Kochase

I get kind of annoyed at people labeling everything 'queer-bait'. Like, yes there are a lot of shows that stick in awkward, out of place interactions for the sake of generating some bromance imagery, but if they actually built bromance into the story, then what's wrong with them taking advantage and selling it? It's just like selling romance. They will promote / share certain scenes. No one calls it 'romance-bait', if it does flunk, then it's called bad writing.

I'm actually not sure why they categorized it as LGBTQ though? Like unless something is confirmed... or the original work was BL or something, there's no real qualifications to tag it as that?

Btw, might want to tag some of your stuff as spoilers. :)

But yeah the bromance so far is amazing. Hope it doesn't end tragically.

Oh. My god. I am so loving the female cast here (I'll usually love the male cast by default, but female is harder to love). All these powerful women oozing confidence and badassery and plain badness... never seen such a nice display of fem power! The little bits of gender role reversal are *amazing* and so refreshing. I may have come for the bromance, but wow the women are just as enjoyable to watch!

There's too many powerful / determined players here... someone is bound to lose out aren't they... *sobs*.

I honestly don't feel like it's queer-baiting. There's not awkwardly out of place interactions for the sake of generating screenshots. I mean, they certainly do take *advantage* of certain scene screenshots, but the characters also kind of just *are* that intense and it fits the storyline.

Lol who knows! Maybe the ultimate plot twist is that they *will* confess... wouldn't that be a shocker.

And yes the female rep! I'm loving the women here. The subtle not subtle gender role inversions are not lost on me. It's refreshing.

Oh my goodness am I loving all the characters! Loving all the men AND women roles here. Also, the two MLs are giving me major Harvey and Mike vibes from Suits! I love the cocky seasoned veteran + eager puppy combo... Ah...

Just please please please don't end in some massive 'everyone dies / betrays each other' tragedy or something and I'll be so happy.

I really hope the finale can be handed over to production company for UN as well... but as it is I think the Lost Tomb production group still owns the rights. Gah....

The thing is, age is kind of strange with DMBJ characters. While I'm sure they mostly got a younger actor to be able to move around more easily, I wouldn't be surprised if he actually did look younger than his years canonically. There's some faux immortality stuff going on, so it could be reasonable he looks like he's in his 60s.

Different production companies. There's a whole real world drama that went on over copyrights and whatnot. Different companies got different parts of the novel to adapt.

As for Chen Pi Ah Si...

Like, ep 19 I think?

Yeah that's fair. Well you could try machine-translating the raw Chinese then: http://www.daomubiji.org/ It's actually not awful, but definitely not great haha. You can also read the summaries here: https://strictlybromance.com/dao-mu-bi-ji-novel-summary-masterpost/

Reboot! WX and XG are still my fave, but I do put them in a separate category from the rest, because it's WX much older and Pingxie post-Ten-Years-Reunion. Quite different from pingxie prior to the Gate.

I think reboot's only problem was that it dragged. Scene cuts were too long. But the acting was phenomenal, and production value good. And yeah, I'm sad they had even less interaction than the rest of the Lost Tomb series, when it should totally be the opposite! There was actually little to no pingxie interactions originally basically through most of the events of Ultimate Note. But all the dramas ended up adding way more pingxie in that didn't exist. Whereas, reboot is after the frickin' reunion, so they're way closer, but the drama decided to mute the bromance instead. I heard there should have been a scene where XG used his blood or something to save Wu Xie or something, but that was not in the drama. :/

Yup! There's definitely some bromance. I don't think quite as much thus far as TLT2, but I also had mixed feelings about some of the bromance in TLT2 because they were kind of awkward and slightly cringeworthy.

There's definitely a Wu Xie gets injured scenario (as is tradition now lol). Not major, but some Pingxie moments for sure with Xiaoge looking after him.

Ah, yeah the translations are quite scarce for how many dramas there are. But there is merebear's translation in English (for the ones not officially translated on Amazon). Might not be as nice as reading in your native language, but it's something at least if you're up to it.

I'm a native speaker so I watched it on other Chinese sites, but you can watch it on wetv or on youtube. Links are actually in the 'where to watch' section above. Youtube is the hotspot one.

Yeah I think the script really is to blame here. If the script is bad... it's hard to act well. And Bai Shu might not be *so* phenomenal of an actor that he can make up for a bad script. Still... I think it got better in later episodes. Beginning was atrocious.

tbh I've never had hesitancy to watch a drama, only hesitancy to be hyped. Why not watch it? As long as you go in with reasonable expectations, you can drop it if / whenever you feel it's not to taste.

This definitely isn't as good as Ultimate Note, I'll say that. But eh... I still watch it. It does get better after the first few episodes.

TBF, I think they screwed up the Changbai Mountains scene in TLT2. It was super confusing and went way off script. Xiaoge losing his memories? Some randos coming in and attacking them? Wu Xie not knowing how he ended up there? It felt like they were trying to set up for something that made no sense. They derailed too hard with that. It would have been even more confusing to continue building off of that.

It was definitely kind of tedious to watch it again, but it made way more sense / followed the story better this time. This is much closer to what happened in the novels.

Reunion was shot in one go I think. The only reason it was two seasons was because come broadcast time, they were made to split. Otherwise, they would have originally been 60-70 episodes.

Ok having watched more than half of series now... it definitely got better after the first couple of episodes of dreadful script. Xiaoge is still OOC af, but I think not much worse than the previous Lost Tomb 2. The starting episodes were just too whack. I feel like the acting was definitely affected by the script. Later on, Bai Shu may not give any super compelling performances, but he makes a believable Wu Xie.

I think Wu Xie has improved a lot past the first couple of episodes... once the normal plot started moving. The whole deal with Ah Ning and co is still dumb though. And who tf is Jason... why did they introduce this rando. I'm still getting used to Xiaoge haha... his expressions are too intense. Or maybe it's just his eyebrows.

Omg fellow Doctor Who fan! Well for them though, it was built into the story. But yeah, you realize it's not the end of the world to have a changing cast.