Yellen:

To My Star

for a moment i read this as To My Shore =)) sorry, just woke up, my eyes are still half-closed =D

Portugalia67:

I'm not sure I want to go that road…

I understand you. The most famous chinese "bromances" The Untamed and Word Of Honor are very long (50 x45min) and are costume dramas so if you are not familiar with xianxia or wuxia (I still cannot be bothered to learn the difference) they are difficult to follow. I saw them both and I did not like any. I loved the music in The Untamed. That's all.

I never wanted to watch either of those, but as I was a part of a challenge where we had to watch dramas outside our comfort zone, I watched The Untamed. I started it and could not make heads or tails of it: it was incomprehensible so I dropped it. At the same time I managed to find a good translation of the book and read it. The translator did a great job with it since they explained every cultural references that appeared in the book. And they were many. I never actually finished the book because around ch.105 it suddenly turns to smut: up to that point it is a gentle love story in the midst of magic, battles and conspiracies. I was completely thrown by the change of tone! Anyway, it helped me immensely to finish watching the drama because I finally understood all the different names, clans etc.etc.

You need to build the stamina for these dramas!

Indie Art Girl:

This is funny to me cuz I love Wuxia and Xiania

The thing is, I had never watched c dramas before The Untamed so the whole xianxia/wuxia universe was a mystery to me. That's where the book came in handy: it explained every relationship, the whys and whereofs of the mythology and made the drama clearer. While I usually hate the horror and the gore, strangely enough it did not bother me as much here (or in Spirealm for that matter). I did not hate The Untamed insomuch as I could not understand the appeal which probably stems from my ignorance of the genre. And the length! But I simply adored the music and this drama became the only drama I ever watched where I never skipped intros and outros. Silver linings!

Indie Art Girl:

Where did you find it?

One of those translation groups had posted it on their site.https://exiledrebelsscanlations.com/novels/grandmaster-of-demonic-cultivation/ I think it was this one! And it is unexpectedly still there. I thought they'd have taken it down by now. But, apparently the official translation by Seven Seas publishers is completely botched with entire paragraphs missing etc. so they must have left it up for that reason.

Sunny_xo:

My first one was TharnType. I was watching Falling into your smile on Viki Rakuten as it was airing (so it was deffo some point during COVID), and while scrolling through the app, I saw TharnType. I wasn't going to watch it at first, but the description seemed interesting, so I gave it a go. It was pretty good, and it got me into BL, but the series that made me fall in love with BL was probably 2gether and SOTUS

I started late with BL (1,5 years ago) and I've been slowly trying to catch up with all "famous" BL series from before 2023. I've heard many positive feedbacks about SOTUS and 2gether, so it's on my PTW list already. TharnType, I watched it a few weeks ago and I really have an issue with this one: I liked the pairing a lot (you can see it with my profile picture) but the toxicity in their relationship really made me inconfortable. I may have liked it some years ago, but I'm now fully hermetic to any type of physical or mental violence. On the other side I watched the first special ep of TharnType yesterday, and I fond it pretty good: as it's a single ep, the story has only a small development and the relationship was pretty healthy. So I may give the season 2 a go after I finished Perfect 10 Liners and 2-3 older "healthy" series ;-)

Anyway TharnType (and a lot of other super well known series) would definitively need its own discussion thread as there is so much to discuss about this one.