assez

* note: the story works for me (at places), the execution not so much (the acting is wooden around the edges for my taste, possible reasons: work with actors, highly probably actors' age), the music is beautiful - and does not blend with acting; it is 2 levels stronger as if wonting to rely what the acting itself doesn't; still solid enough to not stop watching

Edit: So finally, I went to inspect the series thoroughly, and I came to these conclusions:

1) What I mentioned in the initial post of this review - wooden acting - it is used for the melodramatic movie within the series, which, from a technical side, is maybe not done as smoothly as it could be, but I don't mind it as much as I would, if it was in the series itself (it is there, but sparsely, which is good).

2) The original material for the series is tragic if you take it from a real-life perspective. And I believe once it gets into live action, it gets way more fairly inspected than if it stayed only in written words. As it is, from what I have heard, it is the worst of the hell of a situations you would want to fall into if it were happening in real life. And no, it is no excuse that tragic things happened in real life, because if it is a self-reflective work that works with how tragic stuff in real life is, then it would never fall into certain specific traps that it did fall into in here.

And don't get me wrong, there is no shame to the author, because I still believe it has its place in a fictional world. But I must stress here: it is not copy-paste, role-model behavior, it is not something you should excuse if it happenes to you in real life, it is not something you should romanticize in your real life, and it is not something you should accept in your real life. It is definitely not something you should internalize or look up to. As long as you take it as a metaphor, as a symbol non-translatable into real life and not as a representation of anything, we are fine.

3) Construction-wise, it was obviously done by someone older who does understand the craft. I just must admire how incredibly smoothly it works if you watch all of the episodes together. There is zero room for any filler content. It is absolutely like they knew what was going on at all times. Logic-wise, it makes sense; even the story within a story is perfectly done. It's very smooth, very portable, very page-turner-ish, and very digestible.

Where it leaves room for improvement is still acting, and one of the reasons why there is room for the acting to improve is, I would say, thanks to the actors' very young age. It did get into my experience of what I was watching, I'm not going to lie, and at the same time, I must admire to what level and to what capacity the acting already is as it is (...good).

But in this specific circumstance, we must take into consideration what type of material we were dealing with: non-consensual sex, very dangerous types of behavior, rape, and other various very bad human things that you are definitely going to portray differently if you are 20 and if you are 35.

And then again, don't get me wrong, there is a drastic difference, in my perspective, in how you are going to portray university students as a 20-something and as a 30-something. But the impact of portraying students at different ages, and the impact of portraying doctors who are supposed to take care of mental health issues, are going to be drastically different. A person is not going to happen to be a doctor anywhere before 26, if not around 30 years old; to get a degree, you need to be old enough to treat people. On top of that, a doctor who obviously has severe mental issues himself (btw, including supervision was ingenious, grown up idea, great to let people see that even as a doctor who takes care of you as a patient, they are not left alone on all of these things, in fact, they must undergo this in order to do their work, and to fo it right. They absolutelly need supervision and peer supervision) - these things are going to be drastically different.

You definitely can do stuff a little differently as someone who is an adult and has much more perspective on the settings, but the implications and executions will vary much less and the depth is gonna be somewhere entirelly different no matter if you're 20yo acftor or 50yo actor. But as a 20-year-old, you cannot really give all of the necessary emotion-wise insight to a doctor who has all of these experiences himself when he is 15 years older than you.

And I would be very careful about undermining the series if someone were replying to my complaints about this with the argument that we are supposed to tell romance stories, not educational stories or whatever stories. There is something you should see once you get older that you cannot see when you are young, and the twist here is mostly responsibility.

And while they have done many beautiful things in the series, I would say the department of responsibility was severely left behind from the doctor's side. While everything around him grew up — the doctor and author with it — he as a character remained at his age range (20 - and should be much older). (Now, to clarify the confusion - the character was written like that, the actor portrayed him lie that. The character did not allow the actor and his actions to grow up, restricting him. If hewas written differently, if actor was able to rewrite him, it could be easily added those 6 + years in behavior and in thinking both.)

And for some strange reason, in this specific case, I cannot just wave my hand and say, "It's fine, it's just fiction." But at the same time, it's perfectly fine with me, and I have no issues if you decide to go with this simplified route of "it is just fiction" and not scratch that deeply into it. I can even understand why you would be unwilling to go deeper into this.

4) Just to make it perfectly clear, in both actors I have seen wooden-type acting, but at the same time, I have seen that it was very disproportionate because at some points they were way ahead of their age in acting, and at the same time, somewhere they were wooden in their reactions. I would say it applies to both actors. I would say I am leaning more towards wooden acting in the case of Shu Yuan. But it is served in such a way that I can write it off by saying it was done for the character that was supposed to be melodramatic in the movie within the series, so we are covered there.

5) Part of why I was so disappointed that it was supposed to end last week is probably that I thought and felt like this series deserved a longer scale, because we were delivered only around 30 minutes per episode and we had only 12 episodes, which is very much like lower-budget Thai series. I would definitely say there was room for delivering more if we had more time.

