The start of the drama was innovative for me, haven't quite seen that before. Every other character is quite familiar to me after watching Joy of Life - even their personalities are similar. Out of all the republican dramas I've seen so far this is the most "polished", apart from The Disguiser.
Strangely enough mirrors The Disguiser/Nirvana in Fire where the cast of a republican spy drama go and shoot an ancient costume spy/intelligence gathering drama.
I agree the Ling Jun role is well acted by a terrific actress but she is the one character in this show that I…
I'm of the opposite opinion; she's the most interesting because of her condescension and smugness. Makes one want to ask "What does she know? Why does she have her hand in so many things?"
Baili Hongxuan turned out to be the character I disliked the most in the end. The writers didn't leverage his vengeance and resentment properly and he turned into a unreasonable, violent racist [unexplained] after ep36 or so.
Fire, Wood, Earth, and Water Deities die. Theme: Metal Deity's continued curse of living alone forever, to punish his thought of "I don't want to die" a thousand years ago, and also punish his method of doing lots of morally questionable things to wake up his reincarnated friends.
Water Deity joins the Earth Deity in sealing the Jiuying Demon. Theme: To join the reincarnated lovers together forever.
Ling Jun dies. Theme: [Women] To repent by killing themselves. (Actually I found this drama to be rather overt in criticizing women who don't have the "traditional" Confucian virtues.)
I don't understand how the drama got even more boring after the inflection point at episodes 33-36.
Since I'm near the end anyway (ep 40) I'll finish it off, but its really disappointing that the story and dialogue (especially) didn't match up to the cinematography. I started Young Blood recently and even though the set and costumes are garish and the characters vaguely caricatures, the dialogue is interesting and the pacing is good - far more watchable.
Lareina Song got significantly better, I guess it was the writer's fault for creating such an annoying initial character.
In the recent few episodes, Ling Jun both carries the show and advances the plot singlehandedly now that Ming Yefeng turned into a stereotype of himself.
So I just caught up at episode 22, and my view is that it's alright. The cinematography is great in general but the CG needs work - some scenes in the north have very obvious green screen background.
Story is a bit generic, which is a shame because I quite like the acting, and the dull screenplay is dragging down the entire drama. There are only two characters with interesting motivations so far - Baili Hongxuan (Big Brother) and Ming Yefeng; everyone else is basically one dimensional at this point.
Music budget was basically zero. I'm not even certain they were able to afford a instrumental-only version of the main theme; it is very annoying to have the theme played at max volume multiple times an episode.
From the opening credit sequence I'm expecting that the Emperor would be an antagonist at some point, but the first scene of the drama, the drama posters, and the shared vision indicate that the Five Element powers may need to fight the great enemy again, so the Emperor (Earth) could be an ally in the final arc. So far no actual appearance of the final villian has appeared though.
Also I wish it was funny. Just a little bit of humour would be nice. Like 5% humour, similar to NiF would be good. The daoist master and apprentice, some may say, are funny. They are not funny, but pathetic attempts at schadenfreude.
There's just nothing to break up the drudgery at the moment, except waiting for Ming Yefeng to do something interesting.
Not sure how this show together with the untamed got such high rating, I find the storyline so so, nothing to…
The various elements of the storyline is indeed nothing we haven't seen before, but the cinematography, dialogue and comedic timing is top notch. I was on the edge of my seat most of the time, which was not helped by each episode ending with a hook that made me keep watching.
Agree on untamed not being very good; you can't have the first 40% of episodes being incredibly boring and call it a good drama. IIRC the consensus for untamed was that the drama was unable to match the novel, but for joy of life I think you can make a good case that the drama improved on the novel.
It's more fun to watch it in Mandarin with no subs because the subs miss out many important Chinese words (characters)…
Yeah 7.9 on Douban is very good, it's clear the majority on MDL and Douban both liked it. I was referring to complete garbage like "General and I" being rated 8.1 on MDL somehow, while its 3.0 on Douban.
It's more fun to watch it in Mandarin with no subs because the subs miss out many important Chinese words (characters)…
There's quite a few C-dramas which are rated highly on MDL and equally as lowly on Douban. In my experience the dialogue is either poorly written or the voice doesn't match the face/character. Maybe this is like that but in the reverse - the genius of its nuance is lost in translation.
