august media log - personal links roundup
Sep. 1st, 2021 10:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
halfcactusAugust summary: lockdown + got vaxxed + bought some stationery (you can see them here) and a digital keyboard (Casiotouch S1--I'm thinking about posting some sort of ~review~ when I have more time).
I finished a lot of media in August, but most of them were books I started a while back, or shows I've been groupwatching over a period of months. ^^;
HiStory3: Trapped
This is a short Taiwanese BL drama that![[twitter.com profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/e0caa790ec10/-/twitter.com/favicon.ico)
lunarflares made us watch. XD The main romance is between a detective (Meng Shaofei) and the gangster (Tang Yi) whom he's been stalking for the past couple of years because he mysteriously survived a gunfight that left Meng Shaofei's mentor and Tang Yi's father dead. The entire show is just a pile of romance and hurt/comfort tropes over which plot is stretched thinly, so I wouldn't recommend it as a serious gangster BL drama. HOWEVER!!! The secondary cop/gangster pairing, Jack (gangster; Tang Yi's right-hand man) x Zhao Zhi (cop), is SUPER CUTE!!! The actors/characters are very cute and fluffy (in spite of Jack's abundance of knives), and their romance is very fluffy. The tertiary romance (and singular heterosexual pairing) is a heterosexual one between Tang Yi's sister and her bodyguard. So, tropes all around.
The opening song is very catchy and singable, I love hearing it play when we start our watches!
The Day of Becoming You
This is a 26-episode romcom about a boyband leader (Jiang Yi, played by Zhang Xincheng) and an entertainment reporter (Yu Shengsheng, played by Liang Jie) swapping bodies. I LOVED this show. However, I think the first half of it was very hit-or-miss as the setup is focused more on the comedy around bodyswap, had narrative choices I found questionable, and sort of pitted the women against each other in ways I didn't like--even though Jiang Yi was obviously very defensive of Xu Shuyi and critical of the anti-fans' misogyny, I wasn't very happy that Yu Shengsheng's apology did not extend to her own judgemental lenses (this show does come back to this later on, once the characters know each other better). The second half is definitely a different (and, IMO, better) drama than the first: the comedy is now a shared and comfortable experience between two people who do stupid, funny things together. With the romantic setup out of the way, the PoV becomes wider and a more ensemble-cast one. We learn more about the other characters and the friendship between the boyband and Xu Shuyi, and there's a lot of (timely???) commentary about fandom and the entertainment world.
The romance between the two leads was very cute and sweet and effusively warm! The character development is more on Jiang Yi's side because he's the one still figuring out career and emotions, but I loved the richness of Yu Shengsheng's relationships. Her friendship with Tongtong, and their gentle bickering over their respective idol biases! Her shockingly cool parents! The way her parents just adopted her upperclassman without explanation!
It was also very interesting that they portrayed the boyband as a group of people who aren't exactly chummy (Jiang Yi and Pei Jiashu's relationship is mostly antagonistic), but live together and do care about each other. I also really liked how open-ended the show was about other relationships. I feel that it really respects the women's careers and individual growths (this is also what I liked about Go Ahead).
Content notes: bad parents, internalized homophobia (there are a few lines whose punchline is that JY's manager might be gay), a lot of secondhand embarrassment in the first half
Kamen Rider Build
This was also a slow groupwatch (we started in May). I don't know enough about Kamen Rider to talk about this show, but the actor who plays Adachi in Cherry Magic is in this, and I can no longer recognize him as Adachi. XD I have never watched any Kamen Rider before, so I don't know if plot normally moves so fast, but it certainly does here!
The show is aimed at young boys so sadly the women are severely underused. But it has fun ensemble dynamics (especially in the later half), some cool twists (I liked the one about Sento's identity), and a strong central relationship between two men who have a precarious relationship at first but quickly become loudly ride-or-die for each other. I really love the ending (especially for them!), which is happy but also very bittersweet.
The opening is not only catchy, it also changes throughout the show! It's just the one song for the entire series: Be The One sung by Beverly (whoKamenRiderKuya said was Filipino :O), but the characters and scenes included in the opening change every now and then as we enter new story arcs, rewarding people who don't skip the opening. XD (Some of the changes are quite emotional/poignant, too.)
Minari
I thought this movie was very beautiful and spacious, and I loved it up to the halfway point in which stressful situations were arising and I just fast-forwarded my way to the end. /o\ All of the grandmother's scenes hit really hard, and harder because of her interactions with her daughter (who wanted her back in her life so badly) and her grandson (who did not want her in his life at all). And, while I'm not Korean-American, the code-switching sounded very natural to me. (The last movie that I saw that portrayed the family's footprints in the languages they spoke was Patay Na Si Hesus, which mixed Tagalog and Bisaya, which was both comforting and uncomfortably realistic.)
