[Mainland Chinese Drama 2017] Ode To Joy 2 欢乐颂 2

[nectarous]

I'm so pleased that Fan Jie finally stood up to her brother, and by proxy, her mother. Clearly, the lawsuit was merely a scare tactic to get Fan Jie to fall in line and go back to giving her freeloading family the majority of her paycheck so none of them have to work honest jobs and continue to exploit the person they emotionally neglected all her life. Once it was pointed out that not only is Fan Jie willing to go to court, but Brother Fan would soundly lose because Fan Jie has a long paper trail of the money she's given and where it all went and she could call a legion of witnesses to the family's antics: the neighbors that practically lock their doors and pretend they're not home when Mother Fan comes around, the girls of the 22nd floor, Wang Bai Chuan's parents, etc. Never mind that Brother Fan and his equally useless wife have criminal records and Brother Fan has a trail of lost jobs behind him due to his incompetence and violence.

Once Brother Fan realized that his sister finally grew some ovaries and that he doesn't even have a floor to stand on, let alone a leg, of course he dropped the lawsuit. He doesn't want it to become legally mandated that Fan Jie no longer has to provide money (or the courts deciding that their continued abuse and exploitation of Fan Jie means they have to start repaying her all the money she's given them over the span of at least a decade). But as it is, he finally pushed too far and caught her on a bad day (for him) and now ensured that the useless now have to live on a paltry pension of a man barely hanging on to life.

I'm glad to see this character growth from Fan Jie. She was getting frustrating to watch because she constantly cowed to her family instead of standing up and challenging this idiotic notion of blind filial devotion to the family, no matter how much they abused you and favored the perennial screwup because of gender. I mean, we do have similar ideas in the USA (and Canada) to the point that some states/provinces have filial financial obligation laws where the adult child(ren) are financially on the hook for their parents' elder care if the parents didn't make proper arrangements previously, even if that parent abandoned or abused their children. That's going to bite everybody in the richard simmons. There's already been a case where two women intentionally withheld painkillers from their cancer-stricken father because it turned out he sexually abused them as children and they were put in charge of his care. I predict elder abuse is going to make its way to the forefront in the next decade or so.

Anyhoo.

I'm a little annoyed it took until the last couple of episodes of the second season to finally get more insight on QXX's life growing up and why she acts the way she does. I love that Dr. Zhao laid it all out for her parents and heaped an impressive guilt trip upon them. I mean, Elder Qu went too far, being willing to send his wife and daughter into the financial abyss to once again rescue the perennial screwup son. No wonder Qu Lian Jie feels like he can keep doing what he's doing; he knows that no matter what he does, Daddy Dearest is going to bail him out. He lost literally millions with his ineptitude and laziness and yet, he never has to deal with the consequences.

I'm glad this show is getting a third season. I hope everybody comes back.