Skibbies

he's been doing pretty well playing supporting roles in relatively serious historical dramas, far better than the random modern he was doing before lol. I still want to watch Canton Thirteen Hongs ahhhhh.

jinling is modern day nanjing, it became nanjing in ming dynasty when zhu di moved the capital city from nanjing (southern capital) to beijing (northern capital), where his fiefdom was located. beijing is traditionally not a capital due to it being too close to the frontlines.

it was never finished lol, it's officially serialised on qidian, looks like this was serialised 2008-2011. he mentions the novel in interviews about this drama sometimes.

i'm late but i'd call it extremely friendly cctv 1 schedule. normally if it aired like a regular cctv 1 show, it'd be mon-fri, or mon-thurs 2 ep a day. but it'll hit the chinese new years breaks in ep 40ish, which might give you 2 or 4 ep max a week for two weeks. awakening of age's 43 ep took 47 days to air, it was super headache inducing to watch. last time saw such a friendly cctv 1 schedule was 2022 chinese new years' lifelong journey.

Qin empire 1, 2, 3 are set in the warring states (about 150 to 50ish years before qin dynasty was established), 1 is vastly different in vibe from 2 and 3, my favourite is 2 cos it has more diplomatic stuff with other states.

I recently just finished King's War (netflix title?)/ Legend of Chu and Han, and it's paced pretty well (with more battle scenes than I've seen in any other drama tbh), depicts downfall of Qin dynasty to eastablish of Han.

first was 1840-42, second was 1856-1860 (destroyed yuan ming yuan/old summer palace). 1894-1895 was the first sino-japanese war (the second was the WWII one 1931-1945), 1900 was siege of international legations (that sure is a name, kinda whitewashing invasion, english), so it was legit 100 years of wars and whole pile of unequal treaties.

ming dynasty's issue was always it's adapted from a fl centric (some say mary sue) story, and the fl bits was worst part of the drama. I dropped it where you mentioned cos I knew what was coming in history and it would enrage me lol.

tRoP have similar issue, it's adapted from FL story but the production team clearly wanted to have a prince vying for throne story. It has severe pacing adaptation issue.

I'm late but the western actor is credited as 安地, his xiaohongshu/rednote acc is 安地Andy.Baidu baike says Andy Friend was apparently born and raised in Beijing, which explains the awesome Beijing accent. He played He De, and cursory search says the custom guy was totally real, a guy named Robert Hart, came to China in 1854, became Inspector General (this sounds nothing like the chinese title omg?) in Shanghai in 1861, and died in 1911.

Imperfect Victim did it really well, as did Faithful (2023), but both are bit long so they have bit of pacing issues.

you write reviews?! omg. the lackluster second cp and love rival were tagged on by drama, which would explain why they are tired and tropey, I found them somewhat annoying since it breaks fl (and sml at times)'s characterisations. I felt like demon arc could use less time, and mortal arc bit more time, not that I super trust this drama team to not add bunch of terrible writing choices, but it might make it feel bit less lopsided.

maybe they filmed the mortal arc first so the actors didn't ease into their scene as easier mhmm. I think wang yinglu's big emotional scenes could be better in general, but I was super super surprised at her chemistry with chen feiyu, and the effortless comfortable acting around ep 13-17, I feel like thsoe are lot harder to do for most actors. I ship this cp so much that I'm almost on the rps ship omg.

It's okay, I can remind you when you actually have free time :P Feng Baobao is a very unique character, and very hard to play tbh, so I was surprised and impressed the live action pulled it off, for casting, directing and acting.

It's not!! and even for s1 it honestly was that starting bit and a minor char's ability lol. but I think the starting few ep is bit hard to get into for some anyways. if you end up liking s2, there's backstory in ep 10-11 (i think, need to double check) for feng baobao (wang yinglu's character) that I think is worth watching.

If you can speed or skip watch all the zzz bits for you, that works too. It's still bit better than Princess Gambit lulzy second half that wasn't salvageable for me. it's rare for me to really love a cp in drama for both the chemistry and the writing, so I stuck out.

