Yeah, geeky. And yes, you might still say you hate it, but I'm only asking for people to understand, not agree, and I'm not particularly here to "fight" anyone on if they hated it or not. More like, maybe this will change the fabric of how you watch Chinese dramas.
So I'm going to establish some ground work. If you know it, fine. If you don't then maybe it'll help. And I know there is that one person out there trying to find ways to be offended by this... so umm... it's for educatainment. Chill. Knowing more won't kill anyone. (And I'm sure there is someone trying to find way to be offended by the previous statement... *sighs* Really?)
So, this story employed a few story structures along the way. And geekily I'm going to say the thematic development in this drama was better than most dramas with an excellent script that started out slow, but warmed up as no part of it overwhelmed the rest, but it's was like a roleplaying level up.
The first most obvious story structure employed was qǐchéngzhuǎnhé. 起承轉合
Someone will say something like you copied it off of Wikipedia, but I literally wrote that section of Wikipedia.
- 起qǐ: start or introduction, usually meaning the reason a thing begins
- 承chéng: meant handling, process, or hardships
- 轉zhuǎn: turn, turning point
- 合hé: result.
The result is not. Conclusion. Conclusion is an end, result is more like, A+B+C+D=this thing.
Conclusion is more like a QED.
So he, is supposed to be short.
It's said to be invented in the Song Dynasty, and speculated to start with Li Bai, but was 4 different poetry forms that eventually got combined, and then it was later used for academic discourse.
Qi was described as straight, cheng was likened to a mortar, zhuan was described change, and he is likened to a deep pond or overflowing river which helps one reflect on the meaning.
For those familiar, it differs from Kishotenketsu as a professor put it, Qichengzhuanhe tends to reflect more Chinese history and the idea of Mandate of Heaven (for those familiar with that concept). So things are good, things get corrupt, you need to overthrow the government, get new government.
The center of this story structure is DISCOVERY and REALIZATION (Story driver, if you will), not conflict.
The Second Part is Xiqu which was used in old plays. (It finally got an article on Wikipedia I had no hand in after I wrote about its existence)
It's roughly explained as a string of pearls. This means one plot, moving to another plot, etc. It was visualized literally as pearls in the story. The analogous version I would think of it as is something like epic story structure if you ignore Joseph Campbell being an imperialist. So a bunch of stories strung together to create an overall arc. They literally did this for an episode.
Since it's a part of traditional Chinese theater which is subdivided into Peking Opera and the other one which I forgot the name of off the top of my head... this is kinda common in particularly longer stories, and qichengzhuanhe is often used to form the overarching arc.
The Third part, which becomes more apparent later is Dream Record (Not to be confused with Dream Diary from Japan, which dates slightly earlier, BTW)
Dream Record's story driver is regrets one has that were not able to be resolved. I suppose one could think of it as spiritual. This story structure dates from the end of the Ming Dynasty as a way to reflect why Ming was collapsing, etc. It often starts with a "Death" or a Dream where the person has regrets. The last episode shows what those regrets exactly are. and in the modern twist, what he learned he could have done better.
So applying this to the story is spoilers... but I kinda hope this helped to figure out the ending. I know those raised in the US are used to more "explicit" endings and story telling which I could explain to you exactly why US storytelling became, to my eyes in my opinion like beating a dead horse. Haha. I was actually told that if I demonstrate a emotion say crying from someone's relative dying, I must spell out how they feel as "sad" from US writers *in addition* to spending 3 pages showing how the character feels. Like what? Have we gone that far down the rabbit hole of must explain everything US people?
But since the story is tracking discovery over the entire run, it does not need a conclusion. If you were tracking the conflict only, it might help to go back and track the character discoveries and how they were won and lost and then the ending will make more sense. Since this post is long, I'll end it here. The height of the story is mostly on discovery and realizations. Once you get that, I swear the ending makes more sense.
