ShortCircuit

It's a very good ending. And an awesome drama overall.

The sword recognizes the royal luck in him, not the bloodline. So does the little dragon.

It got so serious by the end, I was actually tearing up a lot with the story of Mr. Zheng.

I am not certain what his dad said - did he just retrieve Wei Yuan's body OR did he retrieve the soul, too, in exchange for XQA'a presence in the world? Because I don't think he was talking about Mr. Zheng, even though XQA sees him happy with his family.

BUT IT WAS AMAZING. And it ended satisfactorily enough if they never make a second season, though I BET they will. That is, outside the spin-off LOL. Though it was so funny that everything was real to him and the rest were playing Chinese DnD LOL. (And now I remember Scooby and the Gang roleplaying how they went north only to go south and end up back where they started, LOL).

Also, and this is a big point. I move to depose the freaking Emperor. All in favour? Done.

Ah, it hurt seeing how nobody remembered him but STILL remembered being with him. Especially the mom - even placing food in his bowl while there's nobody there and she doesn't even realise she's doing it. I'm telling you, she's a mama duck and he's her stolen duckling.

And in the end, LOL, they HAD to have the "Luke, I am your father" scene - I bet they fought to keep it in no matter what hahaha~

Ahh. That was so good.

... Second season when?

PS Wang HeDi KILLED this role. He killed it so badly there's nothing left to even send a shadow, done, toast, totally destroyed. I loved it. I hope to see him in many more great roles.

... And I seriously hope Shen Shu is still alive somewhere inside XQA and will help him escape the Supervisor, dad or no dad.

Aaaah, the best ones start in laughter and end in heartbreak and heroism.

This is one of them.

He literally WALKS ON CLOUDS. His steps sound like THUNDER.

That was THE most dramatic entrance EVER in any kind or type or genre of drama I've watched.

Poor book though, and poor Shen Shu. But that was cool asf.

On 36th....

What's wrong with Peng YuChang's face? He looks a lot younger than before, LOL.

So... this is going to be kind of like an interlude, just a mission in a larger game, sort of? I don't care - I just hoped the OP song would sound better, LOL, it sounded like a Bollywood singer trying rap.

Anyway, it's still IAN, even if diluted. I'll take it.

ETA And I actually like ZiZai, LOL, he's like a supernaturally-powered T1000 hahaha~

Because 1. WHY IN FREAKING EARTH does he suddenly care enough about his father/formerly believed to be his grandfather arranging for her little brother to die? So okay, it turned into her mom being completely crazy and forcing her to stop speaking and thus all the problems in her life - but again, HOW WAS THAT HIS FREAKING FAULT?! Waterworks and hearbroken look and all, as if he got a deadly wound. WHY?!

2. He leaves her because HE NEEDS TO PUNISH HIMSELF?! What the heck is he, a monk doing penitence?! WHY would he do that?! It makes ZERO sense. Eat a lemon or two, there's enough punishment.

And then there are the other reasons - like 3. the mother going hard on revenge herself, when we haven't seen her for the past 10 eps enough to recognise her from Adam. Why do I need to care for her mom's love and mom's tears when I don't even know who this woman is? Whenever she was on before, for like 10 minutes all added up, she was all about the presidential campaign.

Which leads to me to 4 - was that the most ineffectual, stupid, completely devolved from his life, totally IGNORANT first-place-runner for president EVER or what? LOL. If this is how he's written in the novel... wow. But if the script writer wanted to draw a parallel to Yoon... Okay, still LOL.

All in all... I don't really see the hype. The ML went from cold-stone abuser to self-flagellating monk in about three eps, but even before, he was leaking tears like nobody's business all of the sudden... I mean, YES he loves her, YES she loves him, they're happy to realise that at the same time, bla bla bla... but his WHOLE personality is that he's a calculated and mean sonovabitch, did someone throw and nuclear bomb in the script and they couldn't find their tags from before the sea-change, LOL?? That was... kind of random. The FL went from mute to chit-chatter but at least she DID have progress, so she's good on that. Why couldn't they do the same for the ML?

ALL the support cast was under-used (particularly the veteran actors playing fathers, mothers, grandfathers etc.) (Also, +60 is the phone prefix for Malaysia, so at least they got the tropical forest-like growth part well, but then everybody in the country was white (from terrorists to hostages and children made deaf by war, though the brochure she got pictured mainly African kids, so that was confusing LOL).

Okay so now I'm done. I just want to repeat it for the rows in the back - I could care less about the mis-translation and the ep was already on 2x speed (which was funny especially in the sex scene, where it STILL was slo-mo in 2x LOL) so I blinked and I missed it LOL. So there's that.

PS See the Light is a good song, but it's annoyingly reminding me of Heize's Round and Round from Goblin SO MUCH.

This was a decent almost-8 until the last two eps, where too much whattafuckery went on to even enjoy the makjang any more. (And the mis-translated part that caused the dramageddon these past weeks didn't even register because TBH I had already checked out by then.)

IF I were to try again, I'd do it for Wang HeDi, but sadly, interim I DID force myself through Love Game in Eastern Fantasy and her voice is SCRATCHING MY EARDRUMS. I get it, she can't help what nature gave her... but OMG. I managed it because Ding YuXi and the support cast were great... but I wished I had never started. I thought her voice in LBFAD was some VA that was supposed to make the character childish and naive and girlish and whatnot... but then to find out the hard way that no, this is how she actually sounds...

