strategies for achieving this include:
- plagiarizing literary classics such as Dream of the Red Chamber from memory, introducing them to a brand new alternate universe pseudohistorical public, and achieving fame and fortune thereby
- introducing future technology inventions such as 'glass,' 'bar soap,' and 'refined sugar' to a brand new alternate universe pseudohistorical public, and achieving fame and fortune thereby
- pursuing a happy future with his crush, a young lady he saw stealing chicken drumsticks at a temple on his first arrival in the Big City and fell head-over-heels in love with on sight
Unfortunately for Fan Xian, his absent mother -- mysteriously dead or disappeared in his infancy -- already introduced glass, bar soap, and refined sugar as luxury items and achieved fame and fortune thereby, so that's a nonstarter. Additionally, in her spare time before producing (illegitimate) Fan Xian, she also founded a merchant empire at the service of the Crown and a powerful secret police service! As a result of his mother's fame and brilliance, various powerful men -- including his father, the Minister of Revenue; the head of the aforementioned secret police service; and the Emperor -- now have Great Plans for Fan Xian and his future, and various other people disagree with those Great Plans and have schemes to arrange for Fan Xian's downfall or murder, and also there's an arranged marriage which Fan Xian would like to make very clear he is not interested in when there's a Mysterious Chicken Drumstick Girl to pursue (three guesses who Mysterious Chicken Drumstick Girl might be --)
The literary plagiarism part of the plan goes more or less consistently well, though! Dream of the Red Chamber is a big hit!
Technically, reincarnation and transmigration are (to my understanding) censored topics in live-action Chinese television. Joy of Life gets around this, originally, with a hilariously flimsy frame story in which a grad student explains that he's excited to submit his new script to Tencent. It then takes further steps. In episode 28 (of 46), Fan Xian finally comes into possession of a box left by his mysterious mother, whom he's been assuming was a fellow transmigrator. In addition to Chekhov's machine gun (which singularly fails to go off in season one), the box contains a letter in which his mother explains that there is no such thing as transmigration and no such thing as alternate universes! In fact, feudal-Imperial society has formed again in the post-apocalyptic future; she herself escaped from a cryogenic pod; and Fan Xian is the result of an experiment in digitization of memory! If Fan Xian would like to know more about the apocalypse, the end of the previous human civilization, the cryogenic pods, etc., the letter contains detailed directions as to where to find the sci-fi plot, but assures him that he's also perfectly free to continue on having adventures in feudal-Imperial politics instead if he would prefer.
....as, indeed, for the rest of the show, he does! At one point a secondary character does briefly go to find the sci-fi plot, comes back, and politely informs Fan Xian that it was very confusing and Fan Xian would probably understand it better if he ever chose to go. Maybe in season two.
I am told that Joy of Life in its original incarnation is a harem novel. This has been altered for the show; there are a lot of interesting women in the cast who show faint lingering traces of their novel incarnations as alternate love interests, but live-action Fan Xian is firmly attached to his chicken drumstick girl only. (My favorite is the romance that thus transforms into a fake-dating-while-firmly-platonic-friends plot with a rival martial artist.)
