The Sword and the Brocade (review)

Shi Yi is a concubine’s daughter of the noble Luo family. After spending years in exile in the countryside with her mother, she is suddenly summoned back to the city.

She has big dreams of living an independent life and earning an income with her embroidery skills, but she finds herself married off to the aloof and powerful General Xu Ling Yi so that the Luo family can retain their hold on power and favour in court.

Ling Yi and Shi Yi try to navigate this awkward arrangement (as she’s many years younger than the general), especially since his household is full of scheming, vicious concubines.

However, Shi Yi can’t be bothered as she’s pointedly focused on her pursuits and does not care a jot about gaining her husband’s favour. Used to being coddled and fawned over by his concubines, Ling Yi finds himself attracted to his assertive and independent-minded wife.

My thoughts

I long avoided The Sword of the Brocade for the following reasons:

• I was super unimpressed with Tan Song Yun’s performance and was majorly annoyed with her aegyo character in Under the Power and didn’t want a repeat performance.
• In general, I dislike harem dramas intensely. I just don’t like watching women bully each other, which is why I have not watched “classics” like Yanxi Palace.
• This is an extremely shallow reason, but I didn’t find Wallace Chung attractive so it didn’t immediately attract me to watch it.

But for some reason, I am suddenly in a romantic mood. Mature, adult, slow burn, arranged marriage romance, that is. Maybe after the intense, hard sci-fi of Three-Body (review coming soon!) I want some fluff 😘

And since one of my favourite tropes is love developing during arranged marriages, so The Sword and the Brocade immediately leaped out to me.

What I think about the drama

To be honest, I expected to hate Show. But not only did I not hate it, I actually enjoyed a big chunk of it. Namely, because I really enjoy the slow-burn romances and the arranged marriage trope. I really enjoy watching Shi Yi and Ling Yi’s gradual attraction to each other and I love Wallace Chung and Tan Song Yun’s performance. I believe that Tan dubbed herself, and that really brought out her character. As Shi Yi, she is both demure and decisive. At times, she can get quite scary when countering the schemes of the concubines. It goes to show that with a good script, an actor can really shine. Though, about that script, more on that later.

As I said earlier, I didn’t find Wallace Chung attractive at first but the man grows on you. He is so manly, honourable and considerate as Ling Yi that these qualities end up making him very attractive indeed. I liked that Ling Yi was so patient to wait for Shi Yi to be ready enough for “marital duties” rather than forcing or guiltingher into it like so many men would’ve done during this period.

And yes, yes, this is one of those dramas with misunderstandings between our couple, but it’s not at epic proportions like Love and Redemption.

I don’t seem to mind misunderstandings and lack of communication in romance dramas as I find them morbidly enjoyable. But if you hate this be warned as the Show has one major arc with that.

(Also, I’d like to report that Wallace Chung is such a good kisser. Like, no fish-eyed kisses, people! But one filled with intense passion and desperate hunger. Fans self. Damn it, we be waiting 30+ freaking episodes and endured bouts of concubine scheming for this and it was all worth it. 😂)

However, I confess that I skipped or fast-forwarded a lot of scheming concubine parts because I can’t stand a lot of that. At times I found the mother-in-laws (both Madam Xu and Luo) intolerable.

Yet. Yet, all this is very realistic because there’s something in the Chinese social hierarchy that puts so much power in the hands of mother-in-laws, especially during more patriarchal times like the Ming Dynasty.

And all those tea conversations the women have with each other. The tea might as well be laced with poison; despite all the sweet smiles and polite words exchanged, every word is laced with toxins, every gesture an attack.

Despite all that horrid scheming, I have a lot of sympathy for the concubines, especially Madam Wen and Qin. I felt their pain and sorrow when Ling Yi rebuffed their advances. As for Qiao Lian Fang, the primary evil concubine? Nah, she deserves everything she got lol.

Anyway, when your entire fate depends on the favour of a man, and when said man ignores you or even treats you with disdain, what can you do? So, the only power they can even exercise over their lives, at times, is through schemes. Even our Shi Yi cannot avoid scheming.

Harems – scarier than the bloodiest battlefields.

But alas, here comes the not-so-great part of the drama. Show tries to convey the painful lives of concubines and women in ancient Ming dynasty times, but it was clumsily done.

But the last 10 episodes of Show was a rush of betrayals and schemes, a lot of them illogical. And with Shi Yi being so understanding of all the betrayals, she became more of a Mary Sue character.

If I were to rate the way the romance between our main couple was written, it would be an 8.5.

But for the plot involving the evil Ou family, concubines and more? It’ll be a 6 or less.

This is gonna be one of those hard-to-rate dramas like The Story of Kunning Palace. It’s the kind of show which does some parts really, really well, and other parts, really badly.

Okay, in the next section, I will elaborate further. Warning, lots of spoilers ahead!

Thoughts about the ending

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As I said, Ling Yi’s neglect of his wives and compliance with his mother’s wishes was responsible for a lot of the concubines’ suffering, and I felt that for most of them, their bitterness and fury was justified. (How they acted on said fury, however, is another matter.) Sure, I get that his concubines were forced on him and that he is depressed and stressed out by the shenanigans of his harem, but he had a choice and far more agency over his life. He could’ve been more considerate of his wives who were there against their wills too.

The way the show tripped, fell and rolled downhill towards the ending got me worried at one point that the concubines would all be dispatched and marked “terrible people”, and our couple justified in their actions as they head towards their happy endings.

Fortunately, they didn’t go down that path. Ling Yi does realise the impact of his coldness and neglect, but it was dealt with far too briefly, awkwardly and was too rushed.

Of all the concubines, I felt the most sorry for Madame Qin, who was made his concubine against her will, who lost her child and ended up sterile because of his mother’s misguided attempt to maintain peace in the household. I felt that among the concubines, her dark motives were the most understandable.

When she begged to raise the child they found on the streets, and seeing her grief when the opportunity was passed to someone else, I wanted to scream at Ling Yi for his lack of empathy and awareness.

So, when he finally apologised to her for his neglect, I felt her bitter laughter too. It was far too late and his apology will not change anything. (I was actually glad she said she will never forgive him.) Now, that scene was so awkward and terribly staged that I wished they could’ve done it in a less silly fashion.

They basically had Ling Yi and Madame Xu apologising to her as she was dying and I’m like … this is so pathetic. At that moment I was Madame Qin hahaha.

At least let Ling Yi regret for longer than 5 minutes; let him really feel the impact of his neglect for several episodes or something (yes, I’m evil). Instead, after a brief scene with him remonstrating with Shi Yi, we move on to their happy lives.

Bleh.

I also thought it was disappointing that one by one, the concubines betrayed Ling Yi. Surely one or two would rise above their pettiness and hurt to give Show some nuance to highlight the complexities of a harem life.

But nah, we want to have Ling Yi and Shi Yi exclusively together without any concubines around.

Final verdict

This is a tough one to rate, truly. On one hand, I truly adored Ling Yi and Shi Yi’s love story, and I think the production quality is above average.

However, the plot had a lot of holes and some bits were so bad I could only endure rather than enjoy them.

So, I can only give it a slightly above-average rating rather than excellent like I truly want to.

But, I still highly recommend this drama if you like watching slow-burn romance dramas and have a thing for arranged marriages. Our lead actors are excellent in their roles and you will really enjoy how their love story unfolds.

Rating: 7.5