Latest / Daebak K-Rambles Podcast: K-drama Reviews / The Untamed | Full C-drama Review / Ep. 53

Transcript

The Untamed | Full C-drama Review / Ep. 53 · Daebak K-Rambles Podcast: K-drama Reviews

• 0:17
  I'm Jessica and this is Tebaki Rambles, where a couple of
• 0:20
  friends review Korean dramas. Except today, today, we're not
• 0:23
  reviewing a Korean drama. Today we're reviewing A/C drama,
• 0:27
  a Chinese drama. And for this episode, I am
• 0:30
  joined by my really good friend Liliana from the Tien Soju
• 0:34
  podcast. How are you, Liliana?
• 0:36
  I'm very well, thank you. I'm really excited to do this.
• 0:40
  It's always fun when we get together.
• 0:42
  So you know, I I'm in for the ride.
• 0:44
  This is about to go on because we were talking before we got on
• 0:49
  and we are basically very frazzled today, very
• 0:53
  discombobulated. We've had things happen and
• 0:55
  like, we're just all over the place and we both thrive on
• 1:00
  chaos energy. So this is going to be a chaotic
• 1:04
  episode, I'm sure. Why?
• 1:06
  What are we reviewing today? We're going to review The
• 1:08
  Untamed. Why The untamed?
• 1:11
  Well, well, good. Thank you for asking.
• 1:15
  So a few months ago we reviewed a sea drama, and this year I
• 1:20
  think I'm just going to dub it my sea drama era, because the
• 1:24
  sea dramas have been sea drama ING lately.
• 1:27
  And I was doing a bunch of tik toks on some sea dramas and
• 1:32
  people were commenting about the untamed.
• 1:37
  And I remember this even happening during the Alchemy of
• 1:41
  Souls era. People were like, oh, the
• 1:43
  bringing up The Untamed a lot, really, Even back then.
• 1:47
  Even back then. And then I thought, a lot of
• 1:50
  people seem to really like The Untamed.
• 1:51
  Let me just finally watch it and I'll review it for the podcast.
• 1:55
  And so I talked to you early, Liliana.
• 1:59
  We did. We did.
• 2:00
  I think I talked to you like in January or something, and it's
• 2:03
  currently July. When we're recording this, I
• 2:07
  think we've already recorded like 3 or 4, so it's in between.
• 2:10
  We did everything else besides the Untamed, The Untamed, and
• 2:15
  now we're here, finally recording our untamed review.
• 2:20
  So before we get into it, if this is your first time
• 2:23
  listening, go ahead and subscribe on your favorite
• 2:25
  podcast app. We're on Apple Podcasts,
• 2:27
  Spotify, Google Podcasts, and many more.
• 2:29
  And if you like us, please give us a review on Apple Podcasts
• 2:32
  that goes such a long way for other listeners just like you to
• 2:34
  find us. And come check us out on social
• 2:36
  media to stay up to date on our latest episodes and reviews.
• 2:40
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• 2:42
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• 2:45
  be a patron. OK?
• 2:47
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• 2:49
  support and get a bunch of extra content for as little as $2.00 a
• 2:52
  month. You can check out the page on
• 2:54
  patreon.com/always Critic Pod and shout out to our patrons
• 2:59
  Curtis, Bale, Cindy City, Alana, Grace, Lorna, Lee, Sammy and
• 3:02
  Caitlin. Love you guys.
• 3:03
  I appreciate you guys so much. All right.
• 3:06
  So we're going to get into it. I think because this is a sea
• 3:13
  drama we the trend that I've the rule that I've set up is that
• 3:18
  spoilers are on the table from the get go They should.
• 3:23
  The thing is it's really hard to talk about a Chinese drama
• 3:26
  without like spoilers just because you know especially with
• 3:31
  this one I mean they throw a lot at you in episode one like
• 3:34
  straight away there's just no way yeah we can do like spoiler
• 3:38
  free. It's difficult to talk about
• 3:40
  some of these sea dramas especially the historical
• 3:43
  costume period pieces or whatever.
• 3:46
  They are so dense and so I assume that if you're watch, if
• 3:52
  you're listening to a podcast on The Untamed, you have probably
• 3:56
  watched The Untamed. So we're gonna get into it.
• 4:00
  Spoilers on the table. That's our PSA.
• 4:02
  I might give another PSA after we get some of the through some
• 4:05
  of this housekeeping stuff, but again, just beware, we're going
• 4:10
  to talk spoilers all right, The My Drama List synopsis reads Wei
• 4:14
  Wu Xian and Lang Wanji, 2 talented disciples of respected
• 4:18
  clans, meet during cultivation training and accidentally
• 4:20
  discover a secret carefully hidden for many years.
• 4:23
  Taking on the legacy of their ancestors, they decide to rid
• 4:26
  the world of the ominous threat. But in a dramatic turn, events
• 4:29
  Wei Wu Xian dies 16 years later, Wei Wu Xian is brought back to
• 4:33
  life through a self sacrificing ritual.
