s01e10 — Episode 10

I watched it for 10 minutes. I probably won't go any further. I just can't. So much violence.. And after that, are we supposed to root for this couple or what? I'll probably watch the last episode later, just to find out how it ends. If they reduce everything to a happy ending, it will be just the height of illogic.

When Yichen handed Lu Feng the noodles, everything was said. A bowl of noodles in the right hand, chopsticks in the left. This inconspicuous gesture, familiar to the point of automatism, is the best proof of their deep connection.

After another round of moral damage, I'm so tired that I can't seem to collect my thoughts.

And now I want Lu Feng to let Yichen go if he wants to leave.

The years go by. The pain accumulates. Old scars don't disappear, but new ones appear on top of them, so it takes time to collect your thoughts. Consciously pause, and then assess your strength with a sober head. Especially Yichen. Everything was clear with Lu Feng ten years ago

Let Yichen go abroad with his brother.
The latter told him just in time that he didn't hold a grudge against Lu Feng, as he had provoked him. And in general, I'm surprised that my brother got married, if it was possible just not to get married... and life is wonderful, you don't have to be sad about trifles. If not the didi of the Cheng family, who would know this simple truth?:

"Ha, you're trying too hard not to offend anyone. No one can be that noble. Allow yourself a little selfishness. You'll be happier that way."

Maybe he'll tell you about the fact that he requested a message from Lu Feng while they're on the plane.

Let Lu Feng go on vacation, relax, think about life. Over the past 10 years, a man has devoured himself from the inside with a teaspoon and is desperately trying to fill this emotional hole, but I am no longer sure that Yichen is capable of doing this.
At least at this stage.

We see that Lu Feng is the first person Yichen thinks about when he wakes up, and the last person he remembers before going to sleep. But I have a feeling that even if both of them decide to give their love a chance now, Lu Feng will still be haunted by the echoes of the past.

It's not so easy to get rid of the feeling that he can be exchanged for someone else at any moment. Actually, that's why Lu Feng hid information about his brother's whereabouts from Yichen.

But Lu Feng never hid his dark sides. Yichen always saw them and accepted them. He believed that happiness together was worth it, so with a smile he made promises that were easy to say, but not so easy to fulfill.

For Lu Feng, Yichen is the center of the world. It's not for nothing that he repeats over and over again: "we've been together since we were 18." For him, their relationship was never interrupted.
And for Yichen, Lu Feng is just a part of his life, his past, his present.

I understand that Yichen rushed to shield Lu Feng because he cares about him to death. His feelings for him are also very deep. But now, for some reason, I can't find the balance between them.
It's like Lu Feng is living this love, and Yichen is just letting it into his life.

After all, they've already lost their youth. There's no hurry, they can take another break. And my nerves are already frayed. It's been four years, five too, plus months in a coma... so you can throw another timeskip at me to be sure.

Perhaps I'll come back here at night with a completely different opinion, a bunch of schizoid arguments and find answers to all my questions, but now I'm so tired, as if the love of these two drove an asphalt paver over me.

But more than for myself, I worry about Aiden.
He repeatedly passes through all this pain, despair and obsession of his character.
I can't imagine how much inner strength such dedication requires.

I'm fucked up, and that's putting it mildly. Ichen has Stockholm syndrome or something like that. He was literally drugged and raped more than once. And he's like, I'm ready to die for this guy. 🤦🏻♀️🤷🏻♀️

I flooded Peter today 🤧 trying to come to my senses... psychological trauma, good evening 🖖

In my opinion, it's already too late, it
was already possible to reconcile, now the separation is losing interest again.

Trash.... Oh, I've been crying for the last two episodes, I thought my eyes would start to boil.

I'm surprised no one wrote that Feng is wearing white now)
And my favorite God: I'm actually straight, but I love you!!
And the coat that Yichen then wears is the one that Feng gave him to whom?

