Sol1056

It could have been his mom, but the timing doesn't work. the story (iirc) was that wufeng had no idea if the spy has succeeded, until suddenly they got news of this marriage selection being pushed up by a few years. So whomever the spy is/was, it had to be someone who was still alive within the past 3-4 years.

the problem is that with this particular director, there's a quiet question of whether this is a story he actually wrote, himself, or is this yet another story he "wrote" via stealing someone else's story.

She's very considerate... to her peers. Anyone who isn't her social equal, all bets are off -- but this is true of almost all of them excepting Xiaoyao & Jing. Like with Nian, the rest of the story sees her behavior as not just acceptable but expected.

Not sure if he's dubbed himself in any other productions, but here his voice is done by Su Shang Qing, whom you might recognize from Sleuth of Ming Dynasty (Tang Fan) or Ultimate Note (Wu Xie). He tends to do younger/high-energy ML voices.

RuoChen reminds me so much of the kinds of characters Hu Ge played when he was younger (like in Chinese Paladin or The Myth) -- a bit of a self-centered rascal with a head full of dreams, who's really only here for the trouble he can get into, starts with barely any power/skill (but ramps up fast), who's more of a pest than a lover, and doesn't always seem all that bright -- but boy is he good-hearted, devoted to his One True Love, and frequently innocent and pure when it comes to what to actually do about that love.

It's a completely different archetype than the Emotionless Perfect Unattainable Lover characters (Immortal Samsara, Starry Love) or the playboy/gambler who turns out to secretly be a master strategist, top-level martial artist, or brilliant scholar (Story of Minglan, Destined). Although that second has its alternate where the ML's cover is that of a delicate scholar wasting away from some illness, real or pretend (Who Rules the World, Love In Between, New Life Begins).

Which basically means I have a sense of how this ML's arc might play, altho tbh it's an archetype I can rarely tolerate long enough to see the guy power up into a maturer version. Guess we'll see if this can be one of the few exceptions!

there's a difference between "we tried so hard but we couldn't save her" and "we didn't bother trying at all". the second? no one will ever know for certain the mother couldn't have been saved, b/c no one tried. the first would be a horrible accident. the second is negligent homicide.

I love both leads, and this looks utterly adorable & hysterical. (Plus props to whomever did the sound editing for the trailer. Perfectly on cue.)

No, the *law* has been in place since 2021, which is why the comedian has no excuse (according to PRC) for making the joke in the past week or so. (That is, he had plenty of time to be aware he shouldn't make jokes at the army's expense, because apparently they're so delicate they can't handle humor. /sarcasm )

from what I've gathered, it appears the comedian might've just been another blip, but CCP/PRC snagged him as a useful excuse to effectively halt everything while they "reconsider" or "re-evaluate" all dramas, comedies, and variety shows. Last I heard from some melons is that currently broadcasting shows must freeze their marketing, all variety shows are temporarily frozen (as are all special events and similar), and any not-yet-broadcast shows must go through re-licensing before they'll be cleared for airing. Lots of time, money, energy wasted (and no word on whether your average station is just going to broadcast dead air, or old reruns of shows that'd never pass censorship now?) --- basically everything has been thrown up in the air, grab some popcorn, it may take a while.

It's part of the Overton Window, or alternately, the apocrypha of the frog in the boiling water -- that of course anyone thrown into boiling water (or the farthest reaches of the Overton Window) would rebel. But when you turn the heat up gradually, bit by bit, eventually everyone's boiling to death and they don't even realize it because it's all normalized. There is no "when they came for," because this is China's normal.

The likeliest truth is that it's a combination of things -- but if "double-check we're ready for high traffic" is in there, they may have leapt on it as a believable excuse that's also apolitical and doesn't provoke blame-storming on anyone in the staff or cast.

Speaking as someone who works in web/cloud applications, this is entirely my guess based on my own experience, but it could actually be technical issues. (Sorry for the length!)

First, remember that Lulu is coming off a massive hit with HUGE traffic stats and popularity. Of course any platform would leap to capitalize on that by immediately broadcasting another hit w/her in the lead! And why not use "subscribe now & we'll show it sooner!" to gin up new subscribers -- but adding millions of new viewers means your platform has to be able to handle that traffic.

Normally, too, maybe a few million viewers would watch the instant the episode drops, then another million swing by an hour later, etc, with viewership cresting as time zones wake up and/or get online. But after a huge hit like TtEotM? I'd bet pizza money on a significant chunk of those very-eager new subscribers setting their alarm clocks to wake up at whatever ungodly hour translates to "when it goes live" on the platform or app.

