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We have just finished all sixty episodes of the cdrama Oh My General! Would I actually recommend watching all sixty episodes of Oh My General? I think that depends on how much you require your 'plot' to be 'good' ....
Okay, so the starting plot of Oh My General is essentially: "After Mulan led her armies to victory and revealed her gender, what happened next? ... a rom-com!" Triumphant general Ye Zhao, the Living God of Hell, has been living as a man for decades after the death of the rest of her warrior family; now, having saved the Empire but deceived the Emperor in the process, she's technically liable for the death penalty.
Instead, the Emperor lets her keep her job and appoints her as his advisor, but also decides to marry her off to his most beautiful but useless fop of a nephew, thus rewarding her for her accomplishments and tying her to the royal family in one fell swoop. Who could possibly complain? Not Ye Zhao, actually, who is cheerfully thrilled by the prospect of being matched with some adorable arm candy with whom she may or may not have a secret childhood backstory that only she knows about.
Her prospective spouse Yujin, on the other hand, throws a tantrum at the prospect of being married off to the ferocious general that would do the spunkiest historical YA heroine proud.
The show is leaning very hard on its gender role reversal tropes, and on the one hand it's not exactly nuanced and on the other hand sometimes one is a person of simple tastes who really does just want to watch an amiably violent woman slowly win the heart of a petulant and delicate lad until he's eating from her hand like a baby bird.
Various friends and family, of course, have divergent opinions on this marriage!
Extremely pro: Yujin's concubines, who fall much harder and faster for the General than Yujin himself does and promptly begin scheming ways to make sure their marriage doesn't end in divorce.
Neutral-to-ambivalent: the General's right-hand women, mean lesbians Qui Shiu and Qui Hua, who want her to be happy, and if she thinks he's what's going to make her happy, then, well, they guess ...
*technically both Qui Shiu and Qui Hua get m/f romantic subplots later on so it's not really correct to call them the mean lesbians, especially given the show contains two actual undeniable lesbians who are canonically in love with Ye Zhao, but we started calling them that very early on because they gave off such strong mean lesbian vibes and found it really difficult to stop.
Also, the General's right-hand man and strategist, Huli, who despite having a reputation as a tactical genius has been wildly unsuccessful at conveying his own love to the General and is therefore more or less resigned to being supportive about the marriage she genuinely seems excited about.
Extremely con:
a.) Yujin's mother
b.) Yinuo, the general of rival kingdom Western Xia, who's got a big old evil crush on his enemy Ye Zhao
c.) Yinchuan, Yinuo's sweet little sister, who's got an even bigger crush on her brother's enemy Ye Zhao
d.) Yixin, Ye Zhao's cousin, the most beautiful woman in two kingdoms, whom Ye Zhao may have kind of sort of promised to marry during her years living as a man and who is emphatically not over it
The Yixin subplot is the funniest of all because everyone external to this marriage is convinced that the Junwang is going to dump the General to marry her beautiful cousin, and the Junwang meanwhile spends five episodes vibrating with increasing stress levels about the terrifying interloper who is trying to stEaL?? his WIFE!?!?!?
So that's the first 20 episodes: a rom-com about two unlikely people falling in love and the various side characters who are also in love with them! Overall, a charming romp!
... and by the end of these twenty episodes, their marriage is incredibly solid and there are still forty episodes to go in which they're just happily married partners who combine their skillsets to fight crime. There are whole arcs that are just like "the General takes her whole family, including her husband, their concubines, and her sister-in-law, on a field trip to defeat a rebellious army as a lark." DELIGHTFUL. A+. This is a really wonderful 30-40 percent of a show!
The other 60-70 percent is ... hmm. Okay. So at a certain point we began to theorize that there were two warring writing teams for Oh My General, and one writing team had a vision of a complex political drama, and the other writing team was invested only in married hijinks, and unfortunately these writing teams were ... not great ... at conveying to each other the required plot points ..... Like, our leads barely appear in episodes 20-25 because we are busy finding out a secret about the Emperor's parentage that turns out to have absolutely no relevance. The Empress gets exiled two separate times for completely different crimes, in between which the Emperor and Empress reunite almost entirely offscreen; we're fairly sure it's because somebody from one writing team misread a note from the other writing team and accidentally wrote that plot point in too early and then they had to hastily undo it. Beautiful lesbian cousin falls off a cliff and is left dangling from a tree for a full twenty episodes and two years of in-universe time during which her absence is never mentioned before she suddenly turns up again! "Somewhere, lesbian cousin is still dangling from a tree" is a phrase that you can repeat a near-infinite number of times without getting tired of it, it turns out! Then eventually someone on the writing staff gets really interested in Western Xia palace drama and we get a whole other plot about lesbian cousin's heroic and tragic adventures in sexy espionage, which is definitely an interesting arc but also a WILD tonal shift from the other half of the show where Yujin has decided to bring all his favorite opera singers and stage musicians to support his hard-working wife on the front lines.
