Sol1056

so many other trailers of upcoming wuxia/period/xianxia are all doing the ultra-dark, ultra-dramatic which is all fine but feeling kinda overdosed on that tone rn. love both the leads and could really use a cheerful and happy palate-cleanser like this!

because this ALWAYS bothers me (and because I am not a horse-experienced person by any measure) I really need you to do a list of the dramas you've watched and rate which actors are genuinely good riders and which are clearly not.

I've seen plenty of clips of Leo Wu practicing on horseback, but what about Zhao Lusi? Or Liu Haoran (Eagle Flag)? Wang Kai (Nirvana in Fire)? Zhang Ruoyun (Joy of Life, Sword Snow Stride)? Chen Feiyu (Evernight)? Wallace Chung (General & I, Sword & Brocade)? omg just please start a thread so I can throw names at you, this always bugs me b/c I don't know whether to be impressed by the actor or by the editor who cut it to make the actor look good despite the actor's lack of skill!

I've been watching wuxia and xianxia for 10+ years, and I'd say there's roughly two happy endings for every sad ending, and about a fifth the time it's a "if you tilt your head and squint hard it's a lays-the-groundwork-for-HE open ending" route. But sad endings are not nearly as all-the-time, especially in the last 5-6 years. (Things come in and out of style, after all.)

I don't think the problem, really, is whether the ending is happy or sad. It's whether it's well-written (satisfying, delivers on the story's promise) or badly-written (unsatisfying, doesn't answer its questions or goes back on its promises). You can have a happy ending that's wildly unsatisfying (deus ex machina endings) or a sad ending that feels right and satisfying because it's the story's logical destination.

TtEotM made a lot of promises. It was asking questions related to defying fate, undoing or defeating destiny, having agency in your own story -- and in the end, the answer it gave was "actually, you can't do any of that; your fate is set no matter what you do, might as well die". It didn't live up to its promises, and that's what makes it an unsatisfying ending. If it were the logical end, a lot of people would be crying, sure, but not *pissed*. Not like this.

Under all the "why can't it end happy" noise, I suspect that's the real issue: the show asked a hopeful question and settled for a hopeless answer.

Apparently the "split into two parts" now has an additional clause -- you can't just broadcast season 1 followed immediately by season 2 (which is basically the same as not having two seasons, anyway) -- so now if you split into two seasons, you must have at least a minimum of a three month break between seasons.

Frankly, this story had the potential to keep us all hanging on if the first season had ended at, idk, ep26? or whatever, and then all the various language fandoms would've been spinning our wheels frantically for seasons 2. That's how American and Brit shows work, with anywhere from a few months to a year between seasons, and somehow everyone survives.

"But no, we can't do two seasons, we'll just cut it brutally and rework the episode lengths to get it all in one season" seems like the idea of telling a good story is a distant fifth compared to getting it over with in one run.

tl;dr your guess is as good as mine in why the directors/producers played us like that

aha! I got lost in the explanation of who's who, went by too fast. thank you for explaining!

wait, are LingFei and SuYing the same person? or do we have two separate people with the same modus operandi?

agreed. it's almost a sleeper role, since SMS starts like business as usual for TXT: the prodigal son of a wealthy business or noble family who means well but is constantly a day late and a dollar short -- except he turns out to be (after all the joking) clearly a damn lethal machine. it's easy to forget TXT can actually act, and this is a role that reminds you.

personally even if the result falls slightly short, I'll still always applaud someone pushing themselves to break out of the comfortable mold they've been occupying

I'd say watch until ep35 -- that's a HE-for-now kind of ending. I halted at 36, pending word of how it'd go down... so mentally I've backtracked to the episode where it looks like things will all turn out right. That's my story and I'm sticking to it!

only up to ep10, but this feels like another drama in the new wuxia mode -- a lot less twirling in the air, a lot less flashy sword movements that miss the opponent by a foot, etc. this feels a lot more like Sleuth of the Ming Dynasty's (aka Jackie Chan directed) fights, where it's a lot of direct combat with complex punches & blocks all moving at hella top speed. it lends a sense of realism to wuxia's usual borderline-superhero antics.

