Skibbies

it's like imdb and what most (young) cnetizens use to rate dramas, the industry regularly look at the score. cnetizens are extremely harsh on cdramas because they are bombarded with them, and there's lot of reasons for people rating various popular dramas one star (out of five), plagiarism, scandal related to actor or drama, overpromotion, cheap looking set, tropey characters and plot, bad acting, ugly, actors not being right age etc.

Usually 7+ is pretty good for cdramas, 6+ if it's a idol fluff drama, A LOT of popular cdramas on MDL are in the 6ish or 7ish range, 8+ ones are usually not as popular due to subject matter/subs not being available. It's been slightly inflated in recent years due to huge expansion in users + industry caring more (so there's more bots/paid people influencing the score sometimes). WoH's score is slightly inflated since it's BL (BL fans rate higher but it's just a slight difference), regardless it's a really good score!

it's not literal magic, more established skill in wuxia world, certain people's disgusing skill is just that high level, kind of like certain people can save a dying person?

lol no. that's 源博雅 Yuan Boya, that movie is based on the Japanese novel Onmyouji, his Japanese name is Minamoto no Hiromasa.

Pretty sure it's a "come play the game" easter egg lol.

next saturday if you sub to youku.

it's based on the game not the novel, this was also filmed first.

you can pay a 2 dollar/month to sub youku, and you should get up to 28 ep in english subs (you get one ep a day after that and will finish the drama next saturday). The site is in chinese though and if you are using android, it's little trickier since there's no applepay, someone posted link to tweets showing how to sub in the discussion if you are interested.

there's no reason besides youku purposely prolonging the drama's airing time (domestically, it gets you to watch their other dramas and you are more likely to sub their vip). it's following the non vip schedule they released at the start of the drama. The initial weeks were to build a loyal fanbase of people to watch the drama. A much more dramatic example is tencent's The Sword and the broacade. airing 6 days in a row in the beginning and switching to regular 3 days in second week, then on demand starts on third week..

different writer XD priest and mo xiang tong xiu respectively, in fact I think their (author) fans hate each other but that's another story. WoH share same author as Guardian and Legend of Fei.

the vip schedule is one ep a day, the on demand ep (raws) is basically you paying to watch them 3 days earlier, so you'll see 28 today, 29 on sat, 30 on sun, 31 on mon etc.

there are actually fair few dramas that's not romance focused, more than bl dramas for sure. friendship ones/school ones are more likely to be translated, historical it's kind of rough since it's either serious politics or romcom, even more friendship-ish dramas like Young Blood have het romance in it (but people just ship the whole cast however they want anyways), so it's rough if you want ABSOLUTELY no het.

As someone that doesn't care for romance most of the time, I don't find it super hard to find cdramas to watch, but I also don't need subs so I think that helps quite a bit. The thing is, ensemble dramas are actually pretty hard to write, and ip adaptations are all the rage, ensemble historical ip tends to be those really really long novels and they often don't adapt well (see fight break sphere and martial universe) They do better as donghua and you still need a really good production team for it (like douluo continent's donghua).

I think the most well received one recently was Love in Between from last year? It had too much angsty romance somewhere in the middle for me though. then it's Legend of Condor Heroes 2017. Last year also had new Handsome Siblings that apparently stuck fairly close to the novel, which is a first for Gu Long LOL.

Not quite classic wuxia but still fit in the general vicinity somewhat (so more background setting), Bloody Romance and Ancient detective? and then it's like 2011's https://kisskh.at/2747-the-vigilantes-in-masks which is more wuxia than the two i mentioned lol. The rest I know/have on my to watch are earlier than that and probably don't have subs.

it's 3 ep on friday (it's just watching sat, sun and mon ep in advance) and 5 ep next tuesday (1 regular update + 4 on demand), regular vip/english subs will end on 27th, next saturday.

LOL does Beijingers know that other people find the Beijing accent out of place for characters that come from a completely different place? Jackson Yee's diction and other things could use more work (and I heard he did improve in the movies he filmed later) but lol picking on his accent. A lot of people don't want to watch dub dramas thank you! cos they keep using the same people and sometimes the voice actors don't always fit super well (also the voice actors are paid measley amount and they are better off voicing donghua.....)

Young Blood for fun group adventure drama with lot of plot twists! Hikaru no Go for fantastic friendship drama and coming to love an old sport. Cross Fire for great camaraderie with dash of scifi and mystyer. Die Now for awesome concept. We Are All Alone for ace female lead and getting to know c-ent. Romance of Tiger and Rose for fun historical romcom. They should all be reasonably light watch since i don't know how well you do with thrillers and serious political dramas lol.

As a fan of all three, MHH is a comedy first and foremost, the romance and schemes are secondary. RoTaR is a romcom heavy on the romance, the entire plot serves the romance, the comedy just makes it easier to watch, and little substance it does touch on merely scratch the surface. JoL's comedy is mostly a facade to draw in the audience, the political bits are its core.

