Copy and pasted Regina de Sa's interesting post here:
I saw a lot of comments here (MDL) about Wanning.They all seemed radical to me, with a clear division of feelings, like "I hate her" or "I feel pity for her". Many members expressed a conflict of feelings. In fact, Wanning is a very ambiguous character capable of awakening such antagonistic feelings/opinions, she deserves a study within the scope of psychoanalysis. Li Meng's performance is impeccable. She managed to convey all the challenging complexity of the character.
There are important questions to judge Wanning's character/personality. It is very clear from the beginning that she is not ‘just’ a cruel person. Her actions go beyond the standards of a so-called normal person, within standards outside of pathologies. She borders on psychopathy, but she is not a psychopath. The psychopath doesn't love. Wanning loves, loves obsessively (we shouldn't even call it "love"), has no limits in achieving her objectives, is devoid of values, lives in her own world with her own criteria and 'laws', exactly like a demented person. She even shows "love" for Shen Yu Rong's son who she supposedly thought she was expecting. But look at this detail: she loves her supposed son because he would be Shen Yu Rong's, there is no maternal character in her, just the obsession with everything that comes from Shen Yu Rong.
So...she has no empathy with other people's pain, on the contrary, she feels pleasure. She is sick, sadistic, selfish, manipulative, she is an extremely tragic character, everything in her life is tragic, in her constitution as a character, she reminds me of Medea's relationship with her own family, with Jason and Jason's bride, from the Greek tragedy. Wanning's past, although painful, does not justify her metamorphosis: initially a good person and then a recidivist and cruel criminal. The painful event she suffered was the trigger for what she became, from the perspective of a person who was already problematic in social relationships. The series does not show whether Wanning was a good person before suffering a painful and traumatic experience.
Like every obsessive person, she is focused and found in Shen Yu Rong the right person to corrupt, but she was unable to manipulate him, because he, in turn, ended up joining the game because he is a bad character, in fact, he used her to achieve his ends. She is a fragile woman in opposit of Xue Fan Fei, who is a strong and determinatd woman. One is the antagonist of the other. In all. I know you might say, "What??? Wanning fragile???" Yes she is. She is insecure, needy like an orphan, she placed her entire life in the hands of the biggest crapula in the series: Shen Yu Rong. He is her air, her ground, the unique meaning of her tragic and empty life. Without him, what did she do? I'm not going to give spoilers, watch The Double...A person who is so dependent on someone is simply fragile, without structure. Her violence is proportional to her fragility. In her feverish madness, she expresses her fragility through cruelty. Once rejected, her world collapses. We don't see Wanning oscillate between feelings, because she is focused on just one feeling/obsession. We don't see her take a step back, she advances impetuously without weighing the consequences, like demented people do. But Shen Yu Rong... Yes, he oscillates between the "love" he felt for Xue Fan Fei and his unscrupulous thirst for prominence, we see throughout the episodes that he regrets the crime he commited, like a lucid person does, although he did not hesitate to bury XFF alive. The blackmail that Wanning did to him does not justify such cruelty, there were many ways out of that blackmail, but he was cold and committed a heinous crime consciously, unlike Wanning, whose dementia separates her from any code of ethics and norms. Who really deserves to be hated: Wanning or Shen Yu Rong? Well...In the beggining I hated them both, with different colors, because one is crazy and the other has a bad character. The mad person who commits crimes, despite arousing our natural repulsion, needs to be seen through specific lenses that soften our feelings, because in such a condition, in fact, she deserves our compassion.Crazy people, like Wanning, cannot live in society and are treated as such. Bad character is everywhere and when someone like that threatens society, they are treated with the severity of the law.
One more time I ask: why do we feel sorry for Wanning, if she acts in a perverse, unscrupulous, selfish way? Wanning has understandable and traumatic reasons that serve as a Freudian excuse that redeem her, mitigating her attitudes. From there we connect with her on a human level. We must be careful because we are facing a trap. We cannot lose sight of her recidivist criminal personality, she never regrets it. In the same way, we cannot make our compassion in certain moments when she really deserves pity, the plumb of our judgment. As a mad person, she needs another kind of perception.
Now I'll say what I feel for Wanning. I confess that I got emotional in some scenes, but I cried in "that" scene (I won't give spoilers...). The scene has a spectacular plasticity, with few colors, a lot of gray (like Wanning's inner world) but reacting like a redemptive veil surrounding Wanning's drama/tragedy, the rain washes away her miserable and sad life, the color red screams in contrast to the beatitude of Wanning's smile, reminding me of Ophelia, who also smiles as the river current carries her along, floating like a petal, with a flower in her hands. Ophelia went mad due to her fiancé Hamlet's rejection. Wanning is mad and rejected as daughter, as sister, as woman too...Wanning...What can I say about you? I feel pity for your destiny as a woman devoid of Rationality and because of that so cruel. And what can I say to you? Rest in peace.
PS: Very briefly about the Greek tragedie I mention: Medea is calculating, vindictive, manipulative, she murdered her brother and her own children with Jason, as well as Jason's bride in revenge, at the same time that she helped him gain power. Jason (Shen Yu Rong...) is Creusa's groom, he's ambitious, a strategist, the Princess Creusa (or Glauce), is King Creon's daugther.
DefyingDestiny:
Mulberry_owl:
TaliaToo:
