- I'm sorry to inform you that there will probably be around 20/25 episodes of the 3rd season to finish the Ming…
I doubt it - will obviously be more, as we've still got to dispose of Mings and presumably bring in the ye shopkeepers, but they've already managed to cut a swathe through a large chunk of those chapters, and suggested they are going in a completely different direction to the novel. In the novel, the various merchants bid to transport and sell the goods; in this version the Mings have completely taken over the workshops - and FX has already put a stop to that!). And signalled his plan is to license the intellectual property, rather than set up his own shadow set of workshops.
Any answer is going to be subjective, and we do not know where the drama will end up. What if the drama and novel…
@SoloHan - While your summary of the changes is basically right, I think you are unduly dismissive of the reasons for them. The death arc, for example, has been used to tease out whose loyalties are with who, thus foreshadowing future events nicely, to show that the Emperor actually does genuinely care about FX (to the extent that he is capable of, albeit in part because of his elaborate plans for use of him); and to show how important FX has become in the kingdom. I actually think its a very skillful way of showing some things that the novel either just tells, or needed to be modified so we can not totally hate all of the characters! I could make similar points about the storylines you suggest were added to no ultimate effect.
You may well be right about it ending in more or less the same place, though personally I'm still hoping for a change of ending!, I really dislike the fact that in so many c drams the hero rides off into the sunset to travel the world/ die quietly/etc etc instead of actually contributing to society! Worst example was recent Blossoms in Adversity, where they leave behind a child emperor with no obvious protectors/guides at all!
Finally completed S2. It was an excellent show. Great production, excellent direction, acting and OST. Definitely…
Trying to compare it with Nirvana on fire is interesting, I've been rewatching NIF (for the nth time) just for that purpose, and ultimately can't really decide which I like more.
Both have fabulous acting, plots, script and camera work. The two main leads are pretty much equal in my view, but NIF is much more dependent on him, whereas JOL has several sub-ensembles (Emperor, CPP, FJ; Ruoruo and Fan family in particular) that are gripping, and a cast of many that tell compelling stories in their own right (there a handful of important backstories in NIF, but they are mostly less important it seems to me).
NIF certainly has a lot more martial arts scenes, by dint of the numerous side characters having a fight for fun at the drop of a hat plus a few assassination attempts, but I think JOL's though sparse in season 2, are a lot cooler!
JOL, with its various travels, has a lot more interested scenery and better costumes etc in my view, as well as better music (I really love the incidental music; even that yodelling is growing on me on the rewatch, though I still prefer to e bassoon riff they mostly used in the first season).
One key differentiation between them for me is that JOL is much more multi-layered in the way it tackles the various themes - we get not just the political chess/strategy games between the various players leading up to the end point, but also a lot of implicit commentary on modern society as well as ancient (scammers, celebrity culture, etc etc), literary analysis, coming of age and moving from an essentially selfish perspective to caring about the world and so forth.
And that is in part because while they both tackle one of the same main themes, namely can you change the world, Nirvana's aim isn't to change the system fundamentally, just clean it up, whereas Ye Qing Mei and increasingly FX's is a much more radical vision. As a result, the scope of the two seasons seems greater (whereas Nirvana's second season really wasn't anything like as good as the first).
The other key difference, it seems to me, is that Nirvana's perspective is essentially depressing - how hero has decided he has to sacrifice friendship, love and even his life to fulfill the mission entrusted to him by his father, and there is a discussion in episode 8 where Lin Shu articulates his philosophy, which is essentially that if you have desires and feelings, you can't be happy and carefree ,you just have to keep enduring until it all stops. Fan Xian, on the other hand, is a seize the day kind of person, as reflected in the Li Bai poem that opens the drunken banquet (the poem is called Bring more wine, or bring more wine) who most certainly does not believe in just enduring things until you can fix them twelve years in the future! I can't help preferring the latter philosophy, even if I admire the former!
