Tear Jerker / Ruyi's Royal Love in the Palace

• In episode two Hongli tells Ruyi that he'll protect her and won't let her suffer again. He spends the rest of the series breaking this promise.
• Ruiji's child dies minutes after his birth and Hongli orders him to be buried immediately. Ruiji doesn't find out her baby is dead until after he's been taken away, and she never even gets the chance to see him.
• After her baby's death Qiying holds a piece of clothing she made for him and cries because he never got to wear it.
• The women in the Cold Palace have been there for so long they've lost their grip on reality. Some of them mistake Ruyi for the emperor. One of them, a former concubine of the previous emperor, believes she's only been there a few years when it's actually been closer to thirty years. And one of them is seen cradling what’s obviously an empty blanket in her arms and acting as if she’s soothing her baby.
• Yongzhang essentially becoming the unfavorite son after Langhua's funeral. It doesn't help how his younger brothers, Yongcheng and Yongqi, surpass him in intellect and skills that cause Hongli to favor them more which leads to him ignoring or get unreasonably mad at his current oldest son. The only times he finally gives Yongzhang more attention is when Yongcheng's actions were suspicious and he had a child. Even after he dies from the stress which was ultimately from Chun's death, his death is the only one of all the children who died his father doesn't even mourn since he was too concentrated on Xiangjian.
• Even though she's done plenty of evil stuff that guarantees a one-way ticket to the Cold Palace at the very least, Yuyan's backstory and the reason for all the things she's done is kind of disheartening: When she was young, she worked as a palace maid for the Yu Prince, and she fell in love with him at first sight because of his smile, with him even giving her a bracelet as a gift. She had long dreamed of marrying him, but one day, she got the news that she was to be sent to marry Hongli (then 4th Prince), and she ran all the way to Yu Prince to fight back against the marriage, or at least ask him why he had accepted it. But she couldn't say a word when she had saw his face, and she just smiled and accepted being sent off to a far away country to marry a man she never met just to keep her prince happy.
  • The way she dies is just... depressing. Her title is revoked, her children have been taken away with her eldest being outright removed from the imperial genealogy as payback for her schemes to set him up as crown-prince, and he doesn't even visit her after getting married out of shame at what she's done. Then, she finds out that her beloved prince threw her under the bus and proclaimed that she's just a bastard a noble woman from Jin clan had adopted, so she never even had a chance to marry him if she wanted to, because he would never marry a fondling of unknown origins. She confesses everything she's done to Ruyi out of despair, and when Ruyi leaves, she cries and begs her to come back and tell her the letter was fake. Then, at night, she cries and talks to herself in the mirror, telling herself to be smart and never commit the same mistakes she did in the next life. Her maid finds her corpse peacefully lying down in her Korean dress, looking as if she fell asleep one last time.
• Zhen Huan's conversation with Ruyi before the latter's coronation displays just how much Zhen Huan has been through. She posits that the Emperor is not to be trusted and no woman can truly become his wife. If you haven't watched the previous installment, you may wonder why she sounds so pessimistic despite being a former consort herself. Well... after watching her series, one can really see that she's speaking from experience.
• Ruiji's death. She asks Ruyi if she looks pretty in her best clothes then happily reflects that she's finally going to see her baby.
  Ruiji: My child, your mother's coming. I don't care how others see you. Your mother cherishes you. Your mother loves you. You are always the best child to me.
  • Right before this scene, she confesses that Langhua deserves to die because Yuyan told her that Langhua was the one who killed her baby, but then Ruyi asks her why Yuyan wanted to poison her if she just informed her of Langhua’s supposed crime. Ruiji realizes that Yuyan was the one who killed her baby and is planning to kill her too to get rid of anyone linking back to her. She starts crying from the realization that the woman she trusted for years was the one behind everything bad happening to her.
