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Looking for a little Baihe in your Wuxia? Let me recommend Cage of Shadows, which you can watch with English subtitles right now on Youtube.

The story dumps you right into the middle of itself, and the official synopsis is uniquely unhelpful, so let me edit both into a more chronological format. 

Nan Yanzhi is a young woman whose mother has been imprisoned in the infamous Lingya Tower, where women are sentenced to participate in Life and Death contests for the pleasure of male customers. Those who lose may die in any number of ways. One of those ways is to be poisoned slowly so that one effectively becomes a statue occupied in a typical activity. When she was younger, Yanzhi encountered a martial artist by the name of Zhuang Wujiu, who takes her as a disciple. When Yanzhi learns that the antidote to her mother’s illness is in Lingya Tower as well, Yanzhi commits a crime to be setn there. 

There, among the other women forced to fight to the death in various rigged games, Yanzhi meets Dao Niang a former noble’s daughter, Jiang Man, a washerwoman whose husband sold their child to pay off his bets, so she killed him, and Tuya, a centurion of the Chilan, a fierce fighter. She also meets her old teacher, Wujiu, who appears to be working for the ruler of Lingya Tower. 

The entire story could not work if the men were not vile. Every man here is rapacious, a liar, betrayer and ultimately pathetic, stupid and weak. In fact, it’s basically a feminist tract that men cannot be trusted even if they appear to be decent, they are all bullshit when it comes down to it. That is certainly a position I did not expect in a Chinese period fantasy. But it is an inescapable position the story takes, and repeats over and over as we learn why women are here in Lingya Tower. Women who work for Lingya have been violated, sold as chattel to men, then given a chance to work for their captors to gain back a grain of their agency.

Of these stories, the hardest is that of a famous historian, who is set up and sold to Lingya where she is repeatedly sold to rapists before being given a chance to run a “school” that functions as one of the Life and Death contests. If you ever though that Joo Dee from Avatar the Last Airbender was a bit creepy, then this level of the Tower will creep you out fully. Both the acting and makeup make some hella convincing masks of the women’s faces.

At Episode 20 or so, we seem to be at our end. Having met Wujiu again, her former master confesses her own miserable story, and she and Yanzhi fight. Having failed her last contest, due to betrayal, Yanzhi and her sisters-in-arms are split. There doesn’t seem to anywhere to turn, but the final chapters bring us a great joining of all the women in the Tower who stand up against the men, successfully. 

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Yanzhi and Wujiu have a contentious, but intimate, relationship. As master and disciple, they are like parent and child. Let me digress for a moment. I spent many years studying Chinese martial arts and there were often discussions of the term Sifu (師父) for women, as the second character is that of “father.” In traditional MA, the master is respected at the level of a father, who imparts wisdom, guidance, and in some schools, (not mine) punishment. My teachers never seemed to want to be called Sifu, even when they were Chinese and, over the years, we all sort of developed an allergy to non-Chinese teachers who were called (or referred to themselves! ugh) with that honorific. During the decades I was actively training there was endless conversation about what to call masters who were women. It is unsurprising that we all defaulted to “It’s not “father”, it’s like wiser older person,” i.e, “male words are default” reasoning.

Here, Yanzhi uses Sifu for Wujiu, and their relationship is quite familial, although I might suggest Wujiu acts more like a big sister at times, and others like a lover in that comfortable pot-lust phase of a relationship. The most intimate moment between them comes before they head back into the Tower one last time. They eat and drink together, imagining their lives without Lingya Tower and the multitudes of betrayals by men. Yanzhi says to Wujiu, let us pretend this one night that there is no Tower, no betrayal, no Life or Death… just us. Then they go in and, after a few Uno reverses, lead a rebellion. It was solid stuff. ^_^

This scene is shown twice. The first time I was saying “say  ‘just us'” over and over, but the final words were translated as “just Master and disciple.” Which I thought fair. In the final episode, it was translated as “just us” and I cheered. ^_^

The opening and closing credits are basically the whole story in short, so I knew we’d get a few scenes of spinning with swords (which passes for foreplay in danmei so often ^_^). 

Overall, a fun series that was worth watching all the way through. Very light strokes of Baihe,  but I 100% loved that Yanzhi was never a shrinking flower and we had Tuya, a full-blown woman fighter. By the end, all the women are wielding weapons with some well-earned bloodlust and that worked fine for me.

Ratings: 

Cinematography – 7 solid, a little reuse of footage
Story – 7 Messy af, full of double-and triple crosses and rigged “contests”
Characters – Men-0, Women-9, coincidentally, bascially the same as the number of survivors. (Not, really, but yeah)
Service – 5 In that coy “we know what you mean way, lots of “hurh hurhurh” laughing and implication of torture and rape
Baihe – 5 mostly subtext, but still there

Overall – 8

Very pretty costumes and very fantasy weapon use, and a few looks full of emotion and longing. Cage of Shadows worked for me.