ShortCircuit

This one.
Blazing Him.
A Winter Sun Wakes the Wind (and more, this is a way too long title LOL)
Bittersweet Love (about to air soon)

And then there's a lot more from other Asian countries too. Like

Unfold (Hong Kong)
Lost to You (Singapore)
The Prosecutor's Proposal (South Korea - go pick this one, it's a great start!!)
My Summer of You (Japan)
Knot (Thailand) is finally coming on the 30th. And there are (as usual) a lot of Thai BL already airing or almost over.

It's a glut LOL.

ETA A lot of them are on GaGa.

I know the book came out before TU (by which I mean the drama, not the novel), but I'm kind of feeling awkward looking at the leads and they (mostly Ollie at specific times) look so much like the leads of TU (I mean the actors obviously).

Like, I appreciate that they took the time and bother to make an actual full-length danmei drama, but the resemblance keeps throwing me off. Like the drama is more of a 50 Shades version of Twilight in comparison to TU, instead of its own entity.

From those who read the book (I hear Via Lactea is publishing it, I NEVER buy from them - and from Rosmei either, they SUCK with release times, and they're not cheap either...), do you get the same impression from the first ep?

Wow, this is amazing - good music, beautiful OP, great acting. I like it a whole lot. What do you mean only 10 not even half-hour long eps?! This would be an extraordinary full length series if they let it.

Also what's wrong with the timer, LOL.

I think they kind of made a very emphasized point on how filial piety and therefore family relationships is/are extremely important in an (Ancient) Chinese family. It's NOT that he sees her as directly responsible BUT her mother (presumably) "stole" the one thing that WOULD have saved his older brother and then the FL never told anyone about what she had witnessed until now. Not that she could easily do so, but until she went up the mountain, she could have tried.

He didn't send her to the mountain, he wrote her a letter of divorce. All her dowry was returned, she could have easily just gone to one of her shops or buy a house herself - she chose to return to the mountain by herself (and her splintered personalities).

It's not like he lived a rosey life before or after the tragedy of his family. I wonder why we're expecting modern times' feelings and rationals for people supposedly living however they could in danger for basically every second of their lives (and I include the FL here, obviously). After his brother - and the whole army - died, he spent his years in pain, from his wounds and from the regular torture from charlatans sent by the Dowager. So, FL came and healed him - those years were still lived as they were lived. He's not yet 30 - almost a third of his whole life was like that.

So nope, I don't think people are excusing his actions, but they ARE kind of justified. The fact that they both were living through tragedies of their own families and both were suffering doesn't delete any of their separate feelings.

Drama needs drama, it's a must.

But I can see his POV too - he still doesn't know she's a car full of clowns under that pretty face and it's because she had to survive alone on a mountain for several years with nobody in her family or the outside world ever caring for her well-being.

Those same years, he had to live with the survivor's guilt coming from being the only one who was allowed to live from the whole mess. He had to allow himself to be treated as less than a person (remember those first few eps when each and every charlatan that had the Dowager's ear could come and make him do ANYthing they cared, including being tortured in the name of repenting for his family's sins?!). He had to see his sister-in-law living like a madwoman, his nephew growing up without a father, thinking about all the thousands of men who died for no fault of their own. Thinking about the freaking edict that he DIDN'T know was real or not, but believed his brother to be telling the truth (he didn't go with them to the capital but came later, and he didn't see the edict when his brother had it). 8 years of that will twist someone's mind.

So now take one splitted schizoid beauty who's surviving by focusing on a few very precise points of revenge and redemption and one tortured, guilty-twisted survivor in defense mode - TBH, some of the sweeter parts of their romance are surprising, given the timeline so far is about 6 months. I'm buying it anyway. And the part where he twisted her being all-out for helping him into her doing it out of pity is totally justified BEFORE he finds out she's more broken than him.

After all the heartbreak of 29-32.... my mind is seeking some relief.

Sooooo. It was all due to psilocybin LOL. 'Shrooms, what can you do.

And now seriously, ML, I love you, go drop dead now you bastard. You TOLD her you'll never leave her, NO MATTER WHAT. Grow a freaking brain before you make her go full PTSD-crisis dammit.

PS Also I can't care about Mr Feng's problems right now, can you please not?

PPS Post-clarity gray-haired ML is hot. I'm going to hell for thinking about how hot he is in the middle of the heartbreak but it's a fictional character, he'll get better.

Okay, I've gone and done it. I'm all caught up. What now?!

So that's like about 1144 Euro or 1300 USD. I can't tell if that's a big amount for a regular netizen or a simple work class citizen.

Are fines so small usually or...?

But she never came online LOL. It's like - his love interest lives in Canada and goes to school there, you wouldn't know her, LOL.

He's been in bike and car racing last I've heard. And he had a bit of a trouble re: cultured remarks last year IIRC, I guess he can pick and choose what he wants to do and maybe even has some extra reasons not to pick a drama and/or other entertainment. TBH, I don't really follow their work unless it gets public that they're doing whatever - so if they slow down a bit, it'll eventually come up, what they're doing. Myself though, I'm more of a character fan than an actor fan :D

In this drama... I think they'll try LOL.

Or he got mad his wine was cold. I've seen some characters spit blood because they were enraged or surprised. The equivalent of smashing everything off a table in rage for Western movies, LOL.

That part - especially the hiding place... irks me. I commented below already. She's been stupid with it, if it's as important as we're meant to believe.

And anyway - let's pretend she does present the edict and can prove it's real and not a fake. What does she actually expect?! The Dowager put the freaking army - including a Prince - under the sword. She had the Ding Mansion punished. She had her underling - Muyang - try to get the edict, so it's obvious SHE planned most of it, so that her own son got the throne.

