What historical drama is connected to physical reality? So you think most people falling off cliffs would survive?…
I was referencing wuxia; that's why I used the term. I was talking about some of the set and costume design choices, like the light wood paneling/furniture/floors and the cloaks.
What historical drama is connected to physical reality? So you think most people falling off cliffs would survive?…
I never said I was worried about it, though? And yes, Chinese historical fantasy dramas are frequently extremely unrealistic. The reason this one is so conspicuous is that it picked a particularly gruesome/gritty subject matter and gave it the full wuxia fairyland treatment.
All stories require the suspension of disbelief to some extent and we all have our own criteria for it as audience members. There are signs of unreality that always take us out of the story and signs we can overlook more or less easily, depending on our personal preferences and the other elements of the story we're watching/reading. You don't need to take my impression of the show so personally.
They had addressed the stink issue. FL's mother made perfumes. It was an indication towards how she might have…
Yes, thank you for reminding me of that hilarious moment. "I'm a clean beautiful butcher maid and I don't stink because my mother made scented sachets!" That made me laugh a lot. Some random scented sachet neutralizing the overpowering odor of carrion, pig shit and blood is about as believable as her having superhuman strength while weighing 45 kg.
I've watched ten episodes of this show now and while it has much to recommend it, I can't get over how fake the physical environment/setting feels.
In the middle of winter, with snow coming down in buckets, our injured male lead sleeps with a thin throw blanket and TWO windows cracked open. AFTER swimming in freezing water, collapsing into a snow bank, and lying there long enough to get buried in fresh snow, which by the way should have killed him outright or at least given him life-threatening hypothermia—yet his lips didn't even turn blue, to say nothing of his extremities. And all this snow doesn't look real whatsoever; it looks granular, dry and obviously synthetic. Our female lead comes in from the cold with snow clinging to her and it doesn't melt or wet her hair. No one wears any winter outerwear.
Speaking of the female lead! Butchering pigs and cutting meat without even wearing an apron? Butchering pigs and cutting meat WHILE WEARING HAIRPINS AND COLORFUL DRESSES? And only getting one or two drops of blood artfully splattered on her cheek, and none in her hair or on her clothes and hairpins? She doesn't even wear an apron while she works, never washes her hands, and seems to carry pigs both live and dead over her shoulder around the house, yet we're supposed to believe it doesn't smell like hell in there? Part of the reason butchers have historically been considered untouchable/social pariahs in so many cultures around the world is that they STINK LIKE SHIT and their workplaces are always dirty and gross. Yet her house looks like some sort of sunlit idyll straight out of a laundry detergent commercial.
These are just two examples out of many. Again, I'm enjoying the show, but it's hilarious how disconnected it is from the physical reality of the story it's trying to tell.
I'm still on episode 4, so I'm a little hesitant to opine on the drama as a whole just yet, but I can't help but notice the clumsy handling of witness statements/how new information is introduced and incorporated into the narrative.
In the very first episode we met Sarah Kim's former friend, whom she duped into investing in Boudoir. That woman told Detective Park a sob story about her deep friendship with Sarah Kim that took 20 minutes to exposit via flashbacks and 2 minutes to debunk once he went back to the office and found out she had sued Sarah Kim for defrauding her and had hired thugs to collect the money she was owed. It didn't make any sense that she would conceal something that the police would INEVITABLY discover almost immediately, let alone that the show would linger on her lie for so long before popping it like a soap balloon.
And then in episode 4 we met Sarah Kim's lover and husband, who each confessed to very serious crimes (conspiring to kill Sarah Kim's husband and then stabbing her by accident, in the case of her lover, and entering into a fake marriage with her to facilitate illegal organ transplantation, in the case of the husband) when there was zero pressure to do so. Sure, any rational person in their place would run a cost-benefit analysis and conclude it was better to confess to everything at once because the police would most likely discover anything they might try to hide and use their failure to disclose it against them, BUT 1. in both cases these were crimes that had gone undetected for a long time, so a person scared of getting dragged into a murder case would most likely NOT bring them up unprompted, and 2. again, in episode 1 that lady did try to hide something that was much more easily discovered because the police already had all the receipts, which she had to know.
Anyway. These repeated instances of strange witness behavior make for lifeless and utilitarian storytelling. New characters enter the narrative periodically to add a new layer of paint to the emerging portrait of Sarah Kim, but none of them behave like real human beings in their own right. The script pays no attention to their motivations/characterization beyond their involvement in her life and uses them as mouthpieces to set up flashback sequences when necessary.
Even Detective Park and his sidekick kinda have this issue as characters. We know NOTHING about them beyond the most sparse and superficial details (which are total clichés).