It also means jol can engage in that wonderful dry humour - my Chinese is pretty elementary at this point, so I only pick up a few of plays on names and words and culture references (and am grateful to those who explain them!), but enough comes through even in translation (and with the visual element) to both reinforce the message of celebrating life even when things seem hard, and counterbalance the horrors that occur along the way.
Forgot his name, the one that replaced Eunuch Dai - does he work for the emperor? He's the one who swapped the…
Pretty sure he's the one who swapped the name, and it remains to be seen if he really is loyal to FX, or just acting for Emperor - always remember the novel is not always the same as the series on some of these points!
He actually tried to correct his Qi flow, but FX suddenly became conscious (may be due to energy interaction).…
Yes - the whole scene, with him helping FX to regain consciousness (even at potential cost to his own qi energy), threatening the Imperial doctor (!), hanging about anxiously while they get ready for the surgery, and making the first scalpel cut when they dither too long, adds more to the idea that Emperor really cares about FX , plus maybe some guilt since he set him up in the first place...
He actually tried to correct his Qi flow, but FX suddenly became conscious (may be due to energy interaction).…
Except that Emperor does in fact practice the same type of qi flow - this whole sequence differs from the novel.
Emperor definitely did something to help save him, and perhaps would have done more (we can't know, since regained consciousness and then took charge of his own destiny!) but whether that was enough, or whether actually fixed by Ku He's technique, or something Ye Liu Yuan did is left ambiguous.
Someone said they have covered over 300 chapters (in 82 episodes) but there's still another 300+ chapters to cover…
But a lot of that stuff was never going to be easy to translate to tv, and a lot more would never get past the censors. Combine that with the impossibility of keeping most of the key cast together for enough series to do the full novel - getting back nearly all of them for season 2 was amazing, keeping that up for 3 requires it to be soon!
And personally I thought the whole bidding stuff in the Jiagnan arc in the novel was unnecessarily convoluted. FX's hinted intellectual property/licensing solution was actually foreshadowed in season 1 in relation to his book I think, and makes a lot more sense to a modern watcher.
In the end judging the series in terms of how well it translates the novel to the screen is a mistake in my view - the screenwriter has transformed many characters, and added several layers to it, with some meta around FX and the Dream of the Stone (Red Mansions), literary criticism (the modern day library scenes, and then in various forms in the series), and beefed up the scifi component.
My guess is (and obviously its only that) that they will ditch the whole northern Emperor' s looking for an heir stuff, and probably Haitang's tribal stuff, perhaps even the whole Dongyi segment, and cut to the chase on the Emperor's plan to roll over Northern Qi vs FX's agenda, plus the Emperor's plans to acquire the temple's knowledge (not in the novel at all), plus the threat season 1 told us was lurking under Taiping Villa (and I'm guessing its that the temple is not going to be the same as in the novel...).
We won't know until season 3! In the novel, had more to do with Haitang, and perhaps reading her book (once amended!) did help, but to me it really really looked like the super-slash did the job, and the Ye GM was trying to help FX (warning him about Emperor in particular!).
After getting opinions from novel readersWhat I have came to the conclusion is that season 2 could have been an…
I don't think there was a lot of action scenes in the parts of the novel that were translated into series 2 - the only ones I remember were really in the Jiagnan arc, which only starts in the last couple of episodes (and there is plenty of other action at this end of the series so unnecessary).
It is true that they have reduced the ruthlessness of FX and modifies some of the other characters (or more accurately, transformed them into real, fleshed out characters where in the novel they were little more than caricatures), but that was true in season 1 too - in my view just as well, he is a pretty unattractive character in the novel, and certainly wouldn't have kept me watching this so avidly if they'd stayed true to it!
That said, although the humour acted as a nice counter-balance (no one wants to watch something that is simply too depressing!), season was pretty dark overall, with a pretty hideous underside being revealed about both the society as a whole, and the royal family in particular. Couple that with the lurking threat of the temple/all those sleepers waiting to wake from their pods under the ice (or whatever), and whatever the Emperor's agenda is, and I'm pretty sure season 3 will be even more epic that season 2 was.
what's the significance of fan xian worshipping the ancestors of the Fans in the ancestral hall?
