I just watched that scene its so beautiful I cant... 😮💨 Breathtaking. Absolute cinema! 👏
He goes over the same part of skin over and over, and he pushes the coin. Her skin reddens only from the scrap.
I did scratch myself accidentally (not a lot), and I have lots of cats (and their claws go deeper, longer and draw blood), but still that - it looks painful. And I have a huge problem with (looking) painful + being done intentionally.
She also twitches from time to time, like she's hurting.
I know it's supposed to look gentle, and it's an intimate moment between them, and it's romantic - probably - but all I can think of is OUCH LOL.
when do you think the express package will be available? its probably gonna take a while but i cant wait 😭
It's going to be on the 26 or 27th. How do I know? I have to be away from my laptop for two days, and those are the days. Murphy's law says it HAS to happen (the express) precisely when I'm unable to watch it.
Oh, I just realised that the OP sequence has the (now) infamous feathers in it, and her crown of flowers. It looked kind of strange since I first saw it, but oh!! now it makes sense.
PS And I actually LIKED the feathers (I hope they're feathers, they look like feathers LOL). You could have put him on that horse with those feathers crown right into Mononoke Hime next to the Forest God and he wouldn't have looked awkward.
I think this two vilain brothers story will be heartbreaking. They care for each other so deeply as I see for…
They pretended they love each other. They talked about one another with different people in a WAY different manner.
Much like Xie Zheng subtly threatening Wei Yan through Wei Sheng - he knows what's up and isn't afraid to tell it, it's just that he's polite. The bros are also doing the dance, I bet they'd love to cut each other's throats.
Yuan Qing (Lin Muran) acting reminds me of Gaspard Ulliel in Hannibal Rising (2007). I am very impressed. I think…
OMFG CAN YOU BELIEVE I WAS WAITING TO SEE WHO LIN MURAN WAS GOING TO PLAY?! I just saw him in Dead End and he was THE BEST character there, and wow, he's the little psycho here?!
The longer he doesn't tell her, the worse it'll go when he does. Both Sui bros are psychopaths. Nobody should've…
What the freaking heck, did they kill EVERYBODY in that village?!! Like poor magistrate's daughter, she JUST escaped another dangerous situation - and she went out with dignity, still, she's DEAD!! And the cook, and the old ladies, and even Mme Kang who was a harpy!
The only one I don't have a problem with dying is Mme Song. She had it coming.
Everybody just walks or runs around like mad, finds the nearest cliff (there seem to be two special places like that) and jumps or is thrown off it. They should ban cliffs around the characters of this drama, LOL.
SOOOOOOOOO... Is it me or it sure looks like ChangNing might have some relationship to the bandit chieftain girl? (That character SO reminds me of that bandit girl who catches Gerda in Snow Queen, the one who just wants to keep interesting things). Maybe the two Fan girls aren't related, or maybe there's a third Fan girl? And she has had asthma as a kid too? Curious.
What the HELL is Yan Zheng doing? He caught her (well, more like the plants caught her, still, he told Fido the Falcon to find her - do falcons even hunt by scent?! I don't think so), then he did all that freaking painful-looking scraping thing (don't get me any Ancient Chinese medical treatments even if I'm dying, please and thank you. The only case I can accept it is if Yan Zheng is doing it. Then YES, please and thank you). And then he... left?! And when he caught her again on the cliff (where he teleported to get her obviously, then teleported right back to his patrol), he STILL didn't tell her?!
Boy, are you stupid or something?! You're in a freaking deep hole already, stop digging.
If this keeps going on I don't see any way that she doesn't blame him - as Marquis Wu'An - for bringing this upon the village.
Amazing eps. I see now why they used more than a quarter of the drama to get us up to speed to whoever the village people were, since now I'm sighing over the fate of a village scorpy. Whatever happened to the little nephew? How come ChangNing was wandering the streets alone? And now, poor girl, is in the power of an idiot evil psychopath, who might twist her little mind. At least the bandit girl seems to like her. For now. Until they meet either ChangYu or Yan Zheng or something.