In the drama the protagonist doesn't actually time travel but the story is set up so that the protagonist is a…
The MC also investigates his own "time travel" in-story and finds out the circumstances of his "time travel". Conveniently the explanation also doesn't violate the CCP's "time travel" ban, hence avoiding the censors twice here in real life!
I understand that not everyone feels the same way about this drama and I respect your opinion. Still, there was…
I understand what you mean when you say reading the novel will make it amazing, and maybe that's true. However, that still doesn't mean the drama is amazing, only the combination of drama+novel.
I don't know about others, but I try to judge the adaptation on its own merits, that it was nice to watch or not nice to watch, not to judge on the "purity" of the adaptation to the source material (which is also a complaint which comes up a lot in regards to adaptations), and not being *required* to reference supplementary material in order to make the experience great.
Certainly, some lines (I replayed that line many times :P) and scenes and episodes were great, but not sufficient to call the drama overall great in my opinion.
Strangely enough mirrors The Disguiser/Nirvana in Fire where the cast of a republican spy drama go and shoot an ancient costume spy/intelligence gathering drama.
Baili Hongxuan turned out to be the character I disliked the most in the end. The writers didn't leverage his vengeance and resentment properly and he turned into a unreasonable, violent racist [unexplained] after ep36 or so.
Theme: Metal Deity's continued curse of living alone forever, to punish his thought of "I don't want to die" a thousand years ago, and also punish his method of doing lots of morally questionable things to wake up his reincarnated friends.
Water Deity joins the Earth Deity in sealing the Jiuying Demon.
Theme: To join the reincarnated lovers together forever.
Ling Jun dies.
Theme: [Women] To repent by killing themselves. (Actually I found this drama to be rather overt in criticizing women who don't have the "traditional" Confucian virtues.)
Since I'm near the end anyway (ep 40) I'll finish it off, but its really disappointing that the story and dialogue (especially) didn't match up to the cinematography. I started Young Blood recently and even though the set and costumes are garish and the characters vaguely caricatures, the dialogue is interesting and the pacing is good - far more watchable.
Lareina Song got significantly better, I guess it was the writer's fault for creating such an annoying initial character.
In the recent few episodes, Ling Jun both carries the show and advances the plot singlehandedly now that Ming Yefeng turned into a stereotype of himself.
Story is a bit generic, which is a shame because I quite like the acting, and the dull screenplay is dragging down the entire drama. There are only two characters with interesting motivations so far - Baili Hongxuan (Big Brother) and Ming Yefeng; everyone else is basically one dimensional at this point.
Music budget was basically zero. I'm not even certain they were able to afford a instrumental-only version of the main theme; it is very annoying to have the theme played at max volume multiple times an episode.
From the opening credit sequence I'm expecting that the Emperor would be an antagonist at some point, but the first scene of the drama, the drama posters, and the shared vision indicate that the Five Element powers may need to fight the great enemy again, so the Emperor (Earth) could be an ally in the final arc. So far no actual appearance of the final villian has appeared though.
Also I wish it was funny. Just a little bit of humour would be nice. Like 5% humour, similar to NiF would be good. The daoist master and apprentice, some may say, are funny. They are not funny, but pathetic attempts at schadenfreude.
There's just nothing to break up the drudgery at the moment, except waiting for Ming Yefeng to do something interesting.
In short so far it's not boring, but it is dull.
Agree on untamed not being very good; you can't have the first 40% of episodes being incredibly boring and call it a good drama. IIRC the consensus for untamed was that the drama was unable to match the novel, but for joy of life I think you can make a good case that the drama improved on the novel.
I don't know about others, but I try to judge the adaptation on its own merits, that it was nice to watch or not nice to watch, not to judge on the "purity" of the adaptation to the source material (which is also a complaint which comes up a lot in regards to adaptations), and not being *required* to reference supplementary material in order to make the experience great.
Certainly, some lines (I replayed that line many times :P) and scenes and episodes were great, but not sufficient to call the drama overall great in my opinion.