TaliaToo

The Bobby Ewing shower equivalent was soooooo Bobby Ewing shower.

Did you see the fan video using their past modern dramas to reunite them in a reincarnation? It was very well done!

I saw a fan art, putting him shirtless in front of a bathtub. 😆

N😆🤣❤️

RIP Nine Heads. At least they gave you an epic end and didn’t make you into a dream.

No, no you summed up my feelings 100%. I mean, I was upset and bitter ten years ago when I read the novel, but now you can add totally flummoxed and disappointed as well. I loved that novel. Not so sure what feel about Season 2. Except for Xiang Liu, every one of those beloved characters were butchered horribly.

Yes, after watching XL’s scene with her, I’m singing Haddaway’s What Is Love.

He dubbed himself. That’s his real voice.

If she could accept the FL being whacked on the head and buried alive, and still managed to survive that ordeal, surely she could accept the fact that the ML could survive any kind of attack during warfare and escape 🙃😆

It doesn’t sound like you will enjoy the rest of the drama. You have even passed episode five, which was one of the many climaxes.

Can you hide this behind a spoiler, please? Thank you.

And I am not really arguing about just the women’s gazegenre. Men, too, have found freedom in writing longer, richer novels that could not be adapted into two hour dramas. Joy of Life would be destroyed if it is squeezed into a two hour movie.

But that’s a Wuxia novel, male gaze, TWENTY chapters long. Most of the ones being adapted today are hundreds Of chapters long. One is serialized by the patriarchy newspaper while other ones written in the new genre of the female gaze found its movement on the Internet, where women are given the chance to express what they wanted to read and to show women’s stories are just as rich and interesting. It is apples and oranges.

LOL Not at all. It's just the last few years, the new rules had destroyed so many good books/dramas that many, for years, had so looked forward to being adapted.

Let's pick an example, a controversial one. Let's pretend Gone With The Wind had never been made and that it's still OK to make movies without the words "woke" or "whitewashing" attached to them. Back in those days in the 30s, the book was revered by many readers--southerners and romance readers--for its sweeping saga on a "bygone (romanticized) era" and in the forefront was, of course, the epic love story of a woman who lived through those times. Instead of the long three hours or more of that movie (the audience actually was given a bathroom break), it had to be edited down to suit today's audience's short attention span of one hour and forty minutes. And let's say there was a ban on the talk of war because the government said so.

Can you imagine the outcry of many who loved that book if such a movie were to be made with those limitations? The southerners would cry over the loss of their history and the romance lovers would be left bereft of their FL's epic scenes of yelling to the heavens, "I'll never go hungry again!" in the middle of the epic war. Because the arbitrary one hour and forty minutes would mutilate the core essence of that book.

Some books aren't meant to be mutilated. This book, made today, of course would be very different from the original version that I grew up with, but I'm only picking it as an example because of its epic popularity during those days.

Many of the novels being adapted by the production companies now are "epic" in such a sense--written in an era when the free flow of ideas in the new world of Internet were not curtailed, seen by women as their bastion of freedom because books by men for men were all around them. These novels were a new genre, created specifically for women, written uniquely for women. They are now called novels from the female gaze (as opposed to novels from the male gaze/old wuxia). So these works are relatively new but have a dedicated following. The Chinese industry is also relatively new--it started its golden era from the 90s when the great Hong Kong TVB golden era started to decline. After redoing so many of the old wuxia stories, it found a treasure trove on the Internet--these grand novels with a dedicated fan base. And here lies the Golden Goose with the problem :). You have million dollar eggs waiting to be laid, but you cannot shortchange the special food for the goose :). LOL.

It's truly a unique problem, if one would view it from a different lens, my friend. Have a good night. As usual, I spout steam while I drink tea.

I see your point too and I agree that many are too long. But until there comes a new generation of better script writers, ones trained to not throw spaghetti on the wall when they run out of room/time, I don't see how, except for a few, these shows will be successful outside the Chinese diaspora. Sooner or later, audiences would be critiquing about those weird last three or four episodes LOL. But hey, I live in hope that things would improve, along with the odd censorship orders coming from the Man Behind The Curtain.

Yanxi Palace also had some censored episodes. This was before the 40 episodes limitation, of course, but the end arc with the Chenbi was changed and shortened a lot. Because Chenbi was supposed to be the version of the Uyghur concubine (Hsiang) and because of what was happening politically at that time, the writers had to rewrite and cut a lot of Jia Ni's part out.

But that drama was one of my addiction! What an epic revenge quest!

There is a five-minute episode 40.5 to make sure the viewers see the happy couple happy with a kid.

The loss of momentum. It doesn't seem to work the same way as Western TV, where we anticipate the next season (like Breaking Bad). Take Lost You Forever, for instance. The one year in between slowed the momentum of the excitement of that drama's intriguing setup of three men and one woman and also, everyone rushed to read the book, and after finding out who the final CP was, didn't tune in this season because either they weren't interested any more or they didn't like who she ended up with. Most Western annual continuation of their dramas mostly weren't adapted from books. The writers were actual script writers, sitting down between season to plot out the next arcs.

I'm not happy.

My bitter cup runneth over.