mukkanna

This character's motivational arc never completely made sense to me, either. He's a poorly executed character with a one track mind. While I agree that insanity is common in Chinese dramas, insanity without a proper build-up and presentation is just deus ex machina. "Why'd he do that??" becomes easy to explain when every time, it's "Oh, no reason that would make sense to a normal person. He's just crazy. But look at the carnage!"

He's able to manipulate 2 princes because they're both 1-dimensional caricatures of normal people with brains. Their supposedly smart advisors (the best a prince can buy, right??) are also about as intelligent as ML's bandit friends. He's able to take over armies because the soldiers are also 1-dimensional caricatures of normal people with brains.

This is an example of a drama whose leads are supposed to be so smart and so strong that the villains/dangers also needed to be proportionately huge to be challenging at all. So either they need a supervillain, or they need to be really good at writing a believable scenario in which the superhero is actually in mortal danger without making any dumb mistakes. In this case, they circumvented that by dumbing down other characters so they can be easily used by the villain, and also had the villain use low-down, backstabby methods--he's a danger because he just doesn't play fair, not because he's better than the hero in any way. A little lazy, I think.

But I'm still enjoying the drama. It's still better than a lot of the other dramas this year.

Yes, I read it, and it's as Jenny said.

Not sure if this is a spoiler since it's her initial character setting, but I'll still mark it:


POSSIBLE SPOILER:
This character is a person who doesn't much care about many "normal" motivations, whether negative like greed, lust for power, or jealousy, or positive like justice or righteousness. She doesn't really have any long-term goals and is very focused on living in the now. Emotionally speaking, she's pretty abnormal, just like Wang Ying Lu's other character; she also prioritizes things pretty abnormally, just like Wang Ying Lu's other character.

Wang Ying Lu's performance in I Am Nobody leads me to feel she'll do a great job with this particular role, if she takes it.

While I'm not a fan either, Wu Lei does a good job with fighting scenes and acting. For people who think he's good-looking, what's not to go crazy over? That being said, not sure the visuals match the (overdone) description of Xie Jing Xing in the novel.

Try this one?

https://chubbycheeksthoughts.com/translations/

Happy ending

Wow, you're petty and immature.

I'm not sure how well you read to be honest...I'm fairly sure I told you I'm not a Gong Jun fan? If he succeeds or fails, it's no skin off my back :) Whether a person like you hates him or not, I doubly don't care. A fan like you is a liability, not an asset, though--just FYI.

You seem to think I'm going to be offended by your diatribe here...but you're just making yourself look less intelligent, not me. Best of luck in your future with this kind of attitude!

I don't really care about getting an apology or a thank you from you, and I don't consider myself a Gong Jun fan, either. I'm just a person who hates misinformation. But I see that you make all sorts of assumptions about people and their motivations.

MDL is all full of rumors and people's opinions. Zhao Lusi and Dylan Wang's being in this were also just rumors, as you have now seen. Just because they're considering a drama role doesn't mean they will accept the role. Frankly, this character is also very similar to ones Dylan has already played, so I wouldn't be surprised if he turned it down so he doesn't get typecasted. Same with Zhao Lusi. These pages change actors/actresses constantly...you have to wait until there's an official announcement to believe casting. The popularity chart also is a tool for monetization...so it's not a true measure of how successful someone is. Look at Tony Leung's rank, for example. Just for your future info.

I saw you only had one side's info so I gave you what I found from the other side, since you asked. If you're not familiar with punctuation marks, question marks you're using means it's a question... It's good you're not a person who believes in random gossip and rumors, but your previous posts were concerning. Since you say you will check the facts and question every aspect yourself, then I'll stop responding to your questions on this matter.

Oh, also I should say: MDL is never trustworthy. It's hard to correct misinformation because anyone can update anything based on just rumors.

Kind of like Facebook.

I thought you were actually curious so answered your questions. I assumed you had good intelligence and, like others, can use your brains and come to your own conclusions. Did I ask you to come to the same conclusion as me? I personally don't see any evidence that the rumors are true. That doesn't mean they can't be true--but people are innocent until proven guilty. If you can show me some credible evidence, maybe I'll change my mind.

Why would I try to convince you to watch this? I don't know you, and I don't even know if I'm going to bother to watch this myself. You lacked information, you mentioned you lacked information, I provided you some. You said you didn't like people based on reading the opinions of other people; I just thought you'd like to go and look at both sides before you randomly decide to hate people because other people think they're bad people.

Also something to consider, is Weibo the only social media platform in China? If he was canceled there, could he not have gone elsewhere? Or does Gong Jun control all that? And if he does, why would he still need to take out Zhang Zhehan? Why not actors who are more popular or have more commercial value? Does the negative press and rumor-mongering he gets cancel out the supposed positives?

I always just assume people just need more information and can use their brains to make a logical conclusion after that :) Who wants to hate people for no reason? Takes so much energy!

Spoiled rich kid=Gong Jun? No evidence pointing to that! Gong Jun is originally what seems like middle class (his parents ran a small business, and he mentioned they got cheated a lot; he also struggled for some years to make enough money to pay his staff, which he has talked about in interviews as well) and he doesn't have any family background in the entertainment industry. One of the things he did after getting popular was to pay off the house he was buying for his family to live in...so it doesn't seem that they're wealthy, either. His reputation in the industry is that he's very earnest, sincere, and conscientious, even to people who might seem unimportant. Journalists report that his personality hasn't really changed from before he became popular, and a while back he was voted one of the top celebrities journalists like to work with because he's so nice. I think it's unlikely that all these people who worked with him previously and all these journalists are the ones who have it wrong...especially since antis hacked his personal accounts and still couldn't find anything to cancel him with.

