PeachBlossomGoddess

No balls.

Tears of happiness.

Yeah Fuyao felt like a root canal for me too. This is soooo much better.

Well I will keep an eye on him then. 😄

😂😂😂... Idk I think could be also part of the cleanup effort...

Lol you are way ahead of me and probably best spoiler tag that - since this is a mystery some peeps may get upset even though its just speculation.

Someone told me this is a recent change so that the ratings don't come out too early, before there are enough ratings but it could be that she meant that is how their platform does it.

In the novel she was poisoned while she was pregnant with an unborn child while the emperor and Jianming were wiping out the last of the rebels (took 8 years). The emperor was seriously wounded and almost got killed and that was when Jianming performed the baixi ritual on him. He never forgave him for saving his life like that.

Yeah and there I was thinking it was such a hard job keeping this woman alive and as it turns out...

I am starting to think that so many factions were trying to kill Wu Tzetian at the same time that none of them succeeded bc they were too busy killing each other off in the process! 🤣🤣🤣

Yups.

Yes it was someone in a pale taupe outfit. I agree this all has to be linked somehow but am broadly observing that at that point of the story we have the same set of facts as Baizhu but his conclusion has leaped ahead of what is suggested by what is known up to that point in time. It is a bit sloppy in terms of storytelling.

Yeah and they seem to have gotten rid of the spinning camera.

I may be some episodes behind you but in ep 3/4 he told Hongyi they are the same person when it seemed obvious they are not necessarily.

At least they didn't become that powerful until after Wu Tzetian's time...

The Lins were killed by the triple blade and Baili Yan was poisoned. But it looks like Bingzhu's old comrades were killed by the same blade that was made by the kind of copper used in Baili Yan's construction works. It doesn't however mean Baili Yan was necessarily killed by the same person/organization.

Well Bili-bili, Weibo, Baike etc all have drama pages with comments/reviews including professional written ones but due to the mostly younger cohort its just a mess and if you think the Douban comments are toxic you should see some of those. I don't even bother to go there but I use Douban quite a bit, they have some very smart and sophisticated reviewers and fewer trolls to ignore. To be fair, there are also some great commenters on the other sites, its just you have to know who they are or you wade through a lot of garbage to find a few good gems.

Yeah and the assassin that killed the Lins that Bingzhu killed wasn't using the funky triple blade. Some of the connections later on also seem flimsy.

All I can see is some very limited presence if you can even call it that. Given their ownership status, there is no way they can try to collect and verify Chinese user data the way they do elsewhere. This is an extremely sensitive issue at the moment if they do it I am quite sure they will soon find themselves banned, possibly indefinitely.

But you are right everyone does it. Douban has more credibility that the platforms themselves bc they are independent and juicing (or trashing) the ratings has no commercial benefit to the site itself. One of the reasons they release ratings so late (after all the advertising is secured) is to disincentivize the platforms etc from sending water armies their way. In any case, the Chinese govt is in the middle of a wide scale crackdown on this and other practices, which is great.

Yeah but 2mm RMB is a slap on the wrist and frankly that is a problem that is not unique to Douban, all of the ratings sites have this issue. Many hit dramas had more view counts than the entire population of China and this is an even bigger problem bc it directly affects how much advertisers pay. Douban's rating for whatever it is worth has limited commercial value so the incentive to manipulate the rating is not high, contrary to popular belief. That is why iQiyi is going to the heat map system to try to prevent fraud like that but it hasn't gained credibility either bc no one can see the algorithm to calculate the "heat" level. IMDb is not in used in China, it is an entirely English site that may not even be accessible behind the great China firewall. Given the Chinese govt current paranoia with data security there is zero chance a Western site like IMDb will ever be allowed to collect and verify individual user data in China.