• 4:35
  He conceals himself behind a mask and assumes the identity of
• 4:38
  his Summoner. Soon Wei Wu Xian reunites with
• 4:41
  Long Wanji and they start working together to solve the
• 4:44
  mysteries of the present and unravel the truth behind the
• 4:46
  events in the past. So, happy birthday the young
• 4:51
  teams, because we are currently four years removed from its air
• 4:55
  date. It aired originally June through
• 4:57
  August 2019, so it's four years old.
• 5:00
  Happy Birthday. It is adapted from the Dan May
• 5:04
  novel Motao Sushi, which is also known as Grand Master of Demonic
• 5:09
  Cultivation by MXTX. And it is 50 episodes long.
• 5:16
  Yes, 55 zero episodes long. This is pretty rare nowadays.
• 5:22
  It's nearly impossible basically for shows to have this this run
• 5:27
  runtime. It had two directors, Steve Tong
• 5:31
  and Tong Kalam. And Steve Tong also directed the
• 5:36
  legends from 2019. And Tong Kalam also directed The
• 5:40
  Beauty of Resilience from earlier this year. 2023 I think
• 5:45
  you have. Did you watch Beauty of
• 5:46
  Resilience? So I love the legends.
• 5:50
  Let me put that in there. That's by Lou and Shukai Peak
• 5:53
  loved the legends. The Beauty of Resilience.
• 5:56
  I dropped it. I have a really big problem with
• 6:01
  the actress in it. She's she's just got this like
• 6:06
  really wooden face. She's sad.
• 6:08
  She has the same expression. She's angry.
• 6:10
  She has the same expression. She's like, it's just like she's
• 6:13
  a very one note. Interesting actress.
• 6:16
  I'll come around to that later. Interesting.
• 6:21
  OK, but so you didn't finish Beauty of Resilience but Legends
• 6:27
  is all time. Yeah, and The thing is that the
• 6:30
  really annoying thing about beauty of resilience, this story
• 6:33
  was so freaking good. Like this story is classic
• 6:37
  Shiansha. Like this female lead start offs
• 6:40
  pretty weak, but she's hiding, you know an immense amount of
• 6:44
  power. Really classic Shiansha story.
• 6:47
  And if there had been another female lead in like her role,
• 6:53
  this could have been a really, really good Shawn show.
• 6:55
  But I think it came in and it kind of like fizzled out very
• 6:58
  quickly because there's there wasn't a lot of talk about it.
• 7:01
  So there you go. People were saying actually
• 7:05
  people were saying that like because female lead in the
• 7:10
  beauty of resilience like her her power is like she's a
• 7:13
  phoenix and a lot of people were saying that you know oh this is
• 7:18
  fun. It's almost like she's the
• 7:20
  daughter of the till the end of the moon couple and I was like
• 7:23
  no, no, how dare you. She wishes.
• 7:26
  She wishes. But yeah there was a lot of that
• 7:30
  going on But yeah I did drop that one.
• 7:31
  I was like I'm not even regretful.
• 7:33
  I'll very happily let it go. OK yeah.
• 7:35
  Not everything is gonna, it's gonna land, not every Shansha
• 7:40
  and historical is good, just like any other show or genre.
• 7:44
  So you know, got to pick your battles and if you don't like
• 7:48
  something, you should drop it. And I'll come back to that
• 7:50
  later. This show was written by Dong
• 7:54
  Yaoyu, Yang Xia, Guo Guang Yun and Jin Ma SO4 writers.
• 8:01
  It stars Xiao Jan Shan as Weibo Xian Slash Weiying.
• 8:06
  This was his breakout role. He's been in a bunch of dramas,
• 8:12
  including Oh my Emperor from 2018, The Wolf from 2020, The
• 8:16
  Oath of Love, and most recently The Longest Promise, which I
• 8:19
  think is currently airing. I think it's just about to wrap
• 8:24
  up OK, yeah. And I think because I keep
• 8:27
  seeing it on Netflix, for some reason, Netflix is also airing
• 8:30
  it almost simultaneously to the other platform.
• 8:34
  Yeah, it's a yeah, it's a $0.10 we TV product.
• 8:37
  Well, 10 Cent We TV are basically the same thing that
• 8:40
  you know it's just that in they couldn't have we TV in USA
• 8:46
  because there's already a platform called that.
• 8:48
  So they stayed $0.10 over in USA, but in Europe it's We TV,
• 8:52
  same thing. You know they're all owned by
• 8:53
  the same. So yeah, they're the original
• 8:56
  producers for The Longest promise.
• 8:59
  So his Co star is Wang Yibo as Lang Wang Ji Lanshan and he's
• 9:05
  been in like a few dramas. But I just noted the 2020 Legend
• 9:09
  of Faye. We have checked out all of those
• 9:14
  dramas. OK.
• 9:15
  All of his dramas. Wang Yibo, I've no for Wangi
• 9:20
  Bar. I checked out Legend of Faye.
• 9:21
  I didn't stick with that one just because it's more of a
• 9:26
  Wishy drama. And I'm Wishy is kind of like,
• 9:28
  you know, they're a little bit harder for me to get into for
• 9:32
  Shaozan. I think I've checked out all of
• 9:34
  those, but I've only completed the Wolf.
• 9:37
  I'm my emperor and the ice of love so well, so I'm not going
• 9:43
  to go into the rest of the cast. I think there's like 70 people
• 9:46
  or something. There's so many, many people,
• 9:51
  but those are our main to our lovers, so to speak.
• 9:56
  What did you think of The Untamed?
• 9:58
  What are your thoughts? I know it's been a while since
• 10:01
  you watched it and I think you may have rewatched a few things
• 10:05
  just to prep for the episode, but please help me with your
• 10:08
  thoughts and I'll return the favor it took me when I watched
• 10:15
  it. I watched it in 2020, I think,
• 10:18
  uh, either 2020 or 2021. It might have been 2021 so it
• 10:23
  might have been like high to the pandemic.
• 10:25
  I have a really good friend like real life French and and by that
• 10:31
  I mean you know, I just, I've met in like real life sort of
• 10:34
  thing. She lives like 10 minutes away
• 10:36
  from me. But anyways, she is huge fan of
• 10:40
  the Untamed and she kept saying for months like you need to like
• 10:44
  watch the untamed. How have you not watched The
• 10:46
  Untamed? And I was like, you know, I I
• 10:48
  hit a bit of a lull in my dramas.
• 10:50
  And I thought, you know what? This is the time.
• 10:52
  I think over on Discord, a bunch of people were watching The
• 10:55
  Untamed. And I thought, you know what,
• 10:57
  I'll, I'll give it a go. And I I will say back then, and
• 11:01
  even now, I think more so than back then.
• 11:05
  The thing that grabbed me straight away was that first
• 11:07
  episode. But then, like from up until
• 11:10
  maybe episode 20, I feel like there's a lot of back story to
• 11:15
  get through to get like to what's really good about this
• 11:18
  drama. And now, like watching it a
• 11:21
  second time, I don't need much of that back story.
• 11:25
  So I can like, skip it. And I find that I enjoy that
• 11:29
  more. I love this drama.
• 11:32
  One of the main reasons is Shaozan.
• 11:35
  I feel like he's a pretty good actor and I feel like he conveys
• 11:39
  emotion pretty well. He does, he does a load of
• 11:42
  Broadway as well. So I feel like that, you know, I
• 11:47
  can add a little bit to, you know, the role itself, but I
• 11:54
  still loved it now the second time around, not as much as the
• 11:59
  first time. And that's because that first
• 12:01
  section, I found it a lot to get through.
• 12:05
  Like there's a lot of back story to get through.
• 12:07
  I still love like the main couple.
• 12:10
  If you can call them a couple, we're gonna call them a couple.
• 12:13
  OK. Right.
• 12:14
  Because I feel like they are like it's clearly they are.
• 12:17
  And actually, I've been reading the Dun May for it, OK And
• 12:22
  there's a lot more like in the Dun May.
• 12:25
  They skip around quite a bit more than they do in the drummer
• 12:29
  itself. And and I feel like they work
• 12:33
  through like the back story a little bit quicker than they do
• 12:36
  in the drama. I feel like in the drama they
• 12:39
  might have wanted it to padded it out a little bit more and
• 12:42
  they kind of chose to go, you know, the first section.
• 12:45
  I would have rather they've gone with the second section when
• 12:48
  they kind of like me back up again, you know, he comes back
• 12:51
  from the dead and they meet back up.
• 12:53
  I feel like that's when things get really interesting.
• 12:55
  Like the final what, 15 episodes?
• 13:03
  Well before then. Before then, Then, yeah, before
• 13:06
  he comes back then. But I feel like all the things,
• 13:09
  like, I feel like it's that stretch when they are disciples
• 13:13
  and they're just, you know, learning and doing a lot of, you
• 13:16
  know, disciply things. I feel like there's a lot of
• 13:19
  back story to get through there, but I still loved it.
• 13:21
  So you love the drama. You know, I do.
• 13:23
  You'd recommend the drama? I would.
• 13:25
  OK, for those who don't know, I'm just gonna define that May.
• 13:29
  So Dan May means indulging beauty in Chinese, and it's a
• 13:33
  genre of literature and other fictional media that features
• 13:36
  romantic relationships between male characters, aka the BL
• 13:41
  genre that we no one loved today.
• 13:43
  That is Dan May in China. They also known as the thing
• 13:50
  that doesn't exist in China exactly.
• 13:53
  It is super murky because of Chinese censorship policies and
• 13:57
  the general just homophobia in China.
• 14:02
  It's not illegal in China to be gay, but there are restrictions
• 14:09
  on like lewd behavior and different things like that and
• 14:14
  that falls squarely on the Dan May genre and and basically
• 14:21
  LGBTQ. Oh, definitely, like you're not
• 14:25
  supposed to. You will see that all the
• 14:28
  authors that write Dan May, they will write through pseudomons
• 14:34
  because even if it's technically not illegal, it kind of is.
