L13

I love me an angsty romantic sageuk about unhappy aristocrats. The last one we got was what, Bossam? Does Bloody Heart count? There was too much boring palace bullshit in that one, and obviously The Red Sleeve was all about boring palace bullshit and the romance didn't appeal to me. Everything else has been in the 'fusion sageuk' genre that sugarcoats historical fiction, makes the characters too childish or modern and puts a pink filter on everything.

Anyway, a proud woman humbled by misfortune and a cold schemer who gets his plans wrecked by love? COUNT ME IN. I'm not even gonna complain when the ML inevitably turns out to be a secret prince.

I'm still on episode 1, but I have to say I like this Xu Qin a lot more. I understand her characterisation in the webnovel is a frank depiction of a person with depression and various other reasons to be unhappy, and that's fine with me, but her singleminded obsession with Song Yan when she's so unwell falls on the side of concerning rather than romantic for me. I can enjoy their interactions more (which is after all the goal of the story, which is a romance rather than a more elevated psychological novel that might leave you with conflicted feelings about the leads' relationship on purpose) when she's got her life together a bit more and isn't, like, stuck in an endless dissociative episode. I hope the drama will give her some friends too because she's so terribly isolated in the webnovel that it feels she has absolutely nothing going on in her life except for trying to get back together with SY. She's a shell of a person basically, and I don't think a relationship is enough to fix that.

Thank you!

Are we expecting the English subs to be up immediately or a couple of hours after the episodes are released?

Are the subs on dramacool ripped from MangoTV?

I read a rumour on Twitter (I know...) that this is slated to come out in July. Let's see! I'm so hyped.

I'm 20 minutes into the first episode and I already hate Sanyoung's mother. She doesn't work and depends on her daughter for everything, she lost all their money to scammers AND needed to be consoled about it by SY as if she's the child in their relationship, on that note she makes everything about herself like when she needed reassurance from SY that it was okay for her to keep freeloading, AND she selfishly told SY her ex-husband was dead simply because she didn't want to talk to him, thus preventing SY from having any kind of relationship with her father even after she became an adult? WTF?

Seriously, is the mother the evil demon?

It's called queer cinema, not "a BL."

I will be seated.

When someone says they hated the first episodes of a show, there’s usually zero reason to assume they’ll like the rest of it.

No, I totally get what you're saying. The progression of his feelings renders the first part of the drama kind of pointless; if he was always going to like a girl like Sang Zhi if he met her as an adult, why does it matter at all that they used to know each other or that she loved him as a child?

A more complex relationship between them as adults where Jiaxu works through the fact he used to view Sang Zhi as a younger sister instead of immediately turning on the charm would have been more interesting AND romantic. Because SZ's past does matter and forms the basis of their relationship, so JX not caring about it at all is kinda weird.

My take on the debate over Jiaxu’s feelings for Sang Zhi in the first part of the drama is this: it’s undeniable he flirts with her at times—there are many times he treats her in a way he wouldn’t treat a younger boy, like when he writes her a letter about how happy he was to see her or when he tells her she looks like a puffer fish when she’s eating and asks her to give him her lollipop (hello?!)—but it’s a totally safe and purposeless flirting. The fact he doesn’t even realise she likes him when she’s so obvious about it and he always comes up with a benign explanation for her behaviour shows the thought of them actually doing something together hasn’t occurred to him. I don’t even think he knows he’s flirting with her at times, and he certainly sees her as a child, not a prospective romantic interest. But the subconscious beginnings of an attraction are there.

ENOUGH

This sounds like When the Weather Is Fine meets a 50-episode family drama from 2017.

The first episode was pretty draggy and empty. Fewer flashbacks and more scenes with side characters would have been nice; a TV show has the time to make the world of a webtoon feel lived in (since romantic webtoons tend to focus on the main characters and not flesh out background characters, settings and motivations or have complex plots and relationships), but they didn’t even try to do that here. ML’s dead mother, check, FL’s deadbeat father, check, ML’s childhood trauma, check, FL’s conveniently loyal and obedient guardian figure out of nowhere, check. Every plot point and character is established so hastily, without any emotional depth. For an episode in which nothing really happened, it actually rushed through the important stuff in a way that prevented me from getting emotionally invested.

Also I like the heroine, but after reading the webtoon I was really hoping the drama would infuse the ML’s character with some charisma to match the FL, but instead they toned down his already bland personality and made him a complete cardboard cutout of a love interest. I’ll keep watching for now, but I can already tell I’m going to lose interest in the drama before it ends.

A deadbeat cheating father who was a burden to the one child he raised and didn’t even raise the other one and a mother who left her baby are not a real family.

Yeah, he’s slaying in the set photos I’ve seen. He looked great in Pledge of Allegiance too! It cracks me up that people are saying he doesn’t have enough star power for LSS when he’s both hot and talented, which is a rare combo in cdramas.

I think he’ll grow on many sceptics over the course of the drama.

This trailer makes it look like the two love triangles will be big parts of the plot, which I'm not in love with... I hope they're kept to a minimum, but I know I have no chance of getting what I want in a Taiwanese drama.

That's practically guaranteed IMO.

OK, Weiting is a scumbag for filming their wedding night without telling Xin Xing, but he’s totally right to fight her over her handling of the debt situation in episode 1. And her telling him it’s her problem to deal with, so he should stay out of it pissed me off. One, this is the kind of issue you face with your spouse, and two, the loansharks came to WT’s workplace (which is surely illegal and could be referred to the police, as most of their tactics could, but anyway)! Basically, I get why he divorced her. Sure, he’s a coward and didn’t love her enough, but taking on millions of debt right after you get married for a spouse who doesn’t even want to discuss measures to mitigate the situation with you and has no plan for paying off the debt is too much to ask of most people.