skygiants | Entries tagged with cdrama

I watched some of Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries when it was coming out -- I think the 1920s costumes and Intense Eye Contact propelled me about a season and a half into it before I ran face-first into my procedural television block, which is farther than I get into most procedurals tbh.

Then quite recently a cdrama adaptation came out, Miss S, that went up on HBO last year, and

tenillypo (who had seen and loved all of Miss Fisher previously) wanted to add it to our list. So now we've watched all of that -- and then

genarti, who had never seen any of the original Australian Miss Fisher, wanted to watch some for compare/contrast, which turned into watching the whole series for compare/contrast plus the movie, which we finished up last night. So for this brief moment in time we are now experts in the Miss Fisher Experience!

To be honest, I was not expecting the degree to which Miss S was a near-exact replica of Miss Fisher; I was expecting a similar setup (Independently Wealthy 1920s Style Icon Fights Crime While Engaging In Intense Eye Contact With Local Hot Policeman) and a bunch of different side characters and murder cases, but in fact all of the cases are direct equivalents of Miss Fisher episodes run through localization. This makes for some fascinating and sometimes very funny choices! My personal favorite is that the moderately racist plotline about Miss Fisher's Chinese Boyfriend, His Silk Import Business, And His Communist Arranged Marriage Bride has transformed in Miss S into an identical plotline about Miss S's Russian Boyfriend, His Linen Import Business, And His Communist Arranged Marriage Bride -- I imagine the writing team cackling to themselves when they made that decision -- but I also love every time the original is like 'ello ello zis mystery revolves around zese Bohemian painters ... zey have traveled all the way here from la France .....' and Miss S is like "yeah we had a very intense Bohemian painting scene in 1920s Hangzhou? these Bohemian painters are from Hangzhou."

Obviously the impacts of censorship on the adaptation are pretty notable; Miss S Can flirt widely but Cannot sleep around, and Miss Fisher's butch lesbian doctor friend is young and explicitly straight in her Miss S incarnation despite her dashing pantsuits. None of this was particularly unexpected (they did manage to keep one sympathetic gay couple who feature in one of the early mysteries, which honestly surprised me) but we were taken aback by the changes in the storyline regarding the plucky orphan adopted by both Miss Fisher and Miss S.

( spoilers! )

Also, Miss S' near-instant cahootship with her love interest and their seamless slide over the course of 34 episodes towards "oh yeah we're more or less engaged" without needing to discuss it is incredibly cute, but definitely a different and IMO less rich flavor than Miss Fisher and her love interest's three-season slow burn around their drastic lifestyle incompatibilities and mutual understanding of how extremely badly they could hurt each other if they got it wrong.

On the other hand, all of Miss S' murder mysteries get two full episodes each to play themselves out compared to the brisk hour Miss Fisher has to get in, solve her murder, and get out, which I think is usually for the better. Characters-of-the-week in Miss Fisher simply don't have time to have any actual emotions about the things that are happening to them, which is unfortunate because those things are so often wild. The average Miss Fisher episode features a small business with 4-5 employees; by the end of any given episode, 2-3 of those employees will be dead, 1-2 more will have been arrested, and Miss Fisher will pat the shellshocked survivor on the shoulder and assure them that they shouldn't give up on their dreams! What happens next? That is Not Miss Fisher's Problem. This becomes particularly glaring any time we get a Sympathetic Murderer, they confess to their crime of murder in the name of self-defense or protecting their child or whatnot and are led away, and in the next scene Miss Fisher and her police boyfriend are toasting each other to another job well done. Sometimes I do think that Peter Wimsey and his fits of guilt over the ethics of crime-fighting have ruined me for all other fictional detectives. Anyway, if I owned a small Australian business, I would simply ban her from the precipices.

Miss S caps itself off with the plot that concludes Miss Fisher's first season, but throws in a lot more dramatic Lost Tomb-style bells and whistles (rewatching the Miss Fisher season finale felt deeply anticlimactic in contrast tbh). I'm rather sorry that it never got around to Miss Fisher's Season Two ACAB plot about corruption in the police force, but I don't mourn Miss Fisher's Season Three arc-plot rehabilitating her deadbeat dad, nor the Miss Fisher movie, which was ... not good .... I was going to say more about how it was not good but this post is already very long and I'm quite sleepy, so if anyone particularly cares I can wax longer in a comment tomorrow!