• 14:39
  And even if they will find a reason to kind of like punish
• 14:43
  you, whether that be you messed up a little bit on your taxes or
• 14:47
  anything, they will find a reason to like punish you for
• 14:50
  writing. Done, mate, Especially done
• 14:52
  mate. I get to this big.
• 14:55
  So they, you know, it's really nobody really knows who the
• 14:59
  authors are. And it's like very, it's done
• 15:01
  very, very secretly. And you know, BL in general is
• 15:06
  not a genre the is allowed. And actually I think it was
• 15:10
  earlier this year, even last year, they kind of, like went
• 15:13
  and prohibited it. So there was a couple of other
• 15:16
  dramas that were being adapted from the same author of the
• 15:20
  entained. And those are kind of like
• 15:22
  everything's been put on the back burner because they just
• 15:24
  can't air right now. So, yeah, so anything that falls
• 15:29
  under this vague definition of obscenity or abnormal sexual
• 15:34
  behavior, it is illegal. And so, you know, properties
• 15:40
  like The Untamed are very interesting because they're
• 15:44
  operating under really tight regulations and censorship and
• 15:48
  they cannot make anything overt. And even though the source
• 15:53
  material is clearly, you know, homoerotic, they can, they
• 15:57
  cannot show that on television. So what we get is this really
• 16:03
  nuanced take in the Untamed. My OK, so here's my story of how
• 16:09
  I came at the Untamed. So I had seen so many good
• 16:15
  things about the Untamed like years ago and it had landed on
• 16:19
  Netflix and I was like, oh perfect, I'm not, I'm gonna
• 16:21
  finally press play on this Shansha because I assumed it was
• 16:25
  a Shansha. And it is like a very, I think
• 16:27
  it's a very mild Shansha because you do have like you know
• 16:31
  spirits and ghosts and magic and stuff like that.
• 16:36
  But I also, I feel like it's really more of a Wussia.
• 16:40
  To me this is way more of a Wussia than a Shansha.
• 16:42
  But it see, I think a lot of people will very easily like,
• 16:46
  say, oh, it's a Shansha, Yeah, technically, I feel like it
• 16:49
  isn't. I feel it's heavily, heavily
• 16:52
  towards a Wusha, just because, yes, there's a little bit of
• 16:56
  magic, but there's no gods, there's no, there's nothing more
• 16:59
  that, says Xianchi, None of these people are immortal.
• 17:03
  Like, they're just people. Like the classic description of
• 17:07
  Wusha is warriors that kind of travel through the lands and
• 17:12
  like that's exactly what they are.
• 17:14
  People in need. Yes.
• 17:16
  Which is exactly really what they is.
• 17:18
  Yeah. So the only thing that this has
• 17:21
  is way Wu Shan's ability to control like the what they call
• 17:25
  it, you know, zombies, whatever. The people that are, you know,
• 17:29
  dead, technically zombies. They're zombies.
• 17:31
  Come on, come on. If we're talking about it.
• 17:35
  So, So yeah, that's like the only thing that is like magic
• 17:38
  and they call it like black magic, black, you know, so and
• 17:42
  even that that doesn't come from him, That comes from an amulet.
• 17:46
  So I wouldn't like, yeah, I would call this wishy.
• 17:50
  I wouldn't call it. That's OK.
• 17:52
  Thank you. Because I was reading up on the
• 17:54
  Untamed people calling it Shansha and I'm like, well I
• 17:57
  don't think it really is like it has maybe a couple of elements
• 18:01
  of Shonsha, but it's not like immortals and gods and you know
• 18:08
  the usual like heavy-handed magic and like are the entire
• 18:12
  sets created in CGI? Like no, like this isn't like a
• 18:17
  very typical Shonsha. So anyway I so I was like oh
• 18:21
  perfect, I'm going to press play on the Untamed.
• 18:24
  This was years ago. I got 5 episodes in and I was
• 18:29
  like, fuck this show. I'm not watching any more of
• 18:32
  this because I had no idea that it was based on this book that
• 18:40
  was BL. And I thought these guys are gay
• 18:44
  and no one's saying anything. I hated the fact that it was
• 18:49
  like this thing left unsaid and that there there was like all of
• 18:55
  this tension and subtext and people like no one was talking
• 19:01
  about the elephant in the room, which which is that these two
• 19:04
  are are love each other, right. And I was so mad.
• 19:08
  I was so mad. I was like, if you're going to
• 19:10
  be gay, just be gay. Like I want to see the whole
• 19:13
  thing like soup to, you know, soup nuts to soup, soup to nuts,
• 19:17
  whatever the the idiot is. And I I was, I was mad at it
• 19:21
  because it wasn't overt, It wasn't like unapologetic.
• 19:25
  It was very much flying under the radar, radar and you know,
• 19:31
  Shades of Grey versus being a little more black and white.