Instead, all the harem energy has been displaced onto Fan Xian's thriving harem of paternal figures. By my count, by the end of the drama, he had seven dads plus an ageless amnesiac uncle, all of them allying, scheming, and competing against each other in various configurations. (Except for the ageless amnesiac uncle, who does nothing but lurk in the bushes and occasionally spring forth to murder one of Fan Xian's enemies.) The second-funniest convoluted plot point in the show is when a two-dad coalition explains to a third dad that they have spent the past thirty years gaslighting a fourth dad into believing himself a biological grandfather, but they can't tell let the fifth dad in on the secret or he'll flip his lid --
Anyway, aside from the wild plot twists mentioned above, some things I like about this show:
- good balance of jokes, schemes, and drama
- leans into the transmigration premise without needing to hang its entire plot on it; many of the subplots would change very little if the show was just a straight historical drama, but Fan Xian consistently feels like someone who is bringing a different cultural viewpoint to events, in a way that is often played for humor but also for depth; I really liked the moments where the show pauses to show the loneliness of moving through a world where no one has the same referents
- relatedly, Fan Xian As Modern Character places a high value on human life and a low value on expansionist warfare in a way that's fairly refreshing coming from other wuxia in which our heroes are likely to slaughter redshirts by the dozens
- and the show as a whole is very good about showing every character as a complex human being who exists within a web of connections; Fan Xian prefers to turn his enemies into allies if he can (I'm really charmed by his cute family dynamic with the stepmother and half-brother who initially loathe his very existence) and when people do die, whether heroes or villains, it resonates and has impacts on people that we care about
- finally, something that I'm not really qualified to talk about but thought was interesting: the show depicts a surprising variety of disability -- Chicken Drumstick Girl is chronically ill, one of her brothers is developmentally disabled, and the head of the secret police uses a wheelchair -- and to my inexpert eye handles this much better than I would have expected; occasionally subplots will revolve around medical treatments, but we're just as likely to see things like the head of the secret police casually doing his physical therapy during a scheming session, and although it's not explicit, it's easy to read Fan Xian's own past-life history of chronic illness in the way he interacts with his love interest and her family
And some things I dislike:
- the harem novel origins is especially easy to see in the fact that although there are lots of women they very rarely have plots with each other or indeed that do not center on Fan Xian (Chicken Drumstick Girl does have a best friend but she disappears after the midpoint of the show)
- sometimes tricky to keep track of some of the more arcane bits of plotting
- cliffhanger ending! >:(
Having spent much of his previous life in chronic pain, our hero Fan Xian determines very early on that he does not wish to endanger his second chance by chasing ambition or power, and would simply like to pursue enough wealth to enjoy an easy, comfortable, stress-free life. Strategies for achieving this include:
- plagiarizing literary classics such as Dream of the Red Chamber from memory, introducing them to a brand new alternate universe pseudohistorical public, and achieving fame and fortune thereby
- introducing future technology inventions such as 'glass,' 'bar soap,' and 'refined sugar' to a brand new alternate universe pseudohistorical public, and achieving fame and fortune thereby
- pursuing a happy future with his crush, a young lady he saw stealing chicken drumsticks at a temple on his first arrival in the Big City and fell head-over-heels in love with on sight
Unfortunately for Fan Xian, his absent mother -- mysteriously dead or disappeared in his infancy -- already introduced glass, bar soap, and refined sugar as luxury items and achieved fame and fortune thereby, so that's a nonstarter. Additionally, in her spare time before producing (illegitimate) Fan Xian, she also founded a merchant empire at the service of the Crown and a powerful secret police service! As a result of his mother's fame and brilliance, various powerful men -- including his father, the Minister of Revenue; the head of the aforementioned secret police service; and the Emperor -- now have Great Plans for Fan Xian and his future, and various other people disagree with those Great Plans and have schemes to arrange for Fan Xian's downfall or murder, and also there's an arranged marriage which Fan Xian would like to make very clear he is not interested in when there's a Mysterious Chicken Drumstick Girl to pursue (three guesses who Mysterious Chicken Drumstick Girl might be --)
The literary plagiarism part of the plan goes more or less consistently well, though! Dream of the Red Chamber is a big hit!
Technically, reincarnation and transmigration are (to my understanding) censored topics in live-action Chinese television. Joy of Life gets around this, originally, with a hilariously flimsy frame story in which a grad student explains that he's excited to submit his new script to Tencent. It then takes further steps. In episode 28 (of 46), Fan Xian finally comes into possession of a box left by his mysterious mother, whom he's been assuming was a fellow transmigrator. In addition to Chekhov's machine gun (which singularly fails to go off in season one), the box contains a letter in which his mother explains that there is no such thing as transmigration and no such thing as alternate universes! In fact, feudal-Imperial society has formed again in the post-apocalyptic future; she herself escaped from a cryogenic pod; and Fan Xian is the result of an experiment in digitization of memory! If Fan Xian would like to know more about the apocalypse, the end of the previous human civilization, the cryogenic pods, etc., the letter contains detailed directions as to where to find the sci-fi plot, but assures him that he's also perfectly free to continue on having adventures in feudal-Imperial politics instead if he would prefer.