And you're telling me next week we'll be at one ep per day?! BUT WHY?
The longer he doesn't tell her, the worse it'll go when he does.
Both Sui bros are psychopaths. Nobody should've put out that palace fire years ago. I can't even decide who is the worse - the younger, who lives to torture and is silly evil, or the older, who wants to break everything if it doesn't go his way. Whoever raised them must've been a Lecter or something.
The lightest moment of both eps was Yan Zheng asking the falcon to do dog things, while the falcon was in fact, not a dog.
ugh no wonder You Guan Ye is familiar, he's the fox in Moonlight Mystique
He's cute though. And can act. Once he appeared I knew his character was going to be a good one. He, JingXia and HaoNan should've been fast friends. (It appeared that they were friendly, but they would've been a riot together - evidence the way they worked together to change YuQi's mind about the marriage LOL. Add JingXia and his mercantile ways and they'd have had YuQi paying them to get out of it LOL).
They ran out of things to do in the last episode. The editing messed up big time too - yeah I get it, we want…
I wanted a better ending for the Mu twin. So he was in love with her but had played her for all her worth before he turned dark out of the blue - because WHY would he kill the Beidou disciples when it was basically 100% certain they couldn't defeat Nie-long-name-I-can't-remember. It makes no sense. Also... if Nie-whatever DID die, wasn't that Mu twin's original purpose?! So it was a win-win no matter what if the formation actually worked (which it wouldn't have because they weren't any kind of masters).
I don't know how it goes in the book, maybe they whitewashed him enough that the original ending for the character makes no sense for the drama one, once he truly falls in love. If he was evil, he should've stayed evil. If he turned to the right side, keep him on the right side. Have Nie-the first one kill the disciples, JOIN St. PingShu in her fight against him, die a hero. I mean, it's Li YunRui, obviously he wouldn't be a complete evil character but make it make sense!
And I am a bit disappointed in the (lack of) growth for Uncle Lei's character. Weren't they (most of them) the heroes of their age? So he KNEW all this time what his Sect's Master was doing, killing people, causing disasters with his corpse fighters plague, and so on - and did NOTHING?! NOTHING AT ALL??? Why were he and St. PingShu even friends then?! He couldn't have been such a coward in her times.
The only plausible explanations for the last ep are that they strayed so far from the original work that they couldn't make it back to track in time and just had to slap a haphazard ending over it.
At least I've finally noticed Zhou YiRan, I'll be looking for his dramas. Yu JiaCheng has the build and presence to become a ML but IMHO they overdid it a bit with this role. Not his fault, but the character overstayed his presence in the last ep...
Oh well, it WAS entertaining for a long time. The frustration comes mostly from the part where I expected MQY to lie there dying and making a will and giving everything away in order to have her commit to marrying him and leaving her no way out of it and then to go "PSYCH!!!! Made you believe I was dying - well, I'm not, let's get married!" That would've been 1000% in line with the character and his scheming shameless ways.
They ran out of things to do in the last episode. The editing messed up big time too - yeah I get it, we want some mystery blah blah but that's definitely not the way to go about it.
I could care less about the soap-opera redemption of their "Master" (what, wasn't he the same genocidal maniac from seconds ago? He had done things for years, way before he almost completed the final stage so that he could officially go crazy. And he had just murdered his wife a few minutes back. Like, DRAMA, SERIOUSLY?! Eff that).
PingShu must've been the one single best woman in the Jianghu ever, all the men were in love with her, going to battle with her, trying to save her, trying to get revenge for her, and so on and so forth. It got boring after the few 5 or 10 or so.
And what about the "sneaky" does-he-die-is-he-alive montage?! Whatever for all those dramatic goodbyes if he's going to come back all alive and hale just because almost dying magically saves you from a poison you've had all your life?! Could they have not found a better editor or at least do it so that there's some real emotion behind it?! Why did he appear out of the blue in that patch of flowers, when she already knew he was okay (given the flashback to learning he had expelled all the poison) and she was acting like he respawned from some flower seed or something?! That was... a bit (or more than a bit) cringy.
