ShortCircuit

What in the actual....

I have zero idea how I ended up watching this garbage (at 2x speed). I usually have no problem with age gap and the size difference is definitely one of the selling points BUT she's freaking 16?! Anf chatbots tell me the normal HS-entering age in Japan is 15 actually.

Rant under spoiler. Just in case you want to watch this garbage un-spoiled.

The drama starts with WWX being killed / falling off a cliff at Nightless City, in a long-ago cultivators' war where HE was the villain according to the official story. 13 years on, he's become a legend and his body was never found, so there was a suspicion of him having escaped or something, but no proof of him still being alive (people really did search, both friends and foes).

The story of the present timeline begins with someone having taught Mo XuanYu how to enact a soul-summoning ritual where MXY had to sacrifice himself in order to call WWX back from wherever his soul was meandering. MXY is one of the Jin Clan leader's bastard children that he neglected, as he did all his bastards, and there are some circumstances that led to MXY being kicked off from the clan back to his own mother's family's manor where he's neglected and abused by his family and step-family until he goes mad and decides to take revenge on everybody by calling the most "evil" person he knows of, which is WWX.

In the novel and donghua, the body is MXY's and different than WWX's original one so even if he used a powder/make-up mask (MXY was a known gay madman), there was no need for an iron mask and there isn't one, LOL. In the drama, they chose to keep the same actor - because helllllloooooo, Xiao Zhan and that blinding smile!! - so the mask was used to hide his face that everybody remembered (I would have remembered that smile too, LOL).

Be advised that the timeline is split into two - the present is in 1-2 and then 33-50, and the past, in a linear manner, comes in 3-33. The story starts turning dark around ep 14-15, and then it's a rollercoaster of emotions til the end.

YES, WWX is a ray of sunshine, and the story is so much worth watching... I'd ask everyone to try staying with it for a while. Just for the untamed hero to have a chance to win you over :D

The statue isn't even horror, LOL. There are a few gory scenes, but not jump scares. People are more scary than supernatural things in this drama. Keep watching :D

More like the donghua is closer to the novel's plot (including the time skips - IMHO it's better to watch the drama first to get the main line of the plot). Then the drama changed some things, mostly the Yin Iron origins and backstory, and fleshed out a lot of secondary charas (particularly the women - Mme Yu, YanLi and Wen Qing aren't as prominent in the novel as in the drama).

Aaaaand they did keep a lot of the innuendoes as they went in the novel - the thing about the Lan headband for example, LOL. And you'll see in S3 the actual revenge in the Burial Mounds when JGY traps them all in the caves.

They also kept it almost as gory as in the novel, and the SFX are better (but then they just had to draw them and not computer-generate them, LOL). AND the changed body for WWX.

You HAVE to watch the chibi donghua next, it's the most sugary version of MDZS we could have ever asked for. Even the tragic characters have some good moments :D and WWX is sooooo much cuter when chibi. Then there's LWJ chibi-drunk in front of his uncle. PERFECTION!

The heart of the story is in the drama, too. I'd advise for someone who isn't really into danmei to watch the drama, as it's censored enough that if you want them to be just platonic soulmates, they can be that, AND it presents the plot in a linear timeline (split between past and present), whereas the novel jumps back and forth a lot.

But just FYI, the novel itself ISN'T all that romantic (there are parts that hint it, but WWX is Capt. Oblivious throughout 90% of the story anyway) so if you like it, the novel might be also a good read.

Still haven't started the novel? :D

Anyway - the VAs in the the donghua are mixed and matched in the live adaptation but Bian Jiang voices LWJ in both, so that tone might be familiar (too few times heard though... at least they did keep LWJ's amber eyes in the donghua). WWX's VA from the drama, Lu ZhiXing, also voices him in the audio drama (in the donghua, his VA is Zhang Jie.)

The first season of MDZS is as close to a masterpiece adaptation as they come, but be prepared for the story to get a little muddled toward the end of S3 (they were made with years in-between and censorship did some tricks in that period).

Seconding Spare Me Your Mercy, it's a subtle BL that has actual weight in its plot AND good acting. The ending isn't a HEA but it's not a BE anyway. Give it a chance, it's so worth it.

Also rec'cing Peaceful Property - the first half is more of a doozy romcom but the second half makes it very good. And there's so much eyecandy...

Someone died two years back and they weren't guilty, Singha took the blame (and got sent off to some unimportant place) and King brushed it off. Maybe the person who died is related or known to Thup.

Singha: I am not interested in you and once this is done we'll go our separate ways.
Also Singha: *can't keep his hands off Thup each and every time he's close by*

This show needs more scary jumps. I discovered I liked scary jumps out of the blue, LOL.

Also, Thup and Darin are written in the stars. They're both so scared of ghosts and the only ones around believing there are ghosts anyway, LOL. They should be fast friends.

PS King is such a loser - he came promising he'd changed and then he goes right back to finding a victim to put the blame on and "solve" the case.

The confession is EPIC (not in the drama, though a little bit of it is still there). He promised all kinds of things, including the "everyday" thing, then later tried to backtrack when he realised how serious LWJ was about it... to which LWJ told him exactly how things were going to be in the Lan household LOL.

