ShortCircuit

You haven't watched many of the good ones (or they're not on your watched list at least) - things like The Untamed, Word of Honor, The Sleuth of Ming Dynasty - but whatever.

Good bromances (most include police stories, because some countries are afraid of men being bromancey if they're not in law enforcement LOL): The Devil Judge, Beyond Evil, Nobody Knows, D. P., Hunter (CN), I Don't Want To Be Brothers With You, Mad Dog, My Country, Tale of the Nine-Tailed, The Good Detective, Tunnel, Wok of Love. For starters :D

Yeah that red painting at the end was a mawwige setting and no one can convince me otherwise.

Also, I really hope there's going to be a second season, because I want more.

Not done with it yet, but I have THINGS to say.

Like...

Episode 9 - LOL, the gun training. Shen Yi is so smol. Du Cheng dwarfs him. (That was on my chest for SO long, glad I managed to spill it LOL).

All the episodes: OMG Shen Yi is basically suicidal. Or has no sense of survival. Whatever. Protecc the baby!!!

Ep 17 (where I'm at right now): OMG DU CHENG WTF ARE YOU EVEN DOING DON'T YOU DARE BE THAT WAY SHEN YI WILL BE DEVASTATED! (Not to mention I'll be devastated too).

Also, this drama has cats. I approve. Though Shen Yi's habit of gathering people's pets was kind of intriguing in the beginning, LOL, I thought he would end up with a whole menagerie. I wonder if he gets the black cat too LOL.

If this wasn't supposed to send so many confusingly bromance signals, they should've picked actors who aren't so much different physically. I mean, at this point in time, I can hardly wait for Winner is King, because of how petite Tan Jian Ci is (and I haven't even read the novel yet) :D

LJ has good reason to trust WenJie - I mean, he was even the first to come to the police to tell them the painting had been stolen, when the gallery itself didn't realize it. And when Ding ShengHuo's men made contact, they (LJ and WenJie) had an implicit, mutual trust relationship where they very smoothly worked together to catch them all in the act, even going as far as WJ's life being put in serious danger.

LJ could easily see this kid has a solid set of values and knows what's right and what's wrong, and he can realize how hard it is for him to make friends and place his trust in someone (I mean, he's a good looking kid and that quiet personality would get him lots of normal friends, usually, but he's only friends with the kid who he caught stealing a laptop - and then forced him to return it! - and a girl who knew him from childhood and didn't really take his part actively as a child either). He's starving for affection, after his father's death, and LJ is initially starting to fill that need... until he slipped and told him the distrust ran in the family. It's obvious how quickly WenJie slammed the doors into LJ's face at that. Add to that the taunting DSH does, baiting him with the "truth" of his father's death, and it's a recipe for disaster when combined with not having the police on his side any more, all because Cpt. Su doesn't trust him for being the son of a robber.

I'd rather have Luo Jian's trust be misplaced (though it won't be!) than Cpt. Su's distrust based on circumstances outside WenJie's control. Now he's a hostage with a good chance of being killed (though I know he probably will escape), just because she thinks he's in cahoots with the band of robbers. He has a good set of "interesting" skills, but that doesn't mean he practiced them or is the best there ever was and could easily escape any dangerous situation... She should allow him the benefit of the doubt.

And then, she should definitely extend the benefit of the doubt to her colleague, Luo Jian. They know each other and don't despise each other obviously, why doesn't she trust his judgement? It's not like he did a very big blunder anywhere since this whole story started, he's pretty efficient. So where does all this aggression and distrust come from, in her case?...

I'm starting to really dislike Cpt. Su - I get where she's coming from, but she's way too aggressive. She just doesn't take a second to listen to Luo Jian's explanation before deciding he's "driven by his feelings" so she won't consider what he has to tell her at all.

If LJ coordinated this op, he'd have had WenJie safe already, and his friends too, and the thieves already arrested.

And now we have to wait another 4 days before the next ep, there is no justice LOL

But then who's the guy in the clock repair shop? (WenJie goes there to see the house he grew up in and there's that shop in its place). He also seemed quite interested in the young guy coming to visit.

It's still unclear, though I won't be surprised if the mastermind with the walking stick IS WenJie's dad. But if he set everything in motion, why would he pick Ding ShengHuo, or not stop everything when DSH involved WenJie?

And with so many questions, the series is going to take long breaks even for the VIP watchers, LOL. Aaargh! :D

Is it the same character? The MDL character list calls him a different name, even if it's the same actor. It does look interesting, though, so I guess that's what I'll be watching while BR goes into its 4-days hiatuses before it's over T_T

It's always about surrounding noise when filming, though, isn't it? As in, if they can't film on a sound stage, (and sometimes even IF they film on a sound stage, particularly for costume dramas), the ambiental noise is way too much to be filtered out, so they re-do the sound in the studio later.

In modern dramas, the actors themselves usually re-do their own lines in voice-dub, if they're good enough in Mandarin and have no particularly strange accent, but I guess sometimes the producers want a certain voice/range etc, so the VA takes over.

It's not a big deal usually, it's just how the industry works.

It's more like it's "unpossible" grammar and some words are always mistranslated (even Gao Yang's name keeps coming up as Levin, no idea why, or the very regular "xia*/okay comes up as "row" LOL, Mr. Gao becomes Miss Gao etc.) It is a major headache to try and re-order the sentences or phrases so that they make sense, but it's not impossible in the end.

I guess it's all about if you do want to go to that trouble. Some parts of the TL can be very hard to make sense of. It took me a few months to go through the series, when I usually take much less, particularly for a shorter one, but for me yes, it was worth the trouble. I have to say that by now I do recognize some common Mandarin words or phrases already though, so some meaning was clear to me even without the subs.

