comradeocean

The Rebel is another republican era drama that's very good!

it's out!

it's taken from the book synopsis. in the novel the delivery guy on the scooter who causes the accident at the intersection is also trapped in his own time loop and has his own parallel storyline (which intersects at certain points with the main storyline. like he has a package for Xiao Heyun he's always trying but failing to deliver)

The time loop is never explained in the novel. Li Shiqing uses her knowledge about the Wang Mengmeng case to successfully convince the bus driver not to follow through on the bombing plan. It's not really a puzzle-solving story. Like obviously there's the main puzzle of how to stop the bomb, but the focus is more on character development and exploring the social conditions of every day people and how they might react to exceptional circumstances because of their own personal experiences and life situations.

(and if you're comfortable saying your country, I can probably get you comparative studies)

of course there's always commonalities about how states govern and control people and also inflict violence on them, but if you're interested, you should really look into how the police gets funded in the US, the kind of weapons they carry, statistics about the kinds of interactions law enforcement has with the public. it really is singularly awful in specific ways that's not the case elsewhere. I can recommend specific books and stuff if you're curious

I'm not saying the police in China and elsewhere are not bad. I'm saying there's a substantial difference in how the police functions in the US compared to literally everywhere else in the world. there's no way to actually change things - in China, the US, and elsewhere -if you can't even understand them or analyze them properly.

China is not a liberal democracy and does not have free speech as it exists elsewhere but China is not a police state the way the US is. saying all cops around the world are as bad as the US is definitely letting cops in the US off the hook.

I also found some of the early scenes triggering bc it reminded me of bad police interactions I had in North America or have witnessed (in person). later episodes were a lot easier for me to handle because how the police conducted their operations was different enough to not remind me of North American cops or US cop shows like CSI. hope it gets easier for you too!

nah that's just apologism for the hyper intense police state that's the US, trying to make it seem like it's normalized everywhere in the world. nowhere else is police militarized and funded the way it is in the US. not even other settler states like Canada or Israel where the dynamics are sometimes comparable.

yes, but it's war time drama, so it's very tragic

iQiyi: https://www.iq.com/play/the-rebel-1-nqa2x6y2ns

someone wrote a hilarious AITA au fic https://archiveofourown.org/works/31927597 spoilers for until ep 14

and yeah the foreign concessions factor phroggies mentioned is also pretty important. because there were all of these foreign occupying powers that controlled different areas of shanghai (the concessions), even though the KMT was "the government" their powers were limited in Shanghai and secondary to the foreign colonizers. for example, the Chinese army was not allowed to deploy any troops in Shanghai, and the KMT secret service/police were outranked by the police forces of the concessions

the reply from phroggies basically sums up the background.

an additional factor that's particularly pivotal for 1936 (which is the year the drama begins) is that after the communists and nationalists previous truce collapsed (with the massacre of communist party members in shanghai in 1927), the nationalists, who were the government in power, had an official policy of trying to avoid open confrontation with Japan, in order to buy more time to modernize and improve the Chinese military and focus on its internal enemies, the communists. while the communists had been agitating for resistance against Japan as the top priority as soon as Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931.

the campaign against the communists became increasingly unpopular with regular chinese people as well as within the KMT since Japan was invading and occupying more and more of northern/central China. in December 1936, the KMT leader Chiang Kai-shek was kidnapped by two of his own generals and held hostage and eventually the KMT leadership agreed to enter into negotiations with the communists and unite to fight Japan. the wikipedia pages on these incidents are pretty decent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi%27an_Incident on the kidnapping and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_United_Front on the truce they formed afterwards

yeah and at the same time they didn't slack in being explicit abt comparing how charmed her post release reception was - dad waiting with shawl, pork chops, and a grapefruit leaf bath - compared to the tailor or even old Gu drinking by himself mourning his dead comrades to illustrate the sacrifices common ppl made for the cause

omg when Lan Nansheng straight up ignores the gun papa Zhu is waving in his face to continue dismantling the radio evidence and then when he hears the click of the safety being taken off stops to say I Love Her and then goes back to what he was doing ugh

not ONLY did Lin Nansheng feel so extremely guilty abt the allowance money and spent it all on French pastries and that Tchaikovsky record that he went to all the record shops of Shanghai to hunt for which was also how Old Gu was able to tail him in the first place

and not ONLY was Lin Nansheng so extremely filled with contentment after receiving his present and preoccupied with leafing through the book and then carefully folding up the wrapping paper that he wasn't the least bit suspicious when a random never-seen-before student returns a book to Zhu Yizhen AND he didn't even remember or notice her immediately leaving after very suspiciously erasing some possibly incriminating evidence until prompted by the station chief much later

but HOURS later, being an extremely logical and observant person who should know there is no other explanation for Zhu Yizhen's sudden absence AND having already put in the effort to fake a leg injury and sprinting back to his dorm with the possibility of finding Zhu Yizhen there and somehow helping her escape — all of which would be more efficiently accomplished if he dropped the act and got straight down to business, Lin Nansheng was STILL habouring the secret impossible hope that it was all a giant miraculous misunderstanding and everything could go on as before and he could continue the wonderful impossible fantasy life of Xu Liwen 😭😭😭

ps sorry I have not seen Sparrow just needed to vent

phew ep 11/12 is a doozy. I'm having trouble recovering from it