On the strength of its first half alone Love Like the Galaxy jumped more or less to the top of the list of cdramas I've seen; now that we've seen the whole thing, the second half falters a bit for me but has some real charm points nonetheless.

Cheng Shaoshang, the heroine of Love Like the Galaxy, is the teen daughter of a military family who's being raised by her obnoxious grandmother and abusive aunt and as a result has learned nothing appropriate or educational for her class and station and everything about how to secretly scheme for revenge on people who are mean to you. (She has also learned how to be an engineering genius, but that's a happy accident.) At the beginning of the drama, her parents return after fourteen years at war; Shaoshang promptly stages a dramatic fainting spell to illustrate how poor her treatment has been while they were gone; her father falls for it immediately while her mother, used to training new recruits on the battlefield, equally immediately sees through the charade and is like Well! Can't Endorse This Behavior!

The relationship between Shaoshang and her mother soon develops into an ongoing battle of wills, as Shaoshang's mother struggles to make up for lost time in the only way she knows how -- With Great And Unhelpful Military-Style Discipline -- while Shaoshang, deeply resentful that her mother seems to be constantly furious at her for the result of her own abandonment, doubles down on schemes and bids for independence. Meanwhile, the rest of the family (Shaoshang's extremely affectionate father, brothers, and sweet cousin Yang Yang who is constantly and unhelpfully put in the position of being The Good One as compared to Shaoshang) are all broadly on Team Shaoshang in this fight, which has the effect of annoying her mother even more while not in any way preventing Shaoshang from constantly going on rants about how nobody loves her in this world and she can only look out for herself and then setting out to deliberately push her mother's buttons even harder.

Something I kept saying to

genarti and

tenillypo while we were watching is that the relationship between Shaoshang and her mother in the first half of the drama felt like it was being given the treatment that most dramas give the central romance -- the camera is determined to show how much Shaoshang's mother loves Shaoshang and how absolutely dogshit she is at expressing it and how much she is fucking up about it, while keeping both of them deeply sympathetic at all times. Usually only the romantic hero gets this edit, so the fact that instead we are seeing a beautiful middle-aged woman sneak around pining for glimpses of her daughter while pretending she doesn't care at all is very exciting to me!

Then we got to the back half, which is much more focused on the romance and the broader political plot, and at one point Shaoshang goes on an extended rant about her love interest is just like her mom and I felt very vindicated in my read, lol.

Technically speaking Shaoshang actually has three love interests, all of whom she's engaged to at different points in the drama, but the main one is Ling Buyi (played by the same actor who played Fei Lu in Nirvana in Fire.) Ling Buyi - the emperor's favorite adopted son on a mission to get justice for his murdered family - is ALSO scheming, vengeful, and under-socialized, and falls in love with Shaoshang at first sight upon witnessing her plot to get her mean uncle arrested. They share many hobbies, including talking at great length about how alone they are in this world and how as a result they had no choice but to singlehandedly attempt [elaborate secret revenge scheme] while hordes of parental figures trip over themselves in attempting to aggressively support them.

I have no objection to this romance and I LOVE much of how the major conflict plays out, which

( broad spoilers ) but the romance also pulls Shaoshang increasingly into court politics, which means that her family is in the story much less, and as by this point I was deeply attached to her entire family I kept wanting her to just go home and hang out with them again. (She does occasionally, but not nearly enough! That said, the best arc in the back half is the one where

( spoilers again ))

However, in recompense, the court politics arc does give us the Emperor and his sweet Empress and mean concubine. The mean concubine and the Emperor were childhood sweethearts and the Empress was a political marriage and everyone including their horrible children is constantly trying to use this to pit them against each other for court faction reasons and they are constantly, wearily having to explain that in fact they are extremely fond of each other ... the concubine never wanted to be Empress ... it would be so much work and she would have to attend all the court functions instead of showing up for five minutes to be incredibly rude and then leave again ...

