mukkanna

Just a warning for everyone that the character descriptions in the thread (although awesome) apparently also have spoilers for the ending. Not sure how accurate these will be for the drama, but just be careful while having fun :)

I've posted snippets from the novel in the "discussions" section. If you want the painful bits I can post them, too...but the spoilers are pretty severe (assuming the drama follows the novel, that is).

This isn't a military drama nor a period drama, so should be fine even if those rumored regulations are true.

I agree...I like Yang Yang and Zhao Lusi, and I think they're both beautiful people, but I couldn't buy that pairing in Who Rules the World. To me, the characters seemed more like best friends (without benefits!) than people in love with (and romantically attracted to) each other. It was still enjoyable while the writing was good.

I see. For me, "chemistry" is if I can believe these two characters actually have romantic feelings for each other. That's wholly dependent on their acting skills, for me.

Being called "pretty" is actually a bit of a backhanded compliment. You can look up "is being called pretty a compliment?" on the internet, and you'll find your answer as to why people are taking it as an insult.

In a nutshell, it's reductive. It focuses on the physical appearance. A "beautiful" person can be beautiful inside and out; it can include personality, temperament, etc. A "pretty" person is just good-looking on the outside; and then there's an implication that perhaps that's all there is to them, since they didn't warrant a compliment to their mind or personality, and the best we can do is to compliment their appearance.

I respectfully disagree. Even dressed in women's costumes, Gong Jun does not look like a woman. No one would mistake him for anything but a man dressed in women's clothes. His body build just isn't feminine--the shoulders are too broad. If you show just his face with women's makeup on, I can see how someone might think he's a handsome woman...but they'd only think that he might be a woman because he's wearing women's makeup.

Chengyi can look beautiful. Gong Jun can look beautiful. But neither of them look like women (i.e. "feminine"). I hope that sheds some light on why some folks get irritated. The connotations of these words in the English language are not the same.

"Beautiful": not gender-specific.
"Feminine": gender-specific; it literally refers to having traits of the female sex.

Men can be described as "beautiful" and women as "handsome." Those are both compliments. But saying a woman is "masculine" or a man is "feminine" is typically not a compliment; it's saying instead that they don't fit within their gender at all.

In addition to that, though, there are many who find the division of "feminine" and "masculine" traits in general to be sexist.

I actually am not sure what people think of as "chemistry." Sometimes I see people saying "the chemistry is through the ROOF!" and then two posts later another person says "there's no chemistry..." Not just on this drama but others as well. Does anyone have a definition that everyone agrees with?

As for the costumes and hairstyle, I didn't watch that other one, but I went to look at photos and I'm not seeing it? Which costumes/hair in particular are you thinking of? I see they both have partial updos at times, but there's lots of braids...I also see fur, shorter cut robes, and "ethnic" styling and patterns for Goodbye My Princess. Am I looking at the wrong drama?

There's no character named Mo Bei in the book. There's a character in the book named Mo Tian, but that person never meets An Ning.

An Ning's romantic interest in the book is surnamed Shi and is from a major military family in charge of defending the Northwest. I suspect Mo Bei is a departure from the book (or, more likely, a melding of two romantic storylines that were in the book), but in this case I think it could work out just as well. An Ning's love interest in the book doesn't get appear much at all, and other than his absolute devotion to Han Ye and his loyalty to An Ning, doesn't add much more to the story...he's the stereotypical "upright and loyal general" who literally thinks "Where your command points is the direction of my sword." As for the other couple, they can probably be cut out of the drama entirely without losing much storyline.

I doubt anyone here wants to read about the toxicity of various CPs, especially the ones that the actors themselves have refuted. I don't think we should encourage real-life CPs at all...it's not healthy behavior for fans, and it's not good for the actors and actresses, either. Leave people's private lives private. Why should any one of us care who's dating who offscreen?

I'm honestly not sure why any CP marketing needs to be done for any drama ever. In the West, no one assumes or thinks that co-stars are dating each other, and despite the cesspool of entertainment rumors, I feel Hollywood is actually a lot less drama than C-ent.

If the thought is "the actor and the actress have great real-life chemistry, so their romance scenes will be good" then that's basically just implying "the actor and actress have poor acting skills and professionalism, so unless they actually like each other in real life, the romance scenes will be bad." If that's the situation, why bother watching at all, since the rest of the drama will probably be full of terrible acting?

You can look at the discussion topic above for differences between the two characters and plotlines. There are more differences than similarities, really, unless you're counting really superficial things like: they're both intelligent women descended from nobility who are good at fighting and fall in love with men. Their personalities, abilities, driving forces, relationship types with other characters, etc. are all different. Even what they want for revenge is different. Li Changge wanted to kill for revenge. Di Ziyuan wants justice, but her plans don't necessarily involve killing the objects of her revenge.

