halfcactus

Because it was that sort of week.

错撩 Love by Mistake (ongoing, DNF)

Modern-day miscommunication romance between a financial journalist and the CEO that she thinks is her ex-boyfriend's girlfriend's uncle (...). I stopped after the get-together but right before the CEO finds out about the FL's initial ulterior motives because why subject myself to stress lol.

The art style is attractive, all aesthetic, sometimes empty, sometimes hot. I can't tell if it's disproportionate to how dumb the plot is, or appropriately superficial. I read the official translation that's on Webcomics App, where all the names are anglicized to an extent that I actually find them hard to remember! I only know the FL is named Sylvie Jaine... Everyone else has illogical and unmemorable names.

The pop culture callbacks were basic but fun—Pride and Prejudice 2005 and not!Nakashima Mika.

The Villainess Makes Amends (ongoing)

Shoujo fantasy comedy about a magical engineer who, with the help of her unhinged Saintess cousin, goes back one year in time to prevent her family's death. She leaves behind the corrupt system of academia and goes back to make amends with her estranged family with the goal of averting disaster and death. (In spite of its title, she's not really a villainess.)

The family stuff and the poking fun at isekai/regression tropes are super fun! Everyone in the family is a Character and in possession of the tsundere gene. The MC and her diva of a second brother have a believable sibling relationship in which their love language is bickering and insulting each other.

It gets a little less fun when the focus is on MC and the ML (especially when they're surrounded by one-bit villains), but still funny since the MC has nothing but derision over the ML's (the crown prince in disguise) shadiness in spite of all his effort to be as charming as possible. (The dynamic is somewhat similar to Maomao and Jinshi in Apothecary Diaries.)

I wish the running gag of the MC being a math-obsessed engineer were less elementary (as cute as it is that the MC loves wearing checkered print, I want her to discover more geometric patterns!) but, well, this is a shoujo. XD

Some great reaction images, like this one:

Couple Breaker (complete, ~80 chapters)

Modern-day petty revenge + breakup + fake dating romance about a couple who get revenge on their cheating exes by joining a reality/game show called Couple Breaker. I thought it sounded dumb... and then I binged the whole thing overnight. The MC, Taerin, is a popular and charismatic fashion design student whose goal is to set up a store where all the clothes are unisex/non-gendered. Her dream wedding fit for herself is a wedding suit. The ML is the neighbor who irrationally hates her.

I found the first half more fun because it was petty revenge and delightful mind games and breakup tension. Towards the later half, I kind of lost sight of the plot? The drama was brief but extraneous, the MC's "ploys" didn't make sense, and I was getting bored of the trash men. I wish we knew more about the ML's inner life—as amusing it is to have a ML who's defined solely by his relationships with women (his past GF, and his present one), it's not very satisfying. And I wish we had an extra chapter about the MC's shop because it felt so perfunctory for them to set her up to be this cool character with cool ambitions but to not give us any closure on it, as if all these interesting character things were written solely in service of the romance.

Overall: fun MC, fake dating, decent romantic chemistry, good breakup arc for the ML, great jealousy arc, but lacking in closure. The character writing is mostly simplistic, but with touches of complexity.

CW: dysmorphia + surgery, eating disorder + disordered eating—all of which are treated as insecurity and lack of confidence, though the manhwa is sympathetic to it

Till Debt Do Us Part (complete, ~80 chapters)

Modern-day contract marriage romance. WOULD NOT RECOMMEND. This manhwa doesn't live up to the drama of its English title! It's disappointingly generic and even worse, the FL's role is to fix the ML and his family. Dropped it when the FL got pregnant, which was at least pretty much near the end, but was still too much for me to deal with lol.

Plot: The FL owes the ML money. For nonsensical inheritance reasons, the ML needs to be married for a year, so he offers to write off her debt in exchange for a one-year contract marriage. The ML has abuse and abandonment issues which cause him to be a jerk to the FL (he cares for her, but goes hot and cold and is sometimes just mean); his stepfamily is equally dysfunctional and emotionally constipated. Naturally the FL fixes everything and becomes the heart of the family... long before the year is over.

The FL's own situation with her parents (loving and healthy but struggling with bills and medical issues) and a long-term past relationship that turned violent are only written as plot devices and left unexplored, as the focus is all on the ML and his family, because the FL is, idk, built different and overcomes everything with her light or something. An ironic line of messaging because the manhwa started with some sort of social commentary about patriarchal expectations.