• Ruyi approaches Yihuan after she finds out her baby died, and she finds her sitting on her bed patting on the blanket of an empty baby cot while smiling. Ruyi calls out for her, and Yihuan comes back to reality and cries to Ruyi that she is a horrible excuse of a mother because she couldn’t keep her baby alive. Ruyi tries to calm her down and feeds her soup, but she is still depressed and spends most of her days praying for her child.
• Jingsi’s death. The scene switches from Jingsi happily playing on a wooden horse with her nannies and family in the garden to hearing loud barking and seeing Fu Gui’er’s rapidly approaching form as he pounces on Jingsi and causes her to faint. Jingsi’s weak heart is unable to handle the stress and she collapses in front of her mother, who yells at her guards to get the dog away from her daughter. Not only that, but Meiruo prematurely goes into labor from the stress. The next scene, the palace physician is clearly trying hard to revive her from her coma, while Qianlong yells at Noble Consort Jia, because her paranoia over someone coming to hurt her in her sleep caused her to acquire several guard dogs, whose barking kept sending Jingsi into fear-induced comas. Then… Qianlong hears the maids screaming for Jingse in anguish, and the physician comes out of Ruyi’s palace to mournfully declare Jingsi’s death. Everyone except Hongli (who stares in shocked horror) bow down and cry over her death.
  • Later, Ruyi is seen in cataconic shock sitting on her bed and tidying up her daughter’s clothes. Everyone is trying to get her to talk but she just asks why it had to be her daughter, as her daughter was already weak due to her heart condition. She asks why it couldn’t have been her instead as she cries, and Hailan puts her head next to Ruyi’s in solidarity.
  • Adding to this, Yongji is indirectly the reason his sister died at 3 years old. The clothes Jingse wore had Yuyan’s scent on them, and Fu Gui’er for whatever reason immediately rushed to Jingse and scared her, quiet literally, to death. The poor boy just wanted to let his sister wear her favorite colours…
• After Ruyi miscarries Yongjing, Hongli refuses to be the bearer of bad news and leaves the harem women to break it to Ruyi when she wakes up. Hailan regretfully tells Ruyi the child didn’t survive the labor, and Ruyi looks at the ceiling in silence before breaking out in choked sobs as the knowledge of her losing her child for the second time sets in.
  • Later, Hongli comes in and tells her that the miscarriage was her fault because of some lies the Astrologists cooked up about Ruyi’s fate being too much that it killed her child. Ruyi literally lost her child not too long ago after hours of painful labor induced by Nanny Tian, and the last thing she needed was to be told that something out of her control was her fault.
• Xiangjian’s arrival to the palace. Her father gives her up to a man she has never met in her life and forces her to abandon her fiance, who dies chasing after her and accidentally setting off an avalanche. She doesn’t have time to grieve before she is forced to meet the Emperor and has to preform a dance for him while he watches. She attempts suicide and fails, and her days are spent in a palace she doesn’t want to live in being drowned in unwanted gifts and constantly harassed by Hongli who tells her to get over it and accept being his woman. And it’s not helped by the other harem women cursing her behind her back and calling her a witch and a seductress. She only relents when Ruyi convinces her to do it for her tribesmen, and she cries on her first night serving. The poor girl is stuck in a nightmarish hell she never wanted to be in.
• Luyun’s death. She dies wanting to see her son in Xiefang Hall one last time, but she knows she can’t because it’s so far away, and she doesn’t have the energy. She apologizes to Yongzhang for failing to protect him, and collapses. The next scene, everyone in her palace, and Wanyin, are crying in her room. Wanyin tearfully asks why she had to leave, because now she has no one close to talk to. Just as Kexin runs to inform Ruyi, she enters Luyun’s palace to give her her coronation clothes. When informed, she just walks slowly to Luyun’s bed, and stares at her in anguished silence. Luyun was one of Ruyi’s oldest friends from the old Prince manor, and she never doubted her innocence when Ruyi was accused of the cinnabar poisoning and the affair. Now she is gone, too, and Ruyi never got to say goodbye. Not even 3 months later, Yongzhang died from despair over his mother’s death.