• 19:33
  And you know, compared to the heteronormative romance that we
• 19:38
  see in Chinese dramas, this, this was really frustrating
• 19:41
  because they go all the way for a regular hetero norm,
• 19:47
  heteronormative romance. But they won't for these two
• 19:51
  guys. And I'm like, they clearly love
• 19:52
  each other. They're super gay.
• 19:53
  And like I I was very upset with the politics and the back story
• 19:59
  and it was super dense and hard to understand.
• 20:01
  It was extremely convoluted and I just washed my hands of it,
• 20:07
  the plot, like I just washed my hands of being tamed and I said
• 20:10
  I'm not coming back to this and then flash forward.
• 20:14
  Now I'm like, I got this podcast and.
• 20:18
  People are really into the unteamed.
• 20:21
  And I was like, maybe I didn't. Maybe I just wasn't in the right
• 20:24
  headspace to watch it. Maybe I just, you know, I should
• 20:28
  return to it. I should give it a fair shake
• 20:31
  and watch it. So now I watched it all the way
• 20:35
  through and at a breakneck pace, which I'm sure a lot of people
• 20:39
  can relate to because they probably binge.
• 20:42
  I was reading people like, oh, I binged that I couldn't get
• 20:44
  enough. I wanted fifty more episodes.
• 20:47
  Listen, I did not like this show.
• 20:51
  Really. I did not like I I actually,
• 20:54
  right when we started when we talked about it and actually now
• 20:58
  not necessarily back then because I feel like I didn't
• 21:01
  know you as well as I did now. Now I kept thinking in the past
• 21:06
  couple of weeks I kept thinking this is not a drama that Jess
• 21:09
  would like. I don't think this is a drama
• 21:11
  Jess would like. I keep.
• 21:13
  I kept thinking it and I was like well, she's she says we're
• 21:17
  gonna do it we might like let her watch it but I feel like I'm
• 21:21
  gonna know that she's not gonna like this drama.
• 21:24
  Liliana, you know me so well because and I I think I messaged
• 21:29
  you early on. I think it was like episode,
• 21:33
  maybe it's like 15 or something. And I was like I am struggling.
• 21:38
  I am struggling so hard to get through this.
• 21:42
  It is so confusing and you know introduction of 50 million
• 21:49
  characters and I told you on The Voice message, I was like, there
• 21:55
  are literally no ladies and I am all for female empowerment.
• 21:59
  I'm all for strong female leads. I'm all for, you know, side
• 22:04
  characters that are doing great things and they're ladies.
• 22:07
  This is not that show, OK. And actually I was like
• 22:11
  everyone's a boy. Like I don't like.
• 22:13
  I'm like why are why is literally every character is a
• 22:18
  boy. Like who wants to watch boys
• 22:21
  talking about magic And like and I was kind of like whining about
• 22:26
  it because it's not it's not my cup of tea.
• 22:32
  OK. I'll live there is actually
• 22:34
  there's actually that's a common thing when it comes to like BL
• 22:39
  adaptations for China. And actually, if you look at it
• 22:42
  really, BL in general doesn't have a lot of, like female, you
• 22:48
  know, actresses in those dramas at least.
• 22:54
  Like, I can't speak for every single thing, but of the ones
• 22:57
  that I've watched, that's not, you know, something.
• 23:01
  I mean, the really big one, about two years ago, word of
• 23:04
  honor with, you know, Gongjun and Zhang Zahan blew up.
• 23:10
  It blew up. I really loved it.
• 23:12
  There was a lot to like about that drama.
• 23:15
  But that one I think is 36 episodes long, so it's a lot
• 23:18
  shorter. And actually one of the main
• 23:22
  roles, yes, you do have two guys that helm the whole story, but
• 23:28
  the secondary couple is actually a female and a male.
• 23:31
  It's like a heterosexual couple for the second couple.
• 23:35
  And I loved, you know, that whole thing.
• 23:38
  Now the Untamed, I think you have the two female characters
• 23:41
  that would be worth, you know, mentioning would probably be
• 23:45
  Weiwu, Shen's sister. And then Wenching, which is the
• 23:51
  female kind of like doctor, but both of them die.
• 23:54
  So that's what I'm saying is like they introduced these two
• 23:59
  ladies, their various levels of annoying and then they kill
• 24:06
  them. So they're largely absent from,
• 24:12
  you know, the end game episodes in the last maybe like 20
• 24:14
  episodes. So my complaint that Oh my God
• 24:22
  there's too much testosterone. I feel like I don't know.
• 24:26
  I don't, I don't know if that's common or not but I was like
• 24:28
  major for the bulk of the show. And then again, coming into
• 24:33
  this, I I'm going to call it a romance because I that's what it
• 24:36
  was to me was this romance felt so half baked.
• 24:42
  And yes, I'm into like the Darcy level Regency crap that they
• 24:48
  were doing that was like, you know, longing gazes and pregnant
• 24:54
  pauses and an insane amount of flirting back and forth and you
• 25:02
  know, meaningful touches of like the hand, hand grabbing.
