Kim NaBi

She Wasn’t Broken. She Was Holding the World Together with Her Bare Hands

Historical dramas love giving their female leads tragic backstories. A dead parent here, a betrayal there maybe a few episodes of crying into a pillow before she “gets over it” and the plot moves on to the romance everyone actually tuned in for. The First Jasmine does not do this. It refuses to do this, and that refusal is the whole reason this drama stayed with me.

What gets me is how the show treats Ye Li’s pain. It doesn’t play her composure as denial. It plays it as discipline, as a woman making an active, conscious choice, again and again to carry her grief privately so it doesn’t get in the way of what she has to do. Standing calm at the funeral of the grandmother who murdered her own mother isn’t a woman who’s “lost it.” It’s a woman who has decided, on her own terms, exactly how much of herself the world is allowed to see. That is not weakness. That’s armour she built alone with no one’s help because no one ever offered.

And here’s the part that really won me over. Even while carrying all of that, even while fractured, even while lonely in a way most of the people around her couldn’t begin to imagine, she still got up and did what needed to be done. She tracked down the men who destroyed Lishan and orchestrated their downfalls one by one, patiently, using their own pride and greed against them until they walked themselves into the trap. She helped heal her husband’s legs when the royal physicians had given up. She rebuilt a household that was falling apart around her. None of it came from anyone holding her hand through it. It came from her own intelligence, her own will, dragging herself forward one task at a time even while unraveling underneath. That’s the part of her character that feels the most real to me. She didn’t need to be whole to be capable.

And then, just when she lets that armour down, just when her husband finally earns enough trust that she’s willing to believe she doesn’t need to carry it alone anymore, he hands her divorce papers. Not out of cruelty exactly but out of his own wounded pride misreading her devotion as obligation. He doesn’t realise that the one promise she actually believed was that she wouldn’t have to go back to being alone. And the moment he breaks that, even unintentionally, she fractures further than before, because now even the version of “alone” she’d survived once already feels unbearable a second time with someone she trusted standing right there.

That’s not a romance plot device. That’s what happens to women, to people, who are taught that being needed is conditional that their pain is only acceptable as long as it doesn’t inconvenience anyone else’s feelings.

Ye Li isn’t a woman who needed fixing. She’s a woman who needed someone to finally stay.


This drama understood the difference and so did I, watching it.

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Refreshing to see a Vilified female get the guy

Everlasting Longing gave us drama, angst, and maybe not a lot of longing (shocker, given the title). But what it also gave us was a princess who became the fandom’s favourite punching bag. And honestly? I’m tired of it. Let’s talk about why this princess deserves more love—or at least less hate—and why the double standards in how we judge male and female characters need to go.


The Princess: Messy, Flawed, and Human

Let’s start by acknowledging the obvious: the princess was not perfect. She was obsessive, possessive, and made some seriously questionable choices. But here’s the thing: she wasn’t evil. Her actions came from a place of genuine love and insecurity, not malice. She wanted the guy, she thought being a princess meant she could have him, and when it didn’t work out, she spiralled. Haven’t we all been there? (Okay, maybe not the princess part, but you get what I mean.)

What I appreciated about her character was that she wasn’t one-dimensional. She wasn’t just the “crazy ex” or the “villainous rival.” She had depth. She was flawed, yes, but she was also relatable. And isn’t that what makes a character interesting?


The Double Standard: Brooding Hero vs. “Crazy” Princess

Here’s where I get heated. If the princess were a prince—let’s say, a cold, brooding, possessive prince who locked his love interest in a palace and declared, “You’re mine, and no one else can have you”—the fandom would be obsessed. He’d be the dark, tormented hero of a thousand fanfics. People would be like, “Oh, he’s so protective! He’s so passionate! He just loves her too much!” But because it’s a princess doing the same thing? Suddenly she’s “crazy,” “toxic,” and “the worst.”
Excuse me, where is the consistency?

This isn’t just about Everlasting Longing—it’s a pattern in storytelling. Male characters get away with murder (sometimes literally) in dramas, and we’re like, “Oh, he’s flawed, but he’s so dreamy.” But when a female character breathes too hard in the direction of her love interest, she’s labelled a villain. It’s giving… internalised misogyny. And I’m not here for it.


Why the Hate?

I get it—the princess wasn’t always likeable (she sometimes pissed me off too). She made mistakes, she crossed lines, and she definitely went about things the wrong way. But can we at least appreciate her complexity? She wasn’t just a plot device to create drama. She was a fully realised character with her own motivations and struggles. And yet, she got more hate than male characters who did far worse. Why? Because she’s a woman who dared to be messy.