• Pretty much any of the princes’ deaths. They were brought up and raised solely to be used as pawns by their mothers, and the ones that weren’t used and were loved by their mothers were either killed by someone else to get rid of competition or as revenge, or ignored because their mother is not favored and so their father focuses more on the “outstanding” sons:
  • Yonglian’s death. His mother’s paranoia that Ruyi is out to get her causes her to put so much pressure on him to be outstanding because he’s the legitimate son and thus has to look far better than his siblings. In the end, he has an asthma flare up because of reed flowers in his bedroom and dies from suffocation in his sleep. Then Hongli hears Langhua screaming their son’s name after she finds him dead.
  • Yongcong’s death. The poor child contracted pox from Xiyue’s maid after her death out of a desire to get revenge for her old mistress. Langhua is seen standing by the palace gate where he is being treated, and her servants are obviously worried for her since she sat there for days without eating. Sulian tries to cheer her up by saying that the child will pull through, but then the physician tearfully shouts:
  “Seventh Prince has died!”
  • Yonghuang’s stress gets to him after Langhua’s funeral and he ends up so sick that he spends most of his days bedridden and refusing medicine. Ruyi sees him one last time, and he cries and apologizes for scheming against her and tells her who told him that Langhua killed his mother, then collapses. Ruyi calls for the physician, but he tells her Yonghuang has died. She just stares at him while crying calling his name one last time before accepting Yonghuang's dead.
    • Hongli's reaction to Yonghuang's death shows a genuine look of regret and sadness. When Ruyi and Hongli talk alone after his death, this is one of the moments where Hongli is being true to himself. He did love Yonghuang, he had to show coldness to him because he never forgot how his son showed he wanted to be Crown Prince in Langhua's funeral. But he was his first child and he mourns the fact that his child died before him. He even keeps a keepsake of Yonghuang's mother showing he did have some affection for her before her death.
  • 10th Prince. He and his mother truly didn’t deserve anything that happened to them because of a jealous Yanwan that thought of them as competition and a threat to her future. He is sent away from his mother to live with other people, and his recovery is slow and turbulent before succumbing to a cold that dragged on for too long, and his mother doesn’t even get to see him before he dies because of the situation with Hengchuo.
  • Yongzhang dies because of the absolute mountain of stress he had to endure trying to stay in his father’s good graces while simultaneously avoiding angering him for any slight misdemeanor. Last he was seen, he was crying on his bed and calling to his mother, saying that his father has abandoned him. He dies 3 months after his mother, and his father doesn’t even bother to grieve either of them.
• After the scene where Hongli gives Ruyi a harsh slap for giving Xiangjian contraceptives, He is reprimanded by Zhenhuan for going too far and tells Ruyi to stand up, saying she did nothing wrong. Ruyi stands up, and she is clearly clenching her jaw and taking deep breaths so she won’t cry from the pain. When she is leaving the pavilion, she takes a moment to turn around and silently gesture for Hailan to not follow her, and Hailan stands there in anguish watching her leave.
• Ling Yunche getting turned into a eunuch because of petty rumors. The man did everything he could, and fought for justice, but all he got in return was Yanwan spreading rumors out of jealousy and Hongli taking out his anger on him. He is sent to Ruyi’s palace to work for her, and Ruyi starts crying heavily when no one is looking. And Hongli keeps humiliating him, even accusing him of stealing something from the palace just so he could have the excuse to demote him down to a dust-cleaning eunuch.
  • When Yunche is walking around one day, Yongji stops him and orders him to kneel, then slaps him. The reason? He is unable to understand why Yunche is the way he is now, why his father is acting cruel, and why his mother just stopped talking out of exhaustion at this situation. He questions why everyone around him is changing, and starts crying. All Yunche could do is just hug him and tell him to not be afraid.
  • Sanbao is forced to kill his friend Yunche. As he prepares for the execution he's crying and promises Yunche he'll burn incense and bow in his memory every year.
