monstersnroses

short length:

*My Name is Zhao Wudi
*My Lethal Man (but be forewarned, the cheese levels are off the charts and this is squarely in the "batsh*t insane" category of c-dramas)
*Koi to Dangan (this is a cheesefest j-drama, but fits your requirements except that the FL is sort of mid on the intelligence scale)


full length:

*When Destiny Brings the Demon
*My Fated Boy
*Story of Kunning Palace

and also

*Speed and Love ---> but with a few caveats: one, FL's babygirl act is strong and not everybody can hack it.... and two, the last third of the drama really falls off a cliff and never recovers.

if you tell me what you liked most in particular about it, i can try to recc you some shows that might be a good fit for you

why would anyone need to help you put on a band aid. Are you missing fingers or eyes?

im getting 30% angst and 70% fall asleep at this point. I hope it picks up. The easy listening lullaby music doesn't help much. Neither does "generic buisness plot". What percent of this show takes place in the virtual game? The first scenes gear you up for excitement, mystery, and a rich sumptuous aesthetic, and then make you slog through a bunch of cubicles and important documents and business meetings and literal cement walls. Aigoo.

i work an environment where bandaids are somewhat routine, and NO grown adult puts a band aid on another grown adult. That's the kind of thing you can report to HR.

oh my god, they cgi'd the ML a 6pack this is hilarious. Just when i think i've seen everything, a c-drama comes along and proves that no i have not.

you could go ahead and boycott and apologize til your blue in the face, and try to cancel whoever you want but the fact is that gen z, who now pretty much dictates the direction of culture and marketing in current year, has complete fatigue for ww2 stuff. Everyone screeching about jews and nazis for so long, comparing everything and everyone to jews and nazis, countries making it illegal to ask questions about what happened because the ww2 official narrative is so sacred and revered, no one allowed to criticize jews about ANYthing, no one allowed to praise old germany about ANYthing, in such extreme black and white terms, with such official rancor and zeal, a zero tolerance policy for stepping even an inch off the approved moral line, germany today in a weirdly similar situation = one of the primary culprits in pushing russia into a ww3 situation / making freedom of expression illegal / disenfranchising AfD / participating in ethnic replacement strategies for europe / kissing klaus schwabs ass.... and yet they claim they take the moral high ground all the time. Gen Z is not buying it.

gen z no longer cares. they only care abt whether this show is good or not. if it is, they will watch it no matter who's in it, as long as they're not in the epstein files. Your boycott efforts won't matter to the bottom line, all that will matter is whether the drama is entertaining.

welp. I've seen vote manipulation happen for sure, and it proly happens on every drama basically, but I gotta say... the last 30% or so of the drama really put a damper on it, that might be affecting it as well.

I come here every time something seems like it might come close and post about it. So far nothing has panned out, but as far as "Distraction-Worthy", I think When Destiny Brings the Demon, Speed and Love (kinda) and Learning To Love.


If I ever find anything as good as SOKP again, I'll post it in comments but so far nothing.

The last time I felt this way about a cdrama was never.

Welcome to the Xie Wei Intensive Care Burn Unit. We are all family here. And no, there is no cure.

This one is like for 30 episodes you think you might be seeing a tiny little flame flickering in the distance, and then suddenly you're standing in the middle of a raging forest fire like "well that escalated quickly".

You can only watch it for the first time ONCE, so enjoy it. Get as immersed as possible, take days off of work, turn all the lights out and hide under your covers and BINGE THIS, do not 2x! do not skip! Let it wash over you and through you.

And your dedication and patience WILL be rewarded.

You guys never fully understand the jealousy the rest of us experience when someone new comes in and watches this for the first time. IF ONLY I could bash my head with a cast iron frypan in exactly the right spot to give myself selective amnesia and forget I ever saw this so I can watch it for the first time all over again.....

But anyways. What you're watching pre-episode 30 (or so), is a man OBSESSED. Mkay. He is the lion in the tall grass. And she is the unsuspecting little bunny rabbit.

sigh

this was such a good watch, there are just no words

VERY. I remember on my first watch getting to like ep 22... 23.... 24.... like 'this IS a romance, right?' and I almost dropped.

So glad I didn't. This is literally one of the top ten best things I've ever seen come out of ANY country, ever.

i want to jump in on this conv, because I think you two both have similar tastes to mine in many ways. I can see your perspective, agree with both of your points, and just want to elaborate on WHY to me this is a masterpiece.

Before I do tho, I want to say that I rated Lesson In Love and My Fated Boy VERY high. I only rated this one *slightly* higher. Why would I do this when production values and spice are lacking compared to some of the other ones I've enjoyed....

It's the artistic merit this has. I'll give you a few examples:

Example one

In the first episode, the opening scenes, you have FL and 2ML sitting in a diner, calmly talking. The colors of the scene are plain and unassuming, like the inside of a Denny's restaurant. Their clothes and hair are equally plain, they are sitting calmly with arms at their sides, there's nothing that special or interesting happening. The scene is composed of balance and lines.... you have the two seated in a booth in profile, framed by the backdrop of a window with wood venetian blinds. Everything is symmetrical. You have all these lines, the blinds, the table, the booth with vertical-seam padded back.

This is then juxtaposed to another scene, the flashback of her on the pier. The colors of the scene are even more drab, if that's possible. The sky is gray, the sea is dark rough and choppy, the pier is nondescript, her clothes are nondescript and plain, her hair is plain. All is quiet. Then suddenly she screams and takes a running leap into the water. Her arms and legs are splayed as she jumps in a way that looks like an anime scene.

