ShortCircuit

Thank you for the rec! I actually wanted to watch it after finishing Handsome Siblings, because I felt Hu Yi Tian got short-changed with his character's plotline in that drama, but somehow I mixed it up with Ancient Detective (I think... I'm pretty bad with remembering drama titles, LOL) and that one turned me off anything detective for a while. Then other dramas got in the way :D I'll just have to give it another try :)

If you pinky promise they don't die, then I'll try at least the one with Xu Kai (just because it's him :D) Thanks for the rec!

You wouldn't have heard of it, because it might be a Freudian slip, LOL. I obviously meant You Are My Hero (I'll go correct it now). I feel so guilty now, LOL, like I've betrayed all the other actors I like :D

Zhan-ge, I didn't mean it!!! But Bai-ge is also so good looking, I couldn't help myself :D

There are main female characters, though they're not the main leads of the story (they are credited as support characters, but they're definitely very important to the plot). If by the end you've not empathised with YanLi and Wen Qing's storylines, then there's no help for it, LOL.

The BL is toned down due to censorship to just great bromance, so if you're not into actual BL, you could just ignore the 'ship and pretend they're just really good friends.

This is one drama that actually is worth the hype that surrounds it, so you could just give the first few episodes a try. Don't let the first two stop you - they're introducing a storyline that will follow the first half of the drama, and you need to give it time to get to where it's going to.

If you still decide to drop it, but still want to watch a nice historical/wuxia/xianxia cdrama...

- Joy of Life - very smart characters, plot comes first, good actors, pretty good development. There's some romance, and it's all straight.

- The Romance of Tiger and Rose - historical rom-com. It's not supposed to be too deep, but it's still highly entertaining. Also straight romance, and female-centered in more than one way.

- Ashes of Love - melodrama, love triangle (straight), very beautiful actors, excellent cinematography, great music.

But you could still give The Untamed a go - as a person who really digs wuxia/xianxia, there's still a huge difference between how this drama was shot and presented to most all of the rest of them, particularly in regards to how women are expected to act and speak, come to think of it. Have a go at it :)

I wanted to try a Republican era cdrama, but they have this bad habit of killing off MCs. I can't stand to fall for a great chara only for them to be wiped out in a blaze of glory, dammit. I've yet to read a spoiler that says this or that RE cdrama hero actually survives!!

My top ten... Well, I like romantic stories, good plot, character development, nice cinematography if they can have it, good music. So...

1. The Untamed (nothing compares). The story is amazing, the OST is extraordinary, I've never wanted to visit China more than when watching this drama - except for when watching The Wolf. I swear The Wolf's cinematography and filming locations are a whole character in and of themselves LOL. The MCs of TU are complex, lots of character development, and it doesn't hurt at all that Xiao Zhan has a killer smile and is a great actor (though TBH, WWX's story is so interesting, I think nobody could have failed to make him unforgettable.)

2. Love and Redemption. I didn't even like it in the beginning, and I still don't like parts of it (like the whole plotline of the sister and her lover. Though the bad guy involved with the sister did have a nice development in the end.) But it eventually won me over, mostly with the ML's story and with the soundtrack. It is a grander story than most other xianxia, and I still revisit it from time to time despite some problems I have with the last arc of the story, LOL.

3. Ashes of Love. This, mainly because of the Run Yu plotline. I like the MLs in the beginning, and even cared that they should end up together, but for me, in the end, it's all about Run Yu's story - that, and the soundtrack. "Upwards to the Moon" is a magnificent song.

4. Ever Night. I didn't expect to like it so much, in fact, I almost dropped it at first. But then... it grew on me. And I still remember the whole hilarious debacle of the Chicken Soup Letter, does anyone else? :D The soundtrack is also amazing, I really like the chemistry of the whole cast, and I definitely didn't expect for it to have such an impact on me.

5. The Sleuth of Ming Dinasty. It killed me dead with the cuteness. Imagine me flailing my hands around trying to find words to describe how cute it can get at times. Other than the cute, it's a good story (still waiting for the novel to be completely translated, not long now), and has extremely lovable characters. Even the genius/lecherous doctor gets extra points for being a nice guy. But my love is definitely reserved for Wang Zhi, Tang Fan and Sui Zhou, in that order. (One can never sing Wang Zhi's praises enough.)

6. The Romance of Tiger and Rose. Because it actually is funny, despite everything. The theatre of fruits is to die for!

7. You Are My Hero (Oops!). I like Bai Jing Ting. And the drama is pretty good, too. It tended to look too much like Descendants of the Sun from time to time, but it managed to be its own beast in the end.

8. Word of Honor. The censors were all asleep LOL. And Gong Jun really did his everything, and it shows. I've yet to read a Priest novel, but Faraway Wanderers would probably be the first, if I do... but now I'm scared the WKX in the novel is not the WKX I've come to like :D

9. The Legends. Because Bai Lu and Xu Kai have amazing chemistry (she tends to have amazing chemistry with her ML in all the dramas I've seen her in). The ending is a bit of an editing mess, but I did like the drama a lot.