( One more spoiler )

Some other comments:
- I did not think I would come around on the B love interest, a scholar who spends the first 30 episodes doing nothing but constantly negging Shaoshang, but in the last act he made an incredible turnaround; the C love interest is a perfect darling infant
- the drama is just chock full of mean girls whose whole personality is being mean to Shaoshang, and about a third of them get unexpected and compelling character arcs and another third of them spiral all the way downhill into murder and you simply cannot tell which ones are going to be which because the larval phase for all of them looks more or less the same
- Jiang Cheng's actor is there as the incredibly kind and filial but absolutely useless Crown Prince who doesn't clench his jaw once

I will close with a .gif of one of the first times Shaoshang and her mom are actually on the same page while getting joint vengeance on someone who has offended both of them.

( Look at them! )

I had both accurate and inaccurate impressions about The Imperial Coroner going in.

The inaccurate impression was that this show was going to be a sort of historical procedural featuring a series of cases-of-the-week that our plucky Tang Dynasty coroner heroine was going to become responsible for solving; this was untrue! Most of the show is actually a big overarching metaplot in which our protagonists go on a long road trip to find a missing person and sort out a political conspiracy while their parents all deal with more political conspiracies back home at the Palace. This wrong-footed me a little in that I forgot to pay attention to the political conspiracies at first and I did have to do a little confused catch-up once it became clear that I should have been trying to sort out what was going along with them from the start.

The accurate impression (gained from other people's posts) was that this show features a perfect and charming sedoretu. This was one thousand percent correct and did not lose my attention for a moment!

The main characters include:

- Chu Chu (adorable bow hair), a wide-eyed but talented baby from a family of small-town coroners who has come to the big city to take the Imperial coroner exam and prove she's the best she can be! Chu Chu is GIFTED AND PROFESSIONAL in the art of autopsy and she LOVES her work and she LOVES her handsome and ethical but moderately antisocial new boss and she has NEVER previously had cause to suspect anybody's motives in her earnest little life, which might be because she grew up in a tiny town that until recently was completely inaccessible except by crossing a canyon hand-over-hand on a rope

- Commandery Prince Xiao Jin Yu (stern in red), Chu Chu's handsome and ethical but moderately antisocial new boss, a member of the royal family filling a post as prosecutor and well on his way to deeply offending the entire rest of the court in his Pursuit of Justice! Just as serious and professional as Chu Chu but significantly less trusting, which might be because he grew up in the palace, Notorious Pit Of Vipers; nonetheless completely willing to let Chu Chu earnestly re-enact various crime reconstructions on his consenting body, a.) because he loves justice and b.) because he loves a puzzlebox and c.) because he loves Chu Chu

- Jing Yi (perky ponytail), Prince An's longterm action-comedy sidekick; a cheery young man with boundless reserves of good humor who enjoys running around on rooftops, leaping in and out of windows regardless of whether there are perfectly good doors, running elaborate secret identity scams, being pinned to the ground and/or against the wall by Prince An, and pining for Leng Yue

- Leng Yue (less perky ponytail), the granddaughter of a vaguely sinister official whom everyone more or less suspects to be planning a coup against the throne, who has channeled her resentment at her granddad into running off to the jianghu to become the best Action Heroine she can be; self-assigned bodyguard to Jin Yu (platonic), self-assigned rival to Jing Yi (romantic), and the most beautiful woman that Chu Chu has ever seen, which Chu Chu is SO happy to explain to her at length

- General Xiao Jin Li (armor), Jin Yu's non-identical twin brother, who does NOT understand his brother's interests and hobbies and is also NOT interested in getting involved in the romance quadrangle in any way shape or form but WILL hang around for thirty episodes being aggressively supportive as best he knows how! midway through the show switches to an opening theme that seems to be earnestly trying to convince us that he is the main character, which is rather like if The Untamed launched a new intro around episode 20 that focused entirely on Lan Xichen

Aside from these main youths, the rest of the cast is mostly comprised of various parents, mentors, and scheming eunuchs. Unfortunately I had just finished She Who Became the Sun at the time that we started watching this show and thus I felt obliged to tune out whenever the show started edging into Evil Eunuch Comedy Hour rather than spiraling into a long and underinformed discussion with myself about gender and masculinity and eunuchs in palace television, but I don't actually think the evil eunuchs knew what was going on in the plot either until like episode 40 so I don't think I missed all that much.

Eunuchs aside, a very pleasant show and overall I enjoyed it very much! Enjoyable to see youths with a diverse array of talents Solving Puzzles And Enjoying Each Other's Company.