I still haven't been able to put my thoughts together into something very concrete, and at such moments, as a person with abstract thinking, it's easier for me to grasp a thought through a detail. This is how complex emotions and impressions first gather around a point, and only then gradually turn into words.

One pattern caught my eye in this story: if a sunflower appears in the frame, then both Lu Feng and Yichen are always next to it.
Even when the characters are physically far from each other.

For example, during the first breakup, Yichen has knitted sunflowers, and Lu Feng himself appears in another part of the screen. Or, when Yichen is sitting at his desk, the gift is next to him, and an article with a photo of Lu Feng is open on the monitor.
Anyway, the frame still finds a way to bring the three of them together.

I understand that the sunflower fulfills its function in the plot as Yichen's favorite flower, but for a person with a rich imagination, it also becomes part of the bond between the characters. Especially if you follow the form in which it appears in the frame.

The first time we see him is in Yichen's childhood photo, where he holds three flowers in his hands. It is from this photo that Lu Feng understands which flowers he loves, and then bouquets of three sunflowers will become companions of their lives during the period when they are bound by love.

But first, there is only one live sunflower when Lu Feng starts courting Yichen. Later, there are two knitted sunflowers that he makes with his own hands. And then the flower begins to change along with the story itself.

During the first breakup, Yichen has a gift that reminds him of the feelings that continue to exist even at a distance. Both characters are like those two knitted sunflowers that Lu Feng carefully planted in one pot.

During the second breakup, the flower returns through Lu Feng. True, there was one, the very first living sunflower, but now it exists only in the old video. It was as if history had temporarily rolled back to its starting point.

In fact, the inanimate shape of a sunflower, I'll call it that, becomes a marker of memory, like, for example, the rim with Yichen's sunflowers, which remained captured in a joint photo, and fresh flowers become part of their life together.

So, a bouquet of three sunflowers appears when Lu Feng voluntarily moves in with Yichen. They also accompany the abduction era when they appear in Lu Feng's office, where they are still alive, but the petals are already beginning to fall. (Yichen, by the way, is there too, though only in the photos that Lu Feng is looking at on his phone). But when Yichen lies in a coma, trapped in his own body, the flowers wither.

It was this change of form that hooked me the most, because the sunflower here seems to live the same story as the characters themselves.:

~ alive when love is alive

~ artificial, when love has to be stored through distance

~ fading away when love starts to hurt

~ dead when love turned into ruins

After I finished breaking up this visual observation, I kept trying to figure out why the idea of a sunflower as a connection between the characters wouldn't leave my head, and at some point I remembered one detail that finally dragged me down the rabbit hole.

•••
I'm sure no one will ever be able to read this essay from beginning to end, but I just can't keep it to myself. 🫠
•••

A young sunflower turns after the sun because the cells grow faster on the side that remains in the shade. This is what makes the stem bend and turn back to the light.

If you look at the story literally, Lu Feng is always reaching for Yichen, like a sunflower reaching for the sun. Yichen becomes his starting point, the center around which his whole life is gradually built. Lu Feng can make mistakes, cause pain, make sacrifices, destroy his own happiness and the happiness of others, but still find a way back to Yichen over and over again.

But it wasn't the craving for light itself that got me hooked, but the mechanism that creates it. The sunflower does not move because of the sun, but because it is pushed by the side that remains without light.
And that's what I see Lu Feng in.

In separation, his love does not weaken, but on the contrary grows with renewed vigor. The longer Lu Feng stays without Yichen, the more tension, stubbornness, and an almost painful desire to bring this connection back accumulate in him. Love ceases to be a calm feeling and turns into a force that makes him move forward again and again.

And if I start to see Lu Feng through the shadow side of the sunflower, then the flower itself reminds me of Yichen, especially with its duality.

On the one hand, he is constantly drawn to Lu Feng. Even when he tries to move away, chooses a different direction, or convinces himself that he can live without this connection, his life returns him to the same person over and over again.

He pulls away, but he doesn't let go. He runs away, but returns. He chooses a distance, but continues to look where the most painful and at the same time the most important thing in his life remains.

