Blossoms in Adversity (2024) - Final Review

Final review/rating: Blossoms in Adversity (2024) - A heartwarming comeback tale with family at its centre and a strong heroine at the helm

This is 8.5/10 stars ✮✮✮✮✮✮✮✮ from Pandafan🐼

Overall rating:         8.5 Stars Plot:                       8 Stars Acting/cast:            8.5 Stars Couple chemistry:   8 stars Music:                    8 Stars Re-watch value:      8.5 Stars Enjoyment factor:   8.5 Stars

Blossoms in Adversity (2024) is one of the dark horses in the 2024 drama line to date. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the Hua family's heartwarming comeback tale, how much I rooted for their success, how moved I was by their losses, and how invested I was in their outcome.  

For those who despair at the preponderance of flakey c-drama heroines, the titular Hua Zhi as played by Zhang Jing Yi is a breath of fresh air, with her incisive intelligence, her courage in the face of adversity, and her visionary outlook.  If anything, Hua Zhi is a little too perfect, a few minor flaws notwithstanding. But who better to take the helm? It certainly makes for some very compelling feel-good watching.  

Undoubtedly, suspension of disbelief is needed to enjoy this drama because plot armour abounds. That said, the story is engaging and full of twists and turns, and the empowerment of women by women is an uplifting leitmotif throughout, as is the importance of family.   

While the drama is not romance focused, the main pairing of Zhang Jing Yi's Hua Zhi and Hu Yi Tian's Gu Yan Xi is also a #relationship goals portrayal of a very healthy romance.

SPOILERS AHEADS

Plot: A family adrift after a sea change in their fortunes and a capable heroine takes the wheel

For a spoiler free synopsis, see mine 👉here. 

The drama is about the Hua family and their comeback tale, for which a nautical metaphor is quite fitting. When Imperial Minister Hua Yi Zheng dares to criticise the Emperor for neglecting to select a Crown Prince and for indulging the Security Bureau's lawless methods, this leads to a sea change in the Hua family's fortunes. The enraged Emperor forfeits the Hua family's assets and exiles all the Hua menfolk to the barren lands of the North. The women of the Hua family and their young are left destitute and rudderless. 

In the face of adversity, the eldest young lady of the Hua family, Hua Zhi (played by Zhang Jing Yi), steps up as the head of the household. Taking on the responsibility of ensuring her family's survival is no easy task. As Hua Zhi notes, it is as if she is on a ship in which the captain and crew have left, leaving only the rowdy and often uncooperative passengers in stormy waters. She has the ability to steer the ship to safety, but must convince her family to trust her vision. She also knows she can spread her wings and fly on her own, but doing so would leave her family shipwrecked.

Rather than abandoning ship, Hua Zhi takes the helm. Using all of her considerable acumen and starting with almost nothing, she builds a street vendor candied hawthorn business, which she turns into a gao dian/pastry catering business, before transforming that into a thriving high end restaurant. Cognisant of the need to educate the Hua children, Hua Zhi also sets up a school with an inspiring intellectual and physical curriculum.  

In the process, Hua Zhi ensures that her family not only survive, but thrive. She also draws them together into a close knit unit with an all-hands-on-deck ethos and a common dream - to earn the astronomical sum needed to ransom their men back so that the family can be reunited.  

Along the way, Hua Zhi meets Gu Yan Xi (played by Hu Yi Tian) and takes his neurodivergent little sister Shao Yao (played by Lu Yu Xiao) under her wing. Gu Yan Xi's secret identity is the new Commander of the Security Bureau and nephew to the Emperor, but he moonlights as a Guard and then as a Teacher at the Hua school. Love blossoms between Hua Zhi and Gu Yan Xi as they weather many storms together. 

But their hopes for a shared future and the Hua family's dreams of reunion are put in jeopardy by an Emperor who cannot brook any hint of divided loyalties, perceived or otherwise, in Gu Yan Xi, his beloved nephew and deadliest sword...   

Strengths: A moving family and female-centric tale

One of this drama's great strengths is the moving portrayal of the Hua family's comeback tale, which is told in an engaging and 'page turning' way.

The side characters are well cast and the ensemble cast includes a number of older veteran actresses (eg Liu Jia as old Madam Hua, Tian Miao as Hua Zhi's mother, Myolie Wu as 3rd Aunty, Yang Ming Na as 2nd Aunty etc) who elevate this drama beyond the usual idol c-drama fare.  