Final Thoughts: Let’s Do Better

To the writers: can we please give female characters the same grace and complexity you give male characters? Flawed women can be just as compelling as flawed men.
And to the audience: let’s check our biases. If we’re going to stan male characters who are possessive and problematic, we need to extend the same understanding to female characters who exhibit the same traits.

The princess in Everlasting Longing was a vibe. Was she a chaotic vibe? Absolutely. But she deserved better—from the(I so wanted her to end with her man)

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The Xiao Men’s Curse of Yearning

Palace dramas usually give you one man worth rooting for and a dozen who exist to complicate the plot. Blossoms of Power does something rarer. It hands nearly every man in the Xiao line the same affliction. They yearn. Not performatively, not as a trick to manufacture jealousy. It's an actual character trait passed down like a family curse, starting with the throne itself and running through every son who was ever supposed to sit on it. So let's go through them one by one:

First…….Xiao Huayong, because honestly he might be the one who yearned the hardest out of all of them.

Huayong is introduced to Shen Xihe(the FL), as the frail, dying crown prince. All coughing fits and trembling hands, the kind of setup a lesser show would use for pity. Instead the show turns his fragility into the opposite of weakness. But here's the thing people forget about him. She wasn't even interested in him at first. She married him half expecting him to die anyway and he knew that, and he still didn't hold back. He went through life and death for her more times than I can even count at this point. Saving her, protecting her, putting himself in danger over and over for a woman who wasn't sure she wanted him yet. That's not a man waiting to be loved back before he commits. That's a man who decided to build a whole future for her regardless of whether she ever chose him, even knowing the terms she came into the marriage on. His yearning isn't loud. It's structural. He doesn't chase Shen Xihe with words. He restructures his entire position around her instead, planning ahead as if she was always going to stay even when nothing promised him that. The clearest proof of it is small but says everything. He gives up the front of his own wedding procession just to ride beside her sedan instead of ahead (I think that might have been the first time I’ve seen a crown prince do that for his bride…..)It showed a crown prince choosing equality over spectacle is basically a confession to the whole world dressed up as etiquette. But by that point in the story, it's really just confirmation of something he'd already been proving for a long time.

Then we have Xiao Changqing and honestly, this one got to me a bit. He gave Gu Qingzhi everything. His name, his protection, his knees before the emperor. None of it worked. Not because he loved badly, but because he loved on the wrong timeline. There's no villain to point at here. Just bad timing wearing the shape of a person. I actually felt for him watching this. He did everything right and it still wasn't enough and there's something a little unfair about a story that punishes a man for loving too early instead of too little. I hope going forward the actor gets to play someone who isn't quite so tragically stuck in this obsessive, doomed devotion loop. He clearly has the range for it, I'd just love to see it pointed somewhere lighter next time.

Moving on……to my dare I say favourite?!……..

Xiao Changying the reckless one. I liked how he loves with his whole chest, runs into fire for a woman who never asked him to. He doesn't get subtlety, he gets intensity and it costs him just as much. Even when he ends up marrying someone else, he says the thing out loud first. He doesn't let it die quietly. That's still yearning. It just wears a different consequence.

Xiao Changyu the quiet one. He chooses a woman nine years older than him, a dancer with no political value to offer and means it enough to disappear from the entire court for her. That's yearning with nothing to gain and everything to lose, which somehow makes it the most convincing version of all four……

Now, not every Xiao son gets this, and that gap is its own kind of lesson.

We cannot forget Xiao Changmin, the second prince, never learns it at all. His interest in Shen Yingruo isn't love, it's leverage. He wants what her family can hand him, and when she sees through it and walks away, he doesn't chase her the way his brothers chase the women they actually want. He just moves on to the next available advantage. It costs him his life in the end, which almost feels like the show punishing him for feeling too little instead of too much.

Honourable mention…… Xiao Changtai, the fourth prince, worser in a quieter way. He performs devotion instead of living it. The reach for poisoned wine, the public gestures of a man who'd apparently die for his wife, all of it is calculated to make his father believe he's harmless. His wife Li Yanhui isn't fooled for a second. She knows she's a prop in his image, not a person he chose.



Changmin and Changtai walk away from the story mostly intact, because they never risked anything real. The Xiao men who actually loved who actually “YEARNERED” paid for it in every possible way. Huayong with his patience, Changqing with his marriage, Changying with his heart, Changyu with his place at court.

That's the whole family curse, written in every son who was ever honest about it. And somehow I couldn't stop watching to see who'd be next.

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