If they really had no more to say or show, I'd have preferred they shortened it by one episode or something. Like this... TBH, the final ep (or the final 4 eps rather) is a bit underwhelming.
Oh well. MQY as a character was finally one who could plan by using his loved ones for once LOL, and while the ending is weak, it's not completely bad. Zhao was... initially cute and lively, eventually kind of a revolving door type of character - hot and cold whenever the door turned.
So there's that. Could have been better, but then a lot of them usually are like this.
PS I seriously missed Song the father these last few eps. I'd have liked to see him recovered enough, even if with no cultivation. He was a good wingman to his son.
Which also reminds me - is it me or did we see a lot more of the SML than the ML in the freaking final ep?! Like... why?! I still blame the editor.
1. In the flashback from the clinic cellar, where LiLun and ZhuYan fall apart, it was 8 years ago, right? Why…
I don't think it's coincidence. He's supposedly thousands of years old, maybe born immediately after Cheng Huang fell out with the original Baize Avatar because of his supposed cure for the plague. All the avatars are mortal, they don't get immortality from being chosen. They even have to apprentice to learn how to use the Baize Token. Wan'er couldn't have been only the second one, and Wen Xiao isn't only the third Avatar. So all the others Baize Avatars must've known the power held by the strongest Wilderness demon - and there's no mention of any other Da Yao other than Zhu Yan (and before, Cheng Huang).
They waltzed over the explanations, but it only makes sense like this - Zhu Yan was there for almost all the other Avatars and got along with them just fine, including Wan'er. Wan'er must've apprenticed with the previous Avatar, too, like Wen Xiao was with her. Zhu Yan likes humans anyway, he might've tried to make friends with every one of them who was decent, LOL.
And after all, the Mountain Gods are almost as old as the original goddesses, and they were keeping the gate closed when the plague came the first time. They have to know things. I can't imagine they'd keep something as important as the balance from half the balance-making entities.
Zhu Yan is sneaky, he won't tell anyone (and particularly his dearest and closest friends) things that might hurt them in the long run. Especially since they wouldn't be able to change any single thing about it. I mean - it was common knowledge he had killed YiChen's brother and father. Being friends with him hurt YiChen, because he also loved his family and wanted revenge. What if they all knew from the beginning that Zhu Yao had killed Wan'er (even if it was out of his control)? And when they do learn, it hurts them all and hurts the bond between them. So whatever dark secrets Zhu Yan has, he'd keep them all instead and suffer by himself (it's obvious he's very much affected).
Same director. He loves good cinematography and snow fights in slow-motion. (I highly approve). And handsome leads. And a pretty good plot. And best of all, that one's already bingeable.
He's doing a BL series, and they're probably doing a CYA in front of the censors.
TL;DR China doesn't allow BL dramas to air in their own country (some dramas get produced and aired outside China but not in the mainland.) Actors involved in BL dramas can expect career problems and it usually spreads to everything they're in, no matter how big or small their part.
Long version: China used to allow heavily censored danmei (Chinese BL) dramas. But the big ones were hurricane-level of huge successes (The Untamed made an immense hit for Tencent and it allowed it to become what it is today - not on its own obviously, but it had a large impact). So production teams took on more danmei, and Word of Honor was even less censored and also a huge success, and the party (and therefore censors) didn't like that. So now we don't have any more danmei directly from mainland China. (Sad noises)
He ChangXi (original Song Yan) is ML in a danmei adaptation that is co-produced with Thailand (they started using this work-around for danmei because it's INSANELY popular). (Sammy's Children's Day is the one). And that too is frowned upon. So in order to cover their asses in front of the censors and not land this drama in trouble, the production team decided to just use AI-editing to replace Song Yan's face in the drama whenever he appears LOL. (And it's more hilarious they swapped it with the face of Zhu ZanJin, who played one of the villains in The Untamed :D)
SCD is not airing yet, so I guess they just wanted to make sure there's no controversy about this character's actor.