The explosiveness of her feelings is ALL that jump out at you in those scenes, it's highlighted by the seeming normalcy and colorlessness of the shots. The effect is to make you feel like this FL could do anything at any moment, it adds *implied* feelings of rage, frustration, being lost, being unhinged, juuuust under the surface, like this calm control is hiding deep emotions and psychology. Everything in the diner that at first seemed innocuous and drab, starts to scream "controlled".

A boatload of emotions and information are imparted to the viewer in just the first maybe 5 mins of the show, without ever explicitly laying it out for you. The director leaves it for you to infer on your own.

Example two:

Nighttime, and ML goes to visit FL at the school. ML is in an all-red suit, trying to climb the fence to get onto school property and see her. She is all buttoned up and proper looking, having been in in-session school that day. They talk through the fence, with her looking up at him, and the camera frames them beneath a light shining down, and a statue of mother Mary praying (or some shit, idk some statue of a figure of spiritual grace), and the camera looking down onto the scene.

It looks like the devil trying to get into heaven to visit an angel, but unable to pass into her realm.

This is gorgeous cinematography and symbolism, the director is capable of creating these really fascinating and richly layered cinematic compositions and sequences that blew me away.

Example three:

Like when the father's life is threatening to crash down around him, and he is being very calm, while whittling sticks into points with an exacto knife, over and over again. And you can then feel his tension, his rage, his instability. It makes you wonder what he's gonna do with that knife. He does nothing with the knife except whittle sticks, but somehow this innocent and mundane task becomes ominous and makes the viewer nervous like "something might happen". And later, something *does* happen, he goes to her apartment and has a meltdown.

He used to make ship-in-a-bottles. He carefully, painstakingly constructed every little piece into his ship. Such an item is impressive, yet incredibly delicate. Which is a perfect parallel of his own family and how he views them in his life. The ship is in a carefully bottled and controlled environment, and for all the work he's put in, just one major fall or jolt to the bottle will wreck the whole thing. But now his life is ruined, and so is his ship-in-a-bottle. So he doesn't care anymore, and now he sits and, unable to figure out what to do with his emotions, whittles sticks into sharp points... useless weapons, crude and simplistic renderings of hostility. And this is what he later becomes at Monami's apartment, someone who expresses his crude and simplistic rage over not being able to control his ship-in-a-bottle of a family.

This director is layering meaning beneath meaning beneath meaning all over the place, and doing all this *without* any pretentious bougeois attitude, no fancy clothes, no fancy production values, no fancy vocabulary. Everything is stripped down to its most basic elements, and yet retains its essence. For example the scene where he cuts off his mother. We don't see the mother that much, just enough to know who she is. The scene takes place in his apartment, just a bare room with a few essentials. And yet the emotions of the scene are raw, powerful, and care was obviously taken to get it exactly right.

Lesson In Love was spicier, more toned down with a sense of realism, had a softer and more sumptuous aesthetic, and more ML/FL chemistry. But it was imo more entertainment than art, whereas this one is more art than entertainment. Hence my slightly higher score, though both shows were enjoyable in their own way.

My Fated Boy does touch on deep layers of emotions, and the scene where the kids are throwing toys to eachother from over the fence is GENIUS level good. But that's interspersed with the dog statue with sunglasses going "Ohhh Yeah", and a bubblegum plot about an ML making his way into the world of entertainment industry and idols and making it big in a way that is just so "wrapped in a pink bow" perfect. So it does have artistic merit, the spice levels are totally off the hook, the chemistry is there, but to me it doesn't fully fully transcend like this drama does, into the world of deep implied psychology and emotional content, and cinematic composition.

This show is, imo, so tightly balanced, so carefully crafted, so intricately intertwined as far as the intersections of characters, and their interaction with their environment. The layering of feelings with symbolism is all around you at every turn in this show. There is no lazy storytelling. Even the ending, that people call rushed, is simply clean and neat. Once the characters overcome, the Hero's Journey is over. The bigger mistake by many storytellers is continuing the story past the ending of the Hero's Arc which is unnecessary in storytelling. Knowing where and when to end a show is also an art form. For a J-drama to give a story an ending *at all* is not the usual j-drama route, and to me this is what j-dramas are often missing. I wouldn't call it rushed, I'd call it 'minimalist', which is in keeping with the story itself as it is told.

And this is why I would go so far as to call it a 'masterpiece'.

---> Assault is about someone sustaining emotional harm from a broken promise, therefore every broken promise in which one party experiences hurt feelings is assault.

--->It's only assault within the confines of an actual marriage, therefore it is not about emotional harm, but legal contracts.

Pick one.

> Also i wasn't minimizing rape at all I was pointing out they are both form of ASSAULT and should also be a crime

If your spouse wants you to cheat, is it still assault?

someone pls let me know if this ever gets eng subbed anywhere by anyone

Youre trying to guess my age to belittle my points? Wow keepin it classy, nice.

He makes enough money for people besides her to help him out. Shes a gf not a P.A. besides, all he had to do was just tell her exactly what u just said from the outset. And let her be a part of that decision.

she showed all through this drama, that she never deserved for the most important person in her life to give her "tough love". She deserved to be treated like a partner, a confidant, a refuge and solace, and she should have been leveled with and consulted, and deserved to have some input over her own life. She was powerless from the beginning to the end of this drama, because nobody trusted that her EQ or inner strength was enough for her to handle being told the truth. Which is ironic, because what he did to her forced her to tap into FAR more of her strength and EQ than it would have to just include her in her own life.