So ... I can't, actually, say it's good? It really isn't. And sixty episodes is so much, especially when only like 50% of it tops is actually good content. But on the other hand the parts that are fun are really quite extremely fun. And it's just so enjoyable -- and so rare! -- to see a show that functions as a portrait of a marriage, and a good and working marriage, rather than simply ending at the point that the protagonists fall in love.
Anyway, I would be remiss if I ended this post without mentioning my actual favorite character, the rare but blessed product placement.
Okay, so the starting plot of Oh My General is essentially: "After Mulan led her armies to victory and revealed her gender, what happened next? ... a rom-com!" Triumphant general Ye Zhao, the Living God of Hell, has been living as a man for decades after the death of the rest of her warrior family; now, having saved the Empire but deceived the Emperor in the process, she's technically liable for the death penalty.
Instead, the Emperor lets her keep her job and appoints her as his advisor, but also decides to marry her off to his most beautiful but useless fop of a nephew, thus rewarding her for her accomplishments and tying her to the royal family in one fell swoop. Who could possibly complain? Not Ye Zhao, actually, who is cheerfully thrilled by the prospect of being matched with some adorable arm candy with whom she may or may not have a secret childhood backstory that only she knows about.
Her prospective spouse Yujin, on the other hand, throws a tantrum at the prospect of being married off to the ferocious general that would do the spunkiest historical YA heroine proud.
The show is leaning very hard on its gender role reversal tropes, and on the one hand it's not exactly nuanced and on the other hand sometimes one is a person of simple tastes who really does just want to watch an amiably violent woman slowly win the heart of a petulant and delicate lad until he's eating from her hand like a baby bird.
Various friends and family, of course, have divergent opinions on this marriage!
Extremely pro: Yujin's concubines, who fall much harder and faster for the General than Yujin himself does and promptly begin scheming ways to make sure their marriage doesn't end in divorce.
Neutral-to-ambivalent: the General's right-hand women, mean lesbians Qui Shiu and Qui Hua, who want her to be happy, and if she thinks he's what's going to make her happy, then, well, they guess ...
*technically both Qui Shiu and Qui Hua get m/f romantic subplots later on so it's not really correct to call them the mean lesbians, especially given the show contains two actual undeniable lesbians who are canonically in love with Ye Zhao, but we started calling them that very early on because they gave off such strong mean lesbian vibes and found it really difficult to stop.
Also, the General's right-hand man and strategist, Huli, who despite having a reputation as a tactical genius has been wildly unsuccessful at conveying his own love to the General and is therefore more or less resigned to being supportive about the marriage she genuinely seems excited about.
Extremely con:
a.) Yujin's mother
b.) Yinuo, the general of rival kingdom Western Xia, who's got a big old evil crush on his enemy Ye Zhao
c.) Yinchuan, Yinuo's sweet little sister, who's got an even bigger crush on her brother's enemy Ye Zhao
d.) Yixin, Ye Zhao's cousin, the most beautiful woman in two kingdoms, whom Ye Zhao may have kind of sort of promised to marry during her years living as a man and who is emphatically not over it
The Yixin subplot is the funniest of all because everyone external to this marriage is convinced that the Junwang is going to dump the General to marry her beautiful cousin, and the Junwang meanwhile spends five episodes vibrating with increasing stress levels about the terrifying interloper who is trying to stEaL?? his WIFE!?!?!?
So that's the first 20 episodes: a rom-com about two unlikely people falling in love and the various side characters who are also in love with them! Overall, a charming romp!
... and by the end of these twenty episodes, their marriage is incredibly solid and there are still forty episodes to go in which they're just happily married partners who combine their skillsets to fight crime. There are whole arcs that are just like "the General takes her whole family, including her husband, their concubines, and her sister-in-law, on a field trip to defeat a rebellious army as a lark." DELIGHTFUL. A+. This is a really wonderful 30-40 percent of a show!
