Rating: A
Many fans of the novels and manga are eagerly anticipating the upcoming episode explaining why a frog is featured in the OP. For me, though, the most anticipated episode of this cour of the series is this one, the one which dealt most squarely with Empress Dowager Anshi and the previous Emperor. Despite one minor but somewhat important detail being left out, I am pleased to say that the adaptation fully does this part justice.
While there is a mystery here – did the previous Emperor really die of being cursed by Anshi? – the mystery part is by far the lesser and simpler part of this story. Like all of the mysteries in the series, there’s a perfectly mundane solution: The former Emperor unwittingly poisoned himself over time with the yellow paint he used in his paintings. Orpiment (a type of arsenic sulfide) was widely-used in yellow pigment across Europe and Asia (including China) up until the 19th century, but it is also toxic, and that becoming better-understood was a major contributing factor to it eventually falling out of use. If the former Emperor was regularly exposed to it while painting in a closed room over time, how his health eventually deteriorated from it is easily understandable.
But boy, what comes after that gets explained is where the real meat of the episode is. The late Emperor has previously been portrayed as a somewhat addled figure who became Emperor by process of elimination rather than because he was mentally or emotionally suited for it, and that becomes devastatingly clearer as Anshi reminisces upon Maomao discovering the late Emperor’s painting(s). He comes across here as someone who likely was mentally challenged and certainly was an artist at heart; he’s the type who probably would have been happy being left to his painting in some tucked-away pavilion in the Imperial Palace, far away from the court. That he was forced into being Emperor was, ironically, probably the worst thing that could have happened to him. That doesn’t for a minute excuse that was also unquestionably a pedophile, and many knew of it and sought to take advantage of it. The big twist here is that the Empress Dowager, by her own admission, was one of them.
Plenty about this situation could make anyone’s skin crawl: that fathers were deliberately putting their underage daughters in a predator’s path, that no one around the Emperor was discouraging this behavior, or that the girl who seems to be the biggest victim here – the Empress Dowager – put herself before the Emperor knowing full well about his predilections and with deliberate, ambitious intent to entice him. Sure, you could argue that her father was most to blame for setting up the situation under the guise of her being an attendant to a more proper-aged concubine, and perhaps for putting the idea in his daughter’s head, but she clearly acted on her own agency here. It worked, and thus we have the current Emperor.
But Anshi’s too complicated a character to be passed off as just having been a girl of driving ambitions. The way she expresses herself later in her recollections suggests that she was actually disappointed when she aged out of the Emperor’s interest range, though whether that was because she actually felt something for the Emperor is unclear. What is clear is that, even though she originally won him over with her youth, she also hated that aspect of the Emperor. She found it pathetic that he could only talk to little girls and felt disrespected that he would no longer interact with her – and so she essentially raped him to get pregnant the second time, including a full dose of vindictive psychological trauma which may have been the tipping point for him becoming a recluse. In other words, Anshi has some pretty dark skeletons, and that can’t all be explained away as her delivering justice on the Emperor for his predilections. Does it mean that the compassion she’s known for is only a veneer? Not necessarily. Weathering the challenges and dangers she did without becoming two-faced would be nearly impossible. All of this does clearly lay out why she still felt guilty about it even years after the former Emperor’s death, and like Maomao, she’s plenty willing to avoid contemplating an inconvenient truth – i.e., that she did contribute to the Emperor’s decline even if she didn’t actually kill him.
The other interesting aspect here is what, exactly, the Emperor’s hidden painting represents – or, perhaps more precisely, who it depicts as the central figure. Anshi assumes she’s meant to be his mother, the Empress, and it’s a natural assumption given how important a figure she was in his life. But he did previously paint her wearing yellow as a girl, and this mature woman is wearing a vibrant yellow, too. What does it say about the way he saw and felt about Anshi (or at least the impression she made on him) if he was intending that woman to represent the adult Anshi? And what about the symbolism that the woman’s yellow is what did him in? Why Anshi doesn’t even want to think about that is not hard to understand.
The minor missing detail I mentioned at the beginning is the omission of the explanation for why yellow was Anshi’s default color in her younger years. The novel and manga both explain that it’s because Anshi’s homeland was known for its trade in tumeric, a derivative of which is used for yellow pigment. Granted, this is more a curiosity than a necessary detail, but working it in somehow would have been nice. Otherwise the episode does an excellent job of handling its potentially very tricky subject matter.
USA Anime 