Sol1056

1. There's no way on god's green earth that the actress playing Luo Yi Lian could possibly be 39. Either someone added it wrong and she's actually 29, or she made a deal with the devil, in which case could she please pass along the devil's phone # so I can also make a deal to be permanently young, too.

2. The actress playing Lin Hai Ru has stolen Every. Damn. Scene. she's been in. Even the scenes where she has maybe a line or nothing at all. She's operating at Jiang Cheng levels of eyeroll mastery.

I couldn't place her face, and kept mistaking her for Huang Can Can instead. Glad to know the real actress!

Worse, not even a concubine, a house maid. Apparently you can't get any lower than that. I suppose because at least a concubine does have a legal status, as a second wife, while a servant is essentially a non-entity.

Rather awkward CGI aside, from the opening this feels like old-school wuxia. The good guys are earnest, the FL is smart (but with a personality that plays against expectations, of course), the scenery is breathtaking, the world is massive, and the plot is basically molasses in january.

In short, it has the vibe of a faithful adaptation of Condor Heroes, Demi Gods, Mount Deer, and the like. It's all about what happens along the way, and not so much any planned itinerary (aka the plot). Characters are either dispassionate or burn hot and bright, and half the dialogue happens without words (because those of like minds understand each other instinctively, of course).

Personally, I'd be more surprised if this *wasn't* a tragedy. The expectation of a happy-ever-after feels like a modern wuxia thing to me, compared to the number of 'lone warrior must set aside his love and continue his lone warrior journey' variations in classic wuxia. Hearts are gonna be broken, I'm just saying, but at least it'll happen surrounded by gorgeous scenery, if they can get the CGI out of the way long enough to get the shot.

Holy moly, did the subtitles hit the skids in ep5 or what. I'm making it through by listening closely and mentally rearranging the words as I go, but what's onscreen is horrific. Repeating lines -- a line of text, a refresh, and it's the same line of text. Mixing up pronouns (which is understandable for subs where you can't see the hanzi, but even machine translation can see the hanzi to know which pronoun is being used). Hell, the subtitles are even confusing "you" and "me" and I'm just not seeing how that can happen by accident.

Wait, is this a MangoTV production and no one told me?

Ahh, so Qiao never got promoted to legal status? And that means Mme Lin is 2nd Son's second wife? No wonder the woman is totally unimpressed with Qiao or 2nd son, lol.

Okay, let me see if I've got this right. (Gathered from eps 1 & 2, so it's mostly background info.)

Yining's Father is actually the 2nd son, and the 1st son is "posted outside". I'm guessing military, maybe? (Unless it's a euphemism similar to being sent to the farm?) And 1st son's wife went w/ 1st son? Mme Qiao is now 2nd son's legal wife (technically) but is still considered concubine rank compared to her sister-in-law?

So what's Mme Lin's connection? She's merchant background, so someone's wife. Mme Qiao sending over the accounting means Mme Lin is legal wife... but to who? Is there a 3rd son? Is he dead, or also sent up the river?

Is there no way to change the year once it's been set?

The relationship diagram just posted is so small I can't make out the exact details, but does it look to anyone else like Neo's either wearing a shirt made of sparkly reflective gauze, or isn't wearing a shirt at all and was instead dipped into a vat of glittery face powder? Asking for a friend.

I only just now read the synopsis in full, and realized if I had, there would've been no need to see who'd be the ML. "a painful love that's akin to having one's heart pierced by thousands of arrows" just about screams in all-caps CHENG YI CHENG YI for several minutes at full volume.

Someday the boy really needs to play a goofy, understated, and rather clumsy egghead, but fortunately for this story, this day is not that day.

Making her look bad is the OP's goal.

The problem is you cannot simultaneously lack all talent AND be a major threat to other actors in terms of outshining them. The very fact her anti-fans keep voicing that fear ("take any spotlight" etc) means that secretly they realize she does have the skills to do that. From what I've seen, she's still a little unpolished in places, but she's demonstrated a decent range in the 3-4 roles I've seen her in. She's got potential, if she can land roles that push her farther.