As far as Zhang Zhehan's cancellation...it seems that he didn't go into the shrine and there were photoshopped/misunderstood photos, but he was still canceled quickly. His Weibo was removed over this incident. But he still hasn't been reinstated even though there are accounts in China that have posted "truth/clarifications" for him and he officially filed his case with the police a few months after he got canceled. If he's completely innocent and was the victim of some plot, of course his fans are angry! I'm not a fan, so I just wonder if there's something the public doesn't know about why he wasn't allowed to come back even after it was shown that the cancellation was a mistake, especially since apparently Zhang Zhehan's family are members of the CCP. Things don't add up.

I'm sure there are some people who believe that stuff, and others who don't. All of the things with Zhang Zhehan's cancellation are rumors, and Zhang Zhehan himself has not been able to produce any evidence of wrong-doing by anyone, including Gong Jun. I was following for a bit out of curiosity, but Zhang Zhehan's solo fans (if they're actually his fans and not antis in disguise) are toxic.

People don't always need proof or reason to hate, unfortunately. All reasonable evidence points to the conclusion that Gong Jun is actually a pretty nice person, if you look at the lack of the antis' ability to cancel him even after his social media was hacked and his info doxxed.

Disclaimer: I haven't looked into this issue for over a year now, because like I said, those folks are toxic. If there's proof of anything from Zhang Zhehan's standpoint, do let me know and I'll go take a look.

Welcome to MDL! I was just going to say...the whole point of being an actor is to play the role of someone you're not. Gong Jun is a pretty good character actor. No one who had watched his previous works thought he could play a character like in Word of Honor, and then people who had only watched Word of Honor thought that he couldn't play an upright, noble character like in Legend of Anle. I would argue he did a good job at bringing both of these characters to life.

I think this character is actually well within his range. But I was wondering whether it was a "fresh" enough character that Gong Jun would be interested, since he's said a few times that he wants to play different types of roles...and his Word of Honor character is already a morally gray, revenge-minded person who has soft spots for only a select group of people and could kill others like ants/peel their skin/break their bones one by one and see nothing wrong with it. But hearing you say this, it looks like this character is different enough that people think he can't do it.

There's a lot of speculation that the reason neither of the main leads were able to dub themselves was because so many lines needed to be changed to make it through review.

Well, having watched other dramas after this one that weren't supposed to be S+...the production value is actually not that bad, in retrospect. Many other dramas much worse, but since our expectations are lower it's easier to accept.

Yes.

Part of their issue was expanding Luo Mingxi's role, which involved giving him some of the accomplishments that Di Ziyuan had in the book.

I don't think the characters are without complexity though. Han Ye especially is actually more fleshed out than book Han Ye. Drama Di Ziyuan is definitely less of a bull in a china shop, and I'll agree with you that she's less domineering than she is in the book. I don't think she was erased because her core characteristics are all there: but I don't think they did a good job showcasing her "softer" side, nor her sharp edges (which were given to Luo Mingxi, in my opinion). While she's still 3-D, her personality is just not as faceted as it was in the book. Drama Di Ziyuan tends more towards the "woman with a mission" side and less towards the "...except when Han Ye is involved" end. A pity, since I think this role would definitely be more popular if it were.

I think the Empress was very much the same as a villain, with the same motivations as the book. And while they did erase the active portion of the Emperor's role in the Di family's tragedy, they did make it quite clear that both he and Di Ziyuan know that he grabbed the opportunity the Empress gave him with both hands and was a willing accomplice (though not the perpetrator).

I agree Mo Bei could have been a much better villain, though, and I wonder why they made him 2-D at the very end when he could easily have been 3-D by showing some love and regret for Anning instead of making him basically unredeemable and single-track-mind power-hungry. It seems that they re-dubbed that scene, and whatever was scripted and acted out didn't pass censorship...who knows what may have been?

Yes, that's exactly what I meant by saying Di Ziyuan's side of the love relationship was established by her acting and not by concrete actions.

I don't think it can really be compared to Nirvana in Fire, honestly. Apples and oranges; Nirvana in Fire is a serious drama, while Legend of Anle is an idol drama. Nirvana in Fire's main theme is justice/revenge with not much romance in it at all, while Legend of Anle is a love story on a background of justice/revenge.

Also, to clarify--I don't think it's taboo per se to take over the throne...but people who attempt to overthrow their legitimate government don't tend to end well (overthrowing illegitimate and typically unstintingly unredeemable usurpers is another story).

I have to say, C-drama has had some pretty rough patches. Wuxia is probably my favorite genre for C-drama, and that's really unpopular these days! I was just rewatching Journey to the West (1986) in all its fuzzy glory and ridiculous "special effects," and it reminds me not to judge CGI so hard, haha. But the 1986 one has the best Sun Wukong in all the adaptations I've seen :) Awesome actor!

Gong Jun's acting style reminds me a lot of Tony Leung (one of my favorite actors since the 80s) in his early days, so I've been watching his dramas even when they're not my usual cup of tea. His eyes are so expressive, and he acts with his whole body--very similar to Tony in that regard. You can 100% tell when he's in "acting" mode vs when he's just Gong Jun wearing some fancy robes. Looking forward to seeing his future works :)