I don't know why MangoTV does this... I still hope a proper fansub appears, at least, for some of their dramas that are not as popular as the major IP ones, but pretty good themselves.

And just when WenJie was all ready to own it all up. Now the other cop is just throwing accusations around and being suspicious based on WJ's background, and LJ can't even go back to their easy friendship and just ask WJ to just trust him on this one...

It's going to become an ugly mess if they follow WJ to the exchange and he gets caught in the whole ring thing. His friends are both involved too, now, and he'll have more pressure points to offer the bad guys to push on :(

I have a bad feeling about where it's all heading...

Just a few angry words and he destroyed all that trust... LJ, you fool...

Each adaptation did its own little changes. It's never mentioned in the novel that his eyes glow red either, LOL. But yes, it's easier (and definitely cheaper) to animate amazing effects around the Chi fighting displays, so the donghua was always going to win that one.

The drama won the character impersonation aspect (particularly where it concerns female characters) and with fleshing out more of the story in a more logical timeline (and also the soundtrack, it's the best IMHO among the whole lot of adaptations), the donghua does great effects and is allowed a bit more liberty from the censors, so some WangXian made it through, the audio drama waltzed around most of the censorship, LOL, up to and including sound effects from 18+ scenes, and the novel gave everyone free reign to their imagination. (And then the chibi donghua just added more sugar on top, LOL).

I like all MXTX's novels, but somehow TGCF is the least of them for me - it's too convoluted and, while there are moments when I totally love Xie Liang and Hua Cheng, I don't love them all the time, or actually like them much together. So for me, the next MXTX-adaptation I actually really-really WANT is SVSSS, because there isn't a moment when I don't love SQQ LOL. The donghua's first season was pretty good, I can't wait for season 2.

But I won't say no to ANY good danmei adaptation either :D

It depends... It looked like they had a pretty good relationship, despite what his dad was teaching him. It definitely seemed his father wanted to give him a certain edge, and when he died, WenJie was mad enough at him not to want anything from him any more (since he only took his mother's necklace to the orphanage as a keepsake).

Depending on what actually happened 12 years back and why his father didn't make contact again - if it IS his father - he might end up understanding... who knows. And then he'd face a choice between a crooked and a straight father figure, which would be interesting.

I think that one's "Lao Fang" (/Old Fang), Luo Jian's mentor in the police force. He even tells his superior not to bring him up every time he does an oopsie, LOL, he's embarassed.

I loved how WenJie was trying desperately to over-explain how he ended up on the construction site, and Cpt. Luo was only interested in yelling at him for placing himself in danger again. Like, WJ was: "...and I heard Officer Liao on the phone and..." but LJ: "AND you will NOT put yourSELF in DANGER ever AGAIN IS THAT UNDERSTOOD!!"

I was ROFLMAO by then.

And then obviously he - Cpt. Luo - has to go interrogate Ding ShengHuo again, and DSH is like, "Aww, the perpetrator died? So sorry not sorry LOL but anyway I had no beef with him, just his dad", then LJ went instantly into papa bear mode "Who EXACTLY do you think died, hmm?" Loved, loved, loved his change of expression, he was ready to go to town on DSH LOL.

Not sure how the internet student nudes case ended up on LJ's plate or how it'll tie up with WenJie's dad's death, but I think WenJie's dad is not actually all the way dead and he's very probably the mastermind behind all this. It would explain all the intricacies of dancing around taunting WenJie, and if DSH discovers him to be the master planner LOL, hell will break loose :D

Aww, eps 12 and 13 show more bromance and also start a new arc...

I don't use Spotify, so I have no idea if it's there already. But the English title seems to be the official one, so it it got/gets to Spotify, that would be the name there, too, I guess.

Looking up the song, though, it appears that the singer is actually Li Xin Yi (who goes by Rex in English), not Wang JungKai, so I think that, IF he's singing a song for the OST, this is not the one. But this IS the ending credits song, so... If there'll be a KW song, it's not here yet.

The drama changes the story a bit - the truth is that Wei WuXian really did lose control of it, on QiongQi Path and in Nightless City too. But since he's the main hero of the story, he can't be too black or else it would never pass censorship. So they made it a leap of logic and introduced a furthering of power for the tunes in the Collection of Turmoil book, so that Su She could use it to enrage the spirits WWX had called up, instead of letting them be appeased. WWX doesn't need the amulet to control the puppets, it just makes it easier for him to do so, and control many more than just with the tunes, and more powerful ones, too.

So no, Su She doesn't overpower WWX's Chen Qing, but he does alter the tunes enough that he can't efficiently control the spirits, up and until they act randomly, attacking whomever and making WWX even more distraught and in less control.

The end credit song is "The Box that Divides the World" by Rex (dunno if that's a stage name for KW or not and can't tell if it's his voice there...):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiD3SsKMeYw

In Chinese it seems to be 李鑫一-分割世界的框, which Google Translate changes a bit from the English name, don't know why.

Is there another song for the end credits other than this one? It's the one used up to ep 11 at least.

I find it extremely interesting how Cpt. Luo always finds the same answers as WenJie, and in about the same time, when he said he'd need WenJie's "way of thinking" to get those answers. Almost like Cpt. Luo himself has a secret ability or a hidden past.

I don't doubt there won't be any final switch showing that Cpt. Luo used to be a thief or whatnot, given Chinese rules for dramas involving the police, but he sure can send anyone's spidey senses tingling...

Also, WenJie, dammit, don't go there!! That kind of secret about one's father's demise NEVER ends on a good note, particularly when it's probably the main plotline of a police drama with such dramatic score, LOL.