TV ramblings

[azdak]

After a couple of months of obsession with “Nirvana in Fire”, I have finally started to wean myself off it. The obvious place to look for distractions was to other Chinese and Korean dramas but I have to say that the results have been a mixed bag. I bounced hard off “The Disguiser”, despite its having the extremely compelling hook of reuniting most of the NiF cast (although not, alas, Mu Nihuang) and a setting – spies in Japanese-occupied Shanghai just prior to WW2 – that should have been right up my alley. Unfortunately, even these attractions can’t compensate for the fact that it’s atrocious. I think it’s trying to be iddy, but without the writers doing any of the work to set up the iddiness. It’s like reading one of those fanfics that begins “Pain coursed through his body like a thousand fiery suns...” - fine if yours is the kind of id that can cut straight to the chase, but cringemaking if you need groundwork and build-up and a narrative that has some kind of logic to it. I got a little bit further with “Ode to Joy”, which is also largely populated with NiF actors (this time including Nihuang, although Mei Changsu is sadly absent) but the relentless infantilisation of the female characters proved too much for my delicate nerves after five or so episodes. It doesn’t help that I’m not really cut out for romance-focused stories. If a highly intelligent business hot-shot has left a top job in America and returned to Shanghai to search for her lost brother, I want to watch her try to find him, not engage in tiresome internet flirtations with an anonymous and frankly rather unappealing Unknown Bloke (also, I accidentally watched episode 1 of season 2, by which time she has met the Unknown Bloke, and it turns out he is spectacularly awful but the show thinks he is charming and romantic).

The other series I have tried are the Korean dramas “The King: Eternal Monarch”, “Rookie Historian Goo Hae-Ryung”, “Crash Landing on You” and “Hotel del Luna”. “Rookie Historian” absolutely charmed me with its opening couple of episodes, but it goes on far too long for its very slim storyline (far too long even by the standards of kdramas, which basically regard “interminable” as something to aspire to), and when I finally – FINALLY! – got to the end, the climax turned out to be a cheap rip-off of “Nirvana in Fire” (though it did at least enable me the pleasure of going back to wallow in all the richness and depth of the original, which shone all the brighter by comparison). Apart from its lovely opening episodes, the best thing about “Rookie Historian” is that it introduces you to the concept of Joseon-era historians (many thanks to legionseagle for the link), an institution we are in sore need of today and a fantastic example of thinking outside the box. By contrast, the sole virtue of “Crash Landing on You” lies in its premise – rich South Korean accidentally paraglides into North Korea, where she falls in love. It’s a straight-up romance starring a male lead who has only one facial expression (I’m unclear if this is because that’s all he can manage or because he believes it’s the only facial expression heroic North Korean army officers have at their disposal), and it was written by a team/someone who believes that love is at its most romantic when it makes people jealous and irrational. The female character is unbelievably irritating, but this is a writing rather than an acting choice. I assume she’s meant to be unlikable at first and gradually improve, but I didn’t make it as far as her improvement because I was bored out of my mind long before then (quite an achievement given that she was hiding illegally in North Korea, which one would think would make for an exciting storyline).

Best of the bunch are “The King”, which has a team of down-to-earth cops operating alongside the eponymous fantasy-type monarch, and wacky (and not-so-wacky) parallel worlds/time travel hijinks to dilute the romance, and “Hotel del Luna”, which I totally didn’t expect to like. I knew from skygiants' costume polls that the heroine is constantly changing from one high fashion outfit to the next, and that kind of high maintenance femininity is not my cup of tea (to use a Jang Man Wol phrase), but it turns out I did Jang Man Wol a huge injustice. For all her fake fingernails and bright red lipstick, she is in reality a Magnificent Bastard with a backstory full of epic manpain (yes, she’s a woman, but it’s definitely manpain she’s feeling, and it just goes to show that female characters can be as fascinating as male ones in these sorts of roles and writers should let them do it a lot more often). The romance is even more diluted than in “The King”, this time by ghost-of-the-week subplots and an array of former boyfriends and reincarnated souls from a previous life. I’m on episode 11 (of 16 – what makes for the interminability isn’t the number of episodes but the fact that each one is TWO HOURS long) and I’m thoroughly enjoying it. It isn’t “Nirvana in Fire” levels of enjoyment, but then, what is? I’m semi-resigned to the fact that “Nirvana in Fire” is a once in a lifetime fannish experience and I shall not see its like again.