I get that Sarah Kim is the whole story here and I think the show is doing a great job of gradually peeling back the layers of mystery and deception she's shrouded in, but still, for a story of this kind to work well, it has to root its world and secondary characters in some sort of three-dimensional reality. But here NOTHING feels real except for Sarah Kim, largely because the other characters do not act like actual humans convincingly. Everyone except for her is a vehicle for plot progression and nothing else.
Well, it's because the first episode is literally the synopsis. I actually thought the pilot went a lot more deeper…
No, it’s because it’s very conventional and emotionally manipulative. It hit every cliche from the drink-pouring power play to the disrespectful chaebol heir talking down to an older person to the fist clenching to the vegetative parent in a care facility to the annoying hysterical grandma beating up a random person at her granddaughter’s funeral because Korean dramas always pretend grief gives you license to abuse people.
The first episode was heavy-handed and predictable, and the ending and preview suggest the drama will only get more over-the-top from here. I'll give the second episode a chance, but I expect this one to be a drop for me.
Honestly, it’s censorship that’s making everything confusing.In the original version, they’re in an open…
Open relationship, or more like no relationship? I haven't read the original novel, but I'd be surprised if they were hooking up with each other while also hooking up with other people. He seems to have no interest in her, which is fair and understandable; their relationship is in the past and he is embroiled in a deadly mystery that concerns his origin, so he has no time or emotional bandwidth for a complicated romance with his ex. It's her unconditional devotion to him that seems out of place.
I do think if she was shown carrying on with other men, Long Yu's care for Gao Feng would read as friendly concern rather than hopeless pining.
It kills me that Gao Feng is this moody jobless bum who's got a gorgeous bar owner offering him employment, accommodation, money, transportation, a shoulder to cry on, food, positive affirmation, secretarial services, etc. without expecting anything in return and he can't even be bothered to make eye contact with her lmao
Spot on hint. I am suspecting that they have the same Mom or are relatives. Just my guess. As you watch to ep…
That's the obvious implication, yeah. My guess would be that Gao Feng is the biological child of the dead woman (who was also Feifei's mother) and another man, and that Feifei's father killed her in a crime of passion. Gao Feng's biological father could be Xu Peng, Xu Zhiyang's father and Wu Guohao's business partner. So Gao Feng would be half-siblings with both Feifei and her husband, and would also be the lawful owner of the shares that are currently being contested within Penglai.
But I wouldn't be surprised if this was all a red herring and Feifei and Gao Feng turned out to have different mothers. That's where the mysterious woman in a wheelchair could come in.
Edit: I just realized I got my dead Penglai executives mixed up. I meant to suggest the recently deceased board member who left no heirs as Gao Feng’s most likely father. I guess Xu Peng could also work, though.
Fei fei is unreliable narrator and we can’t judge her from what she tells us. A big part of the scheme is being…
Her being an unreliable narrator and not knowing everything doesn't excuse her terrible personality and poor choices based on the information she did have...
And she clearly met Wang Dan without telling her fiancé (which was already veering into crazy bitch territory) to insult her and throw money at her like some soap opera villain. Then Wang Dan turned out to be better at slinging insults and being a crazy bitch than her, so she... pushed her down the stairs.
Like, I'm sorry, but no, there's no excusing or rationalizing that. She acted deplorably, and what is more, she's a moron who directs her anger at the nearest vulnerable target and can't control her emotions. Again, I trust and hope she'll get some character development, but her actions were completely indefensible.
I've only watched the first two episodes so far, but Wu Feifei's character introduction made her look utterly detestable. Stupid, petty, muddle-headed and vindictive. She dragged that guy into a transparently transactional, loveless marriage and then when it turned out he had had another girlfriend in the past, she got so mad she completely lost her head—and assaulted the ex-girlfriend (not even him!) and left her for dead! And when the ex-girlfriend disappeared, presumably out of fear of her psycho antics, she tried to find the ex-girlfriend again...?
And all the while she was biting her lip and scrunching her brows like she was on the verge of tears. Lady, you're not the victim in any of this.
She needs to get humbled by life HARD because I can't imagine where else her character growth is going to come from.
1 
All stories require the suspension of disbelief to some extent and we all have our own criteria for it as audience members. There are signs of unreality that always take us out of the story and signs we can overlook more or less easily, depending on our personal preferences and the other elements of the story we're watching/reading. You don't need to take my impression of the show so personally.