So just imagine ALL THAT TRAFFIC hitting the site, probably within a very compressed time period. If I were on the development team, I'd be doing one of two things. Panicking severely, or quitting my job, changing my name, and moving and leaving no forwarding address, because I'd have no guarantee the site wouldn't explode in a catastrophic failure the instant that first episode went live -- not without serious load-testing to know 100% certain we're ready.

And plus, we're not the only ones watching a show on QY! Let's say the platform's average traffic is a million viewers, peaking at two million a few times a day -- and now they're supposed to have capacity to handle what could be FOUR times (or more!!) of that? Which is worse? To be watching the 9th ep of your niche show and suddenly the entire site is completely off the air for no reason you can see? Or to subscribe, log on in excitement, and what you can get jitters and freezes (if it doesn't crash outright) and then we get cascade failure as people desperately try to get back onto the site, forcing it to load over and over repeatedly four million times in the space of five seconds?

Think of a sports arena in your downtown area, where the traffic's already pretty bad just from regular traffic. And now ten thousand cars are all trying to get out of the parking lot onto streets that were barely enough for five hundred cars -- traffic will be so bad it could take you HOURS to just get a half-dozen blocks. That's the potential snarl we're talking about. Which would you rather have: a bunch of people getting anxious at having to wait, or four million people burying your twitter, tumbler, weibo, and instagram accounts with furious screeching over the fact that your site keeps crashing and they can't watch their current faves? (And I would not be surprised if PRC would find a way to penalize QY severely for letting it happen, too.)

tl;dr: I'm actually inclined to think that "technical difficulties" might be more accurately "hold on we need to stress-test this about sixty more times (or at least do a bit of traffic calming first) before we unleash all you mad hounds across the globe onto our platform".

so are they or are they not giving refunds? anyone know?

idk about Song Yi being "too old" for a romcom -- she's just very good at screwball comedy, which is rare in cdramas (and when you do see it, it tends to skew to a slightly older actress/character).

screwball is (roughly) where the character (usually female) is either actually so smart she's kind of clueless, or is so clueless that she comes around the other end and has moment of genius insight. it's one of the harder types of comedy to pull off, but Song Yi does an excellent job of it in Joy of Life.

that's not a style you see very often for ingenue (younger actress) roles, who usually just get played as ignorant rather than unintelligent. (note that Betty White was playing the screwball blonde well into her 90s.)

So no difference between if it's made for streaming vs meant to be tv-broadcast?

I found out more. The producers shoved it into a single season b/c they feared a possible situation if the 1st season proved to be popular -- that other production companies would immediately find any/all possible dirt as a way to shut the show down (since it really was dominating all the charts). Had it been split into 2 seasons, there's a very good chance we never would've seen the 2nd half, with all the competition doing its best to find reasons the show shouldn't be allowed to continue.

And apparently that kind of response did happen, and to a degree far beyond what any previous show had gotten. Like, competitors were going back 8-10 years looking for anything anyone on the production had done that even remotely smacked of wrongdoing, to gin up reasons for the series to be taken off the air. That's just a level of brutal that's completely out-of-hand, but looks like TtEotM's producers weren't wrong in hedging their bets and pushing for only one season.

excellent! I actually really like her natural voice.

first, that sounds an awful lot like Bai Lu's real voice -- anyone know if it's just really good dubbing or if it's actually her?

second, am I the only one thinking, "Groundhog Day but with murder"?

I've gotten to the point that any drama that appears to let its actors get a) soaked by rain, b) covered with actual mud (not just a smudge on the cheek), c) significantly wounded in a way that doesn't disappear by the next scene and/or d) in any way does something so the lead characters do not, in fact, look like every frame is a painting of them being perfect -- that drama shoots to the top of my to-watch list.

I guess I'm just getting burnt by wondering whether "I must at all times be filmed in a way that always makes me look magazine-cover ready" might be in the actor's contract, or if directors & costumers just can't handle letting anyone dress down and dirty even if privately the actors actually are willing to commit to the bit.

I heard elsewhere that for some reason (censorship? episode limit? something else?) that it won't be broadcast on TV, but will be streamed instead -- and apparently the rules for streaming are different. Larger episode limit, less of some kinds of censorship?, not entirely certain.

my guess is the writer wasn't going to cut a whole season down to only 40 episodes and give us a hack job -- so they went with the streaming option for its larger episode limit. if anyone else knows more about how it works in re tv vs streaming, please tell!