Love that gives you butterflies

The 22-episode c-drama Butterflied Lover 《风月变 fēng yuè biàn》 is supposedly inspired by the story of Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai. If you’re expecting an adaptation of the Butterfly Lovers story, I’ll just be upfront: that’s not what you’re getting. But let’s listen to the famous Butterfly Lovers violin concerto anyway. For the vibes. And also because it’s my fave.

Butterflied Lover (the name doesn’t work super well in English and sounds like someone’s partner has been tenderised like a flattened chicken breast) might not be faithful to the Liang-Zhu story, but it’s a lovely show and a beautiful story in its own right. Also, if you’re a One True Pair (OTP) shipper like me, let me tell you: the ships in this show SAIL. THEY SAIL GOOD. This alone should make you watch Butterflied Lover. Unless you don’t like OTPs and shipping. In which case I have bad news for you about this newsletter.

Our main characters in Butterflied Lover are Ling Changfeng (Zhao Yiqin) and Tang Qianyue (Lu Xiaoyu). At the beginning of the show, they’re a couple celebrating their third wedding anniversary on New Year’s Eve. He’s an officer dedicated to keeping the city safe. She runs a store selling cosmetics. He’s handsome. She’s beautiful. She waits for him to end his shift with an umbrella because she heard it’s going to snow. He surprises her by draping a coat around her shoulders, affectionately nagging her about not putting on enough layers for the wintry night. They’re devoted to each other. Heart eyes 😍😍😍 and everything. It’s all going perfectly.

And yet.

In the middle of their New Year’s Eve date, the city is attacked by a horde of Butterfly Slaves—humans possessed by a mysterious poison that turns them into violent and vicious monsters. Changfeng entrusts Qianyue to a guard, telling her to hide in her cosmetics shop until the danger is over. He himself charges into the fray with the rest of his soldiers.

When Changfeng returns for his wife, he finds her lying bloodied on the ground, surrounded by the bodies of Butterfly Slaves. She pulls through… but it turns out that she’s a Butterfly Slave. 

At a time when his father, the commandant in charge of the entire city’s security, and his older brother, the closed-off and tyrannical Marquis Wu An, are hell-bent on hunting out Butterfly Slaves and exterminating them, it’s obvious that Changfeng will not be handing over his beloved. Unlike other people, who lose their senses when turned into Butterfly Slaves, there’s something special about Qianyue that allows her to hold on to her innate goodness and be a, erm, high-functioning Butterfly Slave. Changfeng decides that he’ll do all it takes to purge the curse from his wife’s body.

Meanwhile, Changfeng’s brother Ling Changjin, the Marquis Wu An (Deng Kai), is keeping a secret of his own, also related to the Butterfly Slave curse. I won’t go into it here, but suffice to say Changjin discovers that he needs Kirin Blood, a very rare blood type, to achieve his ends. The only person he can find with Kirin Blood is Princess Bao Zhu (Wu Ri Li Ge), so he bullies the Emperor—an easy feat, given that the emperor is only five years old and very inconsequential to the overall narrative—into marrying Bao Zhu off to him. At first, he sees it as little more than a marriage of convenience (for him). But Bao Zhu is delighted; it turns out that she’s had a crush on him for the longest time. Despite his outward demeanour, Changjin does actually have a heart (🚨TSUNDERE ALERT 🚨), and it doesn’t take long for guilt to prick his conscience as he interacts with the earnest and openly trusting princess.

I’m a sucker for romance and romantic comedies, but often get a little impatient with the will-they-won’t-they trope that tends to drag romance dramas out episode after episode. There’s none of that in Butterflied Lover. The show starts off with our main characters already in love and married. There is some tension, of course—otherwise where got drama to watch—but there’s never any question of how they feel about each other. The secondary couple, too, don’t mess about with confusion and misunderstandings. Once the marquis realises that the princess isn’t who he’d imagined her to be, and that their marriage has turned out to be more than he’d bargained for, he doesn’t waste time with denial.

It’s also a bonus that both Chang brothers are satisfyingly egalitarian husbands. In one scene, Changfeng wonders if there’s a way he can take his wife’s place in experiencing childbirth pains; when she teases him for thinking of something so silly, he tells her that it isn’t fair for women to have to endure all the pain alone when a baby is born to both parents. Meanwhile, stranded in a cave in the middle of a snowstorm, Bao Zhu sheepishly confesses that she’s on her period and has stained her clothing. Changjin not only goes out in the storm to borrow a change of clothes from a nearby village—don’t ask why they didn’t seek shelter in the village, it ruins the romance!—but also washes her stained clothes for her. When Bao Zhu protests that his manly hands are for wielding weapons and not doing laundry, he rebuts her gently by saying that both laundry and weaponry have “no gender”, and can be done by anyone.

Good, good. I like these brothers. They can stay. But do they? I won’t tell you, you’ll just have to watch the show.

Ultimately, Butterflied Lover is about love and devotion. The Chang brothers’ father, the commandant, is devoted to his sacred duty, willing to make tough decisions even when his own family is on the line. It strains his relationship with both Changfeng and Changjin but every interaction is imbued with a sense that, underneath the tension, there is still plenty of affection—he repeatedly refers to his two sons as “逆子 (unfilial sons)”, but is in reality a softie who craves their company. Changjin is devoted to his family to the point of making some morally questionable decisions, but he is driven throughout by love and loyalty. Changfeng and Qianyue are a rock solid couple whose devotion to each other is repeatedly demonstrated by the lengths they are willing to go to protect what they have. 

Just like how Liang-Zhu is a story about two lovers fighting against the odds—gender roles, family expectations, even illness and death—the Butterflied Lover story of Changfeng and Qianyue shows them performing miracles for their love and the life they want together.

I try not to spoil anything when I write these things, and I hope I’ve succeeded in this newsletter. I’ll say, though, that the ending is open to interpretation. You can be delulu or boohoohoo, it’s up to you. Apparently the director and screenwriter themselves disagree. Personally, I’m choosing to remain delulu while knowing deep down that it’s at least partially boohoohoo.