geechoo

maybe I'm more romantically inclined but I always find political sub-plots in cdramas boring lol I just want to see the leads fall in love :c

from enhypen? kind of..

lol none of these replies are correct. this is a A+ drama. cnets have actually been saying the production looks cheap. also, the male actors were all nobodies when this drama started filming.

so it looks like FL, ML & SML are dubbing their own characters while 3ML & 2FL are dubbed by voice actors. ngl you can kind of tell the difference with professionals lol line reading really is a talent of its own..

btw I thought it was interesting how they aged up Zhang Linghe in this drama. Xie Wei is supposed to be 7~8 years older than Jiang Xuening but in real life, Linghe is 3 years younger than Bai Lu. I think he lost a lot of weight and the drama didn't use any filters on him. You can really see his fine lines clearly lol which is kind of rare for cdramas because they tend to like using blurry filters that smoothen actors skin.

Xie Wei is the male lead and who her character ends up with, but it's a veryy slow building romance. FL likes the SML up until the 20th episode or so.

OFL doesn't have a chance to be honest.. historical dramas have a much bigger audience than modern romcoms. also IQIYI is a bigger streaming platform than Mango.

they both worked with Esther too lol

the first day "heat ranking" (IQIYI's popularity ranking basically is already 7000+ wow for reference, the only other drama that is higher this year is Chang Feng Du and that one had the advantage of having several days of notice. This drama air dropped so this first day performance is really impressive. Will be interesting to see if it can maintain this.

that's near the very end lol honestly when I read the novel, I was surprised by how late the romance between the leads happens. FL pretty much likes SML for most of the story.

IQIYI is kind of in a hard spot because the drama they were planning on airing in this time slot (the Liu Shi Shi & Liu Yu Ning one) has been pushed back to December. They don't really have any other large productions to air atm. I thought they were going to air drop the zombie historical drama but I guess this one was a better choice for them.

omg it actually air dropped??

pretty sure it's fake rumors again lol iqiyi has a zombie historical drama that just passed review so they will probably air drop that one.

good things so far: production (no blurry filter is a huge plus for me) and scale looks grand.

bad things so far: the wigs are distracting especially the ugly bangs

Dylan's acting is kind of stiff in this. He kind of has this default "scrunch his eyebrows" look going on all the time. Maybe the role is a bit too mature for him. I'm also not buying that his character is supposed to be older than Bai Lu because he clearly looks younger lol

Dylan does have an accent (Sichuan accent) but imo his biggest problem is his line reading is very slurred. I'm kind of surprised you managed to pick up the difference without understanding Mandarin lol

still too early. this was always rumored to air during CNY break (early 2024)

I didn't watch Destined, what happened to that drama? I think it had high streams in China

I just want ZLH to have a good character again lol MJTY was his most mainstream lead role so far and it is a terrible way to be introduced to a wider audience lol I liked him so much as ChangHeng in LBFAD and he was very good playing different characters there. Now because of one drama (MJTY) and bad character, people are calling him a bad actor :/

bruh he put chen xing xu through it in that drama. I thought he was handsome in GMP but all the unflattering angles in TSL.. :/

so how is the male lead character? I have ptsd from mjty because zlh's character in that drama was kind of.. dumb lol I want him to have a good character