Skibbies

no the novel was about a fictional group shooting game aka esport. it mentions real games that the characters previously played starcraft 1, 2, warcraft, dota. dt was in singapore for a group game DoTA, appledog was there for a solo game, a racing game.

You Complete had perfect ending spot at ep 19 and ep 30, but then they didn't let's add in some love triangle and ruins everyone's characterisation, literally everyone :D

It's both a prequel and sequel since this drama spans over longer period of time (as does the novel it's based on)

5. in the novel she has 2 kids + an adopted daughter. In the drama, who knows. I can't answer 1, 3, 4 because they are different from the novel lol.

you don't need to watch the first one, this is a prequel and a sequel.

1 is the prequel and details forming and break up of team solo + dt meeting appledog, 2 is appledog joining SP and dt playing for K&K. GGS used the esport bit from 1&2, 3 is gun's romance spinoff. 2 starts before 3 and ends after 3. The robot thing is original because ctf isn't as exciting and they wanted to air on tv so esport is no go. The characterisation for some of the characters (at least appledog) should be closer to this version than GGS.

Unrequited Love's novel is frustrating too so that's just how the story goes, even though i haven't watched this version of the drama, because 40 ep + drama original bits + i didn't like the novel/previous version much. You Complete started well but it crashed and burn lol.

16 is day 5 of chinese new years lol. I do think they should have kept to the original schedule since it'd finish while everyone is on holidays. i guess they changed it to avoid vvip clashing with chinese new years eve (11th)? when everyone is busy. It's back to 3 days a week for vip and 6 ep in one go for vvip, so maybe vvip did ok and they are prolonging the drama airing?

Ooooh nice article! That's a lot of trends there that you summarised. I'm sort of surprised by Intense Love? but I guess it aired at the perfect time, since Romance of Tiger and Rose just aired, and it's a decent romance. Not enough people watched Hikaru no Go oh my gosh! but it has so many loyal and active fans since it got voted in this list, hahaha. 8.8 on douban, +0.5 since ending is real wild for douban.

I'm pretty happy about gender reversal trend, and all the quality thrillers, rise of shorter dramas due to webdramas being profitable which is a huge relief. Low conflict fluff dramas is nice too, I remember watching Love O2O and being so happy that it didn't really have misunderstandings. I want to note that I loved last year we had some female centric-dramas (Twenty Your Life On, Nothing But Thirty, Imperfect Love from earlier the year to just year end's Hear Her, Dear Missy and My Best Friend's Story), to Fighting Youth airing right now and I know there's couple more dramas waiting to air.

I watched way too much dramas last year tbh. My top 10 is probably fairly different from this list since I'm picky about romances. Let's see A Murderous Affair in Horizon Tower (thriller), Cross Fire (esport/friendship), Hikaru no Go (sport/friendship), We Are All Alone (best drama to see behind scenes of c-ent! ace FL), Bad Kids (thriller), Romance of Tiger & Rose (snarky historical romcom), Danger of Her (female centric thriller), Candle in the Tomb Lost Caverns (tomb raiding/adventure thriller I guess?), Tientsin Mystic 2 (republican thriller), With You/Together (anthology drama about the pandemic)

I also watched bunch of 2019 dramas, Joy of Life (historical adventure/politics?), Your Fukubukuro (episodic slice of life), Our Shiny Days (school/friendship, enjoyed both the movie and drama), Waiting For You in the Future (school/friendship), Goodbye My Princess (historical angst romance), then some really old historical dramas. I still have bunch of quality dramas in backlog though, like Winter Begonia, Fearless Whisper, Ancient Detective, Lovely Us, Love is Sweet.

Her brother request to accompany the girl getting married (and then got captured and used as hostages rip) so maybe the drama made her do it instead of brother. Her brother haven't been as relevant as I hoped so far (i'm bit behind though).

Completely different. i don't remember xiao qi being framed for zilong's death but I wouldn't be surprised, but he didn't fake his death at this point. He does do it later though so maybe they moved it.

Awu never goes back to Helan lol? she also never gets kidnapped again, i sure hope they don't do that. Someone else was sent for political marriage. The timeline is little different in the drama. By the time Helan Zhen becomes a king, she's either pregnant or already gave birth.

I actually think the meat of the story is battles + politics > wuxia, there weren't enough bits of wuxia in the novel. I don't think either otp are good choice for the otp, and the script will be real challenging to adapt, since all of the characters sound like larger than life legends, and that's hard to portray in drama.

anyways, the novel's romance bits are actually rather minimal lol, and you can't tell there's romance till near the end. You have to squint and specifically look for it for hints in the earlier bits. Both leads have more important things than romance for the most part, it's why i liked the novel despite its sue-ish characters. (the entire cast is sue-ish on purpose, it's meant to written like legends)

There's a female general, Qiu Jiu Shuang and that's about it. The wuxia bits isn't that wuxia-like, it's more to intro characters + establish background and relationship while she travels around.