I've been wanting to watch Couple of Mirrors since I first heard about it -- it's laser-targeted at me in a number of ways -- but with one thing and another we didn't get around to it until this month.

Q: Okay, what is Couple of Mirrors and why is it laser-targeted at you specifically?
A: It's about a romance novel author who falls in love with a lesbian assassin in Republic-era Shanghai!

Q: Wait, really lesbians?
A: Really lesbians in the source material, a faint veneer of plausible deniability for the live action, you know the drill. A better question is, 'really Republic-era Shanghai --'

Q: Wait, is it not Republic-era Shanghai?
A: I mean, it's for sure Shanghai, but as for time period ... okay, Republic-era China did span 30 years and nothing in the narrative itself ever gives a date; we really did try to figure it out, but this was a losing game. I've put some

( costume pics under the cut so you too can play along! )

Q: ... okay, well, thanks for that moderately unnecessary detour, can we get back to the lesbians? Tell me more about them please?
A: Sure! You Yi is the romance novelist, and Yan Wei is the assassin. They meet when You Yi's discovery that her terrible husband is having an affair with her best friend coincides with Yan Wei's decision to assassinate said best friend, resulting in You Yi getting accused of the murder --

Q: This is so dramatic! Why did Yan Wei kill the best friend?!
A: Yan Wei is on a murderous revenge rampage because the kid who delivered her milk once a week got killed in a hit-and-run accident. Yan Wei has a very precise sense of justice and a less precise sense of proportion.

Q: Amazing.
A: Absolutely. Anyway, then You Yi offers a huge reward to anyone who can catch the killer!

Q: Wow! Seems like a setup for a tense and dramatic relationship with a lot of secrets and lies and possible betrayal?
A: Honestly, not really! Despite the setup, the 'plot' -- which involves multiple murders and gangsters and staged car accidents and gunfights in the streets of Shanghai, and also far too much of You Yi's horrible husband and boring ex and a detective investigating murders that truly nobody cares about -- kind of exists in parallel to the romance, which mostly consists of Yan Wei rescuing You Yi from peril in between scenes of the two of them hanging out at Yan Wei's house being adorable and domestic.

Q: Would you like to describe the domesticity further?
A: You know, they spend a lot of time cooking together and play with the cat and You Yi redecorates Yan Wei's house and drags a protesting Yan Wei to come shopping with her, and Yan Wei desperately attempts to ensure that You Yi doesn't accidentally trigger any of the death traps she's got lying around the house. Classic 'stoic former child soldier raised on a brainwashing island designed to train the humanity out of her learns to re-experience emotion via romance with an outgoing high femme socialite' rom-com tropes.

Q: ....brainwashing island?
A: Yan Wei's backstory is VERY unclear but definitely involves some form of remote island child supersoldier training and also fighting in a war. What war? See above re: 'when is this set?' We Simply Do Not Know.

Q: I feel like maybe you are trying to intimate here that the plot is not entirely coherent...
A: Yeah, if this sounds interesting to you, maybe don't ... watch for the plot ...... instead, watch for Yan Wei full-body panicking when You Yi gives her a hug and wistfully imagining herself as the kind of person who could figure out how to hug back!

Q: All right, but it's got to end tragically, right?
A: In fact it does not!

( ending spoilers )

Tonight we finished watching the first season (second not yet filmed) of Joy of Life, a transmigration cdrama about a bright young man who dies of a long terminal illness and awakens as a bright young baby, with all his past-life memories, in a pseudohistorical Chinese empire.

Having spent much of his previous life in chronic pain, our hero Fan Xian determines very early on that he does not wish to endanger his second chance by chasing ambition or power, and would simply like to pursue enough wealth to enjoy an easy, comfortable, stress-free life. Strategies for achieving this include:

- plagiarizing literary classics such as Dream of the Red Chamber from memory, introducing them to a brand new alternate universe pseudohistorical public, and achieving fame and fortune thereby
- introducing future technology inventions such as 'glass,' 'bar soap,' and 'refined sugar' to a brand new alternate universe pseudohistorical public, and achieving fame and fortune thereby
- pursuing a happy future with his crush, a young lady he saw stealing chicken drumsticks at a temple on his first arrival in the Big City and fell head-over-heels in love with on sight