As with any large family, there are strong and weak personalities, petty rivalries, and tensions amongst the Hua women. But going through hardships as women in a man's world draws them closer, as does working collectively towards their common goal of a family reunion.  Importantly, whatever their differences, their hearts are in the right place, making the drama a much more emotionally satisfying watch then say, the recent Romance on the Farm (2023) (review👉here), where the extended family dynamics were relentlessly toxic.    

Here, the joys and tragedies the Hua women experience along the way are told in a way that will have you cheering for their every triumph (however improbable) and moved by each painful loss. I suspect there cannot have been too many dry eyed viewers when Grandma Hua passed away before a reunion was possible and the Dowager Empress came to pay her last respects to her old friend, or when Hua Rong and her unborn child failed to make it home, or when, so close and yet so far from their goal, the Emperor decrees that the Hua men are never to be ransomed.   

The empowerment of women by women is a powerful theme that runs throughout the drama.  To mention but a few instances, this ranges from Hua Zhi returning the indenture papers of all the maids and concubines offering them both freedom and choices; to the Hua women rolling up their sleeves to back each of Hua Zhi's ventures and in doing so equipping themselves to earn their livelihoods; to them banding together to free Hua Xian from her abusive husband and helping her to secure a divorce; to the reminder to the women of the house that the Hua household will always be their home, come what may.  

Strong leads, a #relationship goals romance, and a complex villain

Central to this empowerment, is of course the titular Hua Zhi, who is a breath of fresh air and the perfect answer to those who are tired of flakey, irrational c-drama heroines that make you cringe with second hand embarrassment. 

Instead, with Hua Zhi we have an incisively intelligent heroine with an EQ that matches her high IQ, a truly visionary outlook, and courage and tenacity in spades. She is also genuinely good and kind, and as such, is a leader that earns the respect and love of her family, and inspires them to dream big with her. I particularly liked her approach to adjudicating difficult family affairs, which tempered justice with mercy. She was particularly awesome when she avenged her Grandma by publicly meting out some much needed justice to the toxic Hua Jing in excommunicating her from the Hua family (a necessary 清理門戶), and when she successfully petitioned the court for a divorce and compensation for Hua Xian.

It would be easy for such a character to be come off as an insipid Mary Sue, but Zhang Jing Yi pulls off a Hua Zhi who is truly likeable, even if she is almost too perfect. Thankfully, the drama does give Hua Zhi some flaws. Initially, she is resentful of her hapless family and seriously contemplates abandoning ship and leaving them to fend for themselves. She is also outspoken to the point of recklessness before an Emperor she knows to be capricious and in circumstances where doing so could easily endanger her entire family. In the final arc, Hua Zhi is goaded by the Emperor into saying too much, giving him an excuse to dash all of the Hua family's hopes to ransom their men, and the drama allows us to see that even Hua Zhi has a breaking point in the aftermath.        

As for the hero, Gu Yan Xi, he is, like the heroine, intelligent and formidable. Aloof stoic roles are hard to get right, but Hu Yi Tian does the duality of the character justice. He exudes danger as the masked Security Bureau Chief (and his action scenes are top notch - think lean, mean, fighting machine!), but is ever so tender and protective of his little sister Shao Yao (who, incidentally is exceedingly well portrayed by the versatile Lu Yu Xiao). 

With Hua Zhi, his eyes glow and his face takes on a subtle warmth that is only there for her, completely disproving his father's cynical take that their family does not produce romantics. I also like the intersectionality of Gu Yan Xi's duality. His hidden (and not so hidden) assists to Hua Zhi were outstanding, including when he thwarted Hua Jing's gruesome final blow to the Hua family by stealthily moving her remains and placing them outside the Song manor instead, or when he played along with the Hua women to 'pretend' to be the dreaded masked Security Bureau Commander to back their daring rescue of Hua Xian.  

Romance largely takes a back seat to the family comeback story, but it is there in sufficient quantities to satisfy the romantics out there (and indeed, there are more secondary CP pairings than you can shake a stick at - I counted at least 6 by the end of the drama in addition to our main CP, though realistically not all end up with happy endings). 

As for the main CP, Hua Zhi and Gu Yan Xi have a sweet and supportive #relationship goals romance. 

There are no aggravating green-tea characters and annoying love triangles. The second male lead, Wu Xu Ze's Shen Qi, is actually quite the gentleman and is off-screen studying for examinations for more than half the drama, and poses no serious competition for Hua Zhi's affections. Shao Yao also very much adores her Hua jie jie and wholeheartedly supports her elder brother's romance with Hua Zhi and counts herself as a Hua family member.   