• 25:08
  That all is fine. It's literally just for 50
• 25:13
  episodes. It was a lot.
• 25:17
  I wonder. I wonder if you'd feel the same
• 25:19
  way if you had watched the 20 episode version as opposed to
• 25:22
  the 50 episode version. Because a 20 episode version, is
• 25:26
  that the special edition that I read about?
• 25:28
  Yeah. So that's basically they've cut
• 25:30
  a bunch of, like, the stuff that doesn't necessarily need to be
• 25:35
  in the story. And because, like, I, I will
• 25:39
  admit, I love this drama, but I know this isn't a drama that's
• 25:42
  going to repeal to, you know, the huge masses.
• 25:45
  It's not one that I'm going to recommend to everybody.
• 25:48
  And second of all, I wushia. Because to me, this is a wushia,
• 25:52
  and wushia sometimes just doesn't hit the sport in Wusha.
• 25:56
  Classically, there's always a lot of heavy politics, and
• 26:00
  that's not necessarily something that appeals to me.
• 26:03
  So when I first watched it, I knew I had to go through all of
• 26:06
  that because I kind of needed, you know, a little bit of the
• 26:09
  back story of what was happening.
• 26:12
  But by the end, I was like, so basically the whole thing is
• 26:18
  that you could have just summarized everybody's greedy
• 26:21
  for this one amulet, yet everybody criticizes the one
• 26:25
  person who can use it and has been able to master it.
• 26:30
  That's basically what all of those politics are, is like to
• 26:33
  be the strongest clan and for this amulet.
• 26:37
  So yeah, this is obviously something that comes up a lot.
• 26:42
  And Lucia and Shiansha is that these righteous sex are not that
• 26:46
  righteous. They're pretty greedy.
• 26:48
  They're pretty ambitious and closeminded.
• 26:54
  And so that was that was always going to be the kid.
• 26:56
  Like, I never walked into this thinking everyone's going to be
• 26:59
  a good guy, that they were very much problematic and toxic.
• 27:05
  And they had, you know, there were themes in here about like
• 27:11
  protecting refugees, right? Because he has this, He becomes
• 27:15
  the yielding patriarch, and he helps out the remnants of the
• 27:18
  Wen clan. And these people are largely
• 27:22
  innocent women, children, people who had nothing to do with like
• 27:27
  the Nazi era of the Wen clan. And he's like, look, these
• 27:33
  people deserve to live and they become these refugees, right?
• 27:38
  And then everyone else is like, you gotta kill them and like
• 27:43
  from zero to 60, right? Even though they know these are
• 27:47
  defenseless people, it doesn't matter.
• 27:51
  They they're Germans, so to speak.
• 27:55
  In the in a in a World War 2 comparison, cancel culture
• 28:00
  because he gets cancelled like 50 million times.
• 28:04
  Misinformation like you know fake news and things like that.
• 28:09
  This is these are like themes that run through the unteamed
• 28:13
  and mob justice. That's a really big one.
• 28:18
  Huge one in the show is. But actually they just whip
• 28:22
  themselves into a frenzy and they just completely annihilate
• 28:28
  him without, without any evidence or without hearing
• 28:33
  different points of view. There's actually about the, you
• 28:38
  know, mob, what did you call it? Mob, mob justice.
• 28:42
  Mob justice. And there's actually a really
• 28:46
  popular theory that the basically that is the author
• 28:51
  taking like a dig directly at the mob justice that happens
• 28:58
  within like the Internet There was actually, I think I can't
• 29:03
  remember because it's been a while but I'm pretty sure I read
• 29:06
  it. I don't know if it's a theory,
• 29:07
  if it has been confirmed that basically I think the author
• 29:12
  herself was a victim of like cyberbullying and all of this
• 29:16
  like thing and that kind of like translated into her when she
• 29:20
  wrote this this book and they kind of stuck with it.
• 29:25
  And it's also like the, you know, mob justice.
• 29:28
  It's not really justice because the person can be very much
• 29:32
  innocent, which in the case of, like, you know, way was Sheen as
• 29:36
  a character. The guy just can't catch a
• 29:38
  break, literally. Not evil.
• 29:41
  He's not evil, but you're making him be this person, right?
• 29:46
  Which is such a common theme in Washiya, Shansha and whatnot.
• 29:50
  A lot of these people, they don't start off as evil, but you
• 29:54
  push it, You push it, you push, and then you're surprised that
• 29:57
  they're gonna react, right? Right.
• 29:59
  And I'm always a fan of that arc.
• 30:01
  That's like, I'm always a fan of this arc, especially when they
• 30:04
  come to that realization of, oh, you you want a villain, I'll
• 30:07
  give you a villain, Which is exactly what happens with Weibo
• 30:11
  Xian, I think around episode 35. I like the 30s feel like that
• 30:18
  shit hitting the fan set of episodes.
• 30:20
  Like in the flashback sequence, Yeah, that's when they're
• 30:24
  ramping up to swap over into the future scene, because that's
• 30:30
  when the war is about to break out.
