To tell the truth, in "The Case of Di Gong of the Tang Dynasty", the author prefers the first case "The Phoenix Seal Case", and I also think that Di Renjie's character setting and narrative techniques are the most prominent in "The Phoenix Seal Case".
In "The Case of the Phoenix Seal", the director used a nested narrative structure, which made the case very brilliant. On the surface, this case is cut from the arson case of Ju Shuilou, but behind it is inextricably linked, involving the case of the loss of the phoenix seal in the palace, just like the complaint of the seemingly incompetent county order in the play, this is a fight between the gods above, don't check it again, they are all masters who can't afford to offend.
In the early days of the case, Di Renjie fought against fate and pursued justice in line with the original intention of finding a truth, but it turned out to involve a darker court dispute.
He originally thought that the Changsun Qing faction was planning to kill Zhongliang by mistake in order to bring down the queen. Then he planned the Tianhuo case, first burned the queen's beloved sycamore, and then burned the farmers who raised silkworms for the queen, and deducted the hat of a queen who was punished by heaven for her immorality, and abolished it to hinder the new policy.
But in the end, it became an infernal affair between the two factions. originally thought that the leader of the Royal Forest Army who was rebelled against was the queen's general, but Wei Wuji, who had always helped the queen openly, hated the queen's conservatives very much.
In this unpredictable Game of Thrones, it seems that the winner or loser has been decided, but what about the innocent best friend He Dajing? There are still a dozen or so innocent lives, those who are not worthy of being recorded in the history books, aren't their lives their lives? At this moment, although Di Renjie finally solved the case and pursued the truth, at this time, his belief was also shaken, what is justice? What did he pursue?
This seems to be a worthless character emotion, but it is actually the biggest highlight of this play, which gives up talking about the story from a big picture, but an equal narrative that reverses the logic of the protagonist. The foothold of the story is people, even passers-by who are not worthy of their names in the history books, their lives are still worth seeing, and their innocent lying guns are still deplorable. It is not for a greater purpose that thousands of people have become a number that is understated in the history books.
"The Case of Di Gong of the Tang Dynasty" is such an internal interlocking logic, which constitutes a story structure with rich layers. On the surface, it is about the strange cases of Di Renjie's performance of duties in various places, but behind all this, there has always been a looming game of power in the court.
Therefore, judging from the character setting and narrative structure alone, "The Case of Di Gong of the Tang Dynasty" is still quite good!