I thought the ending and the message about resilience were very depressing: they remind me too much of how the resilience of Filipinos is always romanticized whenever parts of the country are submerged in flood and families have to rebuild in an endless cycle that poverty can't break. The older I get, the stronger I feel that resilience is only for communities that have little in the way of options. :(
Neon Yang, "The Black Tides of Heaven": thoughts here
Jessica Zafra, "Twisted Travels: Rambles in Central Europe”: thoughts here
Allie Brosh, "Solutions and Other Problems": I liked this book for personal reasons, but due to the content, it's in no way a pleasant or enjoyable read. "Banana" was very funny, though. I'm also anti-reccing the physical book as it is very, very heavy and unwieldy. Might sell my physical copy and switch to digital when I have more energy. (Book contains: pet illness + death, suicide and grief, cancer scare, medical situations, drugs)
The Day of Becoming You Tumblr gifset tag in chronological order
The Day of Becoming You gifs (Twitter thread)
Couple of Mirrors (12-episode republican era GL drama, which we're now groupwatching) gifs (Twitter thread)
Piano arrangement/sheet music for Crush On (ep 22 piano BGM) from The Day of Becoming You
Piano arrangement/sheet music for My Soul (ep 23 guitar BGM) from The Day of Becoming You: here's a video of me playing a draft of this arrangement, using a random instrument setting in my new keyboard XD
I finished a lot of media in August, but most of them were books I started a while back, or shows I've been groupwatching over a period of months. ^^;
TV/Movies
This is a short Taiwanese BL drama that
The opening song is very catchy and singable, I love hearing it play when we start our watches!
This is a 26-episode romcom about a boyband leader (Jiang Yi, played by Zhang Xincheng) and an entertainment reporter (Yu Shengsheng, played by Liang Jie) swapping bodies. I LOVED this show. However, I think the first half of it was very hit-or-miss as the setup is focused more on the comedy around bodyswap, had narrative choices I found questionable, and sort of pitted the women against each other in ways I didn't like--even though Jiang Yi was obviously very defensive of Xu Shuyi and critical of the anti-fans' misogyny, I wasn't very happy that Yu Shengsheng's apology did not extend to her own judgemental lenses (this show does come back to this later on, once the characters know each other better). The second half is definitely a different (and, IMO, better) drama than the first: the comedy is now a shared and comfortable experience between two people who do stupid, funny things together. With the romantic setup out of the way, the PoV becomes wider and a more ensemble-cast one. We learn more about the other characters and the friendship between the boyband and Xu Shuyi, and there's a lot of (timely???) commentary about fandom and the entertainment world.
The romance between the two leads was very cute and sweet and effusively warm! The character development is more on Jiang Yi's side because he's the one still figuring out career and emotions, but I loved the richness of Yu Shengsheng's relationships. Her friendship with Tongtong, and their gentle bickering over their respective idol biases! Her shockingly cool parents! The way her parents just adopted her upperclassman without explanation!
It was also very interesting that they portrayed the boyband as a group of people who aren't exactly chummy (Jiang Yi and Pei Jiashu's relationship is mostly antagonistic), but live together and do care about each other. I also really liked how open-ended the show was about other relationships. I feel that it really respects the women's careers and individual growths (this is also what I liked about Go Ahead).
Content notes: bad parents, internalized homophobia (there are a few lines whose punchline is that JY's manager might be gay), a lot of secondhand embarrassment in the first half
This was also a slow groupwatch (we started in May). I don't know enough about Kamen Rider to talk about this show, but the actor who plays Adachi in Cherry Magic is in this, and I can no longer recognize him as Adachi. XD I have never watched any Kamen Rider before, so I don't know if plot normally moves so fast, but it certainly does here!
The show is aimed at young boys so sadly the women are severely underused. But it has fun ensemble dynamics (especially in the later half), some cool twists (I liked the one about Sento's identity), and a strong central relationship between two men who have a precarious relationship at first but quickly become loudly ride-or-die for each other. I really love the ending (especially for them!), which is happy but also very bittersweet.
The opening is not only catchy, it also changes throughout the show! It's just the one song for the entire series: Be The One sung by Beverly (who
I thought this movie was very beautiful and spacious, and I loved it up to the halfway point in which stressful situations were arising and I just fast-forwarded my way to the end. /o\ All of the grandmother's scenes hit really hard, and harder because of her interactions with her daughter (who wanted her back in her life so badly) and her grandson (who did not want her in his life at all). And, while I'm not Korean-American, the code-switching sounded very natural to me. (The last movie that I saw that portrayed the family's footprints in the languages they spoke was Patay Na Si Hesus, which mixed Tagalog and Bisaya, which was both comforting and uncomfortably realistic.)
I thought the ending and the message about resilience were very depressing: they remind me too much of how the resilience of Filipinos is always romanticized whenever parts of the country are submerged in flood and families have to rebuild in an endless cycle that poverty can't break. The older I get, the stronger I feel that resilience is only for communities that have little in the way of options. :(
Books
Lastly, a list of fanworks I made throughout the month:
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no subject
Date: 2021-09-04 08:16 am (UTC)I've yet to watch "Minari" . . . not sure if I will. Even though I identify as a Korean-American, I am not exactly the "stereotypical" one who grew up in the US, so I find it not relatable to me. Though I just learned about codeswitching, so I think it's interesting you mentioned that!
no subject
Date: 2021-09-09 12:24 pm (UTC)Have you ever watched anything that maps close to your background? It's definitely atypical. :O
no subject
Date: 2021-09-09 12:30 pm (UTC)I don’t think there is anything out there I can relate to. I’m a Korean adoptee who grew up in Korea. I’m a Korean-American who didn’t live in the US during my formative years. I also grew up in a US military community but also out in a Korean city. There are a few people like me, but we are definitely rare!