Sol1056

He's a very straightforward soul, and tbh, as naive as Dou Ming in some ways, like if you just charge in and say, "that person is guilty!" then the heavens will hear you and somehow make it right, and that it isn't made right is both incomprehensible and frustrating to him.

Him rolling up to the wedding like he can just brazen his way into stopping it is so totally in character -- and the times we see him taking a step back, appearing to give way, while building his case, those are entirely thanks to DZ's advice and scoldings.

They really are a good pair, and I think this past ep (or the one before), even DZ admitted it. SM is all decisive action but without thinking first, while she's all thinking first, second, third before she finally acts. She could use some of his decisiveness, just as he's learning to use some of her caution.

I see a countdown. So the Dec 16 airing date is official?

Mad props to the sound engineer for the audio during the father-son argument 30min into ep 12. Having all the sound suddenly at a far distance, and gradually fading back in -- such an excellent way to underscore (literally?) how thoroughly a bone-deep shock will level a person.

I'm so into this story I've come out the other side, where I don't want to see everything fall apart. So I'm paused midway through ep12 with a strong sense of dread. On the plus side, theory is the longer I delay, the more episodes I'll have to watch once I get over this. Well, that's the theory, at least.

This can only end in tears.

through ep11? I think we're at 5 or 6, minimum.

doh! thank you for the correction!

I think my current favorite word to describe this director's work has to be 'economical'. Everyone is at one location, planning for the next act -- and he cuts directly to that act. As least so far I haven't seen him do the "we'll whisper so the audience doesn't hear" (aaaargh I HATE that nonsense). Instead, he just skips right to it. If how a character gets from A to B doesn't push the story forward, establish a character's trait, or further a character's development, he skips it. It took a bit to ease into, since it's not the most common way of directing/editing, but it makes the story way more compact.

No wonder I hit the midway mark on each episode and start bracing for credits. The amount of story you can pack in is tremendous, if you keep a brisk pace. If he can keep this up for the whole run, we may end up with double the story we'd normally get!

Pretty sure it's the reverse -- in the first life, he thought the culprit was Prince Qing, who told ML he'd targeted the wrong people. (iow, he'd killed all those innocent people and didn't even figure out the mastermind.)

He's also an interesting character in that he isn't really a hothead, for the most part. He can be incredibly still and calm during the kind of moments where a wrong move will get someone killed. At the same time, he's clearly impulsive (or at least not prone to reconsidering his snap decisions) -- feed him the right information at the right time in the right way, and the boy will go off like a rocket. But the story doesn't treat him like he's stupid for that, either.

Which makes total sense for him: not hesitating in battle can be the best way to survive, but not hesitating in politics gets dead the fastest. When the FL forces him to slow down and think twice, the script is very good at making it plausible that a) he'd listen and b) he'd come around to agreeing. And what's rare in cdramas is that he doesn't go along just to placate her; he's going along because he's smart enough to realize what she says makes sense, and even if he doesn't trust her, he shouldn't dismiss her advice out of hand.

yeah, saw that. I do wish the listings would show the characters' given names plus their family names -- like when young, the FL is something-shu (prosperity) and as an adult, she's Zhao. Pretty sure I heard a different name for the ML, when his mother's talking to him. Just be nice to know so I don't get confused (again) about who's who.

I know it's a big thing to have your power couple matching each other wit for wit, but I'm really liking that the FL and ML do have differences in their skill sets. He's very good at reading people, very good at organizing people, and definitely good at leading people considering his elite troops give serious signs of ride-or-die. But he's really not good at the schemes. I mean, he can pick up that they're there, but he's a little too straightforward to see how all the crooked lines come together. (Not to say he doesn't try, and I appreciate the story showing him puzzling things out.)

Meanwhile, the FL is also good at organizing and leading, but I feel like she's always been so busy hiding her real thoughts/intentions, she figures this is the same of anyone outside her very small trusted circle. In a way, she's put so much focus on trying to hide her own tells to learn how to identify anyone else's. That makes it real easy for the ML to cut through her pretenses/defenses, because he's very good at picking up on tells. It also means she can cut through him right back, since she can diagnose any scheme at twenty paces -- while to him, it's like she's reading the questions in his head and answering them without him even asking.

