cdrama: The Spirit of the Sword

The Spirit of the Sword is a 2007 wuxia series based (very very loosely, I understand) on a Gu Long novel, focusing on two brothers-Dazang and Baoyu-who don't know the other exists. Dazang grew up in Japan and has come to China to fulfill his foster father's mission of finding a set of legendary swords, and prefers cutting people down to talking. (Not actually kidding here.) Baoyu was raised by his maternal grandfather, who overcompensated for being an uberdouche who destroyed his daughter's life and was largely responsible for her attempting suicide right after Baoyu was born by being overprotective and refusing to let Baoyu learn any martial arts, though Baoyu manages to learn a few on the side. Meanwhile, their mother, Yanzhu, actually survived jumping off a cliff and was rescued by the leader of an "evil" sect (in this series, "evil" seems to mean "not part of the self-important group of middleaged male martial artists who like to talk about their importance") who she now masquerades as. As you can imagine, there's a lot of "Stop trying to kill your brother/mother/son/daughter/grandfather!" going on in this series.

Dazang takes up travelling (aka "accidentally makes her an accessory to a couple murders and quasi-kidnaps her and then she hangs around until she can try to find a way to prove she didn't help him kill people") with Pearl, Baoyu's childhood friend. Pearl's paternal grandmother is a part of the same "Evil" sect as Yanzhu, and he compensates for this by also being an uberdouche who destroys his daughter's life. (As you can tell, paternal fathers are horrible in this series. Mother's are complicated and sympathetic, and adopted fathers manage to do a pretty good job with diffucult kids.) Meanwhile Baoyu travels to meet his father's friend, Zi Yi Hou (who was a very annoying Nice Guy who contributed to Yanzhu's depression, but apparently learned his lesson because he was quite excellent once he'd matured a bit) and along the way he hooks up with Yi Hou's daughter, Benyue. There's also an enemy princess, Touchen, who is on a mission that gets quickly forgotten about because she and her adventuring companion, Mulang, get caught up in everything else going on.

It's a very very "wuxia" wuxia, complete with poisonings, curses, amnesia, people returning from the dead, every romantic pairing (there are 4 main romantic pairings, and I surprisingly liked all of them, though one went bad in every possible way, even if it made sense) counting as "enemies as lovers" at some point in time, long lost family members, betrayals, etc etc etc. It has every kind of angst it can think of (Yet, midway through, someone apparently thought there wasn't enough melodrama and added a very annoying plotpoint that added nothing good and kind of took over for a while. Thankfully, the series recovered, but you'll know what I'm talking about when you see it if you watch the series.) to the point where I honestly wondered if anyone was gonig to make it out alive. It actually has a pretty high major character survival rate, with most of the survivors as happy as can be realistically expected. Largely there's nothing particularly original about it (only Yanzhu's portrayal stands out to me, because she was consistently portrayed as sympathetic-but not pitiful-and as having a legitimate POV of her own, in a role that would normally have ended with her realizing the error of her ways and repenting just in time to die tragically, not end happily-all things considered, she probably has the most positve ending of the characters), but it was fun and I'd watch it again (with liberal ff-ing through middle-aged men talking about how important they are).

Here's a video of the credits:

The series has been licensed in the US by TaiSeng, and is available on DVD with English subtitles through Netflix.