  • When Yunche takes his last breath, Hailan is seen crying over the choice she had to make. It was either letting Hongli keep taking his sadistic pleasure out on both Yunche and Ruyi, or execute Yunche (who was okay with it) to end the rumors. The man saved her sister on multiple occasions and she is forever grateful to him, so the pain of having to end his life is unbearable.
• Ruyi's death. She is last seen sitting outside in her courtyard, having some tea, and Rong Pei asks her to come inside as it is cold. Ruyi dismisses the thought, and asks Rong Pei to sit down and have some tea. Rong Pei is surprised, and says that it is forbidden by the palace rule. Ruyi does not care and allows her to sit down. Ruyi reminisces about the day she met Rong Pei, and the latter says that Ruyi saved her life and is eternally grateful. Ruyi, again, reminisces about the first time she entered the palace, when Hongli asked her to marry him. Ruyi imagines what it would be like if the people who died in her life, like her fellow concubines and children, were still alive and chatting with her as she does now. She sends Rong Pei to put on a new pot of tea, but when Rong Pei comes back, she sees Ruyi slumped over in her seat, her hand barely clutching the fan she was waving moments prior, and a letter meant for Yongji on her table. Rong Pei realizes that her mistress has died and falls to the ground with a heartbroken face, and Jinbao later says that she committed suicide to follow her mistress.
  • Hongli learning of Ruyi’s death. Before she departed, he decided to go on a trip with some of his guards and concubines to a hunting ground, after Ruyi refused to come along. He wakes up one morning, and learns from Jinbao that Ruyi died from her tuberculosis. Muping bluntly states that Ruyi’s death was her fault, because she was so mad at him that she refused to drink the medicines he sent, and he yells at her to shut her mouth since this matter does not concern her, and when Jinbao asks about the funeral preparations, Hongli angrily asks him what is he talking about, and orders everyone out of his room. He then collapses on his bed and anguishly ponders the circumstances of Ruyi’s death, since he last saw her alive and well.
  • Ruyi’s funeral. Everyone is pained by her departure, from Sanbao, Lingzhi and Yunzhi, to the other concubines that Ruyi befriended. Wanyin tearfully asks why she had to leave them, Meiruo states that since Wei Yanwan got her just desserts, Ruyi should’ve been able to enjoy the rest of her life, and Xiangjian calmly asks why everyone is sad, since Ruyi is probably happier in the afterlife and gets to be with her young lover. But Hailan… Hailan is just silently crying throughout the funeral. Out of all the women in the palace, Hailan probably loved Ruyi the most since she was the one who defended her against Xiyue when she accused her of stealing coal, and told her to stand up for herself when Ruyi was confined to the Cold Palace. And yet, Ruyi didn’t even tell her she was sick and kept it a secret as to not distress her. Ruyi’s death most likely hit her the hardest.
  • Ruyi’s letter to Yongji. She knew she was dying soon, so she wrote to Yongji a letter telling him not to be saddened by her death, since she was going to be freed from the clutches of being an empress, and sincerely wishes for Yongji to be free as well and to be able to do what his heart wants instead of what other people want. Hongli tells his son to hold on to the letter, since it’s the only thing he can remember his mother by.
• Hongli meets the painter who painted his portrait with Ruyi, and tells him to redo the painting, since Ruyi cut off her side and burnt it before her death. The painter sincerely explains that he can’t do that, since the painting was done when Ruyi and Hongli were in the deepest of their love, to the point that he held her hand despite the fact it was against the rules, and he can’t paint the same situation when Ruyi and Hongli fell out of love and he started choosing other people’s sides over her’s.
• Hongli walks the same path he and Ruyi used to walk on in their younger years and remembers when he and Ruyi still loved each other, when he first saw her after their wedding, and when she stated that the phrase she loved him saying to her most was “Do not worry”. Hongli collapses on a railing and can’t help but cry over losing the one person who loved him most, who loved him past his title as Emperor, who never even wished to be roped into the fiascos of the harem, and the one person he began to distrust when the other women started rumors about her.

---