10 variations

Work pressure didn't let up in August either, so the stress-watching continued.

TV new (finished)

My fascination with Nothing But You has now led me to trying out the leads' back catalogues:

Zhou Yutong was last in Will Love in Spring (on viki here), a 21-ep romance cdrama from 2024, starring Li Xian as her love interest, an embalmer who tries to see everything in life with equanimity and calm after getting into lots of fights in his youth and feeling responsible for his best friend's death. She's a successful sales person and workaholic who was in a car accident when she was 12, where her father died and she lost a leg. The story is very sweetly told, with lots of flashbacks and non-linear cuts. I watched the whole thing within a week and liked it overall. Some of the relationship dynamics and generational conflicts with their parents/grandmother were amazing, but the miscommunication between the leads got on my nerves, as well as the sometimes preachy dialogue about life and death from all characters. CW for death, since that's the theme of the show and some important people die. Last but not least: it gets extra points for having an actually hot sex scene - that's very rare for a het cdrama. There are many happy/cuddly/kiss scenes, too. I should probably make a kissy picspam post. :D

TV new (unfinished)

Amidst a Snowstorm of Love, a 2024 cdrama starring Wu Lei and Zhou Jianmai as successful (i.e. impossibly competent) billiard players. It's on viki. It was filmed in Finland, replete with lots of night scenes and snow everywhere (the BTS about that is funny because apparently it did not snow nearly enough and most of the snow is fake). It's based on a webnovel by MBFB, the same author who wrote Love Me Love My Voice, which was so low on drama it verged on boring, but I sat through the whole thing last year. Lets see if I can do it with the Finnish billiards romance, too. So far Wu Lei's subtle expressions are still holding my attention (and he's soooo pretty), but his character is the older one in the relationship, and he's very stoic, which just isn't Wu Lei. Plus there are some tropes I don't like - and I recognize them as typical for the author: both leads are hyper-competent, they seem to have an inhuman number of hours every day to do their multiple jobs and travel for six hours on top of that, there is a lot of eating/food conversation going on, the man does implausible romantic things for the woman while keeping important things secret from her, all the side characters are in favor of the romance and constantly commenting on it. I went into it expecting pretty much all of it, so it's not too bad. It turns out that watching characters play billiard tournaments is much less interesting than watching people cook (which is what Love Me Love My Voice did), but I have now started watching BTS material, which I found pretty interesting, especially the featurettes on the leads getting proper training in the sport. (Otoh, I have also been watching a ton of Dongji Rescue BTS material, and learning to freedive >> learning to play billiards, just sayin. ;))

I also started reading the novel the drama is based on, trying to figure out if some of the relationship setup things were better in the novel, but it turns out the drama is very very close to the novel, often scene by scene, including dialogue. Which is probably a good thing, because there is only a terrible MTL translation available of the novel (the title is "During the Snowstorm"). I actually needed the drama to explain some of the book scenes to me, because the translation was pretty much incomprehensible. /o\ I did not get to the kiss scenes in the novel yet, but apparently the drama was heavily censored and stripped of eight episodes to meet the episode limit requirements when it aired last year, so maybe there will be some more differences going forward. There are still a *ton* of kiss scenes left in any case.

I started Shine, BeOnCloud and MileApo's new BL (this is only on wetv). They're taking their mission statement to increase Thai soft power seriously and have chosen another political topic: 1960s student protests. I didn't like ep1 much, but have heard that they get better. I found ep2 better than ep1, at least, and have now watched through ep 4, but to me none of the pairings make sense, and I really do not like Mile's character in this. They're sexy together, no question, but I'm not happy about them just being sexually attracted to each other with no other connection - at least one of the couples has a love of literature in common, even though they never seem to agree on its interpretation. I hope I'll be able to finish it, despite the setup screaming tragedy for everyone. Not least because Apo is absolutely gorgeous and doing great in the role and I'm already halfway through anyway.

TV new (dropped)

I started Breeze By The Sea (on viki), a Taiwanese remake of the kdrama „Top Star Yoo Baek“, starring Puff Guo, who I really like. The first two episodes were so bad I had to push myself to continue, which really only worked because I was too tired to think of anything else to watch. It's about a burned-out asshole of a movie star being sent to relax on an island, at a guesthouse the female lead and her grandmother run. He slowly gets entangled with the locals and their problems, and slowly loses his asshole behavior. Unfortunately, that is very strong in the beginning, and I think unforgivable in places, so really wasn't enjoying his redemption as much as the show thought I should. Unfortunately, I also didn't find him attractive, and his acting was so-so. Puff Guo was wonderful as always, but she couldn't really save this on her own. I gave up on it after 7 (of 18) episodes.

Viki peddled My Girlfriend Is The Man! to me, a genderswap kdrama based on a graphic novel. Here on viki. The female lead turns into a man because of a genetic quirk that runs in her family - and episode one already conveniently ignores that everyone knew this was coming for dramatic reasons. Ooof. I made it through almost thee eps, in fits and starts, and then dropped it. It seemed to always do the opposite of what I wanted it to do, gender-wise, while heaping on the embarrassment squick. Yes, it's embarrassing to suddenly have a different gender, but I'm interested in the repercussions for the main characters, not what the sister's friends group thinks about the new hunk, nor her constantly ogling her newly-male sister. Oi. I really wanted to like it. :(

I also tried an ep of Love is for the Dogs (also on viki), but it did not grip me at all. (I'm not a dog person, that might explain it.) It's obviously geared towards animal lovers, with many scenes of cute animals just for the sake of cute animals. If that's your thing, you might like it.

I checked out half an episode of Romance in the Alley, which in Chinese is just "Alley Family" or maybe "The House in the Alley" (Chinese is hard yo), so the romance part is almost certainly false advertising, but it looks interesting at first glance. It's supposedly a slice-of-life show about three families in an industrial town in the 80s. It won a bunch of awards, which is what alerted me to it. I hope I'll have the time/motivation to check out more of it, but the subs are terrible, so probably not. It's on youtube.

TV continued

My watchalong made it through three more eps of When A Snail Falls in Love, and we're mostly enjoying it? I've forgotten almost all the case details since I watched it last in 2018, and we're both enjoying Wang Kai's voice and face. Nothing much to report otherwise.