Why even post if you have nothing positive or even constructive to say? Putting aside that you make baseless conjectures and treat every rumor as if it's 100% set in stone, you wish people ill when they're working hard. Was this post supposed to reflect poorly on the drama, or on you as a person?

Some other points for thought: the drama may diverge significantly from the source work, like other dramas that only resemble the source work by 25%. Even the ones that "follow closely" still diverge from source works 5-10% of the time. Word of Honor, for example, was praised by some for "following the novel;" frankly, it only resembles the base novel by maybe 30%, if I'm being generous. The official information released on this drama is very little. What evidence has the drama officially put out that makes anyone think the modern arcs are going to be involved at all, much less that they'll keep the characters as teenagers in them? Do you really expect scantily-clad/half-naked characters to appear in a live action Chinese drama, when they literally have a history of editing out "too much cleavage" and male nipples? And lastly, people who watch this may not watch the donghua or read the manhua, and may simply be fans of the actors/actresses/genre. How many people who watch Marvel movies read the comics? Would they even know (or care) if this follows the manhua or not?

Not completely sure since I haven't read the novel about Qi Ye, but he's referred to as "Jin Wang" which is a position below an emperor and likely represents a titled prince of the first rank. Usually that title is only available to the sons of an emperor, who typically have to perform some service of merit to obtain the title. So, most likely he's a powerful prince, and could be a son, brother, or uncle of the ruling emperor. Not sure if he's the crown prince, but I'd think that if he were the crown prince or emperor he would have been titled as such.

You're right about it being a fictional setting, but I'm not sure what China is thinking. They apparently picked out certain elements of costumes in two recently airing dramas as being "too Japanese." One has been partially removed from streaming, and the other supposedly delayed release for a bit to edit out the offending elements. Given that Youku's last big hit with Gong Jun was removed in China, they might be a bit trigger-shy now. I'm just hoping it airs before one of the actors or actresses manages to get canceled. There seems to be an epidemic of cancellations recently.

Not necessarily a bad thing. Aren't viewers always complaining about bad editing? If they can give us a quality end product, I'll be happier than if they rushed it and the quality suffered. They have some popular actors and actresses, so they should take their time and polish it. Maybe they're also preemptively making some edits for the costumes (though from leaked photos I don't see anything that looks very Japanese or Korean anyway). There are also dramas that got bombed because of animal abuse accusations, plagiarism, etc etc, so a lot of items to double and triple check for...

If you're upset about getting into arguments, I think the issue is the words you're selecting. I don't know if you're choosing those particular words on purpose or if maybe English is not your first language, but sometimes the way you phrase things can be inflammatory. I've never watched anything with YBY (or is it YBJ?) in it and frankly don't know or care anything about her career or success, but I can see why people are getting triggered by the posts.

Using words like "sensitive" "accusing" "claiming"--you're asking for someone to get offended here. Another (less inflammatory) example, your previous post where you say "Yuan Bingyan is refusing to leave the hotel," a more objective and factual way to say that without possibly implying that YBY is a childish or stubborn person throwing a tantrum would be "Yuan Bingyan has not left the hotel."

Just some food for thought. Best!

In the novel, Luo Mingxi likes Di Ziyuan.

But it seems as though Di Ziyuan never realizes he has romantic feelings for her, and he never says anything to her about it. She thinks of him like her older brother.

If you don't mind spoilers...below is an excerpt from the novel.

---

Mo Shuang hooked the corner of her mouth, "I heard that all the women in Dajing are smitten with Your Highness because of Your Highness' wisdom and gentleness. His Highness can do this to everyone, but not to the Marquis of Jing'an. What’s more, your royal family still has a feud with the Di family. With the Marquis of Jing’an's disposition, I’m afraid that in this life, she can never like you. Your Highness, I think...you might as well give up on her, there are thousands of women in the world."

Mo Shuang looked up at the sky above the dense forest, dotted with stars, and her voice was extraordinarily clear.

Han Ye smiled and leaned on the tree beside him without answering. He looked at the stars in the sky, and suddenly felt sentimental.

A few months ago he was at the bottom of the Hua Yuan Valley, and the person who lived and died beside him was Di Ziyuan. Now it was the princess of Northern Qin who accompanied him, nagging. Ah, life really could not be predicted.

Ziyuan, there is a girl who asked me to give up on you. She has a noble status and a bold temperament. She is better than most women in the world.

However, she doesn't know that there are thousands of women in this world, but there is only one Di Ziyuan.