Comments

[nineveh_uk]

I have a terrible feeling that Nirvana in Fire may be to cdrama and kdrama what The Lord of the Rings is to doorstopper fantasy novels. The peak of the genre, and everything afterwards will fail to measure up. Even the sequels by the same author.

I have somehow watched 15 episodes of The Untamed, though. The wigs are terrible, the acting adequate at best, I had a sudden realisation that the tropes are right out of classic school story fiction*, and the Tortoise of Slaughter actually turned up. But I am a complete sucker for stoical/expressionless characters who feel passionately inside but cannot admit their feelings (TM). Even if the stoical expression might seem to come from the actor being botoxed at an unusually young age.

[azdak]

Was the Tortoise of Slaughter unexpectedly awe-inspiring or expectedly ludicrous? I think if you've made it to 15 episodes, you're hooked enough to watch it to the end. I did try ep 1 but it was too soon after NiF so I gave up. I get the appeal of stoic characters with passionate depths, though, so I'll probably try it again at some point (although it doesn't helped that it has disappeared from Austrian Netflix - watching via Dramacool is a bit of a pain, so I'm kicking myself for not having got further in while I had the chance).

[nineveh_uk]

It was sort of like a dinosaur tortoise with a very long snake-like neck, and I wonder if it was meant to be a Turtle of Slaughter because it was living in an underground lake. I would not particularly call it awesome, but by this point my ludicrous-metre had moved on and I was able to cope. I probably will end up watching all of it, it feels like the very definition of popcorn TV including the bad for you yet addictive implication!

I hadn't come across Dramacool before - looks useful, but not as easy as Netflix. (Wolfgang is in IT! Surely he can get you non-region-restricted Netflix!)

Ed. Untamed does do one thing better than NiF; it translates the affirmative "shu" word as "Understood", which works well.

[azdak]

Regretfully, Wolfgang is not in the hacking line of IT, so I am stuck with the choices of Netflix Austria.

"Understood" is a very good translation! I've noticed that Korean seems to have an equivalent affirmative, which sounds a bit like "Yay" (but with the same falling intonation as shì). (On a linguistically related note, there is a bit in "The King" when a Chinese delegation shows up and addresses him as "Biesha", which felt wonderfully familiar amidst the sea of Korean).

I'll put The Untamed back on my "will watch eventually" list, but first I want to watch enough of "The Story of Ming Lan" to see if I can get invested in it. And to do that I first have to finish Hotel del Luna (up to episode 13 now!)

[nineveh_uk]

I love the idea of a Korean affirmative that sounds like Yay. And unexpected Beisha! I'm really doomed if I am magically transported to any other than a very specific set of circumstances in China, though.

Magnificent Bastard with a backstory full of epic manpain

That definitely sounds worth a look - I had actually been a bit put off by the costume porn because I assumed it was in lieu of plot, but maybe its worth a go. Though I'm booked for autumn at the moment by NiF2 and planning to watch the original Skam fron the beginning, which I can justify to myself as educational. I shall await your report on the Story of Ming Lan.

[azdak]

If you're magically transported to Ancient China, remember the absolutely key lesson of NiF and DON'T ENTER THE PALACE!!! This advice will help you more than mastering any number of honorifics.

Is Skam meant to be good? I know nothing about it, so I've just googled it - is it the Norwegian setting that appeals or is there more to it than that?

[nineveh_uk]

Good point. I will get the first cart out to the regions.

Skam is genuinely good. I've only seen series 3, which was the one when it became huge in Norway and 'broke out' internationally, but I believe that all of it is good. Certainly what I have seen is well written, and the director gets strong performances out of a mixed professional and amateur cast who actually feel like teenagers. I was mostly attracted by it being good Norwegian drama, but it is genuinely interesting I think in aiming to do a show about teenagers that feels real and a bit "inform, educate, entertain" in dealing with some serious issues. Its major innovation is one that you don't get watching retrospectively with English subtitles, which is that it was originally broadcast "in real time" and with character social media, so the audience followed through the week, and then the whole episode was shown. Leading to the article that made me think "I have to look at this", about an Oslo city council* meeting when the chair asked would everyone please put down their phones and engage with the budget, to get the response that no, they wouldn't, because they were on tenterhooks for the anticipated Skam update.

