ASmith

💯 I love his voice.

I don’t think of it as extortion myself, someone needs to pay for the streaming costs & server costs of watching the show, not to mention making it in the first place. It’s just an alternative model, iQIYI & Netflix hit you for fixed prices per month regardless of what you watch, whereas Youku’s more like a lower base and then a small extra to unlock every VIP package, of which there’s 1 or maybe 2 per show. As long as you watch under 2 shows a month Youku is still better pricing than the others in my region.

But yeah we all pick the battles 😂 I just feel for whoever was responsible for the leak, heads in some company or platform partner will likely roll.

I don’t. We’re talking a series Youku is translating, dubbing, and sending to post production houses to fix up stuff like editing, ADR. In combination with presumably needing to send it to the TV channel to be broadcast as well. There are so many sources of leaks on so many levels I doubt anyone has a clue how it happened.

Ignoring leaked content and watching on the official channel is the way to go though, at least for me I feel the more $$ the platform makes the more likely they are to give me more shows like this 😃😆

I mean I don’t think any show with CY can really be called a dark horse myself 😅😅 But it is a good show, each ep feels unbelievably short. it’s a good thing I’m watching while airing or I’d get no sleep that’s for sure 😂😂

Spoiler tags are also lovely for those who are just starting the show if you wanna pop one on :D

Probably because people think that if you're a fan of revenge dramas you'd enjoy both? I think it's valid, though I agree with you it's a completely different genre of revenge (and personally I probably prefer VoA, since here I can cheer on the ML against enemies who are a genuine threat, whereas I never felt like the enemies were a threat in NiF, the lead was so flawlessly omnipotent that I just felt sorry for anyone unwise enough to cross him.) But if no other similarity, there's leads with vendettas wearing fur cloaks in both XD

He did have a guard for her— that guy who set the dude on fire, who was shown gagged in the back room while the plot unfolded I think? But yeah it was a bad moment, and the first moment you realise that XHA may be smart, but there are other sharks in this pond and his life may be protected by plot armor but his plots are not 😭

I don’t think anything could have saved her though myself. She would have died in ep1 had he not stepped in to defend her, and in stepping in he exposed the fact he cared about her, and the only thing ever protecting her was that no one thought she was worth targeting except to draw him out. It was sad how she died, but once YFS decided that XHA needed to be hurt and that her death was the best way to do it, I can’t think of any way she could have been saved (though it was a particularly tragic way to die.) 😭

They technically did— that was the point of the travel pass thing. As long as he carries it, no matter how good his disguise is, it will let them ID his disguise and when he was arriving and what he was wearing, then kill him. They just didn’t anticipate that the people who were meant to be reporting what he was disguised as and confirming it was still him carrying the travel pass were lying.

He let the kid go who was also in on it. I reckon he’ll let her off the death list if she’s useful enough in this arc like he did that driver guy, myself. (Or maybe that’s just my wishful thinking, I like her loyalty 😂)

They clarify later, you need some special tonics and 100 days of growth time before it can be safely done without damaging the original's face. Suspend that disbelief, but it at least it took 100 days and a special tonic XD

Maybe he’s lying about that and actually he’s trying to avoid murdering her which he’ll have to do if she gets in the way of his crazy king? And he’s not planning on taking on XHA at all? At this point it’s her master he’d more plausibly keep in line with her as a hostage than XHA.

MLC is still #1 in my heart 🥰
(agree this one is good though. it’s good I’m watching while airing bc I don’t know that I could voluntarily stop watching with the cliff hangers they keep leaving eps on 😂.)

I can believe it, loved his scenes in this so much

Here is good, there’s no weighting as far as I know, 10s are 10s on MDL, it’s just pure maths (eg 1 1 and 4 10 = 8.2), but yeah on imdb I’d try putting 9 and see if the numbers improve more with more spread at the top.

imdb ratings are crazy though, like 4k 10-star, 1k 1-star and still it’s a 3.8 there. I think you need to have an even weighting of 8-9-10 to get a higher number with whatever “weighting” system they use. (That or you’ve got to be Disney’s little mermaid, who scores 7s with 22k 8+ and 48k 1’s lol.)

💯I can see that working too! Ao3 functions pretty well with that kind of system too. I hope some dev sets up a fan site like that in the future so fans will have somewhere to go to get real ratings for assessing shows 🤩

Heh, that’s not a bad idea — some site should set up a fan site that only offers 2-5 star ratings, with the extra special 6 stars out of 5 for shows better than 100%. Or better yet, some site that splits ratings into “how much I enjoyed” vs “quality of script” vs “quality of editing” etc so that there was a clearer breakdown of what it was getting the stars for. There’s definitely room for sites to improve their ratings beyond just stars, and let viewers sort by more than just flat stars imo, so that the people who care mostly about writing could sort on that, vs acting to sort on that etc. there could even be fluff or angst out of 5 ratings so that the stuff people sort on could actually filter for enjoyment. Hope some site rises to do it one day to save the data from being swamped by bots🙏😔

Hopefully in 20-30 years, some better site than Douban will rise for rating dramas if it keeps going downhill like IMDb. 🙏

They’re going to fail to stop him being popular as long as MLC exists I think, so it’s a losing battle for them no matter what they vote because regardless of rating, if a viewer liked MLC then they will probably end up working through everything else he’s been in they can find and realise the 1-star ratings are a joke 😂 He’s not only amazing with a good script, but he can carry a bad one. A lot of actors can do the first, but less can do the second for me. Especially anything involving suffering or fight scenes, he’s beautiful to watch.

Hope the haters are being paid overtime for their hard work by whoever is marketing, hard to imagine anyone would waste their life spreading poison instead of just watching what they do like for free.

At this point, my head canon is that YFS has been slaughtering and oppressing for years because he is a bored guy and just wants to produce a good opponent to relieve his boredom of being the cleverest guy around to play a decent battle of wits chess against him. He has too much charisma, I could watch him and XHA do mental chess and drink tea all day 😂