Frost_edelweiss

oops how did you reach ep20 when only 16 are out as of now?
do you only watch previews and excerpts ? even then previews are only till 18....

dream on... Your comments will not make it to directors, actors and producers anyway. They have other fish to fry than looking at comments in MDL! It is just your way of letting out toxic steam. Whatever.
Go on wasting your valuable time at 3x speed...
Try that with Droopy cartoons too, especially with the sound at 3x speed if you can ; that one ? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JWotX1ymGQ
🤣

Chen Zheyuan does not want to be seen as an actor only playing sweet romantic roles such as in Hidden Love and a few other ones. He has played other roles too. Recent Dark Night and Dawn was very good despite there was no romance there.
I am fine with the way the adaptation goes in The White Olive Tree, not showing battlefields when it is more about a civil war and the ordinary life disturbed by anonymous aggressors whose motives seem just incomprehensible to the layman. It is also in tune with the difficult themes presented here about mental sufferings. . Liang Jie is a fine actress too.

I thought the Jiang Yu/Wang Han incident was a good reminder that what is seen in the news is not necessarily proof to a story, and that video confirmation of a complaint can be distorted.
That said, Jiang Yu would have been expelled from the schools I know, if videos had shown him doing what he did. Even if he was provoked and the other boy finally came round to admit his part in the guilt. Good thing the ones who took the video were exposed as the primary bullies and malevolent ones.

She has favorites too. And some actors and actresses she hates and will never admit they did good. I think Chen Zheyuan is on her black list, also because he played in Sword and Fairy 4 and she hated the adaptations of her favorite game when she was young + he played with Ju Jingyi there, for whom she can't be hating enough.
I have unsubscribed to her channel since she ranted Hidden Love, parroting some negative comments playing whistleblower to dire sins that were even beaten down in the official Chinese press. But she liked The First Shot, which I also did.
She has stuff she likes that not many saw but was excellent, such as She and Her Girls, or Oh No! Here Comes Trouble. She likes I Am Nobody and loved LGIEF (sorry, not me... to each their own. I was ok with LBFAD)
Her videos are fine when they deal about the Black Wukong RPG, tour her audience through Hengdian sets, present the proper way to play the guqin, or discuss the 2025 CNY gala on TV. In the past, her videos about Joy of Life were fine too with interesting notes about poetry and language.
She focuses much on color and cinematography but her views are skewed to look like "specialist" to gun down what did not catch her fancy. I agree she is a specialist when it comes to costumes and to playing ancient instruments.

You want sizzling and bubbling romance between a guy in an army camp and next PTSD sufferers?
Although there are not many explosive scenes there, you could try Road Home (the bomb specialist does not suffer from PTSD and the FL is not made to see friends and kids die, so that helps)

I hope you found it uplifting!

I try not to come to this section too often, when it becomes like a bashing ball. Some loud complainers like to ruin the pleasure of others, and some do it without even having watched the drama.... They will complain at anything anyway in the MDL drama pages: too smiling, too tearful, too adapted differently, too slow,, too quick, too this, too that.... . I refrain from answering too much to those: it's a waste of time.

For some cheer, you may want to check my Companion piece, which I will update along the way with more characters appearing.
https://mydramalist.com/discussions/bai-se-gan-lan-shu/123595-shooting-location-cast-and-crew-and-more

She has pretty dreamy smiles and other expressions too. Why be hung up on only the tears? It's natural that she would cry after losing touch with friends or sad at the effects of bombs.
She also has a very beautiful smile at the mirage and in the dance in the alley scene, later.

I have added Song Ran's father in the cast, and you can also find him on the Companion piece :
https://mydramalist.com/discussions/bai-se-gan-lan-shu/123595-shooting-location-cast-and-crew-and-more

(I will continue to along the way in the Character's Gallery with brief description, pictures and actor's micro bios,, as the characters first appear, and more)

where?

For pictures and some background info, you can look at my Companion piece in hidden Recent discussions section : https://mydramalist.com/discussions/the-first-shot/130515-the-first-shot-companion-piece

She also wrote his name in the heart she drew with a stick, in the dust, in the fireside "drunken" scene, before he wiped it away to keep her secret.

If you are interested in the other characters "Chinese characters" names and more info, you can have a look at my Companion piece which is very illustrated with pictures and Gifs :
https://mydramalist.com/discussions/bai-se-gan-lan-shu/123595-shooting-location-cast-and-crew-and-more (direct link, but you can also find it as "Companion piece" in the Discussions section above this comments one)
I will probably still be adding to it on the way..

Well many journalists don't take pains to research properly and will be unable to pronounce the names. Even though it may take only a click on Internet to find a correct pronunciation audio recording.
Plus the Americans love to use the obsolete Wade-Giles romanization, or Europeans use another system, when the United Nations agreed that the official language of China is putonghua and the romanization in "alphabet" system is pinyin.

Of course, people who read the news are not aware of the rules for pinyin, even if they hear over and over in the news Xi being pronounced as Si like in Spanish "yes". And their school system is so poor that they mostly never were made aware there of the fact that East Asian people in the billions use the family name as first one, and the given names following.
So I would not be surprised if during his first visit to the US, way back when, Xi Jinping could have been addressed as "Mr Ping"...