I think the bigger problem is she played the antagonist enough times that her anti-fans are convinced she's exactly what she played: conniving, underhanded, two-faced, etc. They're no longer able to see her as anything but her character(s), and cannot see the person behind those roles. Which I'd say is an excellent sign of an actor's talent, just as their dismissal of her as private (not-the-character) person is an excellent sign of their small-mindedness.

At first, she was all talk about someone standing up for her people... which clearly she wanted, she just didn't want to be the one to do it. Then suddenly she's all flirty with a guy who killed most (all?) of the people with her, but not in a smart way.

She's what my grandmother would've called a preacher's daughter -- plays the rule-abiding role enough to fool you, but is really looking to break every rule, consequences be damned. If you don't get the second half of her story (where she wises up and finds her own way), all you have is a spoiled child who's gone overboard from her first taste of freedom. (And frequently, just like here, she ends up trading rules set by an overly-strict father for rules set by a domineering boyfriend -- which is the opposite of freedom, imo.)

Frankly, I was really hoping she wouldn't do the flirty thing, but would have the smarts (and self-preservation) to find a loophole. Something Scheherazade-esque, ie 'if you can beat me at this game/contest/etc before dawn, you can have me in bed, if not, you'll have to wait until the next night to try.' But I guess that kind of quick thinking is only reserved for FLs, and even then she'll probably cave quickly, anyway, if the bastard in question is her final guy.

I'd say it's her character that's restrained, but the actress herself has improved since the earliest series I saw her in. This one, she has an emotional breakdown in grief, and does a fairly good job at it. Not afraid to give it her all when she cries. That kind of vulnerability in front of the camera (or the uncaring whether you look horribly messy) doesn't come easy, but it's usually a good indicator of an actor's potential talent, if they keep at it.

I watched some more, with the volume turned up to hear better, and yeah, Alen's also dubbed. There are one or two words/expressions that he says with an inflection that's definitely him, and I didn't hear it, so it's a VA. One with the right pitch and timbre, but lacking that extra bit of flirtatious drawl.

Technically they're all dubbed, since the actors' voices weren't recorded during the filming. (With such a short series, they may've chosen to cut corners by not insisting on silent sets.) The dubbing is especially obvious with whomever did FL's lines -- it's like watching animation, with the VA adding gasps and sighs and groans that have no corresponding lip movement or chest rise/fall in the actor. (Not to mention it makes female characters sound like ditzy twits, all surprised and shocked gasps.)

However, if someone's dubbing Alen Fang, holy moly are they very, very good at nailing his real voice. Like, mimicry levels. (Which isn't totally out of the realm of possibility, as both Xu Kai and Bai Lu have had VAs who sound damn near identical to the actors' real voices.)

good heart > good looking, but cdramas seem to be certain that good looking must equal good person.

(which on the flip side means old, ugly, plain, or overweight is all bad looking ergo bad person. so, so, so done on that trope.)

I think it's because if she took them off, we wouldn't remember she's the main character and/or might not recognize her. The rare dramas (like Are You The One or Lost You Forever) where the heroine actually dresses down to fit the circumstance are the exceptions that prove the rule.

It's significant because once you realize what butterflies mean, it's very clearly signalling LR as reincarnated... and then does the same for SRQ, and that's at least a half-dozen episodes before the actual reveal. Point is, there seem to be multiple places where the director was adding hints, knowing we'd never notice until rewatch -- and that means a story crafted with the intention you'd notice new things on rewatch... unlike stories where rewatching only makes you realize just how many holes there were in the plot.

And another hint: in ep7, around the 28-minute mark, LR sits behind a screen reading, while SRQ is painting her portrait. When the camera looks at her through the screen, there's a butterfly on the screen that seems to hover behind her shoulder. There's another butterfly to the lower left that's out of focus... until the camera looks from her side of the screen, towards SRQ -- and that's when, very intentionally, the camera focuses for just a second on the painted butterfly before refocusing on SRQ's hand.

I never even noticed the butterflies when I was watching the show during its run, and now I can't stop noticing them!

I'm side-eyeing strongly the "smoking marijuana in the United States", because last time I checked, South Korea is not the US. If his actions were a crime in the US, he'd have to be caught in the US (or extradited to the US) to stand trial for that. I'd be curious to hear why South Korea considers itself able to prosecute for something outside its jurisdiction, or maybe that's just part of their extra bit of shaming a person.