The Story of Minglan : comments [azdak]

A LOT of patience is required for this one, not least because the opening episodes are even more confusing than Nirvana in Fire, and just when you think you've got everyone sorted out, there's a big time jump and half the cast are suddenly played by different actors.

If you're going to make the investment of time and patience, I have to say that while Nirvana in Fire pays off in spades, whereas The Story of Minglan doesn't, or at least notfor me. It was good enough to keep me watching, but the finale is a great disappointment.

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and half the cast are suddenly played by different actors.

Oh, hell, no. ;-) Huge casts with sprawling complex plot-lines are something I tend to bounce off of anyway, even without having to try to track who's who when everybody has pretty much the same hairstyle.

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In that case I think I can safely say The Story of Minglan isn't for you! (Does it help if people have different decorative ways of securing their hairstyles?)

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Provided they're consistent about it, it would, actually! (I'm mildly face-blind, enough so to appreciate things like the American tendency to cast one male lead as blond and the other as brunet, etc. I often have to use narrative cues rather than recognition to track a character through an episode, especially if they change hairstyles, dress up/dress down, etc. Trying to do that for a big cast from a culture with, ah, more consistency of phenotype, and where I don't know the narrative cues.... yeah. Probably best I don't, unless there's a pop-up video version. ;-) )

Which is a shame, since Minglan herself sounds pretty awesome.

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Minglan is pretty awesome and her grandmother is truly awesome but c-dramas do seem to take a narrative approach that involves chucking you in at the deep end and letting you struggle for about ten episodes until you finally figure out how to swim. And the Story of Minglan has so many families with umpteen offspring that it's hard enough keeping track without mild face blindness (it really doesn't help that most of the time they're known by their position in the family, so Minglan, as the sixth child, is referred to as "Sixth Miss" or "Little Sixth", while "Second", depending on context, can be either her older brother or her future husband ("Darling Second" is the pet name he proposes)).

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*headdesk*

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azdak

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September