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Nice catch! I don't have an in-universe theory for why Shen Wei changes glasses, but I do have a production theory:

There are very few scenes in Shen Wei's apartment, and in all of them, when he's wearing glasses, he's wearing Style 1. All of these scenes are unconnected to other events and outfits ... except for the one in episode 7, where he brings Zhao Yunlan back to his place to rub his arm semi-tenderly in gratitude after defending him in the alleyway -- where he was, in fact, wearing Style 2.

Same outfit, different glasses.

Since we know that that episode 7 scene was their first scene together, and since I'm pretty sure that all the other scenes in Shen Wei's apartment got shot first too (before it got struck and redressed as Zhao Yunlan's apartment), it stands to reason that the Style 1 pair got lost/broken at some point and replaced with the Style 2 pair.

So when did the switch happen? Pretty early, I'm guessing, considering he only seems to be wearing them a) in his apartment, b) in the hallway outside his apartment, c) outdoors on the Dragon City University grounds (but not on the roof), and d) in his office. (If there's another place he's got them on, it's so minor that it slipped my notice.) These must have been the earliest of his scenes that they shot, with everything else coming later in production order.

Here's a couple more instances of same outfit, different glasses:

I'd say that if you're trying to find an in-universe explanation, you'd have a hard time creating a reason for how he gets thrown off a building wearing one pair of glasses and lands wearing a different pair of glasses -- but the truth is, he gets thrown off a building wearing one pair of glasses, does a whole magical girl transformation into an outfit that doesn't even have glasses, and then lands wearing a different pair of glasses, which is by some rights even harder to explain. Let's split the difference and say the glasses are part of the same shadow stuff as his cloak and his hair are, yeah?

Shen Wei's glasses

While idly browsing for a reference image when I was thinking about my "glasses" bingo prompt, I made a discovery: Shen Wei has two different styles of glasses frames!

Style 1 - Wire rims with black temples that narrow and change to gunmetal toward the ears, a uniform wire bridge, and very little visible end piece/hinge:

Style 2 - Wire rims with thicker black temples that widen toward the ears, a tapered bridge that is thinner in the center, and a more pronounced black end piece. The hinge is also set back farther on the arm:

If you were wondering (as I naturally did), Ye Zun wears Style 2:

(Now go forth, fandom, and write a billion fics that explain the reason for the style change!)

#shen wei #dragon city fashion

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I don't know if I've appreciated just how spectacularly extra Shen Wei's wallet chain is. It's not simply a chain, which would be extra enough on its own. It's a beaded chain, with what looks like an angry face on one of the silver beads. Each end is attached by a lobster claw clasp to one of his belt loops. There is no wallet involved.

He's only wearing it for the Episode 8 sequence of events where he has a conversation with a bush, scraps with Bad Wig Loserboy, hauls his mentor's drunk ass into a cab, hauls Zhao Yunlan's drunk hurty tummy ass into a different cab, washes dishes, messes with his boyfriend's work email, makes breakfast, and generally reevaluates ten thousand years' worth of life choices, which still somehow manages to be not the weirdest night Shen Wei's had all week.

#guardian #zhen hun #dragon city fashion

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So it turns out that the underground MMA fight club and the Dixing bar are just two redresses of the same space. They even leave a lot of the ropes and barrels behind when they switch from one to the other, which, sure, why not?

I know it's kind of hard to see with only these shots, but here's a shot of what I'm pretty sure is both these spaces, stripped down to bare bones as the Ming flour factory in the Disguiser:

We never see the MMA arena connect to the outside world, but we do see the Dixing bar's entrance, which is absolutely the entrance to the flour factory (and which I don't have a non-spoilery image of in the Disguiser, but trust me on this one).

(Which is also the location where they are that one time Chu Shuzhi and Guo Changcheng are wandering around Dixing, except that it looks absolutely nothing like the rest of Dixing.)

These locations also both have the chest-high green paint on the otherwise grey wall, which is a lot less visible in Dixing (because there's a ton of crap all over the walls), but still there.

I guess this goes a long way toward explaining why the MMA fight club has a fully stocked bar. I'm pretty sure the main part of the bar and the bottom shelf on the backpiece are the same, just repainted. The top part is clearly totally different, though, and the MMA bar has very rounded corners, while the Dixing bar has sharp right angles.

I made the terrible mistake of realizing this right before I was going to go to bed, which meant that instead of being sleepy, I got myself all fired up and had to post about it. Okay, good-night.

(Hi, friends! In the last year and a half, I've watched a lot more shows filmed in Dragon City Shanghai Film Park, so it may be time to comb through my Guardian screenshots and look for more repeating locations like this. I'll let you know if I find anything good!)