PS There are plenty of Chinese-language danmei either made in Taiwan, or labeled as produced in Hong Kong, or supposedly made in Thailand. And there are already-huge-budget dramas MADE that they won't ever air because they're danmei, even censored. Including one based on Heaven Official's Blessing (TGCF), called Eternal Faith, by the same author of The Untamed, where the ML was Zhang LingHe himself. (More sad noises).
1. In the flashback from the clinic cellar, where LiLun and ZhuYan fall apart, it was 8 years ago, right? Why…
1. They fell apart when Li Lun started killing humans. IIRC, when Wan'er seals Li Lun, Zhu Yan's hair is black. Some time had passed in between. Though it's true he has a "true" self and a "mortal world" mask.
2. ZY is much older than Wan'er. She's the Baize Avatar, he's a demon (more in the daimon Greek sense of the word, like an elemental, than in the Christian sense of the word). And the Baize Avatar and the strongest demon in the Wilds are supposed to balance each other and keep the world at peace. They WOULD have been in constant contact since she was chosen. Add to that the Mountain Gods who are visiting with both of them (and Li Lun before he got twisted).
3-4. He used to love the mortal world and he was always a vessel for evil power. But since he got the Ever-burning wood in him, he can't control it every year at the Blood Moon. So it's only been happening for the past 8 years and he's already caused a massacre. He's definitely unhappy about it. And he killed Wan'er, lost Wen Xiao (since he had to send her to her foster dad), and it's just that he's not a murderous unhinged killer. He can't cope with losing control and killing innocents.
5. Li Lun doesn't like humans. He thinks demons are better - being more powerful. He's not one to have patience with noisy kids. It's not that he's bothered, he's being annoyed and maybe considering how to deal with the nuisance LOL.
3 
I did scratch myself accidentally (not a lot), and I have lots of cats (and their claws go deeper, longer and draw blood), but still that - it looks painful. And I have a huge problem with (looking) painful + being done intentionally.
She also twitches from time to time, like she's hurting.
I know it's supposed to look gentle, and it's an intimate moment between them, and it's romantic - probably - but all I can think of is OUCH LOL.
So there you go. Count on my bad luck.
PS And I actually LIKED the feathers (I hope they're feathers, they look like feathers LOL). You could have put him on that horse with those feathers crown right into Mononoke Hime next to the Forest God and he wouldn't have looked awkward.
Much like Xie Zheng subtly threatening Wei Yan through Wei Sheng - he knows what's up and isn't afraid to tell it, it's just that he's polite. The bros are also doing the dance, I bet they'd love to cut each other's throats.
I didn't even recognise him til you said it!!
... I might need glasses.
The only one I don't have a problem with dying is Mme Song. She had it coming.
Everybody just walks or runs around like mad, finds the nearest cliff (there seem to be two special places like that) and jumps or is thrown off it. They should ban cliffs around the characters of this drama, LOL.
SOOOOOOOOO... Is it me or it sure looks like ChangNing might have some relationship to the bandit chieftain girl? (That character SO reminds me of that bandit girl who catches Gerda in Snow Queen, the one who just wants to keep interesting things). Maybe the two Fan girls aren't related, or maybe there's a third Fan girl? And she has had asthma as a kid too? Curious.
What the HELL is Yan Zheng doing? He caught her (well, more like the plants caught her, still, he told Fido the Falcon to find her - do falcons even hunt by scent?! I don't think so), then he did all that freaking painful-looking scraping thing (don't get me any Ancient Chinese medical treatments even if I'm dying, please and thank you. The only case I can accept it is if Yan Zheng is doing it. Then YES, please and thank you). And then he... left?! And when he caught her again on the cliff (where he teleported to get her obviously, then teleported right back to his patrol), he STILL didn't tell her?!
Boy, are you stupid or something?! You're in a freaking deep hole already, stop digging.
If this keeps going on I don't see any way that she doesn't blame him - as Marquis Wu'An - for bringing this upon the village.