I prefer "Family name" + "Given Name(s)" , a variation on Surname + Given Name. Talking about "first names" can be very confusing imho depending on context, despite the phrase "to be on first-name terms".
The "middle name" concept is very anglospheric. In other countries, it is something else that can have meaning such as patronym. Or be a string of multiple given names extended for various reasons, of which one will be underlined as the "usual given name", with the other ones relegated as alternate names...
Also, in Chinese names, there is not necessarily a generation "middle" or "last" appearing character (I used the examples of Mao ZEdong and Xi JinPING for names with generation name parts, but there are lots of people who only have a family one character name + a given one character name). And the two characters in a given name may not have one generation name character at all.

Well, correction: ZE is NOT his personal first name nor DONG his personal middle name. ZEDONG is his "first name" or "given name" according to Western standards.

I am somewhat annoyed by the convention in romanization to write Chinese names according to syllables, when as I pointed out, with the example of Zhousheng Cheng, the family name can be 2 syllables, and the personal (given) name one syllable...

Therefore, in my companion pieces, I systematically write names without a space in pinyin : example I write Xi Jinping and not Xi Jin Ping. Same for actor names, since they can be confusing, even for those who have grasped that the first part of the written name is a family name.

Xi or Mao are family names (these are not nicknames, pen names, given names, milk names or whatnot. Plain family names like Jones in English speaking countries).

My sons who were born abroad have both Western and Chinese given names : Tianyu and Tianhu, written as such on their birth certificate and foreign passports ; Tian is their generation name shared now with several cousins. In China, of course their names are written in a three character string with no space, first one being their family name.

Zedong should not be cut, just like Joséphine should not be cut to Jo Se Phi Ne or José Phine.... ;)

Oh another fun fact: Xi Jinping's brother is Xi Yuanping. Guess what? the ping part is a generation name, but compounded with a first syllable from a proverb which his father liked! "Xi Jinping's name was given by his father, from the phrase "The same nature，Varies on nurture (chinese pinyin: xing xiang jin, xi xiang yuan)" in the Three Character Classic. Therefore, he also has a brother named Xi Yuanping." So there, the generation name appears as last syllable...

No nothing to do with middle name. In China, on documents the first name (one or two characters) is a family name and the second and third names are, depending, either a one character given name (by parents) or a two characters given name which may incorporate a generation name.

For instance : Zhousheng Chen in One and Only+Forever and Ever, where there is a fun exchange between ML and a new acquaintance who mistakes him for being Mr Zhou, "first name" Shengchen, and is corrected to appropriate understanding. I mean, even Chinese people can be confused, when there is no precision!

The generation name is now optional although it used to be common. Here is a famous example :

Mao Zedong (毛泽东): Mao (毛) is the family name and Ze (泽) the generation name. His real personal name is Dong (东). The name of Mao Zedong’s grandfather is Mao Enpu (毛恩普 ) and the father’s name is Mao Yichang (毛贻昌). The generation names of the three generations are respectively 恩(En), 贻(Yi) and 泽(Ze), belonging to the 12th, 13th and 14th generations of the Mao clan in Shaoshan, Hunan Province (Mao Zedong’s hometown). According to the genealogy of the clan of the Maos at Shaoshan, Hunan Province, the chain of generation names of Mao Zedong’s family is a poem with five characters to a line.
The generation name Ze (泽) in the name of Mao Zedong (毛泽东) stands as the fourteenth character of the poem, namely the fourteenth generation since the chain of generation names was begun in 1737. Even though Mao Zedong had several names that he used for different reasons or for different periods of time, the name with the generation name Zedong (泽东) never changed and he used it all his life.

Not all Chinese generation names are as scholarly as building a poem over generations. Some modern families with more humble origins decide to use a generation name for the children to mark the family relation between cousins too. Anyway, when there are two or more children in a family, they would often share a generation name.
For example, in Taiwan, "Barbie Hsu" name was 徐熙媛 ; her younger sister is "Dee Hsu" 徐熙娣 and her elder sister is Hsu Si-hsien :the generation name is romanized as "Si" or pinyin "Xi" for 熙 with a meaning of "excellence". The generation name usually is in 2nd position in a 3 character full name, but it can also be in 3rd position, less frequently. (Barbie Hsu is well known for her role as Shancai in 2001 drama Meteor Garden, she died, 48 years old, on Feb.2, 2025 from complications of influenza, on a family trip to Japan)

Chinese names are very interesting, and what I just wrote is only the tip of the iceberg. There are also the usual nicknames, pen names, art names, and when it touches gentry, "courtesy names", and for royals, "reign names" and more. The Li 李 name is very common in China, and many claim that they descend from the famous Li Shimin 李世民 who was known as the Tang dynasty founder better known as emperor Taizong.

It's a "high quality S+ drama" : it had lots of money thrown into it. They could afford building a "city". And it is now another touristic spot, not only for Chen Zheyuan and The White Olive Tree fans. It still stands there, so if you go to SIchuan, you could take the train from Chengdu to Leshan, and next a taxi to drive you to the site !

Listen to the other songs here : https://mydramalist.com/discussions/bai-se-gan-lan-shu/134834-the-white-olive-tree-full-ost-with-eng-subs

see my answer to Claddagh above