As others have said, effectively a declaration he is not a prince/contender for the throne. But of course he’s said things like this before - remember in season 1 assuring second prince he wasn’t carrying water and therefore would not be taking over treasury… only to find out Warner was chicken drumstick girl! My theory is that when FX realises that Darth Vader (I mean the emperor) is trying to kill Wu Zhu, and more about his plans and the threat lurking in the secret cavern at taiping villa/the temple, he may once again find himself pushed into being a prince.
I don’t like the fact that how everyone normally disgested the fact that Xian was emperor’s son like come…
They strongly signalled that the Emperor was his father from the very beginning of season 1 - what illegitimate son of a minor minister gets an escort of imperial guards to bring him to the capital, the Emperor's personal eunuch to escort him to the Temple where the Emperor just happens to be hanging out, and then rescues him from machinations of two main princes!
And season 1 contains two moments where Emperor looked as if he was about to say Luke I'm your father at Taiping Villa - first time interrupted by archer, where Emperor does an amazing backflip to protect FX; second time just before he goes north, when FX himself interrupts the Emperor mid sentence, and Emperor flubs it.
same here. well except for the first 5 eps, of S2, which i feel like spend to long on his "ressurrection", i love…
Though in fairness that was true of season 1 too, especially the early episodes. In many cases the explanation for sometime occurs several episodes later (the girls preparing to leap out in a state of undress when FX enters town being the classic example), and in a lot of cases the more times you watch, the more you reinterpret what people are really saying (some of CPPs interactions with Emperor for example)...
Its just that in season 1 there was generally a lot more fighting etc so I guess it was easier to engage at a surface level even if you missed the next layer of meanings...
He would need to get in line. Aren't there like 3-4 princes ahead of him? And I don't think he wants to be a prince…
Second Prince and CP look likely to topple sooner rather than later, so that leaves first prince, who we were told in season 1 can't inherit because his mother is from Dongyi, and that rather unpromising at this point at least 'third' prince (really fourth if you count FX).
You could have just used No 3 as a shield!?!?Geez!!! What kind of father is this???
Although it sounded outrageously callous, I actually think Emperor was trying to work out whether FX knew that Emperor was a grand master, and so didn't really need protection. This was in part a test of his loyalty after all, so needed to know if he was just acting in his move to protect him...
You may well be right about it ending in more or less the same place, though personally I'm still hoping for a change of ending!, I really dislike the fact that in so many c drams the hero rides off into the sunset to travel the world/ die quietly/etc etc instead of actually contributing to society! Worst example was recent Blossoms in Adversity, where they leave behind a child emperor with no obvious protectors/guides at all!
Both have fabulous acting, plots, script and camera work. The two main leads are pretty much equal in my view, but NIF is much more dependent on him, whereas JOL has several sub-ensembles (Emperor, CPP, FJ; Ruoruo and Fan family in particular) that are gripping, and a cast of many that tell compelling stories in their own right (there a handful of important backstories in NIF, but they are mostly less important it seems to me).
NIF certainly has a lot more martial arts scenes, by dint of the numerous side characters having a fight for fun at the drop of a hat plus a few assassination attempts, but I think JOL's though sparse in season 2, are a lot cooler!
JOL, with its various travels, has a lot more interested scenery and better costumes etc in my view, as well as better music (I really love the incidental music; even that yodelling is growing on me on the rewatch, though I still prefer to e bassoon riff they mostly used in the first season).
One key differentiation between them for me is that JOL is much more multi-layered in the way it tackles the various themes - we get not just the political chess/strategy games between the various players leading up to the end point, but also a lot of implicit commentary on modern society as well as ancient (scammers, celebrity culture, etc etc), literary analysis, coming of age and moving from an essentially selfish perspective to caring about the world and so forth.