Amazing eps. I see now why they used more than a quarter of the drama to get us up to speed to whoever the village people were, since now I'm sighing over the fate of a village scorpy. Whatever happened to the little nephew? How come ChangNing was wandering the streets alone? And now, poor girl, is in the power of an idiot evil psychopath, who might twist her little mind. At least the bandit girl seems to like her. For now. Until they meet either ChangYu or Yan Zheng or something.
And you're telling me next week we'll be at one ep per day?! BUT WHY?
Both Sui bros are psychopaths. Nobody should've put out that palace fire years ago. I can't even decide who is the worse - the younger, who lives to torture and is silly evil, or the older, who wants to break everything if it doesn't go his way. Whoever raised them must've been a Lecter or something.
The lightest moment of both eps was Yan Zheng asking the falcon to do dog things, while the falcon was in fact, not a dog.
(I'm not watching that one, I'm a danmei fan but I'll very probably pass, it's about gangsters and I don't like those tropes).
I don't know how it goes in the book, maybe they whitewashed him enough that the original ending for the character makes no sense for the drama one, once he truly falls in love. If he was evil, he should've stayed evil. If he turned to the right side, keep him on the right side. Have Nie-the first one kill the disciples, JOIN St. PingShu in her fight against him, die a hero. I mean, it's Li YunRui, obviously he wouldn't be a complete evil character but make it make sense!
And I am a bit disappointed in the (lack of) growth for Uncle Lei's character. Weren't they (most of them) the heroes of their age? So he KNEW all this time what his Sect's Master was doing, killing people, causing disasters with his corpse fighters plague, and so on - and did NOTHING?! NOTHING AT ALL??? Why were he and St. PingShu even friends then?! He couldn't have been such a coward in her times.
The only plausible explanations for the last ep are that they strayed so far from the original work that they couldn't make it back to track in time and just had to slap a haphazard ending over it.
At least I've finally noticed Zhou YiRan, I'll be looking for his dramas. Yu JiaCheng has the build and presence to become a ML but IMHO they overdid it a bit with this role. Not his fault, but the character overstayed his presence in the last ep...
Oh well, it WAS entertaining for a long time. The frustration comes mostly from the part where I expected MQY to lie there dying and making a will and giving everything away in order to have her commit to marrying him and leaving her no way out of it and then to go "PSYCH!!!! Made you believe I was dying - well, I'm not, let's get married!" That would've been 1000% in line with the character and his scheming shameless ways.
I'll just imagine that's how it went anyway LOL.
I could care less about the soap-opera redemption of their "Master" (what, wasn't he the same genocidal maniac from seconds ago? He had done things for years, way before he almost completed the final stage so that he could officially go crazy. And he had just murdered his wife a few minutes back. Like, DRAMA, SERIOUSLY?! Eff that).
PingShu must've been the one single best woman in the Jianghu ever, all the men were in love with her, going to battle with her, trying to save her, trying to get revenge for her, and so on and so forth. It got boring after the few 5 or 10 or so.
And what about the "sneaky" does-he-die-is-he-alive montage?! Whatever for all those dramatic goodbyes if he's going to come back all alive and hale just because almost dying magically saves you from a poison you've had all your life?! Could they have not found a better editor or at least do it so that there's some real emotion behind it?! Why did he appear out of the blue in that patch of flowers, when she already knew he was okay (given the flashback to learning he had expelled all the poison) and she was acting like he respawned from some flower seed or something?! That was... a bit (or more than a bit) cringy.
If they really had no more to say or show, I'd have preferred they shortened it by one episode or something. Like this... TBH, the final ep (or the final 4 eps rather) is a bit underwhelming.
Oh well. MQY as a character was finally one who could plan by using his loved ones for once LOL, and while the ending is weak, it's not completely bad. Zhao was... initially cute and lively, eventually kind of a revolving door type of character - hot and cold whenever the door turned.
So there's that. Could have been better, but then a lot of them usually are like this.