as for the plot, tonally it reminds me somewhat of NiF -- especially in its obvious notes of not for the idol-watching bunch: no spoon-feeding the audience with voiceovers, for starters. plus a cast of characters who all have their own private motivations (instead of existing solely as plot devices or as cardboard background characters from central casting). now it's just a question of whether it can keep this up all the way to the end.

it does feel like a drama that's hyper-aware of having two A-list actors and thus determined to keep them both in the fanciest get-up possible, even if it makes no sense for their role. as a new disciple? I expected simple white clothing with minimal and simple headdress. the feather boa was... jarring. when YXW is supposed to be a maid? yet she's dressed with same fancy headdress and fancy clothing, and looks nothing like the maids around her.

it's almost like the showrunner/director was worried we'd forget who the main characters are if they aren't always dressed ostentatiously compared to anyone else in the scene. (yet there are random points where BL & LYX do get more suitable attire -- YLX in the river, BL in the prison iirc, but the next scene it's back to ornamentation & embellishment for no apparent story-reason.)

I'm not even sure it feels cheap, so much as... lacking confidence. like, if we let either character dress down for longer than a minute, you might forget they're supposed to be one of the leads -- as if the story doesn't think I'll "get it" without helluva lotta noisy costuming-signaling.

yep! like LYX, she does her own dubbing.

it's a really bizarre word choice for the translation, so my hope is that it has more nuance in the original. whenever I see "fetus", I mentally change it to "child-slash-vessel of the first demon lord" -- TTJ is technically his own person, but he was created for the sole purpose of his soul being destroyed so the demon lord could step into TTJ's body and take over from there. so, a child (hence 'fetus') but also a vessel with a light sprinkling of avatar.

plus there's the news that Netflix will be picking up the series for US/Western markets. if you're hoping to capitalize on a growing soft power around exporting wuxia, I honestly think you could not do more to damage that than to export a drama where a character is repeatedly abused, neglected, abandoned, betrayed, and then blamed for all of that and forced to die to make up for a path he clearly wants nothing to do with, anyway. Western entertainment is very big on the power of the individual, and bucking destiny/fate. A drama that goes in the total opposite direction just doesn't seem like it'd be the marvelous (and rewatchable) hit that Netflix would spend money on.

(although if Netflix were to say, "we'll buy the director's cut *without* all the trimming necessary for chinese tv," I'd be down for that. not sure if netflix can ask for that or if PRC would allow it, but I'd totally be rewatching on netflix if they did, just to signal my approval of getting around the damn censors.)

the problem is that when it comes to the script, though, LBFAD's script is miles above the quality/skill of TTEOTM's script. BL in particular has been served a pretty badly-written character.

(Although it shows her chops, b/c an actress of lesser skill wouldn't be able to breathe any life into a character randomly turns stupid like LSS/YXW.)

at this point, it doesn't even have much of a high *watch* value, if the ending looks to be pretty clearly foregone. I've suffered through watching these characters suffer for so many episodes. I'm not particularly interested in suffering through even more just to have it confirmed that all the show knew how to deliver was suffering.

Someone wake me when it's over and the verdict is in. I'm going back to rewatch LBFAD.

nooooooooooooooooooooo /sobs

He's always been wiry. He's a former ballet dancer and built like it -- all tendons and long muscles, not a lot of bulk. I wouldn't be surprised if (after leaving the boyband) he gradually returned to his original ways of keeping in shape (that is, balletic methods instead of pop/dance methods).

I haven't read the novel, but my interpretation is based on her comment in the 1st or 2nd episode, that she "hasn't seen the moon since the Demon Lord came" -- like, he blacked out the sky. So "the end of the moon" sounds to me like "when the Demon Lord is reborn".

thought it was a dream, a tear, and a thread, and combining the tear and the thread gets her the nine nails. which... sounds a little like a D&D quest (which would make this a side quest?) but I suppose that's no surprise, tropes of epics generally tending to similar patterns, even across cultures.

Is it just me, or is the fortune-teller/immortal sect guy (friend of the CP) supposed to be that much of a buffoon? he seems to exist mostly for random humor, but if so, he's not very funny. Unless incompetence is supposed to be funny? idk