Wang Yinglu could do better with some emotional scenes but she worked pretty well for me in the early over the top comedy bits and the comfy domestic romance bits that you are stuck on, I think those are harder to do. Oh oh, you could check out I am Nobody s2 when you are out of dramas too, I know you dropped s1, but this has different vibe (more mysterious-ish) that might work for you, and it's an arc by itself. Wen Qi was also fabulous in it!

LOL yeah this one isn't meant to be then, I mostly like this drama for the cp dynamic and surprising chemistry. The novel was very slice of life and mostly just about the otp, I think they could have kept the drama original chars/setup but the scriptwriting was just way too subpar, and got worse in second half for me.

14 is like middle of the fluffy bits, there's more plot later, but I don't really like the drama original bits cos they cause more misunderstanding and is kinda shoddily written (which is what count as "plot" in second half.

Re: sexual assault and how society at large treat it, there's Imperfect Victim from 2 years ago.

I liked the idea but I felt the execution falls bit flat for me at times, I think there was also bunch of slice of life stuff I didn't care about or something. I'm not actually bothered by the production value or the acting as I've seen this team's far more amataur works (Moral Peanuts) and liked the later seasons, which predate filming time of this series.

I also prefaced that 6 and 7 are decent ratings to me at the start, my ratings are far closer to douban, compared to MDL.

I found his role reasonable memorable in Trilateral Slope, but I loved Jiang Qilin so much more, and I feel Jiang Qilin probably won't get another role close to nominations, ahhh. The movie/drama circle kinda really like Jiang Qiming, he got really good movie resources that made me scratch my head (first billing small budget moviex2, second billing to shen teng). For Nie Yuan, I think I liked his role as well, he was sorta exasperated at FL a lot, which isn't what I expected from his role. I think generally they just exceeded my expectations, I don't think it was amazing enough for nominations but I don't really object I guess.

Magnolia is most definitely balancing between different dramas (and sometimes big companies), but as are Golden Eagle and Feitian. Magnolia's nominations/winners picks are smidge better in recent years. I always handwave the ones I don't agree with hahaha.

Yeah Douban doesn't let you do .5 ratings, which is really dumb. If 8.5 and 9.5 have similar 5 stars, then 8.5 must have more lower ratings, maybe antis, or more people that might nitpick, which I think cnetizens excel at LOL. Douban do clear out ratings it thinks is suspicious, but with the amount of votes it gets, I don't think the low ratings super matter.

You can't actually downrate a drama en mass usually without fans that would boost it. Mass rating drop usually only happens with big scandals (stark drop of Pretty Li Huizhen after Dilraba's controversial Golden Eagle win). They CAN be tanked significantly if plagiarism (Fall in Love with Your Smile, there's some combo of disrepecting real life esport players/industry + problematic plots being widespread) or negative feedback became widespread (Firework of My Heart) oops, I guess that was kinda tangent.

Mostly the 8.5+ shows tend to be hard to rate 1 stars. For lot of them, I think people that don't like the show either wouldn't watch it/finish it or bother rating it. There's also been bit of rating boost in recent 5 or so years compared to before, I guess fandom started caring about drama ratings more? (movies always cared about them but it has its own rating scale) There's also bit of recency bias too, iirc in mid-2010s, it was really hard to get 8+, and 2020 had more than 8+ in the year. A lot of the high rated dramas also get more votes of 4 or 5 stars from new accounts (fandom do it for new accounts to make it look more legit, yes it's a thing. it's why Bad Kids have something like 100mil+ votes, which is way way over its viewcount level.)

Support are often fierce competition since there's bunch of veterans, you basically have to be really lucky to end up getting award. I think only Huang Yao lucked out (for Minning Town)? Jiang Qiming got best supporting actor for Escape from Trilateral Slope this year, I feel like he took the "encourage young people slot" on top of something for Trilateral Slope, even though I think Francis Ng or Jiang Qilin (Dantuo) should have gotten nomination instead of Jiang Qiming. Song Jia def got bit buff'ed up from Zhang Guimei's personal achievement + how well the drama was received, but I also think it's not easy to play a real person, especially one so highly regarded, as there's certain level of expectations.