March media

[halfcactus]

MANGA / MANHUA / MANHWA:

Wrote about Swimming Lessons for a Mermaid, Guiding the Eccentric Tyrant,The Tale of Goldiluck the Black Kitten, How to Get My Husband on My Side, and Raising My Fiancé with Money here; The Baengri Clan's Unwanted Granddaughter here; Divorcing the Emperor, As The Heart Leads, and The One within the Villainess here.

My personal favs of the bunch are Swimming Lessons for a Mermaid and The Tale of Goldiluck the Black Kitten (my daily pick-me-up) as top-tier reads, followed by The Baengri Clan's Unwanted Granddaughter and The One within the Villainess (dumb villains but strong emotional core).

Still reading weekly for fun: As the Heart Leads and Materialistic Lady.

Also read the (new + ongoing) scanlations for SSS-Grade Café in Front of The Dungeon (fantasy manhwa with FMC) and 流星划过之日 The Day of the Shooting Star (baihe manhua, which I wrote about here).

MOVIES:

Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (2020): A liuet rec—a little science fiction comedy shot/edited as though it was all done in one take. A very interesting experience, though I feel like it gave me some motion sickness (just a little!). ^^; The premise is that the computer in the main character's bedroom shows him the "future" (two minutes from now), while the monitor in the café shows the "past" (two minutes ago), and the characters start playing with the timey-wimeyness and trying to figure out how much they can bypass the two-minute limits.

The total runtime 70 minutes, long enough to take the concept as far as they can go, but short enough not to get dull and repetitive. It feels both like a short story and a play where every scene is staged to move the plot forward and the characters only move through a number of sets. Overall, a really neat and loving take on science fiction stories where they maximized what little budget they had!

Nezha 2 (2025): Still too kiddie for me tbh, though the character animations were very cool. I'm glad that the marketing was aggressive enough for them to actually screen this in my country (and in our regular theaters too!).

The Substance (2024): wrote about it here.

TV:

Wrote my first impressions of Bai Yao Pu and I Am Married... But! here. My thoughts for Bai Yao Pu still stand—it's my favorite donghua (I cried several times in season 1), though I have to get in the mood for it.

Updated thoughts about I Am Married... But!: Having finished it, I think the original CN title sets expectations better (the EN title isn't bad, I just think the CN title is more fitting for the type of story it wanted to tell). The first half was, to me, an excellent watch with a rhythm that was both movie-like and conversational, so PERFECT to put on when I was eating lunch or doing chores. I found the last 1/3 kind of dragged-out but I did find the ending emotionally satisfying even though it didn't feel like they really maximized the screentime they had for the characters and their various relationships. I really missed Ko Chia-yen's little friend group/vent group in the second half; it felt kind of disingenuous for them to set up that friend group only to highlight Fu Mengpo specifically as being part of it.

That said, it was still a good watch, a lot better than most modern-day dramas (so many little lived details) I've seen in recent years and so short! It was interesting to see an FL navigate her feelings about love, marriage, and having kids as a married adult and reacting to conflicts in "realistic" ways. I also loved how Hokkien was part of Ko Chia-yen's character voice, it made the dialogue feel much more ~real~. It's also overall a really nice glimpse of Taipei—the living spaces, the rental bike chases, the shenanigans, the vibes...

CW: a cockroach scene (in the flashback where Ko Chia-yen and Fu Meng-po carry a bathtub over their head), some secondhand embarrassment (especially in the scene where Jasper Liu has to take a fertility exam), some adult toilet humor

BOOKS:

Straw into Gold: Fairy Tales Respun by Hilary McKay
Checked this out because superborb wrote about it here.

I feel like most of the fairy tale retellings I've read tend to be edgier and put more "creative" spins on them, so it's nice to have retellings that are straightforward enough to be refreshers for me but still interpretative enough to feel new. tl;dr - I really liked this collection! My fav stories were Snow White and the Princess and the Pea (even though I felt briefly blindsided because I genuinely thought it would have a f/f endgame ^^;); I also really enjoyed the non-linear aspects of Hansel and Gretel! They had me rereading the story immediately after.

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RECENTLY:

Finished Cheese in the Trap (manhwa) and Ya She (donghua).

Watched the "new" Justice in the Dark eps (eps# 9 and 10). "Watched" is a pretty generous way of saying "relied on my memory of the audio drama to understand what's going on". The "zero empathy" thing and DNA talk continue to befuddle me, though they mostly seem to be focused on the argument of nature VS nurture and what that means for Pei Su. It's quite interesting that they made LWZ's mentor's daughter a co-intern in this adaptation, it integrates her more into the plot and emotional themes since she was mostly offscreen in the original work. I'm trying to relearn how to GIF post GIFs on Tumblr and my fandom Bluesky but tbh my fandom energy has been on the decline and my ability to focus worse... it's already a miracle that I managed to watch two whole eps in a week.

Feeling a bit anxious in light of global news, because the repercussions of certain US policies might eventually ripple into my livelihood, but I'm trying not to think too much about it.

After months of being bald, the tree (I think it might be narra?) across the street has finally sprouted bright new leaves and has been practicing how to flower. :) I was actually really worried it was dying because it grows on concrete and seemed withered for so long and its "seasons" seemed out of sync with the rest of the trees along the street, but the vicious summer seems to have brought it back to life.

I'm still paper-journaling faithfully. Four months in and no blank pages, thanks to the manhwa I write about and the smatterings of cmedia that have me drawing new vocabulary. It's the only thing that feels tangible and real these days.