#guardian #zhen hun #the bar is in hell #mma arena

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Look, we all love the cover, and we're right to. We should love the cover. It's such a delightful contrast to the other (gorgeous, this is not a criticism) danmei covers they've been doing, the ones with swirling gossamer robes and blossoms falling gently from trees. No, this one lets you know from the start that you are in for the catastrophe romance of a bitey man who cannot work a cell phone and a disaster bisexual who makes instant noodles with coffee, neither of whom has a lick of respect for the other's personal space. Also, they fuck.

What I haven't stopped laughing about, though, is the little block of text right over Shen Wei's right armpit:

From the author of Sha Po Lang: Stars of Chaos and Faraway Wanderers comes Guardian, the hit novel series that inspired a live-action TV show.

It inspired a TV show. You know, just a show. No adjectives. You can't watch it anywhere. We're not going to tell you what it's called. It's just, you know, a show. There's some action. It was live. You should be enticed to read this book by knowing this fact, but you should feel no similar draw to the drama it inspired. It's the 'she's everything, he's just Ken' of media cross-promotion.

Guardian: truly one of the shows of all time.

#guardian #zhen hun #meta #just dixing around

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It seems it's the five-year anniversary of Guardian's airing, and it's been a year and change since I started this ridiculous blog, so this seems like a good time to write down a thought I've been having, and that thought is this: When I first thought about doing making a Tumblr to chronicle all the Guardian weirdnesses that caught my eye, I wondered, oh no, as I watch more c-dramas, will I then feel obligated to do this kind of deep-dive analysis for them as well?

As it turns out, the answer has been ... no. Not because I wouldn't enjoy it, mind you, but because nothing else I've seen has inspired in me the level of head-clutching befuddled awe that Guardian has.

At first I thought it was just that everything else I was watching was a period/costume piece, so of course we're not going to be dealing with random English in odd locations or jackass vehicle choices. But then I started watching some things set in the 20th and 21st centuries, some that are even filmed in Dragon City Shanghai Film Park, and ... nope. There are peculiar choices here and there, sure, but nothing even approaching the level of Zhao Yunlan's inexplicable apartment swing. Plenty of shows have fake books, but how many have fake bookcase walls? Think of how many objects in the main SID room alone I not only can't explain but can't even identify. And that's even before we get to what the hell everyone is wearing.

Truly, the more I watch other things, the more I realize what a unique gem of chaotic wonder Guardian is, 50% heartbreaking work of staggering genius, 50% dumb as a guinea pig in a roller skate, and I'm happy to have all of you fine internet people to share it with.

#guardian #zhen hun #meta

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Happy Dragon City Pride!

#guardian #zhen hun #just dixing around

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Like many storage apps, OneDrive likes to give me daily reminders of images I collected on that date in previous years! This is usually a nice little reminder of what I was doing in days past ... except that we've now crossed the one-year anniversary of this blog, which means sometimes I see things like this:

Ah, yes, this beautiful pool

In the backyard of this nice house

Owned by these nice people

That I went to a year ago.

Such memories.

#guardian #zhen hun #rich people #just dixing around #meta

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Here is the truly psychotic thing about the Nice Doctor Lady’s office: When she drugs Zhao Yunlan, it is by pouring from a pot of pre-creamered coffee. Look at it! Sitting right over there on the little red coffeemaker, a quarter-pot of piping hot coffee with the creamer already added to it.

I actually don’t drink coffee, so I had to check with a couple people, and all of them confirmed for me that that is not a normal thing to do under any circumstances, least of all when you’re trying not to be suspicious while you’re drugging someone.

And then of course Zhao Yunlan drinks it, because he had a fight with his boyfriend and has lost control of his life.

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I try to keep the contents of this this blog more or less relevant to its original mission of documenting the strange and wonderful production choices made by the Guardian drama, but I've made another over at @welcometothejianghu for c-drama-related reblogging and shitposting (including Guardian stuff), where you can find absolute nonsense like this incoherent gem.

#chuguo #just dixing around

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why is there a swing in the apartment

#zhao yunlan's apartment

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@supernovasimplicity in here with a key observation:

As I am the opposite of a high-class fashionista, I did not notice that these are, in fact, $780 Gucci women's Ace sneakers: "The House's classic low-top sneaker is embellished with the gold embroidered bee against the green and red Web. The bee is an archival code first introduced in Gucci ready-to-wear in the 1970s."

And here I was poking fun of them because I thought they embodied the fun-yet-tacky aesthetic of clearance-rack novelty shoes at Payless, the kind your first-grade teacher would've worn for the last day of the semester before Winter Break to go with her Santa sweatshirt with jingle bells and sequins. Looking at them, you can almost smell the cardstock of the generic nondenominational holiday cards with individually wrapped candy canes taped inside.

