L13

Right, she grew up in a household where her place and her adoptive parents' love were conditional on good behaviour, she suffers from depression and she's always had her life planned out for her, and still she tries her best to get closer to Song Yan from the moment she meets him again. Yes, she doesn't quite have a long-term plan yet and doesn't know how far she's prepared to go to be with him because she hasn't seen him in 10 years and he keeps pushing her away, but it's clear to the audience that the pull between Xu Qin and Song Yan is impossible to fight and they'll figure things out gradually as they get closer.

The fact Xu Qin has realistic concerns and behaviour doesn't make her weak or a coward. Honestly, when people say things like this about the female leads they don't like it smacks of misogyny.

That's an interesting way of putting it. I've also observed that unless they're trashy manga adaptations (which can be very fun in their own way), most recent romantic jdramas try to insert some wholesome life lesson and lack passion. It's quite the shift from the 2000s style of jdramas that gave us emotionally raw and dramatic romances like Long Vacation, Nagareboshi, Pride, etc.

I think the way he left was actually pretty good for him. He would have stayed on for another year and wrecked his relationship with his long-suffering fiancée otherwise. Now he can spend more time with her and his parents.

lmao what? She pursues him the entire time. How is she a coward?

They have some dramas that are actually pretty good, notably The White Castle and Letter from the Cloud, that they’ve already “subbed” with complete gibberish and no one else wants to bother subbing them even though the existing subs are unintelligible. It’s infuriating how they claim dramas for international distribution and all they do is ensure they’ll never be translated.

No.

Romance... revenge... drama... on JTBC and not some bootleg station like ENA or Channel A... yes, finally some real food.

I love me an angsty romantic sageuk about unhappy aristocrats. The last one we got was what, Bossam? Does Bloody Heart count? There was too much boring palace bullshit in that one, and obviously The Red Sleeve was all about boring palace bullshit and the romance didn't appeal to me. Everything else has been in the 'fusion sageuk' genre that sugarcoats historical fiction, makes the characters too childish or modern and puts a pink filter on everything.

Anyway, a proud woman humbled by misfortune and a cold schemer who gets his plans wrecked by love? COUNT ME IN. I'm not even gonna complain when the ML inevitably turns out to be a secret prince.

I'm still on episode 1, but I have to say I like this Xu Qin a lot more. I understand her characterisation in the webnovel is a frank depiction of a person with depression and various other reasons to be unhappy, and that's fine with me, but her singleminded obsession with Song Yan when she's so unwell falls on the side of concerning rather than romantic for me. I can enjoy their interactions more (which is after all the goal of the story, which is a romance rather than a more elevated psychological novel that might leave you with conflicted feelings about the leads' relationship on purpose) when she's got her life together a bit more and isn't, like, stuck in an endless dissociative episode. I hope the drama will give her some friends too because she's so terribly isolated in the webnovel that it feels she has absolutely nothing going on in her life except for trying to get back together with SY. She's a shell of a person basically, and I don't think a relationship is enough to fix that.

Thank you!

Are we expecting the English subs to be up immediately or a couple of hours after the episodes are released?

Are the subs on dramacool ripped from MangoTV?

I read a rumour on Twitter (I know...) that this is slated to come out in July. Let's see! I'm so hyped.

I'm 20 minutes into the first episode and I already hate Sanyoung's mother. She doesn't work and depends on her daughter for everything, she lost all their money to scammers AND needed to be consoled about it by SY as if she's the child in their relationship, on that note she makes everything about herself like when she needed reassurance from SY that it was okay for her to keep freeloading, AND she selfishly told SY her ex-husband was dead simply because she didn't want to talk to him, thus preventing SY from having any kind of relationship with her father even after she became an adult? WTF?

Seriously, is the mother the evil demon?

It's called queer cinema, not "a BL."

I will be seated.

When someone says they hated the first episodes of a show, there’s usually zero reason to assume they’ll like the rest of it.

No, I totally get what you're saying. The progression of his feelings renders the first part of the drama kind of pointless; if he was always going to like a girl like Sang Zhi if he met her as an adult, why does it matter at all that they used to know each other or that she loved him as a child?

A more complex relationship between them as adults where Jiaxu works through the fact he used to view Sang Zhi as a younger sister instead of immediately turning on the charm would have been more interesting AND romantic. Because SZ's past does matter and forms the basis of their relationship, so JX not caring about it at all is kinda weird.

My take on the debate over Jiaxu’s feelings for Sang Zhi in the first part of the drama is this: it’s undeniable he flirts with her at times—there are many times he treats her in a way he wouldn’t treat a younger boy, like when he writes her a letter about how happy he was to see her or when he tells her she looks like a puffer fish when she’s eating and asks her to give him her lollipop (hello?!)—but it’s a totally safe and purposeless flirting. The fact he doesn’t even realise she likes him when she’s so obvious about it and he always comes up with a benign explanation for her behaviour shows the thought of them actually doing something together hasn’t occurred to him. I don’t even think he knows he’s flirting with her at times, and he certainly sees her as a child, not a prospective romantic interest. But the subconscious beginnings of an attraction are there.

ENOUGH