On the other hand, there is a power in him that tries to protect him from this love. The part that makes you keep your distance, choose safety, and hide your feelings. Yichen is constantly hiding something: his fears, resentments, vulnerability, and his own affection. He rarely talks about what's going on inside him, preferring to keep it all to himself, so he seems to me like a man turned in two directions at once.

One part of him has been reaching out to Lu Feng for a long time, but the other still does not allow him to take the last step. Yichen is like a flower, like that part of a sunflower that turns towards the sun, but at the same time cannot exist without its own shadow.

That's why the sunflower stuck in my head as an image of their connection. In this story, Lu Feng and Yichen do not look like two separate elements, but as parts of the same mechanism: one creates movement, the other responds to it, and together they turn towards the light over and over again.

It would be possible to stop at this point, but this whole system cannot exist on its own, because without the sun, the sunflower would not have a goal to reach for, and the shadow side would need to direct the flower, triggering the movement mechanism.

And in the story of Lu Feng and Yichen, this sun becomes love, which first begins in Lu Feng, then it grows stronger and gradually turns into a desire to make it mutual. Therefore, the whole story begins with a one-way movement: Lu Feng is the first to reach for love and at the same time tries to bring Yichen to it.

At this stage, their relationship still resembles a sunflower, where one sets the movement, the other gradually turns to meet it, but then something appears that does not exist in nature: no one prevents the sunflower from following the sun, and Lu Feng and Yichen constantly have to overcome resistance. Their love exists in a world that is not ready to recognize it as natural. Every rapprochement turns into conflict, and every attempt to be together is followed by a new separation. And it is separation that gradually changes the mechanism itself.

When love turns out to be inaccessible, Lu Feng does not let it go, but on the contrary, the longer he remains without Yichen, the stronger the desire to regain what he has lost becomes. What was once just a feeling is gradually turning into a force that at first helps you fight for love and survive the years of waiting, but over time it becomes too much.

Lu Feng still aspires to the same sun, still wants the same love, only now he is trying to get to her at any cost, and this is where the tragedy of their relationship is born, because Yichen is not moving towards love at the same speed.

Where Lu Feng is getting more persistent, Yichen is getting more and more tired of this pressure. Where one sees salvation, the other begins to feel cornered. Therefore, their story gradually ceases to resemble natural growth: the sunflower turns to the light without pain, and Lu Feng and Yichen fight for their love - through her.

And the more Lu Feng tries to bring them closer to the same goal, the more noticeable it becomes that history repeats itself over and over again: love alone does not guarantee happiness.

Sometimes the desire to reach out to the sun is so strong that it begins to break the flower itself.

With that, I reached the final slide of the unauthorized botany lecture through the drama filter, because by this point in the long conversation with myself, I had only one unsolved question.

Throughout the story, the characters exist in motion: Lu Feng pursues, holds, returns, and Yichen runs away, resists, returns again ... their relationship is constantly moving in a circle, no matter how painful this circle may become. Even when they are far away, they still determine the direction of each other's lives.

However, only a young flower behaves this way: it moves all the time after the sun, searches for it, turns towards it, grows towards it. But then the moment comes when this movement is no longer necessary. The ripe sunflower remains facing east

And it seems to offer a different model of love, where there is no need to constantly check the presence of another person, there is no need to live in a mode of pursuit and fear of loss. The connection remains, but it is already embedded inside

After ripening, a sunflower does not look directly at the sun, but towards sunrise, where it appears from every day. It's as if it's not the pursuit of light itself that's important, but the memory of where it first appeared.

One day, you can stop reaching out to each other all the time and live in motion, but at the same time keep the direction inside the person who shaped you forever. Not as an object of obsession, and not necessarily as a current love, but as a point from which life once began for you.

For Lu Feng and Yichen's story, it almost sounds like a dream of an ending that they haven't had in a long time: not an eternal pursuit, but a state in which love ceases to be a force that makes you move, and becomes a part of who you are.