But because it's Chinese, somehow we managed to do it relatively short, yet relatively complex, yet relatively deeply intelligent, yet relatively layered — and I am fine with that combination. I actually love it. I just feel that it deserved way more space than it was given.

6) What I enjoyed the most and was the most happy with were the differences between the actors within the series versus the characters within the movie, and how we had this puzzle and the shifted perceptions of it and shifted perspectives of it.

How one of them villan in the movie was a good friend in real life. How someone wanted the role of the main actor, and then, when we were watching the movie, they were actually a character that wanted the main lead. And in real life, how they acknowledged that there were some skills in the main lead that he did not see and would not have shown if he were one of the main characters in the series. Etc.

7) I would say the script and the way the story was told was in lot of ways very satisfying. So is the choice of costumes; that's really nice. I would maybe opt for different colors within the actors' age range and different colors for the stories, just because I feel like the deep atmosphere that it is setting is kind of between their acting skills and acting range.

As in, they cannot pull it as gloomy as the darker furniture and coloring gets, nor as "cold" as it gets, because at some points it is really a very passionate story. And we are constantly trying to drown it in dark colors — why? Well, I know why; that is just a rhetorical question.

Also, I'm not so sure, technique-wise, why series that tend to work with very dark colors — as in gray, white light, and a black or dark color scale — have such a misery about abandoning it and using contrast.

I mean, in *Deep In*, there is at least some attempt at switching from light, like the gold lights, to yellow warm lights. Aka, the white lights are like the therapy room, versus the warm yellow light, which is like the hotel room during the night when they spent time together.

But for the contrast's sake, I would abandon this color grading and color scale altogether. Even in *Justice in the Dark*, I have so frequently seen scenes that could have been lightened and brightened way more than they were, and they just refuse to get rid of the constantly dark colors. At places, it was very suitable, and that is an example, by the way, where I would say it worked perfectly well and was justified.

And/or — but even there, I would say that there was this great disproportion in overusing it, and they did not really do enough justice to make a contrast for these very dark atmospheric scenes with something that screams light and brightness.

I think, texture-wise, this was not a problem for me in *Fangs of Fortune*, I cannot now pinpoint why it was not an issue there. Obviously, the creators there work very much with visual storytelling, and it just shows, and it's perfect in a sense.

And I wouldn't even say they managed to balance the darkness with contrast, as in making something that is incredibly bleak and dark and uses heavy atmosphere and heavy colors to translate this on screen. They don't use the opposite contrasts to balance it out, but for some reason, it might not be an issue there.

It might be because the storytelling from A to Z is kind of a very dark atmosphere too, but it kind of makes sense, and it's smooth, and it gets the impact all together. There is no reason there that would force you out of it, while I would say in *Deep In* and *Justice in the Dark*, it was kind of annoying in places because they pushed it unnecessarily everywhere, even where it did not belong anymore.

Another thing and reason why I think *Fangs of Fortune* uses something many series don't is that I get that if you have a dark, heavy atmosphere with a low-quality budget, and you want to convey the darkness and heaviness through dark colors, it might look laughable if you all of a sudden use baby, bright and light colors. You want to avoid parody-impression.

I think series like *KinnPorche* or *Payback* could balance it ideally. They might have overused the dark tones and made it fierce, but they interchange them with, again, warm other colors heavily saturated lights. And if you cannot switch into a palette of light colors because it would simply not fit the storytelling overall, you have the option to use deep, dark colors but across the whole spectrum.

In *Payback*, what struck me the most were these cuts where we go out of something incredibly deep and dark into darker red, dark green, dark purple, the KinnPorsche series again using yellow light, as in like a rising or falling sun, and green and purple — still heavy, but colorful colors, you know.

So, if you cannot switch to light colors, it's fine, but make it somehow visually diferentiated by using something that gets you out of the constant gray cloud you put on the screen. Using vivacious red, green, purple, and yellow on the darker side of the color spectrum can tone and balance it out perfectly.

And then all of these other bleak, dark gray, dark brown moments will make sense and bigger impacts, and it will fit way better than if you just use this one monotone type of color grading.

8) I have to admit I'm in love with the original soundtrack for the series, which is another reason why I did not want this to end so soon after I started watching it properly, just because the initial credits and now the final song for it, *Tiger in My Love*, were so beautiful. And I just love the sneak peaks after the song; that was ingenious (and wicked).

I also appreciate that they decided not to force the ML to create the lyrics for the OST. Not only because this is overdone already, but also I feel like if you have an actor who is 20, it's way wiser and it adds layers as time goes by if someone older writes the lyrics for them to sing. I might be completely wrong, and the creator of the lyrics might be — I don't know — maybe 15. Kids these days are relentlessly intelligent and bright, and experienced, of course. However, whatever it is, I really love that song.