*sigh*

I don't blame her, the poor woman, she probably gets some flack for it from actual Chinese people too, but for me, even though I did think I was somewhat inured to scratchy-girly voices for women charas (having watched a lot of xianxia/wuxia dramas), her voice is my hard limit. Can't help it.

I managed 4 eps of LBFAD before I gave up, just because of WHD, but the story wasn't catchy enough to merit all the earache.

TBH, I started LBFAD and couldn't stand the FL's voice. Because she couldn't be the only one, they should relax the no VA rule... I think I'll just try to give Ever Night 2 another shot, though it's so focused on Sang Sang I couldn't make it through the first time...

The one where he's looking at ZYC's lips before saying it's not appropriate, do you mean? LOL

I lost track of days, I thought it was already the 18th LOL. *sigh*

YANG YAN!!!! YESSSSSSSSSSS

Do they even know XQA is alive?

BTW. It's been killing me from the first time they used that theme... who wrote the music for this? There's that theme that starts with the same 4 notes as Ever Night's Darkness. The music director credited for GotD doesn't seem to be involved with Ever Night, is there someone else who isn't in the credits in MDL?

PS All of today's ep locations are SO familiar, LOL. I kept thinking - wait, is this where they filmed some scene of TU? Or of Ever Night? Or of... hahaha~

JooWon and Uee are in it, and then there is a great support cast. I LOVED the mom (she and her duck farm - RIP actress Kim JaOk.) There are about four romances going on at once, and heart break, and Uee's character lives, for a while, in a tent like she's Tohru from Fruits Basket, LOL), and it's HILARIOUS!!

They definitely filmed it differently (I guess it was a weekender-type of family drama), but it was so much FUN!

And then there's Jung WoongIn, who was pretty likable (for a middle-aged man with love issues, LOL), and so he shocked me half to death in the very next drama I've watched him in, where he plays a serial killer, the MOST terrifying serial killer in kdramas yet, for me. (It's I Hear Your Voice).

So watch it if you're tempted, it'll be entertaining :D

Myself, I kind of like makjang from time to time. Too bad that since Ojakgyo Brothers I haven't really found a good, long one (yet. There's always hope.)

(Still on 10th, will see if it holds up til the end.)

The second half is better, IMHO, but it's all makjang, makjang as far as the eye can see :D

TBH - not judging your taste at all, just my opinion, based on your list - you've attuned to j-doramas and maybe it's hard to adapt to other ways of story-telling. More than three quarters of your list is media made in Japan, and only ten dramas are c-dramas out of the rest. It kind of takes a while to see how they do it differently. Xianxia (and even more, DANMEI xianxia, even if heavily censored, as this one is), differs a LOT from anything else (even wuxia.)

If the tropes and the slow pace (because when they made this one, they could take their time and weren't limited by the rules that came after) and the subliminal points aren't easily accessible, it might be due to a lack of familiarity with the genre or a kind of "distrust" that this is actually as good as the ratings (and raving comments) make it appear, if it doesn't appeal to you. And that's okay, seriously, not every drama is for everyone. BUT - and this is the point I'm trying to make - maybe it's not really the drama but the type of media you're already used to, and have to come to expect or actually enjoy much better than this type of (completely different) media.

Don't give up, though, there are so many other cdramas of all genres that you could try, there's always a chance you'll find the perfect one next :D

Yes. Yes, it can. But eventually they come through to the other side. (Just think about the redemption arcs.)

The actual rebirth is 16 years later in the drama, 13 in the novel, after the actual DEATH of WWX, not since the beginning of the Cloud Recesses journey. The novel is written with lots of smaller flashbacks, the drama made a single long flashback to the past in order to keep things easier to manage for the watcher.

What you need to always keep in mind with wuxia/xianxia dramas, though, is that things do NOT happen as fast as it looks, since the dead times are taken out (for example, after they left Cloud Recesses because WWX made himself too obnoxious, it's not IMMEDIATELY after that the Wen Clan attacks.) Even the time they spent in the XuanWu cave is contracted - in the novel, it's around 9 days IIRC (they're practicing inedia), but in the drama it's about 3 days at most and they're out. And then there's months before WWX even THINKS about LWJ again, LOL. (Yeah, he's really dumb when it comes to people being addicted to him, hahaha~)

The timeline of flashbacks does add up if you also consider all the time needed for the normal foot-soldiers to move around. Like when the Wens come to Lotus Pier, most of them weren't even masters but simple disciples/clan members, who all had to go on land and couldn't fly over on swords. That takes time - there's kind of a large distance between Nightless City (in Shaanxi) and Lotus Pier (in Hubei), around 750 km. I know wuxia/xianxia play around with long distances as if they're nothing, but just consider the logistics of taking an army (and their food and tents and whatever else is needed) such a long distance. And not just to the Lotus Pier but most of the other clans' home places, too. Just for another example, the distance between Nightless City (in Shaanxi) and Cloud Recesses (in Jiangnan) is around 1400 km.

Let's not even try to count how much time Jin Guangshan wasted before deciding to get off his ass, and the Sunshot Campaign was also browsed over with only mentioning a few things here and there and then the final showdown. It took way more than that.

So yeah, usually in stories, all the tramping around doing normal army chores is passed over because who wants to see that? But it takes time, and it adds up.