And after the shooting at Lu Feng's house, this movement really stops.

Up to this point, Lu Feng always had the opportunity to act: find Yichen, catch up, bring him back, convince, pressure, keep him by his side. Even during the years of separation, this opportunity persisted. After the shot, she disappears, and the old logic stops working, because Yichen falls into a coma, and for the first time Lu Feng finds himself next to him in a situation where nothing can be accelerated, fixed, or solved for two. We can only wait and hope that one day Yichen himself will open his eyes.

The coma becomes the very point at which the whole mechanism that has been pushing their story forward for so long finally stops. The moment when movement for the first time ceases to depend on Lu Feng

The story seems to remind you that love alone is not enough to make another person take a step forward.

In general, I need this whole botanical scheme, in fact, just for the sake of one scene.
The scenes where Lu Feng screws in the light bulb, because it seems to bring everything back to the very beginning and reminds why this mechanism existed in the first place.

The shadow side should help the flower follow the sun, rather than force it to move, and Lu Feng finds himself back where he belongs in this system: in the shade, solving the problem himself, and Yichen is left with light and the opportunity to just smile at him.

This gesture shows very clearly what Lu Feng was aiming for at the beginning of the story. He wanted Yichen to really feel good around him. For the sake of his happiness, Lu Feng worked hard, made difficult decisions and built a better life for them, hoping that Yichen himself would want to stay by his side.

That's probably why the light bulb scene gets to me so much. It still feels the original meaning of everything that was so badly distorted later: not to pull the flower towards the light by force, but simply to help it grow where it is light and warm.

And that evening, Lu Feng managed to find a way to stay by his side and spend Valentine's Day with Yichen. However, it's not like Yichen dreamed before. There's too much regret, pain, and unspoken things between them now.

Finally, there will be a detail that actually hooked me during the viewing. Before all the arguments about sunflowers, rings and other attempts to break this story into symbols

If I continue my old thoughts about the color contrast of the characters, where Lu Feng in black reflects his frozen existence after Yichen's departure, and Yichen in white becomes a kind of bearer of grief for what was destroyed between them, then this line can easily be extended to this part of the story.

Because for the first time in a long time, Lu Feng doesn't appear in total black
It has a light top and a dark bottom.

And if you really want to, it almost looks like a turning point. It's as if anger, resentment, and the desire to punish Yichen are gradually receding, making room for something other than revenge: regret, compassion, and love.

And then the roles seem to start changing altogether. While Yichen is stuck between life and death, it is Lu Feng who gradually begins to wear more and more light-colored clothes, and then appears in white altogether. It was as if it was his turn to mourn the love he had destroyed. To say out loud what has remained unsaid for years. Admit your own mistakes. Learning to live not with resentment, but with guilt and hope

In short, if you really want to, even in this shirt you can find another beautiful symbolic transition.
•••

But my gut tells me that the costume designer just wanted the blood to be clearly visible on the white fabric. 💁🏼♀️
It doesn't make much sense to dress an actor in black if nothing is really noticeable.

So while I'm building another theory about the inner transformation of a character through the shade of a shirt, somewhere off to the side, a man is quietly smiling, who was just choosing the right costume for a scene in a hospital corridor. 🫠

I started my shamelessly long arguments by saying that I hadn't come up with anything coherent. I had only one strange thought: why does the sunflower that constantly appears next to Lu Feng and Yichen never leave my mind?

I'll never know if any of this was really laid down by the authors, or if my brain just saw a pattern where no one had planned it. And I myself am a little shocked by how far this association has brought me. But that's exactly what I enjoy about a good story.

If there was someone who could master all this schizophrenic reasoning from beginning to end, then I can't even imagine how much strength, patience and courage it took.
May there be only sincere, mature and the warmest love in your life 💛

All
the paramedics have already come to take away the phone.
It's time for me to put on a white shirt.
Just not as beautiful as Lu Feng's, but a straitjacket 😌

meaningless bullshit with dumb plot twists