There are no stupid misunderstandings between the leads either (in a somewhat meta nod to audiences tired of the misunderstanding trope Hua Zhi says to Gu Yan Xi that they can avoid this by communicating with each other). Even their brief break up is rational and necessary - to the extent that there is a 'third party' in the lead's relationship, it is the Emperor, who has a complicated hold on Gu Yan Xi.

On one hand, Gu Yan Xi is entirely aware that his Uncle is a gaslighting sociopath, whose 'love' is conditional on his unwavering loyalty (including the kind that requires him to disfigure himself so that he is no longer in the running for the throne) and on his ability and willingness to be the dirty sword in the Emperor's hands. 

But on the other, Gu Yan Xi is bound by ties of love and loyalty to the Uncle who raised him, who is more father to him than his own estranged father, and whom he knows 'loves' him, at least insofar as the Emperor is capable of love, and certainly more than he loves any of his own biological sons. (Incidentally, Hai Yi Tian's Emperor is very well done - a villain with layers who makes it plausible for Gu Yan Xi to be so conflicted, and who 'loves' Gu Yan Xi but is also capable of depriving him of his chance of happiness and of watching him being sliced to ribbons to prove a point).   

Weaknesses: Suspension of disbelief, plot armour, and a deus ex machina ending 

While I enjoyed Blossoms in Adversity (2024), it is not without its weaknesses. To enjoy this drama, a heavy dose of suspension of disbelief is needed. 

The whole starting premise is historically improbable in that if the Hua men were exiled, then there is no way the Hua women and children would have been able to remain in the capital facing only forfeiture of their assets and with access to a humbler abode.  They would have been separated and sold, with no hope of a comeback.  

Furthermore, even accepting the starting premise, the sheer scale of the Hua family's financial success within the space of a few years beggars belief (we are talking astronomical levels of profits, enough to be within a hair of their goal to ransom all their men back and/or to build a canal, 'with a little help from their friends'). The math is feel-good pie in the sky, but whose counting? I was too busy enjoying the Emperor's sour expression when Hua Zhi put his nose out of joint by coming up with enough money to build the canal.  

As for Hua Zhi, she is almost too perfect (is there anything she cannot do?) The drama would probably have been stronger if Hua Zhi was not quite as serenely competent right from the get go, and instead, we saw her making a few serious missteps before gradually growing into who she ultimately becomes as a result of her family's troubles. 

As it is, there is not much scope to show Hua Zhi's growth, and at times, the plot armour is so thick that it had me rolling my eyes. One such moment was in episode 26, when she rode a horse through a group of highly skilled assassins to save Gu Yan Xi and emerged unscathed, before arriving exactly where a rock avalanche trap was set and manages to unleash it on the assassins, singlehandedly dispatching them in one go.    

As for the final arc, I thought it too contrived and reliant on a deus ex machina ending. Second tier villains were introduced at the last minute (the foreign agent Hao Yue and Prince Hui who had a blink-and-you-will-miss-it introduction in episode 1) in order to achieve the end of killing off the Emperor so that the Hua family could reunite and so that Hua Zhi and Gu Yan Xi could have their happily ever after.  

While the happy ending is very well deserved after all that the Hua family and the leads had to endure, I could not help feeing that it was all a bit too pat. The Emperor's convenient death meant that Gu Yan Xi never really had to grapple with the stalemate that the Emperor forces on him and Hua Zhi and Gu Yan Xi's HEA basically happens by default. But to be honest, I was so happy to see the Huas reunited and to see Hua Zhi and Gu Yan Xi's HEA and the tying up of all the other loose ends, that even the contrived manner of getting there didn't really impact on my overall enjoyment.    

Final thoughts

🐼:  Blossoms in Adversity (2024) is a very enjoyable feel-good family-centric comeback drama with women at the forefront and a capable heroine at the helm.  It had me rooting for the Hua family every step of the way, moved by their tragedies and cheering on their triumphs, however improbable.  

While suspension of disbelief is needed to enjoy the drama which is heavy on plot armour, Zhang Jing Yi pulls off a Hua Zhi who is truly likeable even if she is almost too perfect - she is definitely the kind of captain that you would want steering your ship in stormy seas. Hua Zhi and Gu Yan Xi also have the kind of #relationship goals romance that had me sighing for all the right reasons, and although the ending was just a tad too convenient, the happy ever after was a welcome and satisfying one.    

All in all, an enjoyable watch!

8.5/10 stars ✮✮✮✮✮✮✮✮