Sword Stained With Royal Blood eps 1-5
Yyyyyyeeeeessss...new wuxia for me...
Sword Stained With Royal Blood is about Yuan Chengzhi, the son of a general who was killed by the emperor. After seeing about 9 out of every 10 people he knew get slaughtered in the streets (a few of whom were sent through brick walls by a guy with some pretty awesome kung fu) Chengzhi is sent off to be trained by a kung fu master Mountain Hermit. Now, as anyone who's seen a wuxia drama goes, Mountain Hermits are the best LIVING kung fu masters. All the really good dead ones died in caves and left detailed manuals for young men to find and study. For the next twelve years, the only company Chengzhi had was Mountain Hermit, and their neighbor, Other Mountain Hermit. This led to several important things for Chengzhi:
1. Awesome kung fu abilities.
2. Absolutely no social skills.
3. The inability to tell a pretty girl from a handsome boy(see under cut.)
4. Most importantly: really, really bad hair. (Yang Guo: Raised in tomb by amazingly beautiful Tomb Girl. Yuan Chengzhi: Raised on mountain by Mountain Hermits. See the connection?)
Actually, midway through the second ep I stopped noticing the hair...Bobby Dou wears it as manfully and bravely as it can be worn, and his fight scenes and clueness face make up for it.)
Anyway, after 12 years, Dad's men come and take Chengzhi and tell him he's expected to take up where dad left off and get revenge. While the hamster wheels in his head are spinning like crazy trying to keep up with the politics, he gets the bit where they want him to get revenge for his woobie little eyes seeing mass slaughter. He's all for that part. Unfortunately, he gets separated from everyone in a fight (that would have been over in 5 minutes if he hadn't had to save someone every 30 seconds...) and got knocked off a cliff but the guy who traumatized him as a kid by throwing people through brick walls. Being a resilient guy, he jumps right up and wanders into a cave and finds a kung fu manual left there by Golden Snake Sword, which makes his kung fu double. Raised by kung fu Mountain Hermit + kung fu manual in cave = best kung fu skills EVER.
I rather like Chengzhi. He's comes across as arrogant, but most of it is unintentional. He has one primary mode and 2 secondary modes. Primary mode is "protect anyone and anything that vaguely resembles an "in distress." Secondary modes are "YAY! FIGHT! I love to fight!" and "You are a worm and I will crush you with my kung fu." In the first secondary mode, he's just fighting and is pretty much oblivious to the fact that he kind of makes people look foolish by having far superior kung fu skills. In the second...well, when it's on purpose, they really deserve it. He tends to go around with the most adorably clueless look ever as he tries to keep up with politics and squabbles and such. Give him a fight or strategy and he'll come out on top every time. But the rest of the time...well, just point out someone for him to fight when the time comes.
Anyway, while headed off to meet his friends, he runs into Wen Qing Qing, a girl from a family of scoundrels (except for her and her mother, each and every one of them are utter wretches) who likes to go around dressed like a boy. Now, how anyone in the world could possibly assume Eva Huang is a boy no matter how she's dressed and not question it is beyond me, but I'll give Chengzhi the benefit of the doubt as this is probably the first girl he's seen in 12 years(everyone else though...) Besides, his OTP sense tells him something's wrong everytime she makes "brothers" talk, and there seems to be a "Property of Qing Qing" tattoo appearing on his forehead even then. That said, she really would have had her cover blown in 5 minutes with anyone moderately more worldly, what with her taking his arm, fixing his bed, cooking for him and hand feeding him...
Of course, when he finally DOES see her as a girl, I think his brain literally stops functioning for a few minutes. And he keeps calling her "Qingdi," the boy's name she told him, even after he learns her real name, which somehow is really, really cute.
Anyway, he gets caught up in her family's garbage (hopefully he will whisk her away from them for a life of adventures very, very soon) but more importantly, we learn about her parents, AKA Best Wuxia Backstory EVER.
Remember my mentioning they were all utter wretches? Remember Golden Snake Sword(who will now be referred to as GSS)? Apparently GSS is A) Qing Qing's father(not that anyone ever bothered to tell her) and B) the enemy of the Wen family. Because of this, they've treated Qing Qing and her mother, Yi, horribly ever since Qing Qing was born.
Apparently the Wen's wiped out GSS's family and he set out for revenge, swearing to kill 36 members of the Wen family. He's rather vicious and ruthless about it(I was having Hamlet and Macbeth flashes in the early part of the story) but as he is a Tortured Vengeance Driven Soul, he had two paths open to him.
Path 1: Become an evil villain and wreak massive destruction and havok before being killed in a long, dramatic fight with the hero.
Path 2: Meet a girl and be reformed by the power of her pretty fall for her and discover his inner good guy and become a better man, eventually leaving his vengeance behind.
He went with this option:
(not the best picture of Yi, but all I have)
So there he was, doing his vengeance thing:
When lo and behold, he spotted a pretty girl on a swing:
(well...he's seeing her...sadly, I seem to have no pictures of the swing scene, which is a thing of awesomeness...but he's about to swoop down onto her swing...)
Instead of killing her, selling her to a brothel, etc. (you know, normal vengeance-y stuff...) he kidnaps her and carries her back to his cave. Because she's prettier than her male relatives. While they have the normal I hate you/were' enemies/I'll kill you spats, his deep depths of manpain and angst (that cause his to wake up screaming at night no less) win her over, as does the fact that he brings her a bunny to keep her company. This fills him with peace and zen and he renounces his evil ways:
Sadly, her entire family is still a mass of creeps (did I mention that at one point, they came to save her but her father ended up leaving even though he knew she might die because he was afraid of dying in the fight? The jerk.) While GSS may have found his inner nobility, they were still busy stomping on their own, and they screwed them over big time. Causing much more angst and manpain. There was a scene after where Chengzhi is fighting the family heads and he's using GSS's moves because of the manual and Yi starts seeing GSS instead and says his name and walks towards Chengzhi...I may have sniffled a bit...
A nice MV of them(with swings):
Click to viewLess romance, more manpain, as well as a few glimpses of an interesting occassional side effect of his kung fu:
Anyway, so far I am (obviously) enjoying this one quite a bit. The first 2 eps, and the beginning of ep 3 were kinda choppy and seemed to be leaving bits of the story out, but it's calmed down a lot since then.
I'd probably be around ep 10(or higher) now, but I've been watching it with
calixa, and there's very, very little better than watching a fun wuxia with someone. Uhm...except that I'm kinda hooked now and my bingeing tendencies have reawoken...it could be the opportunity to even the score for the Young Warriors play-by-play she gave me a while back...