uchiha

content warning: mentions of several deaths and suicide.

this drama has me heavily conflicted. i have been anticipating this so strongly and for weeks. i was giddy and overwhelmed with excitement to watch this piece of work [even more than with payback, prosecutor's proposal, & deep in]. i watched the first twelve episodes as soon as i possibly could yesterday and stopped in the dead of the morning to sleep.

i loved almost all of the scenes with changyang & qinglang. their chemistry was solid. i loved when they would play around with each other. i loved the way they whispered to each other. their intimacy was fairly solid too. their early scenes felt so genuine, natural, and fluid. unfortunately for me, i had spoiled myself and watched all of their kisses before i watched the piece of work itself [unknowingly]. the former is a testament to how committed i was to this BL before i saw it. i will talk about some of the issues i observed in the following paragraphs. i wanted to end this one with saying my critiques mostly start with the story as soon as changyang departs for hunter school.

you can tell that the creator and staff that made this story come alive truly care about the delivery and execution of this work. however, the story started to fall apart when changyang left. changyang's ambition can make sense to most but it felt random. he was in the mountains for eight years then all of sudden he falls in love then needs to leave right then? we never even got to witness his time in school which felt like a bad decision. his absence was felt and it was void-feeling without him being on screen for a majority of the work. one could surmise that the homophobia and societal / familial expectations exacerbated his leave but it was wack and traumatizing to watch. if china is actually still this antiquated then i feel strongly for the victims of these prejudices alive today. it was actually sickening to see how much homophobia was made a pillar in this story.

i am bewildered by other things as well. sister lan dying was slightly questionable for me but could be more easily accepted comparatively. i was glad that she did not fully disappear from the viewer once she died. she deserved to live. she clearly was an incredible character / person. almost every speech she gave made me cry.
qingtian's death, i still cannot get over. i am beside myself about it because it was nonsensical. i think from a presumptive view one can conclude what the events surrounding and leading up to his death meant but i do not want to guess ! changyang alluded that qingtian intentionally died or commit suicide. i think suicidal ideation is a normal response to loved ones dying but the way it happened was ??? he decides to run off to find the ghost flower, heavy fog randomly appears out of nowhere, then he is lost immediately. the only thing left of him were his shoe and the tool. what??? the sequence of this event was poorly executed, in my opinion. he is then basically never mentioned again especially compared to lan. only his mother and grandmother seem to actually be grieving [i understand grief is different for everyone]. grief is probably why qingtian made the decision he made. however, who can say? did he commit suicide or did he die to the elements?
shi yuhao's death does not make any sense at all to me. not at the time he decided to commit suicide. he did it on the anniversary of lan's accident which is wild. why did he do it? why then? why at all? why did he all of sudden become decent after all the torment, blackmail, coercion, and criminal behavior prior? was it because he managed the comeback so all of a sudden he had a conscious? nonsense. his character pissed me off so his actor did well.

i nearly despise the second main leads. their presences always set me off, internally. i liked them a lot prior to hao yu flipping the script on han lu after they were caught kissing by their show's production team. after that, their relationship was nothing but sloppy, toxic, and dysfunctional garbage. they never spoke about their feelings nor addressed prior obstacles. they never even verbally committed but were somehow boyfriends? they pissed me off every time they came on screen.

wenshu and qingtian were a different story for me. i wanted more of them. i could not understand the pacing of their relationship development. it seemed clear that they were being setup to be together so why did that not happen and instead we got what we got instead? i understand qingtian was still emotionally invested in his formerly actively living partner so i do not get why we got introduced to these two instead, in that way. wenshu then is written to completely disappear from the audience after qingtian's character conclusion. i think there was huge missed opportunity with these two due to bad writing.

there were almost no small production errors like i have noticed in other chinese BL. the cinematography was basically flawless; truly an incredible watch just from this point of view. there were only extremely questionable decisions made like with the punching sound effects, changyang / wenshu deciding to assault that random leech [whom we never see again after wenshu's visit / attack], and others i will mention throughout this review.
i personally do not care for how chinese dramas or BL are filmed. this piece of work was captured a lot more fluidly until changyang left. then it was just timeskips and random events pasted together one after the other just like in bittersweet love. i actually hate this stylistic choice. it makes tracking the story very difficult. at the end, it was said that FIVE YEARS had passed. i presume since the beginning of the show. who would know that prior to it being stated? that is unbelievably amount of time that elapsed. qinglang waited something like two years for changyang? or did he actually wait five years? that is deeply deeply deeply upsetting especially considering leads in BL are always written to be the worst communicators. real relationships cannot survive these kinds of conditions but i get this is fiction.

i have questions. why did the feng brother's mother just decide to leave the family and become a monk? why was changyang's father suddenly and randomly in prison? what happened to that random predator investor? who was the random disabled person who came back into changyang's place? i mean why him? why did changyang take an extended time to return? why did they suddenly "get married" with no proposal shown to viewers? why was their last kiss off? what even is hunter school? what was the point of that endeavor anyway? any good story would not leaving viewers with multiple questions.

in all, because of the second main leads, the storyline without changyang, and the false setup of wenshu + qingtian, i would probably never rewatch this. i find that so unfortunate because this drama was stunning and not lacking intricacies. apart from the cinematography + changyang / qinglang, this BL dropped the ball. however, i still rate it highly despite these gaps and the AI promotion, which was disgusting. objectively, the rating is probably several points lower.