*I think. Possibly it was parliament.

[azdak]

This was intriguing enough to get me to look it up on Netflix, and of course it's not available in Austria. Netflix Austria sucks. It does, however, have Skins, which my children were obsessed with when they were younger. Bexi was a young teenager at the time and Tashi very much not a teenager yet. She rewatched some episodes recently and told me that while it generated a nostalgic glow, now that she's a fully-fledged social worker, she was AMAZED at how much of the awfulness of the characters' lives she'd overlooked. She'd just seen them as cool older kids, not the product of abuse and neglect, all of which now snaps into very clear focus.

I've watched two episodes of "Ming Lan" now, enough that I think I'm going to stay the course. It's by the NiF studio, but it's very different - I hesitate to say "gritty" about a drama set in Ancient China, but it focuses on the lives of the underprivileged, predominantly women, where NiF does that classical drama thing of only caring about nobles with lofty ideals. I feel a bit the way 19th century theatre-goers must have felt on watching their first Ibsen after a lifetime of Shakespeare, a "This is so much more real life than I want to cope with!" sort of feeling. The mother of the heroine, for instance, is a concubine who was sold by her family to a magistrate, who bought her because his primary wife wanted to up her status by increasing the size of the household and ended up regretting it and is hence being cruel to her rival. There is a great deal of manoeuvring and social climbing going on, and etiquette around engagament gifts and which family has more prestige, but it's all amongst gentlefolk rather than the nobility, so there's more of a sense of these being existential issues with potential ruin one misstep away. Bad charcoal smokes horribly, children are beaten worse than Commander Meng (and at their parents' instigation), and when someone is fished out of a river, their corpse is so disgusting that those present can barely refrain from gagging, which is not what corpses are like in NiF (the corpse appears to be the eldest son of a Marquis, a teenager who came along with the wedding party as a sort of jolly outing, and the terror of the host when he first realises he's missing, followed by his far greater terror when the corpse is discovered, is an object lesson in what it means to be lower down on the rungs of a hierarchical society - no one in this world is safe, even if the female servants of concubines have it a lot worse than the males heads of manors). I'm a bit nervous about how much of this sort of sheer crushing awfulness I can take, but our heroine (who is currently only 8 years old) is clearly the kind of person who is going to fight back, and I understand that it's a revenge drama, so I'm hopeful things have to be awful for a while in order to motivate the revenge and will then get more bearable, at least until the revenge happens.

The moral is, make sure, if you are ever transported to Ancient China, that you not only avoid the palace, but also go disguised as a boy. Possibly equipped with a Go Girl so you can pee standing up, thereby putting everyone's suspicions to rest at an early stage.

And I am now absolutely convinced that reincarnation works on a switch-genders-at-every-incarnation basis, otherwise no Chinese woman would ever bother to come back to the earthly plane (I also have a theory that in the case of Prince Jing something went wrong and he was accidentally reincarnated twice in the same timeline, so both Jingyan and Consort Jing are incarnations of the same soul, the superficial differences in their personalities being the result of different environmental forces working on male and female bodies). It does help a lot to imagine the shock of eg. Xie Yue on discovering that in his next life he's likely to be on the receiving end of the sort of treatment he dished out to Liyang. And I can just imagine Nihuang's glee at discovering she will no longer have to worry about suitors or purity or any of that crap.

[nineveh_uk]

I have also never seen Skins. I am amused by Tashi realising what it is really like. The risk of revisiting the slightly-too-old for one material of youth! I am sorry Austrian Netflix is rubbish. I watched Skam via DailyMotion at https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6ngh5u

Ming Lan definitely sounds like it has potential. I hope it continues. I love the idea that the NiF characters experience opposite-gender reincarnation (possibly without knowing this in advance). Lin Shu's horror/outrage alone would be worth the price of admission. Nihuang, OTOH, will have a whale of a time. She's already got a step up with her military experience, she would be unstoppable. It could make for amazing crack fic. The idea of Prince/Consort Jing being the same 'person' is an intriguing way of thinking about them and their similarities beneath the differences of situation.

[azdak]

In case you haven't seen it, I found a gifset of Hu Ge, Liu Tao and Wang Kai reenacting the Great Grandmother scene here: https://www.tumblr.com/blog/view/convenientalias/search/nirvana+in+fire