1) You Are Error by Aftermath: a podcast I picked up because of geraineon's rec here, about details that videogames usually get wrong. So far there's only one episode out (about Arabic, and Islamophobia, and Palestine), but I'm looking forward to the next ones! It sounds like there's gonna be one about horses. XD

2) Wicked (movie): I enjoyed this a lot more than I expected, but act 1 was paced like it was 2 whole acts and I really needed an intermission. (ᵔ́∀ᵔ̀) The best number was What Is This Feeling? by a mile. Defying Gravity on the other hand felt underwhelming for how overdone (and overly long) it was.

More thoughts

I thought this adaptation made Glinda a sharper character, and her relationship with Elphaba more challenging. In the musical version her act 1 moments tend to be reduced to comic relief, but in the film version they come across as far more earnest but also far more dangerous. It's hard to watch this and not think about how white performativeness and conditional allyship are so easily rewarded, retracted, and insulated from consequences while marginalized people get punished and demonized for just daring to speak out, a point that the movie loudly makes but I'm not sure it'll fully follow through on.

Needless to say I got secondhand tired from watching Elphaba advocate for issues that affect her personally but are blind spots for everyone else. :')

And when I was discussing this with daisydiversions she wondered if there were going to be plot changes in the second movie, particularly for Nessa, since it seemed like the actress, a wheelchair user herself, had some input on her character... I'm cautiously interested but still very much afraid haha.

3) 廚廚動人, originally known as U Kill, I Cook and later on serialized as Kitchen Goddess and the Assassin on Tapas: martial arts + comedy manhua about a ditzy cook who becomes the personal chef for a boneheaded assassin. The translation is localized in a way that tries to preserve the wordplay at the cost of its sense of place, but I thought it was an interesting effort, even though it made me look up the raws to reorient myself. The English seems to do more food puns too, though I don't think the energy is sustained in later chapters. XD I'm at around chapter 26, and have put it in the backburner for now.

CW: sexual harassment + threats by minor villains in the first few chapters

( + some CN-EN comparisons (image-heavy) )

Books/Comics

Mostly Chinese-language lit that I have a lot of thoughts about but never wrote proper entries on... and then a couple of indie comics from Shortbox 2024:

priest, "橋頭樓上 End of the Bridge, Top of the Tower"

Jimmeh Aitch, "哈囉哈囉馬尼拉 Halo-Halo Manila"

接骨木花, "陰間沒有珍奶嗎？ Is There Boba in the Underworld?"

Nico Baidan, "Firsts"

Pearl Law, "Karma's A Peach"

Movies/Musicals

SIX The Musical

Twisters (2024)

The Wild Robot (2024)


RECENTLY: Read up to volume 3 of The Apothecary Diaries light novel series and then stopped reading because 12 volumes is kinda a lot... Picked up 青春18×2：重返最初的悸動 again as a palate cleanser and am happy to report that it's not het all the way through. (As a shoujo manga enjoyer I do love het, I just think that an anthology about youth and first loves shouldn't be exclusive to it.)

Watched the first two seasons of the Cinderella Chef donghua because it was suggested by the Netflix algorithm, though "watched" is a generous way of saying "skipped all the plot and non-cooking scenes". 😂 Plot was mostly a setup for the romance and the romance was downright awful from what I saw of it, which really is a shame because it had all the potential to scratch my shoujo + cooking anime itch. The food animation + cooking shenanigans were SO up my alley... And then season 2 gave us too many characters, not enough cooking, and the reactions leaned more ~emotional and nostalgic~ rather spectacularly OTT and I had to cut my losses and drop out... Disappointing because it had a strong season opener (cooking showdown with the restaurant across the street).


CURRENTLY: Watching the cdrama adaptation of Link Click with daisydiversions, since fansubs are complete. Don't think we'll finish before the year ends. ^^; Also watching Arcane s2 and grateful for the staggered release schedule because this show isn't exactly bingeable for me and I like to avoid major spoilers... AND I easily get overwhelmed with high episode counts. XD

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 )

Yong-Jiu Grocery Store (2019)

I was really enjoying this show, but sadly from ep6 onward it became a completely different drama, with weird tone changes that wandered into romcom and then dogsblood territory. It felt like episodes 5 and 6 were meant to be the natural stopping point that was meant to lead into the epilogue but they just dragged it on for a few more episodes.