Unfortunately for Fan Xian, his absent mother -- mysteriously dead or disappeared in his infancy -- already introduced glass, bar soap, and refined sugar as luxury items and achieved fame and fortune thereby, so that's a nonstarter. Additionally, in her spare time before producing (illegitimate) Fan Xian, she also founded a merchant empire at the service of the Crown and a powerful secret police service! As a result of his mother's fame and brilliance, various powerful men -- including his father, the Minister of Revenue; the head of the aforementioned secret police service; and the Emperor -- now have Great Plans for Fan Xian and his future, and various other people disagree with those Great Plans and have schemes to arrange for Fan Xian's downfall or murder, and also there's an arranged marriage which Fan Xian would like to make very clear he is not interested in when there's a Mysterious Chicken Drumstick Girl to pursue (three guesses who Mysterious Chicken Drumstick Girl might be --)

The literary plagiarism part of the plan goes more or less consistently well, though! Dream of the Red Chamber is a big hit!

Technically, reincarnation and transmigration are (to my understanding) censored topics in live-action Chinese television. Joy of Life gets around this, originally, with a hilariously flimsy frame story in which a grad student explains that he's excited to submit his new script to Tencent.

( Major, hilarious, yet surprisingly irrelevant spoilers )

I am told that Joy of Life in its original incarnation is a harem novel. This has been altered for the show; there are a lot of interesting women in the cast who show faint lingering traces of their novel incarnations as alternate love interests, but live-action Fan Xian is firmly attached to his chicken drumstick girl only. (My favorite is the romance that thus transforms into a fake-dating-while-firmly-platonic-friends plot with a rival martial artist.)

Instead, all the harem energy has been displaced onto Fan Xian's thriving harem of paternal figures. By my count, by the end of the drama, he had seven dads plus an ageless amnesiac uncle, all of them allying, scheming, and competing against each other in various configurations. (Except for the ageless amnesiac uncle, who does nothing but lurk in the bushes and occasionally spring forth to murder one of Fan Xian's enemies.) The second-funniest convoluted plot point in the show is

( vague spoilers )

Anyway, aside from the wild plot twists mentioned above,

( some other things I like about this show )

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.

( Cut for many more images )

After more than a year of luxuriously slow viewing,

genarti and I have finally finished watching Nirvana in Fire!

For those unfamiliar: Nirvana in Fire is an astoundingly good Chinese drama which I've often seen people compare to Game of Thrones. I understand why people recommended it this way, especially in GoT's heyday -- Nirvana in Fire is also a sweeping, complex historical-political epic with beautiful outfits -- but I respectfully disagree with this comparison; unlike Game of Thrones, Nirvana in Fire is a.) meticulously plotted, b.) focuses far more on extremely sympathetic humans who are motivated by their own deep senses of ethics, loyalty, and justice, and c.) does not feature dragons or indeed any mythological creatures at all (except for a whole lot of nonsense medicines and poisons, and, possibly, a yeti.)

The plot: the court of Da Liang is locked in factional struggle between two putative heirs to the Emperor's throne; Mei Changsu, Our Hero, is a brilliant scholar and strategist who has come to the capital to graciously allow each of the Emperor's favored sons an opportunity to attempt to recruit him.

However, in fact, Mei Changsu has actually come to maneuver the rise of the Emperor's least favorite son, the extremely honest but congenitally un-strategic Jingyan ... because Mei Changsu, unbeknownst to almost anyone very much including Jingyan, is secretly Jingyan's dearest friend, who was presumed massacred along with his entire family twelve years ago in an Unfortunate Treason Incident, but managed to survive thanks to a rare affliction that causes you to be played by a different actor, and has now returned! for REVENGE! that incidentally involves reforming the entire court and replacing it with a more ethical version of itself!

HIJINKS, IDENTITY PORN, AND A TRULY INCREDIBLE AMOUNT OF POLITICAL AND EMOTIONAL MANIPULATION ENSUE.