I'm just really enjoying (and really really hope the story can keep up) this balance where it's not ML/FL trying to outwit or one-up each other. These two aren't competitive like that. This is more a case where each person is highly competent at something the other can't do at all. That's making their slow burn not the usual cat-and-mouse game, but more a 'why does this person keep walking right through my defenses' kind of game. And unlike one-upping where characters frantically hide any vulnerability -- here, even a simple interaction means accepting the reveal of their weakness (which both handle remarkably gracefully), to rely on the other's competence, and (here's the especially important part) after each incident, neither has manipulated or double-crossed the other using that weakness.

The big thing behind slow-burn is there has to be a lot of burning going on, but I really like stories like this, where it's a slow-trust. After which there should be burning. Lots of burning!

ohhhh. interesting!

ep6 mentions a character named Meisun. 1, it sounds like a two-character first name and thus bizarrely informal. 2, the story's acting like I already know who this person is. 3, I don't have the least clue. Could someone catch me up? Unless we are supposed to have no idea who this person is, and it'll be revealed in due time, in which case, just let me know so I'll stop feeling like I need to back up and re-watch the last three episodes to see what I missed.

lol same. every time I see 'Ms Longevity' I have to wonder if any real people actually looked at these when the AI was done. It's starting to get exhausting having to mentally change the subtitles to 'Miss Shu' so much, and I'm only on the 4th episode!

Unless it leans into SF, which what got JoL's 'I remember my entire past life' scenario past censors. Even if JoL otherwise has a lot of trappings of fantasy slash wuxia with the various super-powered characters.

Apparently the time-travel/reincarnation thing isn't as big a deal anymore? b/c looks like there's another "that end sucked let's start over" showing on iQiyi as coming soon, "The Night is Still Young" (which is a really odd title but okay).

I wonder if we're going to hear real voices or if we'll get dubs. From the BTS, it seems they're talking loud enough to be picked up by mics, but that doesn't always mean no-dubs. I looked up the director, and he doesn't have a long CV yet. 10 releases from 2020 to now, and 1 back in 2016.

Setting aside the first as outlier, in his modern dramas, 1 was dubbed, the other 3 were not. In his historicals, 5 were dubbed, and the 6th doesn't credit any VAs, so either that's the one oddball or it just wasn't a big enough production that anyone cared to find and add VA names. All his dramas have also been pretty short, from 18-24 eps (historical) and 18-26 (modern). The average for modern, historical, and overall are all about the same, rounded up to 22.

That makes this drama a double challenge, if he's getting on-set vocals and is going for 34 episodes. It's also one of the first (far as I can tell) where he's working with fairly well-known actors, both having had major roles in blockbuster dramas. My guess is this is his chance to really level up. Fingers crossed he doesn't munge it.

From the trailer, it looks like there are repeated start-over points (and repeated bad endings). Totally spitballing here, but I wonder if that repeated aspect is what got them past the censors -- as in, it's the repetition itself that's the problem and requires solving. Think Reset but with historical trappings?

At minimum, the script is aware of mordants (what 'fixes' the dye), that light fastness is a concern, that weavers were usually male (those looms were serious monsters), and that Shu brocade is the oldest and most famous of Chinese brocade types/traditions. So it's not a story written out of complete ignorance, even if it fudges some of the finer details.

I have no idea if there were officials who existed entirely to oversee silk dying but knowing China's love of bureaucracy, I wouldn't be surprised if there were. Actually if there's anything that feels a little less historical, it's that we only have *one* brocade master and *one* brocade inspector or whatever he is, and neither seem to have a pantheon of minions running about. Somebody's gotta supervise and inspect everything from the silk worms to the mulberry leaves to the way silk was twisted and tied for transportation and you can hardly expect the big man at top to do that.

But generally speaking, the more valuable a thing was, the more likely it was wrapped up in a bazillion layers of red tape and official documents and various folk trying to pull shenanigans with the system for their own benefit. So, not a documentary, but it's also not spun from *cough* whole silk.