MHH and RoTaR's more equal relationship are result of recent societal trend, cnetizens are much much more likely to slam something for gender inequality these days. RoTaR actually feels like a combination of bunch of tropes and ideas from jjwxc webnovels, and MHH is a string of jokes built one after another.

MHH feels similar to JoL because it's made by the same production company, with many of the same cast, with intention to ride on JoL's success (and it worked pretty well). MHH's source novel is vastly different in tone and themes from my understanding and its IP level was never JoL's level.

NiF is pretty different in tone, but yeah OP protagonist is similar I guess, that goes for most male protag webnovels though.

lol but WoH finish 2 weeks (both on-demand and vip) before Immortality starts. I thought it'd be quicker since tencent have a slew of them but guess they couldn't get it through any faster.

I'm aware all three big platforms lost massive amount of money, only mangotv made a profit, but that;s because mangotv is a smaller platform and it actually relies on its variety shows and close relationship with hunan tv (so its dramas could easily air on hunan tv if they have slots) for profit. I think the big platforms lost out because they were expanding earlier to grab all the potential customers, a lot of internet giants in China tend to use free whatever to attract customers (thus all the gacha games...).

Individual dramas generally make money since platforms and tv stations pay quite a big for them, but tv stations are refraining to buy big budget stuff since tv isn't as popular and they just aren't doing well. The platform lose out because not only do they spend lot of money for exclusive rights (exclusive gets them subscribers, even though for dramas non exclusive dramas like Rattan is better than just airing on youku. exclusive also mean you get banners + better promotion), and also produce a lot of in-house dramas and invest in various dramas they have close relationship with.

The platforms are now actively training people to get used to their price discrimination and it's working pretty darn well. I really wish they would price discriminate according to quality of video and behind the scenes stuff, rather than how many episodes you unlock because it kind of tank drama discussion and popularity.

As for streamers, that's a whole different story, and I'm super unfamiliar with it so it's hard to really talk about it tbh, the censor do tend to crack down on them, but they tend to be real quick on changing and toeing the line. They are also far far far lower in investment compared to dramas and movies.

I'm mostly hoping they stop coming up with new and weird rules that no one is really clear on and everyone self censor, I think dramas in general stop going after the big and popular actors + stop going for super long episodes with fillers so they can sell more, so it's positive change for now. cnetizens complain all the time that there aren't as many good cdramas to watch and i'm always confused since i watched massive amount of them in last few years.

oh right right! you did mention your job before.

It took me half a minute to realise new classics is xinli LOL. Yeah I know about yuewen and xinli because of JoL. They should have made a profit in the second half of last year, since they sold bunch of their dramas to cctv near the end of the year (the new deer and cauldron, my best friend's story, douluo continent, upcoming zhu yilong drama), I know cctv dramas doesn't pay much but neither do the provincial tv stations these days. Anyways, yuewen and xinli had a deal about that writeoff, there's target for its profit for the last 3 years (500mil, 700mil, 900mil i think) and it failed them, rumour has it they extended the target for 3 more years but I didn't see numbers.

short form videos and just social media in general definitely lowered everyone's attention span, i don't think the trend of 60 ep dramas in last couple of years helped either. I'm glad that the new dramas are mostly around 40 ep or less now, and the drama industry isn't so fanatic. It was really chaotic when everyone swarm in to invest, but had little idea in what kind of stories they were investing around 2016/2017.

I think the platforms adapted relatively fast to be honest, consider that both wetv and iqiyi are product of 2010s (youku is bit earlier), vip system started in 2015?, and on-demand episodes started in 2019, people that actively watch dramas regularly have gotten used to paying for vip at least. Non-vip are still majority, and I know that in last year, catching dramas on douyin or weibo watching is popular, but a lot of these people weren't the type to pay for vip to begin with, the platform lost out mostly on non vip members ad revenue.

I actually think tencent started to cash out on untamed and the king's avatar (yang yang is massively popular oversea due to love o2o). I specifically remember TKA having atrocious machine subs on both wetv and netflix because I think they hastily dumped it there, the series was still ongoing domestically. (I can't believe netflix just used wetv's shitty subs, did nobody look at the subs...? they fixed it 2 or 3 weeks later i think LOL) iqiyi is fairly quick on the uptake so I think they followed soon after.

A couple years back, I think 2018, so a year before wetv was a thing (to my knowledge anyways), I was explaining to someone on MDL why subs are slow and there's little incentive for them to cater to international audience. I guess they learnt rather quickly.

Youku has a rep on cnet for being slow and only seem to be good at being paparazzi, there's even a rumour/joke curse that they make everything entertainment related that they touch wilt. They have a few excellent dramas every year but they often fade to oblivion because their promotion tactics aren't that great, and they are really bad at following up with similar content. I think they want to go big this year, they seemed to have gotten in some sort of arrangement with hunan tv so they got most of their dramas, but tv dramas aren't that great at pulling audience as they used to be. *sigh* Youku membership often come with taobao membership, and people just use it to watch old hk dramas, but not everyone subscribe for old dramas yknow.

Great idea about emailing their investment relations team! It's nice to know what would get to actual decisions makers. Also woooo again at connections :P