Big_Red_1011

When I rewatch Fireworks of My Heart, I skip most scenes with the crazy mom 🫣

Why would you run into a room full of reporters and blow your cover? Feels like writers could’ve handled this better 🙄

Even in C-dramas it’s common to have parents like that. That’s why I appreciate dramas where both sets of parents (ML & FL) are nice and supportive.

It’s on Viki in the U.S. now.

If you want something very interesting and short (K-drama length), check out Mobius (it’s a detective drama; more of Hong Kong-style with quite a bit of action elements); Fake It Till You Make It (probably one of the best realistic romance dramas [K or C]); and then if you want to chill to a throwback great high school/college drama, there’s When I Fly Towards You.

Episode lengths vary a lot in C-dramas, from 30-45 minutes to 40-45 to 1 hour+.

Tencent/WeTV, YOUKU, iQIYI and Mango TV are streaming platforms (like Netflix) but some of the better/more popular dramas from their catalog do end up on broadcast TV in China, I believe.
(Interestingly, some dramas are so expensive to produce that they are co-funded by multiple platforms, e.g. Pursuit of Jade aired simultaneously on Tencent/WeTV and on iQIYI).
Another interesting fact — in China there’s an official cap on what percentage of budget can be spend on actors.

You can’t change anyone’s mind on the Internet, so it’s better to move on after blocking that person (if they are clearly a troll/hater/anti). Sometimes people have different preferences and it’s okay, but those normal people usually just move on and don’t try to give drama a score of 1 and then loudly rage-bait in the comments.

I’m missing so much (NOT!) because I blocked troll/hater accounts 🤣

Sometimes lighting in K/C-dramas can be strange, especially when they shine a bright light behind someone 😎
But recents examples of great lighting & cinematography are dramas like “Can This Love Be Translated” (K) and “Pursuit of Jade” (C).

Haha… I love HIMYM but don’t remember that. So many great moments 🥰

Viki and MDL rating scale is kind of like video game rating scale — it’s very skewed to one side. On Viki 1-6 practically don’t exist and on MDL 1-5 are the same. Even terrible / very bad dramas get rated into 6.x on MDL.

Personally, my rating scale (when translated to MDL) is: 10 for great/groundbreakibg dramas, 9 for very good dramas, 8 for good/average (so most dramas fall here), 7 for so-so/below average, and 6 for really bad. This drama is “very good” tier in my mind for now, but I don’t rate anything until the end. How the drama ends is very important to me; but some people rate dramas highly even if the ending clearly is bad which I don’t quite understand.

I use the app because it’s very convenient. The main feature it lacks is not being able to rate individual episodes but it’s fine otherwise. There are ads in the app, but not a lot.

You could be right. But Chinese dramas are still very long (usually) even when they licensed to streaming companies. Pursuit of Jade was 40 episodes long and still set all kinds of records on Netflix :)

For all we know, by the time the wedding happens, the Prince may be the King 👑

Hope so! 🙏

There was an American show called Chuck which was in danger of cancellation until Subway stepped in and rescued it by having them open a Subway shop inside their Best Buy-like electronics store. Now THAT resulted in a lot of product placement! Subway product placement in this drama is more like a nostalgic throwback because Egg Drop has taken over Subway’s role as the major fast-food sponsor 🤣

It’s not really a limit, just based on preferences. There have been 14 & 16 episode dramas recently too. It probably depends on a screenplay too. Oftentimes when dramas were 16+ episodes, writers would be lazy and just add 3-4 episodes by having leads be separated for some stupid reason and then in the last 1-2 episodes they’d be reunited. Same thing with C-dramas where some episodes were clearly padding.

It doesn’t sound like there will be a wedding soon. They are just remembering the kiss that happened at the end of ep. 6. It really seems like that the wedding will happen in the last episode after all the obstacles are going to be cleared and all bad people will be dealt with.

Yes, it’s much better for our sanity to just block trolls/haters and downvote reviews which are clearly biased. People love different things but giving 1 or 2 to this drama while handing out 8/9/10 to similar or worse dramas is clearly biased. On MDL even bad dramas have 6-7 rating 🙄

Wait a sec, have they confirmed Hidden Shadow release date? 🙏

The MDL rating system is such that a very bad drama will have high-6/low-7 rating. So rating a drama 1 or 2 is a good sign that a reviewer may not be very fair, especially if they are a clearly new account or had given out high marks to average dramas in the past.