halfcactus

I'm back to my regular hermit life but last month was... unexpectedly social. And most of the food I tried outside was mid, so I took pictures of cats instead:

Probably the most memorable convo I had was when I asked a visitor, a pharmacist in NYC Chinatown, if there had been a sudden uptick in vaccinations in light of recent political developments (something that daisydiversions had spoken to me about earlier in that day in our near-weekly groupwatch call). And he was like, “there was, but it was because of the news about that Taiwanese actress”… RIP Barbie Hsu, I didn't realize you were so popular in the west.

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Recently watched / currently watching:

Soulmate Adventure S1: Baihe(?) + wuxia donghua about a thief and her mysterious white-haired girlfriend... This is the truest experience of watching something for the ship because I have no head for wuxia or plot and just zoned out every time other characters were talking. It didn't help that we watched a Youtube compilation which cut out the opening and ending songs and didn't give us any breathing room.

Highly recommend the New Year extra AND the original concept MV (set to 髮如雪 / Hair Like Snow) (h/t douqi for both) for 10/10 watches. So cute! And romantic! And a little bit emotional!

I also liked that the animation had a paper texture overlay and artsy touches—it all really came alive in episode 3, which was one of the more beautiful episods.

哑舍 Ya She: Modern-day supernatural donghua about a magical antique shop that attracts customers with wishes and fatedness... which reminds me a bit of Yuuko's shop in xxxHolic. I'm not sure if the novel this is based on is gen or danmei, but the mysterious shopkeeper and the doctor are very shippy.

Only saw two eps before getting distracted with Bai Yao Pu. I wasn't particularly moved by the customers/artifacts of the week (probably because it was two romance-leaning cases in a row), but I do like the concept and format. The whole thing is free to watch on Youtube too so I might pick it up again when I'm in the mood.

CW for stylized visions of animal harm in ep 1 (the animal will be fine)

百妖谱 Bai Yao Pu (also known as Fairies Album): Fantasy donghua about a traveler who helps the spirits she meets along the way but is otherwise morally dubious. Yaoguai-of-the-week format with folk fantasy, nice storytelling, quiet emotional destruction, and found family potential. Seems pretty gen too! Well, so far. XD I've only finished three eps but this is shaping up to be my favorite donghua though I'm keeping my expectations nonexistent. It's a great winding-down watch; I turn off the lights and never skip the OP and ED.

童話故事下集 I Am Married... But!: Newly released Alice Ko/Ko Chia-yen drama about marriage conflicts + living in modern-day Taiwan. A lot of "relatable" details about living with a very traditional mother-in-law. Jasper Liu was a good casting choice for the husband because he really is so cute, but the cuteness is less effective the longer he and Alice Ko's character are married. Only two eps in and so far enjoying it as a show that feels like a movie. It's only around 30 mins / ep so it's kind of a chill lunchtime watch that doesn't need much attention...

Songs: 一蓑煙雨 by Zhang Xincheng & Waltz About Death by Angela Autumn

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My computer is broken again so it's gonna be another exciting weekend of troubleshooting attempts. I'm not optimistic that reinstalling my OS or restoring from backup will help. :( The silver lining is that I finally managed to send off a long-overdue family photobook for printing a few days ago, and I laid everything out on Canva, so the draft file is on the internet and nothing of value will be lost if I have to restore my computer from the last backup point. (I'm still worried that it will turn out so ugly it's ungiftable but at least it's theoretically reworkable in the future!)

In other news, the new Link Click donghua OP just dropped:


And this is what the band has to say in response to the mass wailing:

Link Click

Overall thoughts about the donghua

Season 1 was pretty great and well-paced. It had a case-of-the-day format for the first half, with filler cases between the heavy ones... The noodle girlfriends were sweet... And the entire basketball arc was so well done! But I wouldn't have finished this on my own because it's just too stressful for me.

