Loved It!

I watched Your Name Engraved Herein recently which of course also stars Edward Chen in another time jump/flashback movie and I am smitten. I can watch him all day. The way he conveys love and adoration is so sincere and authentic.

I also loved that the show actually had people speaking Taiwanese which I've found to be rare in Taiwanese BL dramas. One exception being, funnily enough, Your Name Engraved Herein. I also loved that the older version of
Xia Zhi Chen spoke Tainese, mixing his Taiwanese and Chinese the way I mix my Chinese and English with my parents when I speak Chinglish.

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That was awful... definitely not the Filipino version of The Wedding Banquet...

I had seen this marketed as the Filipino version of The Wedding Banquet on GagaOoLala so I had high hopes for it because, as a Taiwanese-American gay man, the "original" holds a special place in my heart.

There are slight correlations between this and the TWB: someone needs a green card, there's a gay couple, etc. But that's about all that connects them.

The family dynamics are completely different, it's barely "hysterical" as GOL describes it, and the surprise death was so out of nowhere and an overused trope and unnecessary. The amount of tension between the characters was incredibly heightened too and the connections didn't resonate, especially after the scene of violence between two of the leads.

TWB was based on family obligations, figuring out what's right for each person based on those, happy mistakes, and everyone coming together as a family. This was none of those things.

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