Meep

This show is so goddamn frustrating. It's extremely beautiful, to the point that it's overly in love with its own visuals and scenes have the tendency to drag on almost indefinitely. This sadly dovetails into the pacing; the show's plot so far could have made for 12/13 interesting episodes but with 18 episodes clocking in at 70 minutes each it feels almost laborious sometimes. The actors and characters are great, varied and interesting, but every time I think something is about to happen it either gets resolved five minutes later or just deflates entirely.

Well, obviously Signal haha. But if you're open to non-asian Dramas I would recommend 'Broadchurch', specifically season 1. It does a lot of the same things Secret Forest did with focusing on one case throughout the season (I think it has 8 eps), great chemistry between the two leads that isn't romantic, but they just play off of each other so well. The scope is slightly different, in Broadchurch it's just about a small town somewhere on the British coast, whereas Secret Forest obviously had larger implications of corruption, but the core concepts felt very similar I think.

In other asian dramas, maybe check out the c-drama black and white, it's fairly old but well done I think, even if it has a completely different vibe.

I am totally with you on the withdrawal symptoms though. None of the new crime shows seem interesting to me haha.

This drama could really be something if we didn't spend so. much. time. on. the. effin. villains. I don't care about chen pi's stupid man pain, nor the other villains, especially not what feels like 70% of an episode's worth. Fo Ye has the most interesting character and he's spent the last few eps basically asleep >.< back to the fun action please ..

Edit: and now that we're sort of back to the fun action, jesus the editing is still so choppy. I long for a DVD version that would probably be 10 extra episodes but maybe it would also be more coherent... Like, how the hell did FoYe get saved?? That was so weird.

Damn this is packing a lot of stuff into its story mythos: An author who is desperate to kill his main character, for reasons yet unknown. A heroine who an enter into a fictional world/dimension/whathaveyou, is smart enough to figure out the rules of this world quickly. A main hero who is beginning to show awareness about his status as a fictional(?) character, or at least that someone is controlling things from ~outside.

So far we haven't had enough of LJS yet, I hope we get to the team up quickly, because I really want them to work together. I really hope this drama tackles some of the themes that come with fictional characters being aware of their fictional status: Does that make them fictional anymore? Can LJS cross over into the ~real world? etc etc

Since this is the QIHM-writer I have high hopes for the story and the smarts of our main characters. And maybe we can also quickly get into the romance part? Ah, can't wait :D