Magnificent Century: Kösem + Favorite Minor Character→ Ayşe Sultan

Despite the visibly difference between the Ottoman & Chinese harems in how in the first the concubines were slaves taken from their families and in the second the concubines were girls called for an election, the reason for Anastasia and Zhen Huan to be picked have the same origin: idealization, Ahmet found peace in a potrait and Yongzheng only found happiness with his wife, and when the same girl from the potrait & a girl with a very similar face to the late empress were separated from their families to reluctlantly serve them, they kept depriving them of their own identities to treat them as those fantasies, peaceful and perfect versions of them they had built in their minds, and those young girls went from being themselves to become the purely good and obedient persons they needed to be to feel loved by those men, to find security and be cherished, manipulated enough to think everything they did was truly for the good of the people, blind to the monstrous egos that were ruinning everyone that disobeyed them, so deeply brainwashed untill reality hitted them, with Zhen Huan it's clearly the trap of the late empress' clothes, together with her family's poor situation and the care she was getting only for her pregnancy that makes her realize why is she truly so favoured, the lie she's been living in, while to Kosem the unlearning comes from an slow yet violent process after Ahmet's death, when she has to fight for her family after Ahmet didn't leave the laws to do it, when she has to realize the fantasy of pureness he had showed her, the idealization of her role in the throne, is no more than a lie that kept her unprepared for the changes and wars to come. In both cases, they gain awareness of the system and use their skills for more than helping their monarchs, they form their own separated goals and outlive them for many time, the way they chose to end with this idealization it's very different, for Zhen Huan it's a planned & very direct revenge, while Kosem's revenge it's a little bit more symbolic: after all, the person who was kept in only a potrait & an idealization everyone made of him was Ahmet, yet the complex and strong ruler who carried the weight of the empire for the rest of her life was no one else more than her.