In the middle of winter, with snow coming down in buckets, our injured male lead sleeps with a thin throw blanket and TWO windows cracked open. AFTER swimming in freezing water, collapsing into a snow bank, and lying there long enough to get buried in fresh snow, which by the way should have killed him outright or at least given him life-threatening hypothermia—yet his lips didn't even turn blue, to say nothing of his extremities. And all this snow doesn't look real whatsoever; it looks granular, dry and obviously synthetic. Our female lead comes in from the cold with snow clinging to her and it doesn't melt or wet her hair. No one wears any winter outerwear.
Speaking of the female lead! Butchering pigs and cutting meat without even wearing an apron? Butchering pigs and cutting meat WHILE WEARING HAIRPINS AND COLORFUL DRESSES? And only getting one or two drops of blood artfully splattered on her cheek, and none in her hair or on her clothes and hairpins? She doesn't even wear an apron while she works, never washes her hands, and seems to carry pigs both live and dead over her shoulder around the house, yet we're supposed to believe it doesn't smell like hell in there? Part of the reason butchers have historically been considered untouchable/social pariahs in so many cultures around the world is that they STINK LIKE SHIT and their workplaces are always dirty and gross. Yet her house looks like some sort of sunlit idyll straight out of a laundry detergent commercial.
These are just two examples out of many. Again, I'm enjoying the show, but it's hilarious how disconnected it is from the physical reality of the story it's trying to tell.
In the very first episode we met Sarah Kim's former friend, whom she duped into investing in Boudoir. That woman told Detective Park a sob story about her deep friendship with Sarah Kim that took 20 minutes to exposit via flashbacks and 2 minutes to debunk once he went back to the office and found out she had sued Sarah Kim for defrauding her and had hired thugs to collect the money she was owed. It didn't make any sense that she would conceal something that the police would INEVITABLY discover almost immediately, let alone that the show would linger on her lie for so long before popping it like a soap balloon.
And then in episode 4 we met Sarah Kim's lover and husband, who each confessed to very serious crimes (conspiring to kill Sarah Kim's husband and then stabbing her by accident, in the case of her lover, and entering into a fake marriage with her to facilitate illegal organ transplantation, in the case of the husband) when there was zero pressure to do so. Sure, any rational person in their place would run a cost-benefit analysis and conclude it was better to confess to everything at once because the police would most likely discover anything they might try to hide and use their failure to disclose it against them, BUT 1. in both cases these were crimes that had gone undetected for a long time, so a person scared of getting dragged into a murder case would most likely NOT bring them up unprompted, and 2. again, in episode 1 that lady did try to hide something that was much more easily discovered because the police already had all the receipts, which she had to know.
Anyway. These repeated instances of strange witness behavior make for lifeless and utilitarian storytelling. New characters enter the narrative periodically to add a new layer of paint to the emerging portrait of Sarah Kim, but none of them behave like real human beings in their own right. The script pays no attention to their motivations/characterization beyond their involvement in her life and uses them as mouthpieces to set up flashback sequences when necessary.
Even Detective Park and his sidekick kinda have this issue as characters. We know NOTHING about them beyond the most sparse and superficial details (which are total clichés).
I get that Sarah Kim is the whole story here and I think the show is doing a great job of gradually peeling back the layers of mystery and deception she's shrouded in, but still, for a story of this kind to work well, it has to root its world and secondary characters in some sort of three-dimensional reality. But here NOTHING feels real except for Sarah Kim, largely because the other characters do not act like actual humans convincingly. Everyone except for her is a vehicle for plot progression and nothing else.
I do think if she was shown carrying on with other men, Long Yu's care for Gao Feng would read as friendly concern rather than hopeless pining.
Girl, please have some dignity and cut him off...
But I wouldn't be surprised if this was all a red herring and Feifei and Gao Feng turned out to have different mothers. That's where the mysterious woman in a wheelchair could come in.
Edit: I just realized I got my dead Penglai executives mixed up. I meant to suggest the recently deceased board member who left no heirs as Gao Feng’s most likely father. I guess Xu Peng could also work, though.
And she clearly met Wang Dan without telling her fiancé (which was already veering into crazy bitch territory) to insult her and throw money at her like some soap opera villain. Then Wang Dan turned out to be better at slinging insults and being a crazy bitch than her, so she... pushed her down the stairs.
Like, I'm sorry, but no, there's no excusing or rationalizing that. She acted deplorably, and what is more, she's a moron who directs her anger at the nearest vulnerable target and can't control her emotions. Again, I trust and hope she'll get some character development, but her actions were completely indefensible.
And all the while she was biting her lip and scrunching her brows like she was on the verge of tears. Lady, you're not the victim in any of this.
She needs to get humbled by life HARD because I can't imagine where else her character growth is going to come from.