#i've declared all your faves face and gay face !! and that's that !!

[coldbycrossfade]

i love making explicitly black or heavily black coded characters in single player rpgs that let you create a character cause we can be main characters too! we can be seen as beautiful and desirable too! we can be powerful and needed!wanted! vital!!! we can be all these wonderful fantastical things too!

im doing it for ME !!

#kore txt #like yeah i made a purple skinned tiefling but like he's black tho #my tall himalayan rock salt colored qunari woman? black #all of my hawkes? black #my sole survivor? black #i've declared all your faves face and gay face !! and that's that !! #having your blorbo look at your Undeniably Black player character and fawn at them and say how much they love and adore them? effervescent

[dangermousie]

Ok so what was your most disappointing drama of 2021…. so far & why? - cdrama or kdrama…

Not THIS is the perfect ask to unleash my inner bitch.

In terms of disappointing as in "I wanted it and didn't get it," please come right in, Hao Yi Xing, since it's the only kind of coming you will be doing. When I first heard they were filming it, I thought they were insane. No way, thought I. And then they did. Oh, well, thought I, no way will ever pass censorship. And then it did. And then they did everything but point blank said they will air in April and even my cautious self got...taken in.

And then it didn't. Oh well. And then China declared gay people on screen are an abomination unto the communist lord and yeah. I should have stuck with my native cynicism. The thought of it actually being filmed and existing and with those perfect leads and never ever seeing light of day without being shredded into incoherency brings on the rage against communism I haven't felt since the tanks rolled through the streets of my childhood in 1991. I kid. A little.

But now let's talk about dramas that actually aired but we would have all been better off if they did not.

FAIR WARNING: I SLAG A LOT OF DRAMAS, SOME OF THEM PROBABLY YOUR FAVES. IF YOU GET UPSET BY THIS SORT OF THING, SKIP THE REST.

This was the worst drama year since I've started watching them in 2006. But I am not going to discuss "well, they are trainwrecks, what else do you expect," like all the dramas with Cheng Xiao, Gulinazha and their wooden ilk, or all the "Seoul apparently has more murderers per capita than a medieval battlefield" kdramas, or that let's make Lee Min Ki a ghost idiocy or how to blow all your budget on outdoor commercials without plot like Jirisan or "we will take Chen Kun in a Cao Dun drama and make it modern propaganda, now choke!" or any of that sort of thing. It's to be expected all of that would be trash. I will also leave alone things that are just not my genre - I don't care how good Hospital Playlist season 347 is, I don't do medical shows and it's not fair to hold that against it or same against that "moron in bright clothes and art girl" drama - wacky romcoms with idiot MLs is not my thing at all. Same goes for "oh please fuck off with your edgy dystopia, Fried Squid." Same for dramas that ended up being ehh but I didn't hate them.

No, I am going talk about dramas that I had high expectations about and which came and punched me in the face and then mugged me.

Please come right in The King's Affection, The Long Ballad, Court Lady, Legend of Fei and Novoland Pearl Eclipse, River Where Moon Rises, Lovers of the Red Sky, LUCA. Mr. Queen, Time Flies and You Are Here, Meet the Dragon.

N1 place is earned by The King's Affection. It's gotten to the point I blacklisted the tag because any time I see any mention of it, I experience irrational rage like it ate my liver for dinner. It's a totally bland and wholesome (barf) youth sageuk and the reason I feel such rage instead of just forgetting it exists is because it took a dark, tormented, gorgeous story and Disneyfied it into the usual fluffy, wholesome, "modern people playing dress up" nonsense. I will never watch Rowoon in anything after this if I can help it because the thought that instead of manhwa ML I got this makes me want to punch things.

The rest is kinda split evenly. Mr. Queen was pretty good and then the ending was the most pointless, homophobic, narratively dishonest piece of nonsense I've seen in a while. Novoland Pearl Eclipse had a good first dozen eps and then descended in repeating the same story, decided an abuser rapist was a sweetheart who would make a great date without any remorse over his actions, and oh to be petty, even by the usual "that's supposed to be a dude?" standards of cdramas, Yang Mi's cross-dressing was ahahahaha. That cast and this is what you do with it?

Legend of Fei - it is perhaps ungracious to include this since it ended in mid January but hi petty central! How you take a Priest novel and that cast and do this soulless, boring, paint by numbers sleep aid, is beyond me. It even looks cheap, which makes me wonder what they did with this budget - embezzle all of it?

The Long Slog - I like Dilraba in the right role but she was absolutely wrong as tough, broken, vengeance driven heroine (part her fault and part the terrible director who blandified everything. She was fine in a similar role in The King's Woman.) Wu Lei as the hulking terrifying barbarian general is like me playing Boadicca. This drama ensured I will try to avoid him in anything. They had zero chemistry. The directing and the script were so bland, I felt like I was watching a flip through book (and so did the makers, because they didn't bother much with battles, substituting drawings.) A story that should have been intense and angsty became a diorama.

Court Lady - I wanted to watch Xu Kai grow up and win over smart girl Li Yitong instead we got drowned in 10,000 random characters who had 95% of screentime, everyone was so annoying, and how the same person who wrote the amazing General and I (and lots of angsty noncon gay porn :P) wrote this...is beyond me.

River Where the Moon Should Be Shoved - I loved it so hard and then the Ji Soo scandal happened and the refilming and the few eps of nonsense and then the ML who...well.

Lovers of Red Sky - so fun, so decent and then so fucking dumb and the blind ML played by an actor who literally stopped bothering to pretend to be blind and the last ep where they literally left green screen in.

LUCA - I will never forgive it for being so good and then derailing utterly in the last two eps. It's totally fine to abuse someone all their life and treat them as a monster despite them never doing anything bad because ahahahahahah they will be a monster eventually and were clearly always a bad seed.

Time Flies and You Are Here was so aggressively dumb, I still feel like it was a scientific experiment. Also it was yet another one from the proponents of the wisdom of the folk Russian saying "if he beats you means he loves you" and Joseph Zeng has gone permanently on my "never watch" list because his petulant man boy was as charming as a turnip; also the plot made me feel as if I was suffering from hallucinations - none of it made sense.

Meet the Dragon - because I am not just a bitch but a petty bitch and the fact that they keep casting Dylan "puppy" Wang as a terrifying killer dude annoys the fuck out of me.

ETA: The fact that I forgot Ancient Love Poetry even for this list says everything about that drama. That cast and that budget and that utter pile of nothing is the result. I hate it because it’s too bland to hate.

#asks