In light of this new information, I think we must all give respect to the good finds of Bai Suxia, Thrifting Queen. For her pregnant sake, I hope they have good arch support.

They're barely visible in the show (like their owner), but shout out to Bai Suxia's comfy Christmas-themed pregnancy sneakers. They're the perfect thing for any fashionable lady to wear in her refrigerator.

#dragon city fashion

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Tags from @equalopportunityoggler: #what what what #Shen wei in just an undershirt #with his necklace clearly visible #what deleted scene???? #why was I specifically robbed of this????

I can help with this one! This is the deleted-scene version of figuring out that Shen Wei is the Black Cloak Envoy (that one). It's much closer to the book version of the scene, which is probably why they filmed it, before they realized that it doesn't really make sense to have them travel all the way back to the Dragon City First Hospital.

There's some other deleted scenes and behind-the-scenes stuff in this YouTube playlist as well, so enjoy!

#weilan #dragon city first hospital

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I cannot tell you why the swing is there, only that the swing is there, and that almost a full year of staring intently at this show has given me no further insights as to why the swing is there.

Yet I would argue that said swing is not even the most inexplicable feature of that disaster man's disaster apartment. (For my money, it's either that incredibly cursed blanket at the end of his bed or the location of his refrigerator, but we all have our own favorites.)

why is there a swing in the apartment

#zhao yunlan's apartment

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They're barely visible in the show (like their owner), but shout out to Bai Suxia's comfy Christmas-themed pregnancy sneakers. They're the perfect thing for any fashionable lady to wear in her refrigerator.

#guardian #zhen hun #dragon city fashion

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I have joked before about how Guardian clearly just raided every prop and costume closet in the vicinity and hoped for the best, but I didn't actually expect to turn on the Lost Tomb (2015) and see the fraternal twin of Baby Ye Zun's terrible first mask.

(At first I thought it was the same mask, but looking at the screenshots side by side makes it clear, no, not quite. Still, you can see why it made me do a double-take.)

I mused earlier:

(I almost wonder if Baby Ye Zun’s mask wasn’t Take 1 of the Black Cloak Envoy mask, but when they put it on, the Brian de Palma vibes were just too much, so they went back to the Sculpey table.)

I'm revising that. My theory now goes like this:

There is only one Ghost King Mask. You know, that one.

The production team created it in black and silver, and except for a brief stint with matte paint, it stayed black and silver for the wide majority of the filming. Then it was time for Ye Zun to shine, so they spray-painted the whole thing gold, which is the kind of decision you can't really take back without a lot of effort. This was fine as they finished up filming in the three non-flashback places Ye Zun appears in the gold mask: the Haixing offices, that one little park, and the various Dixing soundstage sets. (The reason it's clear it didn't go the other way is that when we see it cut in half, the pieces are gold.)

And then they got to their mountain location and went, oh shit, we made this thing gold already, but we still need black masks: one for Baby Shen Wei, who can't exactly be the Black Cloak Envoy Except For That Gold Mask He Wears For Some Reason, and the other for Baby Ye Zun, who I guess has to have something on before he gets given the gold mask in a symbolic You're The Boss Now handover.

Back to the costume closet! Just grab the closest two you have on hand! So one came from the same batch the Lost Tomb used to make their questionable I am from ... history! flashbacks, and if I watched low-budget fantasy c-dramas long enough, I'd surely stumble across a version of the other one as well.

As for the why of their wearing masks at all, I'm pretty sure that the initial justification on the production end was half making Shen Wei plausibly unrecognizable to the SID crew, and half ensuring that no one could tell during the fight scenes that we don't actually have two Zhu Yilongs lying around.

But I'm still charmed by the canonical reason:

That's right, you fresh-faced angel. You're downright terrifying.

#guardian #zhen hun #dragon city fashion #10000 years ago #dmbj

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Hi! Your anatomy of a hand-stack post just came across my dash again, and the "Finally, Zhao Yunlan tops off the whole stack with his other hand, making it a friendship sandwich that both tastes delicious and is the closest he’s ever going to come to topping Shen Wei." line had me snort-laugh once again. It made my morning!

My only regret in making that post is that the scene itself is very emotional, and I now cannot watch it without giving myself the giggles. Alas, hoisted by my own comedy petard! But I'm glad it has brought you -- and many others -- joy as well. Thanks for saying so!

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One more!

I originally posted these to Twitter, but then I thought, you know, if there's anywhere that'd appreciate quality Guardian shitposting...

#just dixing around