Dykumu Ugnis

They made Baek Hee bad right from the start. And the actress did a pretty good job revealing the character’s hidden cunning behind her fake goody-two-shoes supportive tag-along side even in episode 1. By the end of episode 1 it was made plain obvious with her facial expressions, and then right at the beginning of episode 2 her prayer even spells that out.

The humour is too crude for me and the characters too cartoonish. Seven episodes and I cannot manage any more.

It seems the original novel is about the netherworld. So it would seem that all things happened to people in coma. Ruan Lan Zhu is then a creature of the netherworld. It actually makes sense that after Ling Jiu Shi wakes up he has to wait 50 years to get back to the netherworld after he dies from old age. Creating a game for 50 years is a bit too much!

After learning that the original novel is about the netherworld, many things now make more sense, especially the time gap. They did a pretty good job of transferring the story to a game world but some things seem not quite right for the game context.

It’s about 24 hours in total. I think it’s doable!

Excellently casual and casually excellent.

I’d say it’s quite worth watching for the characters other than the main couple. For some bits of the main couple relationship, too, but be ready to see the two go back and forth, forth and back, so basically with little progress in any direction.

Watching this drama I feel a psychopath. It’s basically a comedy show for me. Unnecessarily convoluted, unevenly either too rushed or too drawn out with the characters making all sorts of weird decisions, so it fails to make any real emotional impact save for bemused amusement, if I may say so.

Generative LLMs (no AI exists yet) absolutely can be rejected and avoided and even banned.

I tried to complete it but just couldn’t. Not even as backgroun noise for my crafting. The cast is passable but the script is extremely bad, which very likely did not help the cast to perform.

This drama in a nutshell: a marriage, some scheming, a dance, some scheming, some music, some scheming, another dance, again some scheming and on and on it goes. It gives me a headache, honest.

Lan Wang Ji
Well, yes. Something of the kind.

I do not expect much realism from manga adaptations. Even so, by Episode 2 of this season I was ready to give up. But then I persevered and it was a bit better after that, closer to season one in tone and mood. Character growth? Little to none, though. And the relationship of the main couple would be doomed to fail in real life. Inevitably. As would Nao's relationship with anyone, too. They say she cares about others more than about herself but all I saw was a clumsy egocentric child who has a lot of growing up to do, trapped as she was in her little delusional world.

And the relationship of the main couple was mostly driven by the people around them, with often very very bad pieces of advice.

Among the positive things is excellent acting. Everything else... well, not bad but certainly odd.

Beyond Evil
Unfortunately, watched it already. A rewatch is in my plans but not at the moment. :)

The managed to take a well-worn idea and make something pretty good of it, a few cases of flat, and perhaps even crass, humour notwithstanding.

No, not really. This kind of writing also has it’s merrits and not everything has always to be spelled out.

Noble idiots deserve to be alone.

You are welcome, fellow vertical-drama watcher.

I too wish there was a feature to save lists created by others to a tab on your own profile for future reference to have everything MDL-related on MDL, instead of having to bookmark it somewhere else.

This list is my attempt at some order and structure to track who and what in the chaotic world of vertical drama. It's a bit better today than it was back in early 2024, when I first came across this format, though!

As for the order, I prefer to keep it sorted this way. It's more or less a timeline of the first encounter for me, especially the first two pages. And it also means I can choose who will be featured on the list cover. Though a possible solution would be to add the current order as notes and then sort the list alphabetically. I don't promise to do it right away but I will think of it.

As the creator of the list I can click on Edit and then search the entire list at once but others don't have this ability, so it's indeed a limitation.

Episode 1 includes a trope that I pretty much hate. It’s called jump-to-conclusion: when people see somebody standing somewhere and immediately assume that the person did the thing they are standing next to. An appaling trope of misunderstandings.

And when you see supposedly briliant people doing this, it’s even more appaling. Because the teacher certainly is not portrayed as somebody focused only on math and math alone with no ability to navigate the world (that would be a plausible exuse).