10. Love is Sweet. Well, Bai Lu AND Luo YunXi, what's not to like? And everybody likes a good rom-com.

The Wolf and Douluo Continent should be in that list, too, but I've sweat tears of grief over them and left them out this time, LOL.

So looking at the top 10, I'm definitely a wuxia/xianxia lover more than a watcher of modern cdramas. Can't help it, the most interesting stories are historical fantasy ones :D

Doramas are just dramas, but it's a term used specifically for Japanese dramas. It comes from the way they pronounce some English words, LOL. There's quite a lot of English words that are pronounced definitely different in Japan, and it sounds cute in anime/doramas, and I imagine, in real life :) Things like sararii-man (salary man :D), aisu-kurimu (icecream), waifu (wife) and so on and so forth :)

That being said, I've heard quite a lot of Japanese people speaking in perfect English, so I don't know if it's just a culture thing or something that naturally comes to Japan due to the way their language is structured and/or their words are usually pronounced.

Animation: donghua (China), anime (Japan), aeni (SKorea - though I think most Western people still call it anime)
Drawn art: manga (Japan), comics / graphic novels (the US), manhwa (Korea), manhua (China)

Danmei refers to Chinese BL novels (mostly web-novels) though it might expand to their drama versions too.
Yaoi (Japan) is a much larger umbrella (it's a genre that includes BL under most of its forms - novels, manga and anime. And I guess, movies and doramas, lately.)

Wuxia is a genre of stories that involve martial heroes and are set in ancient China (usually in a recognizable historical period). The world of wuxia stories is the Jianghu (sometimes in dramas they translate this term as "the pugilistic world", which is mighty confusing for a Westerner, because pugilism in the West is boxing). Heroes might be vigilantes - or at least try to help "normal" people who are not martial heroes, and they try to follow a code of action. The fact it's supposed to have some relation to reality doesn't preclude them from ignoring the laws of physics (like walking on water and jumping from the mountain tops unscathed.) One of my favourite wuxia movies is Jet Li's "Hero" - it almost seems an historical movie, but there's all the martial arts in it that definitely moves it over to wuxia.

Xianxia is rather similar to wuxia BUT with a major difference - it involves the world of the immortals or gods too. They get introduced and act as major characters at times, and there's a plethora of supernatural or at least not-quite-natural characters in these stories. "The Untamed" (or at least Mo Dao Zu Shi, the novel it's based on), "Ashes of Love", "Love and Redemption" etc are all xianxia.

Bonus: the BL genre media is usually aimed at women (yes, men are not explicitly excluded, BUT the main target are women who like the idea of BL). Those women are called fujoshi (Japan) and it's not a nice nickname, though that's changing. Men who like BL are called fudanshi (Japan). In China, they're simply called "rotten women", LOL, which is basically the same thing. (I've seen that in a few TL novels.)

It was glaringly obvious by now that he was the one who shot his colleagues. The only question is why. Also it was annoyingly obvious that he and YJI are still working together.

As everyone's phone and each corner of every street seems to be bugged, it makes me almost mad nobody bugged their appartments - they have all their ~secret~ convos in the middle of one of them, at random.

But to be honest, I kind of lost interest since they veered into catch-the-hidden-mole and reduced action scenes to basically zero.

Right now, it's becoming again obvious that Dr. Kang should be the mastermind, because he took himself out of the circle of suspects but HJH is serving him everything up on a platter. If it turns out that it IS him, well...

Finally managed to watch ep 9...

No. Agent goes missing by his own device, comes back with his memory erased and starts looking for moles inside his agency. The enemies are political and among the top dogs of the agency, there's not much personal relationship development, it was all based on action scenes in the beginning and now it's turned into spy-catches-spy-catches-spy twists and turns.

So nope, nothing about what made TBDAW good.

Only The Wolf, and as we all know, they removed basically all supernatural references from that when it went through censorship... But thank you for the rest of the list, I'll have a look :)

Good thing you didn't choose to write about Thai BL or even regular dramas. Dubcon and noncon seems to be the norm in most of them, even the actually good ones.

For a touch of different vibe, this could have mentioned The Romance of Tiger and Rose, which includes exactly the same tropes, but the positions are reversed. I'd be really interested to see if anyone feels that it's in any significant manner different, just because the one doing the manipulation and light abuse-bordering stuff is a cute bubbly girl and we all want them to end up together anyway.

Strange how much the Japanese love vampires, though, huh? There are so many vampire anime, I can't even begin to count them. And some movies/doramas too. Maybe the SK lack of love towards vampires is also linked to how much Japanese media on them there is.

I'm European and vampires are still definitely not my thing. At all. I will diligently avoid any and all vampire stories (in Western or Asian media either, I don't care, I don't like them. Or zombies, though those are of a Haitian origin.)

