mukkanna

Was he wrong? No. Did he make a mistake? Absolutely. He misjudged his brother, and even after warning signs decided to continue doing what he was doing. Even if that was ok by his book, his decisions dragged a lot of his friends down with him. The entire plot of TBOY wouldn’t exist without this person’s stubborn and somewhat arrogant attitude. He said it himself: “Even if the sky falls, I can hold it up!” But in the end, he couldn’t. I don’t dislike him, but he wasn’t perfect.

His mistake was giving up the throne but keeping his military power, support in court, and popularity with the public. The emperor is too suspicious to allow a perceived threat to his throne. This is a very common theme in political dramas.

This can stand alone and is in a separate parallel timeline from Blood of Youth according to the writer.

I’ll watch dramas rated 7 and up for this exact reason. There are some legitimately bad dramas in that range, but also some that are more likeable to me than dramas rated above 8.5.

That drama wasn’t as terrible as the MDL rating makes it look, but it could have been a lot better as far as the script and editing. Also Yang Mi got a lot of criticism for her expressionless acting…even though her character legitimately seems to have only one facial expression in the source material. That’s a pet peeve of mine…dinging actors and actresses when that’s the character they’re playing. People should blame the writers instead! But MDL doesn’t even stop people from rating episodes that haven’t aired yet, so how can we expect the ratings to be accurate…

He doesn’t reappear, but in the same episode (or maybe the next one) they remark in the dialogue that he woke up and SMY was going to give him the antidote. If they do a sequel maybe he’ll show up there.

I agree, this one is far more believable (other than the whole burial thing, for which your logic needs to be suspended). MDL’s ratings are mostly a popularity contest. The more haters you have, the lower the score regardless of the quality of the drama.

That's the thing about universes, though. They are what the author says they are, regardless of what other people think about it. So since the author/screenwriter says they're parallel, they're parallel.

I do think the author originally meant these stories to tie in to each other, but the current state of BR and its characters and timelines don't match up to TBOY anymore. It's not just that the author decided to randomly give the BR characters a happy ending when they would otherwise have naturally developed into the TBOY characters--he actually wrote the development of these characters so that it would take writing gymnastics to make them develop into the TBOY characters. Could he do it? Sure. But it would take some questionable tactics like memory loss, personality change, and power loss. To do that for one character is passable, but he'd have to do it to 2-3 characters...there'd have to be some sort of mass poisoning or bewitching or something. When you have to do that sort of contrived contortion as a writer, it means you didn't really plan ahead well enough...in this case, it seems the author decided not to contort and just create two separate timelines.

Supposedly the author also regretted the ending of the Dashing Youth couple in TBOY...that's why I don't know whether it's a prequel for TBOY, for BR, or for neither.

The Fox Spirit series may or may not have similar inconsistencies. I haven't watched the other two yet (still on my watchlist), but since the stories were scripted around the same time, I would expect fewer of these timeline problems. The problem with TBOY/BR/DY is that the author didn't write them chronologically and TBOY was already filmed before he finished the other books.

The novelist is writing more books currently. The plan is apparently to develop TBOY and BR as parallel worlds, according to what I’m seeing on the internet. I guess the author’s characters diverged so much he really couldn’t reconcile them. So basically, TBOY and BR should be watched independently. I’m not sure how dashing youth ties in to either one.

ML’s acting was praised by fans of the original novel and the novelist, so I suspect what you’re seeing is closer to “Su Muyu” than the ones in TBOY and DY.

You're still here? You actually managed to watch this entire series that you said you hated so much every day since ep 1? Wow. I have to say, I feel like you're even more dedicated to actors you hate than the ones you like.

Watching those will only make you more confused if you're good with details. The timelines are messed up, and many of the BR characters seem like completely different people who just share the same name in TBOY.

There are so many timeline and personality and event discrepancies...I'm pretty sure that's why the novel author/screenwriter suggested viewing BR as a parallel world. He obviously hadn't fully fleshed out the prequel in his mind when he published TBOY, and it seems that SMY and SCH took on a life of their own when he wrote BR and diverged from their "future" selves...

There are too many timeline and personality bugs in my opinion.

For example, Prince Langya looks like he's about to die at any moment, and the physician also says he won't live long. But I believe Xiao Chuhe was only exiled for 4 years at the start of TBOY, and his exile should have started with the incident that ended Langya's life. If Blood River joined that conflict, it would have been 4-6 years later, not 8, unless Bai Hehuai's assessment was so far off that Langya managed to live another 3-4 years despite the pronouncement that he was too far gone to save.