The mother-daughter storyline was particularly disappointing as the escalated dramatics made the characterizations fall apart, ultimately absolving bad motherhood in a super lazy and stereotypical way. There were pieces in the mother's past that, though compelling, belonged to a completely different puzzle. This show was always about men (the main character, his grandfather, and his grandfather's friends), but the second half made it about men in a very unpleasant way in which women’s storylines were meant to complete the men's instead of existing on their own. So what was meant to be a really sweet and poignant epilogue scene ended up a bit soured for me. :( (Though I still really liked it!)

Acting-wise, the leads felt lackluster with little to no personality, but I'm unclear how much of that is the acting and how much of it is the writing and directing. Maybe a bit of everything.

This show also kind of tripped my SEAsian sensitivities (I'm very sensitive haha), but it's mixed with the show's lack of regard for women, and idk if that makes it better or not. ^^;

On the flip side, I did like learning how the Hokkien word for "kitchen" is written: 灶咖 (pronounced the same in Mandarin)! And the OST is still very very good and the whole thing is actually available for streaming internationally.


我五行缺你 (My Five Elements Lack You) chapters 25-35
(Temporarily dropped again bc my brain stopped braining this week haha)

I have mixed feelings about the case writing from the semifinal arc (building murders) to the bridge arc (lesbians). It feels like the author is still trying to get the hang of nailing longer, twistier mysteries. The lead-ups always have me SO invested, but the final answers are not very convincing. For the tournament arc, where the emphasis is more on interpersonal dynamics, the quick wrap-ups make sense considering the limitations of the characters who are at not leisure to truly investigate. But I think some of the reveals feel more focused on piling up the drama and the twists, rather than the integrity of a short story. I think I was most let-down by the Bridge arc because it was set outside the shackles of a tournament, and I feel like it did not pay me back for the level of emotional investment I had in the f/f couple because I still had so many questions left, lol.

fengshui bfs 35/

soooo are we going to address to the mirror situation or was all of that just part of TXC’s mental state at the time? i was a little confused by the pieces and roundabout route of this arc, and unsure if they’ll revisit these cases (it feels like they won’t)

— 🌟 (@halfcactus) August 21, 2023

I Ship My Adversary X Me manhua - volume 8
The latest chapter is showing us Lao Huang watching the variety show, so it seems we are not far from the end of the manhua. :(

I think this is the longest I've stuck with a danmei canon (I have been with these boys since ~2018 or 2019...)——the manhua really is just so good at keeping everything fresh. There's even an easter egg to the audiodrama-exclusive side couple ♥

ismm v8/

not me getting emotional bc 社會人’s pfp is a 小豬 🥹🥹🥹 ty manhua team for the fanservice crumbs even though this ship is only canon in the AD 🫶 pic.twitter.com/FS0Jq5oZhY

— 🌟 (@halfcactus) July 23, 2023

ismm v8 c88

i didn’t think they could possibly do justice to the guessing game in manhua form (since they are guessing songs/song lyrics) BUT!!!!!!!! MY HEART!!!!!!!! pic.twitter.com/hfSH9C25YV

— 🌟 (@halfcactus) August 8, 2023

Marry My Dead Body (2023)
A good arranged marriage movie centered on the dead person's life, relationships, and struggles as a gay Taiwanese man, though I think it went, as many dramas do, a bit too far on the parental apologism (with very contrived rationales for bad behavior). Plot-wise, it's very straightforward and focused more on getting characters where they need to be. As far as messaging goes, the commentary on sexism in particular felt more effective than usual, maybe because it plays with the characters' PoVs and the consequences of one's assumptions.

Anyway, I have been forced to look at Aaron Yan's face again and lay my childhood fondness for him to rest. /o\ He at least played a character that felt... appropriate.

CW for the main character's homophobia and ACAB-ness, especially at the beginning. It's meant to be part of his character's arc where he does get consequences from his actions, and I think they did well in casting an actor who is charismatic and funny. But it's still kind of a lot. He also has temper issues, which are just unpleasant to see in a cop character.

The use of Jolin Tsai's music (an icon, an ally, and an enduring pop star) really bumped this movie up a notch for me!



C.S. Pacat, "Fence" vol1–5
A graphic novel about fencing, boarding school memories, and... love?

Pros: ensemble cast; sports-centric; LGBT characters; homoerotic sports tropes are as homoerotic as they sound

Cons: the characters (except for Aiden) and the storytelling are not making this very engaging for me

( cut because this is going to get long )