And that is in part because while they both tackle one of the same main themes, namely can you change the world, Nirvana's aim isn't to change the system fundamentally, just clean it up, whereas Ye Qing Mei and increasingly FX's is a much more radical vision. As a result, the scope of the two seasons seems greater (whereas Nirvana's second season really wasn't anything like as good as the first).
The other key difference, it seems to me, is that Nirvana's perspective is essentially depressing - how hero has decided he has to sacrifice friendship, love and even his life to fulfill the mission entrusted to him by his father, and there is a discussion in episode 8 where Lin Shu articulates his philosophy, which is essentially that if you have desires and feelings, you can't be happy and carefree ,you just have to keep enduring until it all stops. Fan Xian, on the other hand, is a seize the day kind of person, as reflected in the Li Bai poem that opens the drunken banquet (the poem is called Bring more wine, or bring more wine) who most certainly does not believe in just enduring things until you can fix them twelve years in the future! I can't help preferring the latter philosophy, even if I admire the former!
It also means jol can engage in that wonderful dry humour - my Chinese is pretty elementary at this point, so I only pick up a few of plays on names and words and culture references (and am grateful to those who explain them!), but enough comes through even in translation (and with the visual element) to both reinforce the message of celebrating life even when things seem hard, and counterbalance the horrors that occur along the way.
I think they both deserve a 10...
Emperor definitely did something to help save him, and perhaps would have done more (we can't know, since regained consciousness and then took charge of his own destiny!) but whether that was enough, or whether actually fixed by Ku He's technique, or something Ye Liu Yuan did is left ambiguous.
And personally I thought the whole bidding stuff in the Jiagnan arc in the novel was unnecessarily convoluted. FX's hinted intellectual property/licensing solution was actually foreshadowed in season 1 in relation to his book I think, and makes a lot more sense to a modern watcher.
In the end judging the series in terms of how well it translates the novel to the screen is a mistake in my view - the screenwriter has transformed many characters, and added several layers to it, with some meta around FX and the Dream of the Stone (Red Mansions), literary criticism (the modern day library scenes, and then in various forms in the series), and beefed up the scifi component.
My guess is (and obviously its only that) that they will ditch the whole northern Emperor' s looking for an heir stuff, and probably Haitang's tribal stuff, perhaps even the whole Dongyi segment, and cut to the chase on the Emperor's plan to roll over Northern Qi vs FX's agenda, plus the Emperor's plans to acquire the temple's knowledge (not in the novel at all), plus the threat season 1 told us was lurking under Taiping Villa (and I'm guessing its that the temple is not going to be the same as in the novel...).
It is true that they have reduced the ruthlessness of FX and modifies some of the other characters (or more accurately, transformed them into real, fleshed out characters where in the novel they were little more than caricatures), but that was true in season 1 too - in my view just as well, he is a pretty unattractive character in the novel, and certainly wouldn't have kept me watching this so avidly if they'd stayed true to it!
That said, although the humour acted as a nice counter-balance (no one wants to watch something that is simply too depressing!), season was pretty dark overall, with a pretty hideous underside being revealed about both the society as a whole, and the royal family in particular. Couple that with the lurking threat of the temple/all those sleepers waiting to wake from their pods under the ice (or whatever), and whatever the Emperor's agenda is, and I'm pretty sure season 3 will be even more epic that season 2 was.
My theory is that when FX realises that Darth Vader (I mean the emperor) is trying to kill Wu Zhu, and more about his plans and the threat lurking in the secret cavern at taiping villa/the temple, he may once again find himself pushed into being a prince.
And season 1 contains two moments where Emperor looked as if he was about to say Luke I'm your father at Taiping Villa - first time interrupted by archer, where Emperor does an amazing backflip to protect FX; second time just before he goes north, when FX himself interrupts the Emperor mid sentence, and Emperor flubs it.
Its just that in season 1 there was generally a lot more fighting etc so I guess it was easier to engage at a surface level even if you missed the next layer of meanings...
This was in part a test of his loyalty after all, so needed to know if he was just acting in his move to protect him...