Review: Princess Silver

Sorry for not posting yesterday. In my defence, it was my birthday, and writing a review was pretty low on my list of priorities. Here's a new post today instead!

I must admit I started this series only because it features several actors who were in Ice Fantasy. It made such a change to see so many familiar faces in a Chinese drama that I decided I had to watch it.

Princess Silver (白发, Bái Fā, literally "White Hair") is a 2019 series based on a novel by Yanshang Mo. It's set at some point of Chinese history, but (as with General and I) I don't know when.

This is the first time I've watched a Chinese drama and recognised half the cast:
Aarif Rahman (Li Zhi in The Empress of China) as Wu You
Yunxi Luo (Run Yu in Ashes of Love) as Rong Qi
Xinyu Chen (Chao Ya in Ice Fantasy) as Hen Xiang
Sha Deng (Consort Zhang in General and I) as Consort Yun
Ya Xin Shu (Shuo Gang in Ice Fantasy) as Wu Yu
Ke Xu (Xing Jiu in Ice Fantasy) as Ning Qian Yi
Canti Lau (the emperor in The Princess Wei Young) as the emperor of Northern Lin

The plot is fairly straightforward... at first. Our heroine wakes up after a battle with no memory of who she is. She's told that her name is Rong Le, she's the sister of Western Qi's emperor, and she's going to marry Prince Wu You of Northern Lin. Neither Rong Le nor Wu You are happy about this, until they meet and fall in love. Only problem is, Rong Le's going by an assumed name, so Wu You doesn't know the woman he loves is the woman he's supposed to marry. A complicated chain of events involving an impostor and a missing book lead to Rong Le being forced to marry General Fu Chou instead, and she discovers her new husband is plotting against the emperor of Northern Lin.

The story gets more convoluted as it goes on. I understood most of it, but a few plot points didn't make sense. Maybe they weren't explained properly. Or maybe they were explained and I forgot about them; I watched this series over a month, with long gaps in between the end of one episode and the start of the next. Anyway, this review will become a hopeless muddle if I talk about some of the plot twists. Let's move on to a less complicated subject: the characters.

Wu You and Rong Le

From the opening scene I liked Rong Le. (She fights off a small army alone! How can anyone not like her after that?) I think I liked her best during her time pretending to be a tea house owner; some of her later actions were just plain stupid. I was most annoyed when she went ahead and married Fu Chou. Of all the idiotic ideas! 😒 It turns out just as badly as I expected, and causes a lot of misery for Rong Le and several other people. I spent several episodes thoroughly unhappy with her, thanks to that. But eventually I came to like her again.

When Wu You first appeared, I thought, "There must be some mistake. This lazy, ill-mannered lout can't possibly be the main love interest!" He's such a spoilt brat during the early episodes that I briefly preferred Fu Chou to him. Thank goodness he finally grew up, and after a while I started to like him. And whatever else can be said of him, he never tries to manipulate Rong Le. That makes him miles better than certain other characters. (*glares at Fu Chou*)

Strangely, neither of the protagonists is my favourite character in the whole series. That honour goes to:

Rong Qi

My opinion of Rong Qi started out pretty high, then went down sharply after he apparently betrayed Rong Le's trust, then went up again in the last ten episodes or so. Even when I thought he was a villain I didn't actually hate him. It's hard to hate someone who spends almost their entire screen-time looking like a kicked puppy. Instead of being a murderous scumbag like Lin Shen or a revenge-driven lunatic like Fu Yuan, Rong Qi means well but has a talent for doing the wrong thing at the wrong time. I hoped and hoped he'd get a happy ending as the series got closer and closer to the end. But I knew it wasn't likely 😢 His death reduced me to a sobbing mess for half an hour 😭

Fu Chou

Fu Chou was the one character whose death I was sure I wouldn't mourn. He spends most of the series as a treacherous plotter who wants revenge for how he and his adopted mother were treated. But once he learns who his real mother was, he undergoes a (quite abrupt, it has to be said) change of heart. By the time he dies he's almost a hero. I actually did feel sorry for him when he died. Not nearly as sorry as I felt for Rong Qi, but more than I expected to.

Now here are two characters whose deaths I didn't feel at all sorry about:

Fu Yuan

If Fu Yuan's quest for revenge had only been targeted at the emperor, I would have cheered her on. But she dragged countless innocent people into her schemes: Rong Le, Rong Qi, Fu Chou, the emperor's children, Hen Xiang... She's directly or indirectly responsible for almost every death in the entire series. Not even her tragic backstory can make me feel sorry for her after she made my favourite characters miserable.

Ning Qian Yi

My initial reaction to Ning Qian Yi was an excited squeal of "Xing Jiu!". I fully expected to like him as much as I liked Xing Jiu. Boy, was I in for a shock. Ning Qian Yi is one of this series' many manipulative plotters, and unlike Fu Yuan and Fu Chou he doesn't have the threadbare excuse of wanting revenge. He's just a power-hungry creep. My reaction to his death was an emphatic "Good riddance!".

Unfortunately the series has its implausible moments. The idea that Lin Shen could convincingly impersonate Fu Chou for an extended period of time, around people who know the real Fu Chou, just by wearing a mask is utterly ludicrous. (Hen Xiang impersonating Rong Le is marginally less ridiculous.) And Rong Le's hair randomly turning white in the middle of the series, then just as randomly reverting to black a few episodes later, makes no sense when you think about it.

As mentioned earlier, Fu Chou's redemption is very abrupt. He learns the truth about his birth and almost overnight goes from trying to kill Wu You to fighting alongside him. That's the least believable part of the story. Okay, so it's near the end of the series, so maybe the director thought there wasn't time to show Fu Chou's change of heart. But it still stretches my suspension of disbelief almost to breaking point.

Apart from those minor quibbles I generally enjoyed this series. It's quite good, if you don't try to make sense of certain plot twists.

Is it available online?: The whole series was on YouTube with English subtitles when I first started watching it, but now most of the episodes have been deleted. You can probably still find all the episodes somewhere; I'm just not sure where.

Rating: 7/10.