The other 60-70 percent is ... hmm. Okay. So at a certain point we began to theorize that there were two warring writing teams for Oh My General, and one writing team had a vision of a complex political drama, and the other writing team was invested only in married hijinks, and unfortunately these writing teams were ... not great ... at conveying to each other the required plot points ..... Like, our leads barely appear in episodes 20-25 because we are busy finding out a secret about the Emperor's parentage that turns out to have absolutely no relevance. The Empress gets exiled two separate times for completely different crimes, in between which the Emperor and Empress reunite almost entirely offscreen; we're fairly sure it's because somebody from one writing team misread a note from the other writing team and accidentally wrote that plot point in too early and then they had to hastily undo it. Beautiful lesbian cousin falls off a cliff and is left dangling from a tree for a full twenty episodes and two years of in-universe time during which her absence is never mentioned before she suddenly turns up again! "Somewhere, lesbian cousin is still dangling from a tree" is a phrase that you can repeat a near-infinite number of times without getting tired of it, it turns out! Then eventually someone on the writing staff gets really interested in Western Xia palace drama and we get a whole other plot about lesbian cousin's heroic and tragic adventures in sexy espionage, which is definitely an interesting arc but also a WILD tonal shift from the other half of the show where Yujin has decided to bring all his favorite opera singers and stage musicians to support his hard-working wife on the front lines.
So ... I can't, actually, say it's good? It really isn't. And sixty episodes is so much, especially when only like 50% of it tops is actually good content. But on the other hand the parts that are fun are really quite extremely fun. And it's just so enjoyable -- and so rare! -- to see a show that functions as a portrait of a marriage, and a good and working marriage, rather than simply ending at the point that the protagonists fall in love.
Anyway, I would be remiss if I ended this post without mentioning my actual favorite character, the rare but blessed product placement.
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+1. That was much of the reason I loved The Mummy Returns (2001), even though its mythology was frequently stupider than its CGI.
I've been seeing gifs from this show on Tumblr for at least a year and it looked amazing. I am glad to hear that at least forty to fifty percent of it is!
"We'll put on masks and beat up tyrants when we see them."
. . . Do they actually do this?
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Also why we enjoyed watching all 6 Thin Man Movies despite they ways that SEVERAL of them are very problematic in very period ways.
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Where did you watch it?
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(A scene repeated multiple times throughout the show:
Mother-in-law: I can't believe I have no grandchildren yet! Yujin needs another concubine!
General: Yes sounds GREAT let's get more beautiful women up in here, I'll get right on it! :DDD
Yujin: ugh noooooo mom STOP I love my WIFE I can't even pay attention to the concubines I HAVE they're all just going to end up her concubines ANYWAY)
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"Where?"
I nearly choked on my cereal. That is all.
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So haaaaaave you seen story of minglan yet??
:P I got to ep 10 and kind of meh'd my way out of the plot. At that point, I really only loved the concubines and thought the mom was hilarious (tho a bit overacted). I am reluctantly interested in this whole Yixin subplot though; it sounds like the perfect shenanigans that originally drew me to the show...
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THE CONCUBINES ARE SUCH A DELIGHT! The first arc of the Lesbian Cousin subplot runs from episodes 15-20 and I personally find it delightful, though honestly if you're not into the leads I don't know how well it will work for you. There's also a subplot towards the middle (I think episode 36-38ish?) where The Concubines Go To Battle that might also be fun for you, though the show eventually does extremely poorly by Concubine Yang. :(
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Your contemplation of it having multiple warring writing teams helps make sense of why sometimes I'm like "this is the best and most delightful" and sometimes I'm like "wtf are they doing, this is nonsense? (and not the fun kind!)"
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at last, a life goal that appeals to me
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Damn, that is so appealing to me. I keep wanting more things to turn into rom-coms.
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Btw, does Huli ever get the threesome with Ye Zhao and Zhao Yujin of his dreams? ^^
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SADLY Huli never does get that threesome! It's really tragic, he earned it if anyone did.
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I honestly find the product placement in Chinese shows hilariously shameless. For me, nothing can really top the Cornetto product placement in MDZS, but I've also seen this week unsubtle product placements for rejuvenating face masks in a romcom set in an investment bank.
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Only flaw really is the version I'm watching on Viki seems to have background music that is louder than the actual dialogue.
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