Finally!! Xu QiAn return live watch begins LOL.

Nah, there's nothing romantic between LXC and Meng Yao, that one drama scene in the beginning of the school days came out of the blue. Maybe they tried to imply there's a zhiji (知己) link between them like there's one between WWX and LWJ - the Lan brothers even discuss it at one point in time (in the drama too) and got a bit carried away with it hahaha~ (I mean they did censor anything that could reveal too much yet at the same time kept the actual thread of romance - you can still see it as bromance at most, but it's definitely romance).

Jin Ling was already important by being the only one legitimate Jin Clan heir (his father is the only legitimate son of the lecher), and by the Jin being the freaking 1%-ers of the Jianghu, LOL. But his uncle squad is awesome :D

PS Meant to reply elsewhere - WWX has plenty of great one-liners, but his best, IMHO (you already heard him) is the ~Who cares about the broad well-trod path, I'll just follow my one-plank bridge into the dark~ (Yay, unsung hero! He was already walking that one-plank bridge as soon as Jiang Cheng ran away from the inn where he was supposed to stay put and wait for WWX).

Oh and LWJ's best one-liner isn't in the drama, sadly, but it's in the audio-drama if you're ever inclined to listen to it, and obviously in the novel. He says, ever so meaningfully, ~Everyday means everyday~ and yes it's WWX running off his mouth without thinking again that causes it :D

OMFG FINALLY!!!!!

XU QIAN. COME HOME BABY :D

He's one of those people who ingratiate themselves with everyone, or at least he wants to. The people in his generation tend to sympathize with him because he should have had an honourable position anyway, if his father had any decency (which he doesn't). The fact Jin GuangShan is a lecher is part of why WWX and Jiang Cheng didn't want Jin ZiXuan as a brother-in-law (that and the way he treated YanLi before).

Meng Yao is a chameleon, he tells everyone whatever they want to hear, and had gained a lot of friends through it. But he has some - not a lot - of sincerity. When the Wen Clan destroyed Clan Recesses, killed a lot of the disciples (including LWJ and LXC's father who was living in seclusion - he's never presented in the drama, though he had been still alive til the Wen attacked), Lan XiChen was saved and protected in secret for a goodly while by Meng Yao. So LXC's loyalty is earned (these brothers tend to be straight-up believers in their friends. It's just that one of them picked the right person to trust and the other... had bad luck).

A lot of the drama is presenting brotherly relationships - from actual, blood-brothers (and sworn brothers, and adopted brothers) to soulmates (romantically or un-romantically involved). I love those parts quite a lot.

And there's a joke that the whole story is about Jin Ling's uncles, LOL (all of the main charas are somehow related and most of them turn out to be some kind of uncle to Jin Ling :D)

Actually, he IS of the Jin Clan, he's one of the Jin leader's bastards. Even MO XUANYU (WWX's present timeline's body) is one of Jin GuangShan's bastards, he fathered a lot of them, as you'll soon see. And he DID go undercover in the Wen Clan to find out their secrets, it's just that he did it for his own reasons.

The past timeline flashback isn't showing everything, just everything that happened to WWX and how his relationships with the rest of the Jianghu moved. Not what the other clans were doing and if you remember the first two eps (though not a lot was presented yet), there are a LOT of important people who survived the Sunshot Campaign but are not in the picture anymore (and that's suspicious because such people tend to survive everything and a nuclear bomb on top, in any xianxia/wuxia story. ) There's also the question of WHO and HOW did they manage to summon WWX's soul back, when he was missing for so long...

Hehehe, secrets :D

And the staring countdown, LOL, that Jin nobody (who's actually someone important in how things evolve but anyway) was desperately looking around for someone to save him hahaha~

And everyone else thinking - at least it's not me LOL.

It's not that she just hanged herself - or the way Wen Chao died - it's that WWX drove them to it. And he did it in cold-blood, which, if you think who he IS, is kind of chilling. He's not that easy-going guy who thought smuggling in some wine into the school was fun, anymore... he's turned into a killer.

It's even more gruesome in the novel - not going to spoil it since you might want to try it in the future. But there's a good reason people got to fear WWX after his Burial Mounds stint.

At this point in time LWJ is becoming desperate - he SEES how WWX is slipping and fears it'll affect him through his whole life or even kill him, and is unable to do anything about it. Anything at all. After all... he's an "outsider" now, like WWX called him. WWX also knows how to push him away, and does so because things have irremediably changed. He can't be the carefree young lord anymore, and there's a new distance between WWX and everyone else in the world.

Except YanLi. She's precious to him and the only one he can't give up in any way.

Cutting it off here, or I won't be able to not write some spoiler, LOL.

In the end the thing that does it is the Americans bombing the mountains randomly and not some amazing negotiating skills. Or anything much, rather. Oh, and also 20 million dollars because why not.

I guess it being based on a historical event they couldn't embelish much, but still, as a plot... it kind of falls flat.

No, this is danmei. There are no women between them and they basically adopt a son.

The drama even keeps some suggestive scenes, despite the censorship.

If you watch and like it, there is always the novel for the uncensored story (and a donghua, and a chibi donghua, and an audio drama, and a manhua). There are good reasons why this is one of the best known danmei love stories ever.