Werewolves are Central and Eastern Europe-sourced, though. France had some really interesting (based in real massacres) tales on loup-garous, there are some stories in Germany around the Dark Ages, and then there's the Eastern take on it - they wouldn't necessarily eat the people but the Moon or Sun during eclipses. Werewolves really are very interesting critters of the dark of the Western world, much more interesting than the old dry blood-suckers. But then, wolves really were widespread throughout the whole continent for ages, and even now they still inspire stories all over Europe.

I wonder if SK really ever had anything to do with high density of wolf packs. The terrain would allow their existence, but maybe they never spread that far to the south and east of the continent and establish a foothold, and that's why foxes are way more present in Korean and Chinese folklore.

That's why I had such high hopes of Search :D but nope. My hopes were dashed to the ground and destroyed. *Sigh*

No. no, no... I like Choi Jin Hyuk a whole LOT (I mean, nobody can forget Daddy Gu!) but zombies really are not up my alley. Even handsome ones. If he were a werewolf though...

Seriously, why isn't anyone doing any TV series with werewolves? Though not sparkly ones, thanks (or those were vampires? Anyway). Aside from A Werewolf Boy, I don't remember any of them in SK dramas or movies. It's about time, I'd say...

I liked the idea of werewolves, and in that drama, they would definitely had been zombies created by radiation. But in the end, there were none... (/sad).

I don't hide from horror movies... I mastered the remote control heheh.

This is me perusing the list so that I never watch these dramas, LOL. Talk about scaredy-cats, I am at the Super Sayan level of scaredy cats.

...That being said, I did watch Search and it didn't hit me as horror. Except for the creepy Radioactive Zombie Werewolf (there weren't any Radioactive Zombie Werewolves in the drama, though, SADLY - yeah, I'm still salty about that), there wasn't much to be scared of.

So, it was only today while reading another c-web novel (unrelated to GMDC) that I realized that there's an actual trope of going into a cave and finding a lost book of martial arts that turns the protagonist's life around. All this time, I thought that scene when WWX cheekily tells JC and LWJ he went down a cave and studied a secret martial arts book was just an inside joke between the three of them, but it turns out, it's an insider's inside joke of the plot writers too :D

Good job, team! I love finding small gems like this even after so many re-watches :D (That might mean I need to be watching/reading more wuxia/xianxia, because it never occured to me it was such a nod to the world of tropes, LOL. Live and learn :D)

I felt they put all the small bits in there, just to make sure they get put in, LOL. Like it was a trade - tone down the reveal fest in order to get to squeak in the WangXian moment past the censors.

... But somehow it kind of works.

Though I have to say it - I think they did JC wrong, in the end. He DOES come around, and they DO talk, in the novel and in the drama. The donghua leaves them in limbo. I wish WWX could have heard him be heartbroken about the way their paths diverged. Someone in the donghua plot team doesn't like JC at all :D

That man saying they'd get 3-5 years of peace... Is that a teeny-tiny thread of hope we'll get some more GMDC seasons? Even if WangXian is more reserved, and the actual xianxia takes first place, I'd be all for it. After all... there are all those extras in the novel :D

Oh, so you (also) get into dramas with great OSTs? :D Let's see if I can tempt you into trying a few more, then :)

Have you watched Love and Redemption yet? Here's one of the main themes (no spoilers, engsub and pinyin subs, too):

Love like Coloured Glass: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxOcvaDdvbc

From Ever Night, there's a great song (in two versions; the official one is sung by a woman, but I think the male version is just as good if not more impressive, particularly while actually watching the drama):

Darkness (female ver.): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUA1zbsd2NY
Darkness (male ver.): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juuwNU0O5gY

Another huge favourite of mine is part of the OST of Ashes of Love, an amazing song on its own, but the drama deserves a shoutout too :)

Upwards to the Moon (engsub/pinyin sub): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpan9yLmsgI

For so many years I was completely certain Chinese was too hard for me to ever learn any word, LOL, and now I tend to recognize certain phrases, words, and anticipate replies or questions :D (though mostly in period dramas, not really in the modern-era set ones :D)

Thai is still impossible for me, though, despite learning some great songs through their BL dramas :D, like Skyline from I Told the Sunset About You (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvRtrDdF3rI and Thai ver. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJeEOzEZstU) or Wind from A Tale of Thousand Stars (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CeABlP5g3w).

Sorry for the link spree, I get enthusiastic about OSTs LOL.

If you haven't seen the drama yet, I recommend it :) It's cute, it has lots and lots of fluff, a pretty great scifi/paranormal thread (nothing scary, I promise), and well, Lee Jong Suk. And Suzy, in one of the roles I actually kind of like her in. There's also Jung Hae In (of the Prison Playbook and D. P. fame :D, in his breakout role, IMHO)

I still go back and watch parts of it time and again. (But you also should be warned that I am a LJS fan :D)