Kochase

Omg QQZ and LB are like... the most tropey romance dynamic setup (except it's not a romance). 🤣 I did *not* expect that amount of CP potential going into this. I won't elaborate for fear of spoilers, but it was so worth the emotional investment haha.

For anyone looking for bromances... this is definitely it. It's a slow burn and mostly plot and cases, but... it's solid. Bromances in all the directions.

The number of fics on Chinese Tumblr is exploding for Qiubing for a reason though.

Lol this series is so good, so real, believable, and natural (which is very different from most BLs, which always contain a slight amount of that 'ideal, pretty BL scenes' vibe). It's so good that I'm struggling to enjoy it 100% hahahaha because like... man do I feel Wei Qian's whole dilemma and as an older sibling figure myself, I feel every inch of discomfort he's feeling during this conflict... yikes. It's a little too realistic with no room for air-brushing idealism and now I can't get over Wei Qian's sense of panic and rejection. I'm so curious how the... transformation of the plot will happen but man I'm not sure I can come around to it since they did such a good job channeling all that super believable older brother energy into Wei Qian!

I can't believe I'm actually wishing for crappier writing for once 😭. Oh well... I'm sincerely hoping to be proven wrong. And I still plan on watching it till I can't. But holy crap this feels too uncomfortable because like... when you're an older sibling that's practically like a parent, you just... really can't think about them that way. Ahhhhh I want my bubble of idealized, detached from real life BL back lol. At least with those, I can fast forward through the cringe moments. But with this series... every moment is such superb acting and strong emotions that I CAN'T so I just suffer through it...

It's childhood sweethearts -> 'enemies' -> lovers trope. Again, not romantic by canon, but that would be the ship dynamic.And if this were a boy girl... even if the romance wasn't in canon, no one would doubt this was the relationship trope.

The characters are great, and there was a deeper 'bromance' than I expected. The part that was bad was the CGI, the narrative editing was definitely a bit choppy or certain parts didn't quite make total sense... but vibe wise it was a spot on bromance. And if you want a spoiler as to the kind of ship-worthy bromance it is...

I hadn't realized how much I craved having a confident MC until this drama. Most BLs like to have a lacking confidence / shy / nobody / tsundere MC, and boy was this refreshing!

Also, the transition from 'haha funny game premise' to something more serious was done wonderfully. I find a lot of webnovels with that sort of premise struggle to do that well.

Right? Like it's so sad like in an almost pathetic / pitiful sad way... LJS basically spent 30 years unable to move on and creating everything from scratch.

Yeah I really want to knock my brain in the direction of just like... embracing that the NPCs 'magically' manifest into real human beings. I think maybe if they stuck more to the novel ending, I can go along with it more easily. But poor baby LJS spending 30 years creating that world is just like... sad in a way where we look at alzheimer patients and feel sad and I really hate that. Ugh. Can't they have just 'magicked' RNZ alive instead. I'm ok with veering into the supernatural. This whole 'he's just data' is too depressing.

Lol I'm more willing to believe they just hand-waved the details than it being intentionally multiverse haha. It felt a bit Alice in Wonderland, bordering-on-supernatural sort of vibes.

Novel ending, I didn't read either. I just sort of searched reddit for posts about the ending. But it sounds like in the novel, it was a HE where RNZ became 'real'. But the whole story sounded like it took place in the 12th gate, where RNZ was the guardian. He had just fallen in love with LJS as he was making his way through the gates and was sad that the other was so lonely, so RNZ reset their memories or something so that he could go through the doors with LJS. But yeah idk the deets.

Ngl... I don't really know what to make of the ending. I know this was different from the novel. But I firmly see NPCs as just data. I'm vacillating between seeing RNZ being a NPC as a beautiful poetic tragedy vs just it ruining the whole dynamic altogether. I can't help but see it as also a 'sad' story of a lonely gamer who fell in love with a virtual character... which we very much kind of frown upon irl.

Gah, I want to lean fully into the tragic romance of it all, but I really can't unsee that element of like... getting too deep into VR. Sentience is such an interesting topic in VR, and I'm of mindset that whether or not the characters can be considered sentient is less important than how we the humans choose to respond to them. If a 'character' acts fully human, I do think it's important to treat them similarly (otherwise what does that mean for us as human beings). However, I don't see the 'character's emotions as anything more than good mathematical modeling. So in this case... LJS's emotions are real, and his 'time' with RNZ is also real... but RNZ's emotions are just data. And that just makes the story sad to me in a way that's not a tragic romance... but just like... a sad life for LJS.

Not sure what others think, but I feel like my involvement in tech is ruining this story a bit for me :(

As someone involved in the tech world... (spoiler thoughts below):

Yeah I'm wondering myself. The novel has a different ending, but I think what the drama ending was going for was that this was all a hallucination of his? (But yeah the whole ensemble was there unexplained though) But seems like he actually had to build the VR world himself and reconstruct the characters.

Maybe some random element of supernatural / unexplained phenomena... lol.

More accurately, I'd translate it as:
RNZ: Don't worry. I will protect you... protect you for a lifetime. Regardless of whether it's your lifetime... or my lifetime.

Can you highlight the differences for the ending? Reading some reddit posts, it sounds like in the novel, RNZ is the 12th door guardian and this whole story actually takes place in the 12th door? Basically, LJS had already gone through all the doors by himself, but then RNZ fell in love with him and made them re-live all the doors, but this time with RNZ be his side (because he didn't want him to be lonely?) But if his role as the guardian is to keep the players staying in the fictional realm... what exactly happened at the end? He just came clean and let him leave?

Whereas in this drama, it looks like they opted to pretend like the 12th door never existed at all, that the whole thing was a hallucination by LJS? But then he later actually created the whole VR world and came 'back' to the friends from the fictional reality?

But that's my point - the duration gets it classified differently with different restrictions. The reason Stand By Me was okay was because it was much shorter. There's less restrictions as a result.

It was much shorter episodes and shorter overall duration... although I think iQiyi tried to take a similar approach, it does very clearly feel more like a full length drama than Stand By Me, which is more like a movie.

Yup I realized later haha. I totally forgot he'd introduced himself as that before

I... somehow totally missed RNZ getting introduced as 'Bai Jie' initially and didn't understand the joke for a huge portion of episodes 17-21 hahahaha. Thought it was the other lady in the group. Hilarious.

Are you sure? Just because it got pulled doesn't mean it didn't pass censorship review. Dramas get pulled for a number of reasons. There's the 'unspoken' criteria vs. the actual censorship review. My understanding is that most dangais right now are stuck at the unspoken criteria. A lot of them have passed the official censorship review, but the officials just basically still don't want dangais to air and so make up a lot of retroactive BS to get things pulled. Or they don't give a reason whatsoever. That's why iQiyi dropped it to 20 minute episodes too, was to hopefully get it categorized differently.

Lol somehow I completely missed when they introduced him as Bai Jie? When did LJS learn about this?

omg haha I'm a little surprised this passed censorship. RNZ has such major protective / possessive vibes over LJS like woooow. So many girls getting shoved aside thanks to his shamelessness. 🤣

Supposing it's true.... I don't see how the platforms haven't realized... that the more dangai gets released, the more they *all* benefit. Like... do they think we're anywhere /close/ to satiating our dangai needs? The more we watch, the more we crave. They should be colluding to ride each others' coat tails is what.