For another, the dialogue where TBOY SMY and SCH have their final confrontation:
- SMY calls SCH "Patriarch" instead of "Changhe." Blood River SMY never treated SCH any differently once he became Patriarch and still calls him "Changhe" and bosses him around, to the point where SCH jokingly says he's the true patriarch while he's just SMY's lackey. I really don't see that dynamic changing without some major event happening.
- SCH tells SMY that his reasoning for turning their comrades into drugmen is that they "live in darkness" and "I thought you wouldn't mind." Blood River SCH watched SMY decide to sacrifice himself to give these same comrades a chance for a better future (and true to form was like, "you're being crazy and I wish you wouldn't do this, but I support you 100%!"). He also knows that SMY's goal was to have everyone in Blood River be able to live their lives with freedom and not be just a sword in someone else's hand, which is the complete opposite of being a literal drug-puppet. Unless SCH suffered brain damage or memory loss, there's no way he would have thought Blood River SMY wouldn't have minded.
- TBOY SCH hit SMY hard enough to hurt him. Blood River SCH does have a bottom line, and the bottom line happens to be SMY. Based on his depicted behavior patterns in Blood River, I can't even imagine what kind of earth-shaking event would need to happen to change that.
- TBOY SCH doesn't seem to respect SMY in the same way. Blood River SMY and SCH have their philosophical disagreements, but SCH's behavior towards SMY is consistent. And basically, it's: "If I can convince SMY to do things my way, great. But if I can't, I'll eventually do whatever SMY wants no matter what I prefer or what the cost to me is." Whether it's money, power, his personal happiness, or his life, SCH is willing to give it up for SMY. So for him to change so much, there would have needed to be some major personality change or event that happened.

And thirdly, by the end of Blood River, SCH and SMY are very powerful people. SCH easily defeated Li Hanyi on the roof without even any special skills. SMY cut the sky and a mountain in half in one slash. But in TBOY, even in a group, they needed the Tang Clan's help to defeat Li Hanyi. How could this make sense if these are the same people?

And lastly, they do love each other so much, as you say. Blood River SMY wouldn't give up on SCH so easily. And SCH wouldn't have done what he did to begin with, because even if he didn't consider Blood River his family, he would know that SMY did; and Blood River SCH, no matter how ambitious or greedy he is, would never purposefully destroy something SMY cared about because to him, SMY is more important than all those things. SCH is consistently depicted as someone who's willing to both kill for and die for SMY. I can't even imagine what would drive him to do what he did in TBOY.

This is what I mean by saying Zhou Munan wrote himself into a corner. We'll have to see if he can make it make sense after TBOY 2 :)

Wow, you must have spent a while typing! It was an interesting read :)

I also want to point out, since I keep seeing comments like "Gong Jun's acting improved later in the drama" or "Gong Jun grew into the role"--the evolution of Su Muyu's portrayal from "wooden" to what he looked and acted like at the end of the drama is almost certainly by design because the scenes are not filmed in order. Some scenes that are earlier in the drama were filmed later, and vice versa. This means that Gong Jun (and all the other actors and actresses) set the character's emotions, actions, etc. based on their understanding of the script, not on what had already been filmed, since scenes are not filmed in order.

I also think it's a bit unfair to ding Gong Jun at all for the flat affect in the first 10 episodes, when he's portraying a character who is alive but not quite "living," whose title literally means "Puppet," and whose nickname is "wooden fish." That's actually Kui's base setting. Gong Jun's job is to convincingly portray the development of the not-quite-alive assassin as the story unfolds, so we should judge him on that instead :)

Zhou Munan and now also Gong Jun have said that Blood River is a parallel world with TBOY. Basically, I suspect Zhou Munan wrote himself into a corner and couldn't make it make sense if he tried to reconnect the Blood River SMY and SCH with the ones in TBOY.

I'm actually not sure they're dead.

1- No one from either side of the conflict saw their bodies.
2 - The bad guys were still surrounding the place when Snake reported back. Seems like weird behavior since they were there to kill everyone but then never bothered looking at other places (like the clinic) and instead continued trying to assault this house. If they'd neutralized the defenders, they should have gone in and confirmed it was just the two people.
3 - Mu Qingyang's coin toss (despite being ridiculed by others as a gimmick) is also shown to be 100% accurate in the drama. When it dropped at the end, it landed peach blossom up, which is a "good" outcome.

TBOY SMY/SCH have different power levels and different abilities, which are both decreased compared to their depicted abilities in BR. It's not reasonable to expect both of them would have become weaker instead of stronger.

TBOY SCH/SMY have much more of a boss/subordinate relationship, whereas BR SCH/SMY are clearly brothers who highly value the other person. BR SMY would never have given up on SCH the way TBOY SMY did, he'd still be trying to turn him back till the very end. And BR SCH would likewise never have done what TBOY SCH did because he values SMY above his ambition.

The dialogue in TBOY isn't right if they already lived through the events of BR. TBOY SCH says he thought SMY wouldn't have minded his turning the Dark River assassins into drugmen. I can't even imagine BR SCH being that deluded unless he suffered a personality transplant or brain damage, since he's known from the beginning that BR SMY considers Blood River assassins as his family.

Blood River is still running currently, so there's still time for these to change. But from what Zhou Munan has been saying, I think he either intends for these to remain parallel worlds or he (like some other writers) intends to revise his previous works to align better with later works; in that case, he may rewrite some of the settings in TBOY.

Zhou Munan (novel author/screenwriter) said BR and TBOY can be considered parallel worlds, as he was not able to adequately reconcile the two.

Having watched TBOY and now currently watching BR, I see no way for the events of TBOY to be canon events in BR's timeline. Reasoning below:

The “someone” who took these liberties would be Zhou Munan, who is the screenwriter of Blood River. Coincidentally, Zhou Munan is also the original author of the novels these dramas are based on (including The Blood of Youth). So what you’re talking about is like saying Tolkien took liberties with his characters from The Hobbit when he wrote The Lord of the Rings. Zhou Munan wrote the novel for Blood River after the one for The Blood of Youth and has expressed that he wouldn’t have written The Blood of Youth how he did had he written the books in chronological order.