And now what?! Does Ye Li expect either the Emperor - the SON she put on the throne - to turn on his mother and punish her or the Dowager to just... meekly go away to the Cold Palace or something? What is the actual expectation of them all?! They have no allies other than the old Hua Duke.

Wangfei (王妃) - it's pronounced exactly as written, LOL, King's Wife (or for simplicity, Princess). The W translated to an "oo" sound in English. The "Fei" just means Consort. :D

TLs are tricky - I've seen Wang TLed as Duke from time to time (never as "King", LOL) and also hóu (侯) TLed as "Marquis" as in here, but in other dramas was "Count". It's all in the adaptation, what can you do...

If you have an ear for it, you could catch the actual titles (not for the women, it's way more complicated outside NiangNiang (Empress/Noble Consort, from a person of lower status) for example).

1. Huangdi (皇帝) - Emperor
2. Wang” (王) - Prince/Duke (actual TL: King)
3. Gong (公) - Duke. (Not to be confused for 公公 (gōnggong) which was a title usually given to Imperial Eunuchs of some status, LOL).
4. Hou (侯) - Marquis/Count
5. Bo (伯) - Count/Earl
6. Zi (子) - Viscount
7. Nan (男) - Barron.

And so on, and so forth, LOL.

Actually, no, the Ye dad was made to take the edict from his wife, forcefully, by Marquis Muyang (presumably at the order of the Dowager Empress or at least in the interest of her party). The astronomer - another of the Dowager's pawns - learned about it and was made an accessory to treason either because she was afraid he'd tell the people the edict was real, or because the Dowager had no use for him any more and found a good way to silence him forever on any secret he might know. So he told the Dowager Consort to go get it, which she did, despite being a witness to how much danger that caused to her childhood friend, Ye Li's mother.

The DC was in love with the astronomer, who was completely dedicated to the DE, so that they both swindled DC's trust into helping the DE all these past 10 years (that's the trick with the dragon bringing rain and the poetry book written and read in public while the astronomer was supposedly in seclusion, LOL. That's what's hit the DC really hard, enough so that she gave up an edict. The real one? I don't know. We'll see.

Su whatever, the standard stupid villain.

There are a lot of noble titles, some inherited, some conferred. A "Wang" translates directly to "King", but in Western TLs, it's made into "Prince" because we didn't usually have a hierarchy that ended in an Emperor over all the smaller feudals lords, like China used to have.

So his title is "King" (over his domain, which involved his own standing army he had to pay for, if he was allowed to keep it - I don't know if OUR Ding Wang would be allowed, given the whole treason thing way back). It doesn't IMMEDIATELY lead to him being royalty (as in the direct line to the Imperial Throne), because that's a lot more trickier. Some people in his family ARE Imperial family, he's not in any way in the running for the Imperial Throne himself, despite blood ties. (The closest rival to the actual Emperor is Mo JingLi, who is the former CP's legitimate son.)

What took a lot of time to come across is that the leading family (of the Lishan Academy - "shan" just means mountain) is related to the Imperial family, that Ye Li's mother and the Dowager Empress and Consort respectively were all students at that academy, that a lot of people in the army and other nobles around also went there to be educated until it closed its gates 8 years back.

Other than blood relations, there were also a lot of given titles that are TLed as "Prince" or "Princess" but aren't related - like the title of Commandery Princess to another character from another drama. The Chinese have all different titles for everybody, BUT Western audiences do not have and never had rquivalents for them so the translators adapt as much as they can so everybody gets the gist of it all...

I am EXTREMELY disappointed in the quality of villains in this drama. Doesn't anyone manage to plan another Meng Yao? Can't we have another old fox villain Emperor like in NiF? At this point I'll even take ML's BF turned villain... though I bet he won't.

So - another lame duck assassination attempt that lead nowhere. I bet the ex-convict doing stuff for Marquis Muyang dies (un)expectedly on the road to the capital, so that he manages to move around a few more eps. The final villain is obviously the Dowager Empress now, but since Dowager Consort Qin left (and hasn't been assassinated on her way yet), she's alone and with basically no left and right secret hands to do her bidding.

We have 13 more eps. there was to be some more plot to fill up the last quarter of the drama. I hope a lot of it is spent on their relationship, it's obvious the original writer or the scriptwriters can't write palace political games to save their lives.

PS I bet that the Cangbei princess isn't dead either - at this point, it feels almost like Miss Su "killed" her to give her a chance to disappear legally so that she goes and secretly marries ML's BF. Or something.

YO!! I forgot about Mo JingLi. Is he still alive somewhere? (Though nevermind, he started stupid from the startline. There's no way he grew a brain while hiding.)

PPS Where's the FL's family now? And by family I mean her non step-sister. Our house-bound hubby material assassin needs his alternative love interest!

PPPS (however many Ps it takes) When she hid that all-important decree under the freaking pillow I literally facepalmed. Like for real. 8 years, 70k+ people's reputations, including the whole ML's manor's personnel and family... and you hide it THERE?! Dammit Ye Li, you caught the stupid germs!

Was that... the whole plan?! That's all she managed to imagine would happen were she to assassinate the princess?!

I mean... this is the second time in this drama where the villains are basically stupid as all getout. Like - WHY?? What did she manage to do in the end?? Is she freaking STUPID??? (Yes she is, I don't need anyone to confirm).

Anyway. I feel like the ML was away too much in the last 3-4 eps, give him back and let some smart people do stuff.