Season 2 is almost purely plot-driven, but the plot wasn't that great... Without the time to breathe or the thread of emotional logic it had in season 1, the gendered violence and weaknesses in writing women were much more prominent. To be fair I don't think any of the characters are written well here (the main villain was cartoonishly bad), but the women definitely got the shorter end of the stick for me. It had a lot of missed opportunities with the lesser villains' motivations and character arcs, and one of the episodes had an extremely extended domestic violence scene.

AND episode 9 is a total waste of time. It was meant to be a "three stories" episode playing with different art styles, something that is normally my favorite kind of episode, but it ends up only showing us 1) nothing we didn't already know 2) information about the main villain that would have been better off revealed much earlier... The entire episode was like 26 minutes, and I was so annoyed by it I almost left the groupwatch ajskdl;ja;fdja;fa

First impression on manhua + live action adaptation

I checked out the manhua and live action afterwards to 緩一緩, and I'm really enjoying the manhua! Volume 1 has an opera troupe case set in the aftermath of the basketball arc, where you can see the emotional fallout and Lu Guang's attempt to give Cheng Xiaoshi some time travel therapy... Will definitely continue.

As for the live action adaptation... the Slam Dunk props are inconspicuous reminders that I'm watching a Sugarman Media production. :P The setup is also quite different, as Cheng Xiaoshi is superhuman in more than the specific time travel way... and he and Lu Guang meet as adults, with Lu Guang purposefully seeking him out to presumably set things right. (I haven't watched past episode 1, so it's still unclear what Lu Guang wants.)

热辣滚烫 YOLO (2024)
Chinese movie adaptation of 100 Yen Love.

Thoughts

I never saw the original, so I went into this assuming it was a sports movie, only to find out it wasn't as sports- and FL-centric as I initially thought.

The most interesting part about this movie for me is how it carefully avoids bodyshaming the main character, who for most of the movie is thirty years old, depressed, and fat. She ends up losing weight when she decides to get serious about boxing, but the focus is on how much better she feels when she pursues a goal and learns to do things for herself. The movie acknowledges her as not being conventionally attractive, but it also portrays her as being desirable, in a way that I found pretty natural and realistic.

That said, I don't think this was a very good movie... it uses that one cinematic gimmick that I've come to HATE in cmedia, in which scenes are omitted and then shown as "reveals" in the end, to purposes I don't understand... The main character's emotional arc would have been far more compelling from the get-go if it had been told in a regular, linear fashion!!!!!!!!!! The little 小紅花 montage would still have worked, I promise!!!!!!!

Anyway, I enjoyed the last 30-ish minutes (which had the training montage + ending), but I watched most of the middle bits in the fastest speed Netflix would allow me to watch it in.

The Double eps 1-20
DNF, but sometimes I go back to rewatch the music battle scenes (ep 11).

PS. Netflix appears to do this weird censored words thing where it avoids offensive language? Sometimes to ludricous effect. "Xiao jianren" got translated as "you cow" and "hellcat", which... okay...


Also saw other movies I saw when I was rooming with my parents (due to ant problems)! I think they were Oppenheimer and a recent Matt Damon heist movie (it wasn't great). Did another Kung Fu Hustle rewatch too, since it's apparently on Netflix, and yeah... still a classic. :) Curiously, I get more stressed watching this as an adult, in anticipation of the "painful" scenes (mostly in the first half, a.k.a. the best parts) which is funny because this movie is also now "comfort movie" status to me... Landlady with hair rollers you will always be a legend. ♥


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Other recents:
( August life updates )

两不疑 No Doubt In Us (S1)

STREAMING ON: Netflix (S1), Bilibili on Youtube (S2—not sure if S1 is still up)

Bodyswap donghua, 10 mins per episode—he is the delicate and scholarly Emperor, and she is the brash and warriorlike Empress. I started it a while back and it was a fun iddy romp at first, but I got bored in the second half when we progressed to war, haha. Ended up watching it at 1.5X speed (the fastest that Netflix will let me); I found it worth finishing because a scene at the finale pushed all the right buttons for me. XD


Signal (2016)

STREAMING ON: Netflix (+ Prime Video, it seems?)