• 30:33
  And like, it's been revealed that he has the Tiger Amula.
• 30:36
  And that's, you know what the, you know, whatever's giving him
• 30:40
  power, which then he come to find out that technically it
• 30:43
  isn't. It's the music he's playing.
• 30:46
  Literally, I don't even know what's going on with because.
• 30:50
  So they were like a bunch of Mcguffins, right?
• 30:52
  You had the the Yin iron pieces that 100 years ago, they've
• 30:58
  broken it and it was a whole, you know, shark that happened
• 31:03
  about the Yin iron pieces and it was like the One Ring to rule
• 31:07
  them all and it got broken up in a bunch of pieces and they were
• 31:11
  hidden for a long time. They hold this like evil
• 31:15
  darkness power. I don't even know what the hell,
• 31:18
  it doesn't matter, OK, these are, this is a Mcguffin.
• 31:23
  It doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things.
• 31:24
  They get rid of them pretty easily.
• 31:27
  And then he has this offshoot thing called the Tiger, the
• 31:31
  Stigian Tiger Seal or something, which has like the same type of
• 31:36
  powers. I don't even know it.
• 31:38
  Like that's what's frustrating to me is that even though I'm
• 31:42
  very used to having these sort of Mcguffins and these crazy
• 31:46
  things and relics that do different things and come into
• 31:52
  play in various ways in this story, I just was not feeling
• 31:58
  this set in the the Untamed and the whole reveal that oh you
• 32:04
  thought there were four again iron pieces.
• 32:07
  There's actually 5. Like, I don't like it's.
• 32:11
  It was frustrating to me in ways that I it's hard to explain
• 32:16
  because maybe I just had no patience for it.
• 32:20
  I think I had way more patience for the characters and their
• 32:25
  individual struggles and sort of the pressure that they're under
• 32:29
  because of this political landscape versus the actual
• 32:35
  politics and the minutiae of the stupid things that they're
• 32:39
  searching for, See. But that's the thing that that
• 32:43
  was the beauty that I, you know, came to rewatch it.
• 32:46
  I was like, I don't need the back story and like, I don't
• 32:49
  need the politics anymore, right?
• 32:52
  And you know, I, I, I still really love, like the cost
• 32:58
  itself. Like the characters themselves,
• 33:01
  'cause they're all very Gray characters.
• 33:03
  There's not, like, no one's like a good character or a bad
• 33:06
  character. They're all very Gray characters
• 33:09
  in this drama. And even, like the righteous
• 33:12
  ones kind of like turn, you know, a little bit more Gray as
• 33:15
  you go on throughout the story. But for me, the, you know, the
• 33:20
  politics just dragged a little. It is so dragged too much.
• 33:24
  It is so. And I I can love the drama and
• 33:29
  still like very much admit that. Like I I loved it the first time
• 33:33
  around. But it took me a really long
• 33:36
  time because like the first, I don't know how many episodes I
• 33:39
  kept saying I don't understand like what do you see in this
• 33:43
  drama because I'm not seeing it and it took me a really long
• 33:47
  time to kind of like click. And I think what clicked it for
• 33:50
  me was like way was Shan's character and you know, well I
• 33:53
  love him like let's talk about him because I think he's a
• 33:56
  fantastic of. So the actor I have it here.
• 34:00
  Let me go back to it. Charlotte loved him.
• 34:04
  This is the first time I've ever seen him.
• 34:06
  I've watched the wolf. I didn't finish the wolf dropped
• 34:09
  it. But well he's the second male
• 34:12
  leader to me personally he steals the show like that.
• 34:16
  He steals the show well. So he like, this is honestly
• 34:20
  like my first time. Felt like my first time seeing
• 34:23
  him, loved him. I think he's so compelling and
• 34:28
  really easy to watch. And he's super bubbly and
• 34:32
  charismatic and flirtatious. And it's so easy to like him, so
• 34:39
  easy to like this character because we can all relate to
• 34:42
  being this playful, especially I think in the flashback sequence,
• 34:47
  It's like 30 something episodes long.
• 34:49
  They are supposed to be teenagers.
• 34:51
  So I remember being this carefree and wild.
• 34:55
  And I can go where I want and say what I want and I can do
• 34:58
  this and eat what I want and whatever.
• 35:00
  And there's like this aura of no consequences.
• 35:05
  And I really what he is. What, which is totally what he
• 35:09
  is like. He's just chaos.
• 35:11
  He's chaos. He is extremely free spirit,
• 35:15
  free spirit, extremely smart and sort of like a prodigy in the
• 35:21
  Cultivator Realm. And even though he doesn't
• 35:24
  follow the rules, people respect him because you know, he's good
• 35:27
  at what he does. He's good at, you know,
• 35:30
  swordplay, he's good at. You know, what is it?
• 35:34
  Reciting the different Analects of the of the various clans.
• 35:38
  And he knows how to play outside of the rules because he knows
• 35:44
  how to. He knows what the rules are.