Wang You Shuo sounds like he might be Yu Wu Yuan, at least I hope so, since i don't think he'd fit Huang Chao, he could play one of the supporting characters though. Xuan Lu I'm guessing would be Hua Chun Ran OR Feng Qi Wu, she'd fit both.

also lol this novel, good luck to people watching subs during the wuxia portion, since the otp have the same name in pinyin.

oh gosh. I actually rather enjoyed the beginning of the drama. Loved ML, and the two bestie's characterisations, I love the second otp so much, SML is so adorable and SFL is cunning and self serving but always supportive. FL have some moments that's very naive but she has enough smart moments + she sync with ML when working together later so I like her okay too. I actually rather like all the business stuff they do, and the whole everything is in control thing, it's nice to actually have otp that actually look like they can do a job and are competent.

Romance-wise , the struggle of ML between revenge and romance is kind of interesting, and I liked his gradual change and development. There were some real weird editing moments though, like ep 19. There's two really good spot to end the story if you just tag on the ending to revenge, at ep 20 and ep 30, I personally would have loved the drama if it ended at ep 30. From then onwards, it just seem to a lot of force misunderstanding, it's not that you can't have separation, but at least make it flow. ALSO don't add the a third male lead who wasn't even relevant till now? What was the point of that? He's not a real competition, and the way several situations were handled broke FL, SFL and sometimes even ML's characterisation.

very late but since you haven't watched the drama, I'll answer anyways. romance is fairly minor in the drama, one of the love triangle is relevant to the plot, and it's not back and forth. There's another one with the other ML which is filler, but I think they dedicate maximum 2 or 3 episodes to it? and you can easily skip those scenes, since there's they jump between the two MLs.

Ni Ni was filming L&D when they were filming this. She would have been cast since ZZY essentially formed half the production, and i also don't think she's suited to play up playfulness for FL, she got lot of criticism for L&D due to that. I think this drama is too close in genre/general feel to tRoP too, even though the FL are fairly different, L&D was a better choice for her.

Zitan's, Hu Yao is nice though. but Wanru was nice in the novel too, so was sister in law (she's not in it much), I liked both Wanru and Hu Yao.

it's a week wait for vvip for A Girl Like Me if you bought the episodes though, it's only four days wait if you jump from vip to vvip.

TRP's vvip is also ahead of vip at any given point? except on wednesday? TRP's leaks have been due to vvip, which is little different from JoL's since theirs were from something else.

i didn't watch them sorry XD tencent's new drama A Girl Like Me also update once a week for vvip though, it's the same schedule of Joy of Life that I mentioned. It'd make more sense for them to space out vvip content like legend of fei, i think tencent did it for fei specifically to keep the buzz going + more prompt for impulsive purchase, since it features two high profile popular actors. but youku barely knows how to market its shows, i just don't expect anything from them. (zzy is well known and high profile, but she doesn't have guaranteed fans that will impulse buy regardless)

If we are talking about dissipating buzz, cnetizens already yelled at tencent for it with Joy of Life. I mention JoL because it's the first big drama that had vvip starting from the middle (previous dramas had it for ending), and with the leaks, you had people watching at 4 different rates. it destroyed drama discussion since you just get bombarded with spoilers everywhere you go. i'll note that even with full drama leak half way through the drama + vvip system, the view counts didn't drop. so you tend to retain viewers once you are 2 or 3 weeks into a drama, the leaks mostly affected new viewers that want to binge before the drama officially ended for vvip (there was a 10 days gap?)

i haven't looked at TRP's view count to see how it's doing, but my drama friends have been dropping it for various reasons (pacing, tropes, lack of ML)

huh didn't hear about that. I only know NRTA donated bunch of dramas to Hubei last year. They are constantly throwing up dramas tbh, it's about the same rate as usual I think, although they might be more likely to throw historical up before potential restrictions on them hits (there's rumour about it AGAIN, it'd be limited regardless come July since it's 100 years of cpc).

vip wait 2 days for episodes you *bought in advance*. vvip is watching ep 41 now, vip will get 41 next wednesday. JoL's (tencent produced, but they also sold it to iqiyi) schedule was like mon - wed vip 2 ep a day, vvip get the weekly 6 ep on monday and then you just sit and wait for a week. but then JoL got leaked on week 1, 2, and 4th week, different kind of leaking every week too lol. it's praying on people's compulsive watching habits, extra effective when the show is nearing the end.

I do think they started vvip too early, usually you do it half way through the drama, not 1/3 way through, but they did give 3 more ep per week, and dropped the price of vvip.

oh yeah i think i've seen the site before, but i can't remember from where. Minning Town is pretty well received iirc, and short! I'll probably watch it after Like a Flowing River.