I wish I'd written about this sooner when I'd just freshly watched it, because now I've forgotten all my thoughts. /o\ This was recced by Neigette, who described it as like a hybrid of Reset and Under the Skin.

Signal is a 16-episode crime kdrama with time loop elements and three primary characters:

Lieutenant Park Haeyeong: a hot-headed cop-hating profiler whose worldview has been shaped and shaken by the failure of the police, the injustice of society, and unresolved questions about his brother.

Detective Cha Soohyun: the first female detective in the force, formerly a wide-eyed newbie, and now a steely and tired veteran in the police who takes over the Cold Case Task Force. She is searching for the whereabouts of her missing mentor, Lee Jaehan.

Detective Lee Jaehan: a brash and righteous cop with zero people skills who went missing fifteen years ago.

At the present day (2015), Park Haeyeong finds a walkie-talkie and receives a mysterious transmission from Lee Jaehan from the year 2000, which leads Haeyeong to the site of a dead body. This is the final part of a time loop——in the next transmission, Lee Jaehan is in the year 1989. From that point on, both men work together to solve cases between 1989 to 2000 and uncover the corruption and conspiracies in the police force.

The first episode for this was a great hook! Right amount of tension (the time pressure, lol) and emotional stakes. Other than that, I found the first half of the show, during which Lee Jaehan and Park Haeyeong are still figuring out how "changing time" works, a bit weak and slow. It doesn't help that most of the victims/targets in the first half are women (one of these is a real-life serial murder case, so at least it's not victimizing women for no reason). It does really pick up a lot in the halfway mark, in Lee Jaehan and Park Haeyeong's first brush with the chaebols, and continues to gain momentum as they finally tap on the longer arc that comes together in the case that killed Park Haeyeong's brother.

In terms of characterization, I really enjoyed how the team dynamic of the Cold Cases team as well as the dynamic between the leads sidestepped several common tropes in the genre! It acknowledges that anger is an emotion; between Park Haeyeong and Cha Soohyun, Park Haeyeong is the emotional one with personality issues, and his self-righteous hot-headedness costs them. (I like that he's very flawed and presented as such.) Cha Soohyun gets all the cool car chase and fight scenes, and doesn't trust Haeyeong enough to trust him blindly. The romantic storyline is between Detective Cha and Detective Lee, while Lieutenant Park remains undateable, lol. I really didn't care for Lee Jaehan at first, but the emotional payoff between him and Park Haeyeong's cross-generational interactions (unlocked only when you get to the final case at Inju) was so good and worth the watch!!!!!!!!!!!

Overall, this is a pretty great crime drama with social critique that gets better in the second half, and stays within a reasonable scope! I did end up watching most of it in 1.5x speed because I can't stand suspense. XD Also handles sensitives themes better than I expected.


CONTENT NOTES
There are two cases that involve sexual violence and rape:

1) The 1995 Shin Dahye disappearance case, where some of the assault is onscreen: it continues past the moment where a character grabs a woman by her hair.

2) The 1999 Inju Female High School Student Case: the rape scene is brief and mostly offscreen but is central to the plot, AND there are scenes where she's victim-blamed or pressured to come forward (which the show handles sensitively).

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Thaaaaat's it for May!!! IDK if I should make a roundup of the stuff I watched in May. I feel like I should, just for the visual satisfaction, but... effort.

Recently finished media in June so far: Little Mushroom volume 1 (English + Chinese); Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse; Little Mushroom audiodrama S1.

Soon to finish: New Life Begins; My Love Story with Yamada-kun at Lv999 (I caught up on the manga back in May, but the anime's still ongoing with a few episodes left).