....as, indeed, for the rest of the show, he does! At one point a secondary character does briefly go to find the sci-fi plot, comes back, and politely informs Fan Xian that it was very confusing and Fan Xian would probably understand it better if he ever chose to go. Maybe in season two.
I am told that Joy of Life in its original incarnation is a harem novel. This has been altered for the show; there are a lot of interesting women in the cast who show faint lingering traces of their novel incarnations as alternate love interests, but live-action Fan Xian is firmly attached to his chicken drumstick girl only. (My favorite is the romance that thus transforms into a fake-dating-while-firmly-platonic-friends plot with a rival martial artist.)
Instead, all the harem energy has been displaced onto Fan Xian's thriving harem of paternal figures. By my count, by the end of the drama, he had seven dads plus an ageless amnesiac uncle, all of them allying, scheming, and competing against each other in various configurations. (Except for the ageless amnesiac uncle, who does nothing but lurk in the bushes and occasionally spring forth to murder one of Fan Xian's enemies.) The second-funniest convoluted plot point in the show is when a two-dad coalition explains to a third dad that they have spent the past thirty years gaslighting a fourth dad into believing himself a biological grandfather, but they can't tell let the fifth dad in on the secret or he'll flip his lid --
Anyway, aside from the wild plot twists mentioned above, some things I like about this show:
- good balance of jokes, schemes, and drama
- leans into the transmigration premise without needing to hang its entire plot on it; many of the subplots would change very little if the show was just a straight historical drama, but Fan Xian consistently feels like someone who is bringing a different cultural viewpoint to events, in a way that is often played for humor but also for depth; I really liked the moments where the show pauses to show the loneliness of moving through a world where no one has the same referents
- relatedly, Fan Xian As Modern Character places a high value on human life and a low value on expansionist warfare in a way that's fairly refreshing coming from other wuxia in which our heroes are likely to slaughter redshirts by the dozens
- and the show as a whole is very good about showing every character as a complex human being who exists within a web of connections; Fan Xian prefers to turn his enemies into allies if he can (I'm really charmed by his cute family dynamic with the stepmother and half-brother who initially loathe his very existence) and when people do die, whether heroes or villains, it resonates and has impacts on people that we care about
- finally, something that I'm not really qualified to talk about but thought was interesting: the show depicts a surprising variety of disability -- Chicken Drumstick Girl is chronically ill, one of her brothers is developmentally disabled, and the head of the secret police uses a wheelchair -- and to my inexpert eye handles this much better than I would have expected; occasionally subplots will revolve around medical treatments, but we're just as likely to see things like the head of the secret police casually doing his physical therapy during a scheming session, and although it's not explicit, it's easy to read Fan Xian's own past-life history of chronic illness in the way he interacts with his love interest and her family
And some things I dislike:
- the harem novel origins is especially easy to see in the fact that although there are lots of women they very rarely have plots with each other or indeed that do not center on Fan Xian (Chicken Drumstick Girl does have a best friend but she disappears after the midpoint of the show)
- sometimes tricky to keep track of some of the more arcane bits of plotting
- cliffhanger ending! >:(
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but also, hi yes this was exactly the question that made me start reading the novel, I got to that reveal in the show and was mad about how it was just casually dropped in and then ignored because WOW that's a gamechanger but the show doesn't seem to care? or frame it as that?
uh anyway The Box! is in the novel, and it's locked with a computer and a password derived from a specific modern-day way of writing mandarin characters (that Fan Xian recognises and is kind of ??? about how his mom knew), and there is explicitly a modern-day rifle inside (and a letter to Wu Zhu, of course). there is also a note to Fan Xian that basically says "I know you're my kid reading this because Wu Zhu would've destroyed this box by now like I told him he should in the letter for him. Did you want to know more? You can't take it back if you do want to know more. It's going to change your life." and then Fan Xian closes the box and walks away and we don't get to learn what his mom's secret/hidden message to him is at that time!
so uh PROBABLY it's in there but I haven't gotten to it yet!
but also the novel is explicitly transmigration and all, so it might not be quite as much ridiculous sci-fi. who knows. I can't figure out how here would be Exactly One Mysterious Rifle if there isn't some kind of sci-fi/post-apoc shenanigan going on, though!
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