PS I seriously missed Song the father these last few eps. I'd have liked to see him recovered enough, even if with no cultivation. He was a good wingman to his son.
Which also reminds me - is it me or did we see a lot more of the SML than the ML in the freaking final ep?! Like... why?! I still blame the editor.
They waltzed over the explanations, but it only makes sense like this - Zhu Yan was there for almost all the other Avatars and got along with them just fine, including Wan'er. Wan'er must've apprenticed with the previous Avatar, too, like Wen Xiao was with her. Zhu Yan likes humans anyway, he might've tried to make friends with every one of them who was decent, LOL.
And after all, the Mountain Gods are almost as old as the original goddesses, and they were keeping the gate closed when the plague came the first time. They have to know things. I can't imagine they'd keep something as important as the balance from half the balance-making entities.
Zhu Yan is sneaky, he won't tell anyone (and particularly his dearest and closest friends) things that might hurt them in the long run. Especially since they wouldn't be able to change any single thing about it. I mean - it was common knowledge he had killed YiChen's brother and father. Being friends with him hurt YiChen, because he also loved his family and wanted revenge. What if they all knew from the beginning that Zhu Yao had killed Wan'er (even if it was out of his control)? And when they do learn, it hurts them all and hurts the bond between them. So whatever dark secrets Zhu Yan has, he'd keep them all instead and suffer by himself (it's obvious he's very much affected).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kb_-FGcNthM
Same director. He loves good cinematography and snow fights in slow-motion. (I highly approve). And handsome leads. And a pretty good plot. And best of all, that one's already bingeable.
Don't worry. I am pretty sure he'll get a multipass with her soon enough.
Long version: China used to allow heavily censored danmei (Chinese BL) dramas. But the big ones were hurricane-level of huge successes (The Untamed made an immense hit for Tencent and it allowed it to become what it is today - not on its own obviously, but it had a large impact). So production teams took on more danmei, and Word of Honor was even less censored and also a huge success, and the party (and therefore censors) didn't like that. So now we don't have any more danmei directly from mainland China. (Sad noises)
He ChangXi (original Song Yan) is ML in a danmei adaptation that is co-produced with Thailand (they started using this work-around for danmei because it's INSANELY popular). (Sammy's Children's Day is the one). And that too is frowned upon. So in order to cover their asses in front of the censors and not land this drama in trouble, the production team decided to just use AI-editing to replace Song Yan's face in the drama whenever he appears LOL. (And it's more hilarious they swapped it with the face of Zhu ZanJin, who played one of the villains in The Untamed :D)
SCD is not airing yet, so I guess they just wanted to make sure there's no controversy about this character's actor.
PS There are plenty of Chinese-language danmei either made in Taiwan, or labeled as produced in Hong Kong, or supposedly made in Thailand. And there are already-huge-budget dramas MADE that they won't ever air because they're danmei, even censored. Including one based on Heaven Official's Blessing (TGCF), called Eternal Faith, by the same author of The Untamed, where the ML was Zhang LingHe himself. (More sad noises).
2. ZY is much older than Wan'er. She's the Baize Avatar, he's a demon (more in the daimon Greek sense of the word, like an elemental, than in the Christian sense of the word). And the Baize Avatar and the strongest demon in the Wilds are supposed to balance each other and keep the world at peace. They WOULD have been in constant contact since she was chosen. Add to that the Mountain Gods who are visiting with both of them (and Li Lun before he got twisted).
3-4. He used to love the mortal world and he was always a vessel for evil power. But since he got the Ever-burning wood in him, he can't control it every year at the Blood Moon. So it's only been happening for the past 8 years and he's already caused a massacre. He's definitely unhappy about it. And he killed Wan'er, lost Wen Xiao (since he had to send her to her foster dad), and it's just that he's not a murderous unhinged killer. He can't cope with losing control and killing innocents.
5. Li Lun doesn't like humans. He thinks demons are better - being more powerful. He's not one to have patience with noisy kids. It's not that he's bothered, he's being annoyed and maybe considering how to deal with the nuisance LOL.