( Cast images under the cut )

Favorite subplots include but are not limited to:
- Mei Changsu manipulates the court and sends an enemy into ruin by playing an enthusiastic round of House Hunters
- Mei Changsu manipulates the court and sends an enemy into ruin by raising a question about the seating charts at a holiday party
- Jingrui Has A Birthday Party
- strategist scavenger hunt!
- "Consort Jing is like a cotton ball that cannot be flattened or broken. There's no way to fight her."
- the stressful round of chicken involving a prison escape attempt
- the hilarious round of chicken involving a deadly poison
- everything related to the yeti

genarti and

tenillypo and I (along with it seems more or less half the internet) have been watching The Untamed, the live-action version of Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation. Because of scheduling, we've been gulping it down at a rate of approximately 5 episodes a week; last week we finally finished!

Of the three of us, I was the only one who'd read the novel first (

genarti has read the first few chapters,

tenillypo was coming entirely fresh) which has made it an interesting experience. The biggest change between the two versions is in the pacing of the stories -- Grandmaster paces its backstory reveals throughout the novel, allowing the reader to experience them through the perspective of an older, chiller, already-re-incorporated Wei Wuxian; The Untamed gives you a brief intro to Wei Wuxian's return to the world and then plunges the viewer back into thirty linear episodes of backstory about his tragic fall before returning to present-day reunion road trip hijinks.

Personally, I missed the novel's pacing, because half the fun for me is having the contrast between the younger and older versions of the characters played out over the course of the book; also, the show's pacing in general has a way to stop and linger around climactic moments for several episodes in a way that loses a lot of the zippy energy of the rest of it. Also also, in order to maintain backstory pacing, the show has added a whole evil MacGuffin plot that (as

coffeeandink has pointed out) takes a significant amount of responsibility off Wei Wuxian's shoulders for literally inventing zombie magic, which is kind of frustrating as it very much blunts the point of the message that the cultivation world turned on Wei Wuxian for innovating frightening war magic that it then cheerfully went on to continue using.

On the other hand, I did appreciate that the show slithers its way around censorship by replacing all the backstory's moments of fraught mutually oblivious sexual tension with intense explicitly mutual but technically not sexual pairbonding. For example:

BOOK: Lan Wangji, overcome with fraught pining, anonymously kisses a blindfolded Wei Wuxian
SHOW: Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji have a fraught discussion in which Wei Wuxian says "I used to see you as my soulmate in this life" and Lan Wangji says "I still am"

On the one hand: it's a bummer China can't show makeouts; on the other hand: I think we can all agree that the show's version here may in fact be better.

These changes, plus the amazing array of long-suffering micro-expressions displayed by Lan Wangji's actor, significantly shift the tone of the romance overall. Book!Lan Wangji spends all his time stoically pining for a man he believes is oblivious to his feelings and will never return them; tv!Lan Wangji spends all his time mildly annoyed that his useless undead husband, to whom he has been married for twenty years, forgot another anniversary. Both great tastes and I'm glad to have experienced both!

Speaking of actors, I already loved the novel version of Jin Ling (the bratty nephew of everybody in the cast) but Jin Ling's actor in the show was a true standout for visibly incorporating all the most annoying traits of the actors who played his father and his other variously terrible uncles into his performance. Truly sublime; a very gifted child.

The show also makes a significant effort to give the few female characters more screentime. I'm not sure how well this serves Jiang Yanli, the sweet but tragically doomed sister, who does appear significantly more often but still unfortunately never gets to do anything besides make the same soup recipe ad infinitum. Wen Qing, on the other hand -- an irritable but virtuous doctor from an evil clan who helps our heroes out at a few key points -- has been elevated to a main player, which is probably the best choice the show ever made, except then it makes her disappearance from the story midway through and the absolute lack of women in the future plot significantly more frustrating. Justice for Wen Qing! (as I requested, in my Yuletide letter.)

(If I had to rank my five favorite characters, it would probably go as follows:

#5 - Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian, inextricably linked in favor as they are in life
#4 - Jin Ling; I love a furious gremlin child
#3 - Jiang Cheng; I love the man who taught the furious gremlin child all his worst habits
#2 - Wen Qing; the combo of 'irritable but virtuous doctor' and 'irritable but virtuous elder sister' is too powerful for me to resist
#1 - Lan Jingyi, because someone has to love the most mediocre Lan child and that someone was, inevitably, going to be me.)

My other favorite thing about the show: the special effects on Lan Clan members summoning their magical zithers from Z-space with a strum of their fingers. Amazing. Flawless.

I still have not seen the donghua past the first episode but that will probably be next!