This little scene demonstrates what a difference having really good actors makes.
They are two near-strangers, feeling each other out (well, mainly her, he is more dwelling on resentment, but there is a sliver of that feeling out in him as well) in a high visibility, high ceremony situation. It honestly conveys the emotional insanity of knowing that this person, with whom you interacted for a total of ten minutes at most, and about whom you know next to nothing, will be a person you now will spend your whole life with and have children with and grow old with.
And so she tries to interpret his smallest behavior - she perks up at the kindness of his warning about stairs and feels let down when he adds it’s so she’d not embarrass the family (and because both BJT and SY are good, we feel that, just as we feel that he IS being kind, and does not want to know her out of a sense of misplaced pride.)
You know what I love? In the novel and the adaptation? That unlike in so many dramas, where there is an arranged marriage and the parties react anachronistically, there is a realism to their openness of sorts to it. Yuru is not someone madly in love with Ye Shi’an, secretly crying over doomed love nor is she generally angry that she can’t have trueeeee loooooveeeee; she is someone who knows she has to live with this marriage and so she is open to making it work - she can’t help but hope she can salvage something from this. She is not hoping for love or close friendship, but she is hoping she can have a workable situation as his wife. That feels so realistic to me; unlike anachronistic heroines, she is confined by morals and paths of a period woman’s life. (One of the glorious things about the novel, that I hope the drama keeps, is how being married to GJS actually leads her to becoming the most she can be, to use a cliche phrase, in a way she never could have been married to pretty much anyone else, but she never becomes a famous general or something; she is a merchant queen not a warrior.)
And the thing I love about Jiusi is that underneath his resentment about being cornered into this, he gets it too - more specifically he knows this is not Yuru’s fault, she did not want or scheme for him - so many dramas would create a lengthy tiresome misunderstanding where ML would think FL wanted him blah blah but Gu Jiusi, even at his most immature (and he’s hella immature at the start; it’s a huge credit to BJT that he makes him rather charming and not unbearable) has a working brain and so while he has no interest in a real marriage, he does not blame Yuru for things.
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nevermind. just call my name, then.
New Life Begins, Ep. 15 --
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the way li wei's eyes widen, though lol she's teasing him.
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