• 35:46
  You know what I'm saying? You have to know the rules to
• 35:47
  break the rules. Yeah, exactly.
• 35:49
  So I loved him. I loved his demeanor.
• 35:54
  And I think that his struggle is what I gravitated toward so much
• 36:01
  in the show was him and being so hungry for a family and for his
• 36:09
  adoptive family to end up, he ends up being super self
• 36:15
  sacrificing. Yeah, he does.
• 36:17
  And the whole golden core thing. I mean, him giving it up for his
• 36:23
  brother. And so Jung Jung Tong is the
• 36:28
  brother. Yep.
• 36:30
  He's the the adoptive brother from the same clan that I forget
• 36:34
  what clan they're from, but it's OK.
• 36:37
  The junk, is it the Jung clan for the Lotus pier people?
• 36:41
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let me How do I put this?
• 36:46
  The brother was like a little pussy that I just could not ever
• 36:50
  like. And he was the one.
• 36:52
  He lost his golden core. I could not, could not empathize
• 36:58
  with him because he was. You seem like you wanna say
• 37:03
  something. No.
• 37:05
  No, because there's a very heated, like not heated, heated.
• 37:09
  But there is always big discussion around Jung Chun's
• 37:13
  character. Really.
• 37:14
  I yeah, I'm of the same mind. I don't necessarily like his
• 37:20
  character. But the people who do like his
• 37:22
  character actually when he kind of like dig into their arguments
• 37:27
  it they kind of make sense why they kind of enjoy his
• 37:30
  character. They they painted more as like
• 37:33
  this misunderstood character that there's a lot more to him.
• 37:39
  I don't, I don't necessarily like his character.
• 37:43
  I feel like there's bits that could have been avoided.
• 37:46
  And one of the things that they say is for weighing to be that
• 37:51
  carefree. There needs to be somebody who's
• 37:53
  responsible, like for him and for whatever comes next.
• 37:58
  And people have always said, like, he's being prepared to
• 38:01
  take over his father's role of, like being, you know, clan
• 38:05
  leader. So he's a suckler for rules.
• 38:08
  And I think down right to the end of it.
• 38:11
  He loves his brother, but he's also jealous.
• 38:14
  Jealous, yeah, of the fact that, like, his brother can learn
• 38:19
  something very, very quickly that may take him weeks to
• 38:22
  grasp. So, you know, I feel like
• 38:26
  there's a lot of jealousy there. But yeah, I I was never quite a
• 38:30
  fan of his character. But I know there's a lot of
• 38:33
  people who do enjoy his character.
• 38:35
  And they kind of when you kind of, like sit down and have
• 38:39
  conversations with those people, it's quite interesting to see
• 38:42
  like where they're coming from in terms of, you know, why they
• 38:45
  enjoy him as a character. Yeah, he was a very mediocre
• 38:49
  cultivator, and he was not his father's favorite.
• 38:54
  His mother was a bitch. A like, that's a bitch right
• 38:58
  there. And we might, we might touch on
• 39:00
  her later if we get around to it.
• 39:01
  But, and he had this major inferiority complex with
• 39:06
  weighing who was clearly a great leader, clearly a wonderful
• 39:12
  cultivator, clearly had everything going for him when it
• 39:17
  came to rising the ranks of this like, cultivator clan.
• 39:20
  Political, you know, landscape. And he was not any of those
• 39:27
  things. He was extremely emotional and
• 39:31
  could not get a handle on any situation before.
• 39:34
  It just sort of blew up in his face and he was not.
• 39:39
  He did not do well under pressure.
• 39:40
  He was not leadership material. And even though he had the title
• 39:45
  and he was coming up because he was his father's son, it just
• 39:50
  wasn't like he could not. He was never going to compete
• 39:53
  with weighing. And that played into him losing
• 39:59
  his golden core because he was impulsive and lost it.
• 40:04
  They like, I can't remember what the spell was or whatever, but
• 40:08
  they basically annihilated his little golden core, which is the
• 40:12
  source of his cultivation. He took it badly.
• 40:16
  He was in a huge funk. And weighing being the selfless,
• 40:23
  righteous good brother, he decided to do this thing that
• 40:26
  had a 50% chance of success and elaborately trick him into
• 40:33
  thinking that he could fix this golden core.
• 40:38
  And he can't and he can't then yeah, and then weighing is now
• 40:43
  not gonna call, can't fight. He's sort of defenseless after
• 40:48
  he's maimed himself cultivation wise for his brother and but I
• 40:56
  will say yeah, I will say one of my favorite scenes is when
• 41:01
  waning the you know kind of like they call him the you know
• 41:06
  zombie oh the ghost general. The ghost general yeah.
• 41:10
  When he revealed, no, that's a great, that's a great scene.
• 41:14
  That is a great scene. Like when he reveals everything.
• 41:18
  And then the scene directly after that one where Lanzan and
• 41:25
  weighing in the boat and they're kind of like riding out and like
• 41:29
  the Lotus and they kind of like he kind of like picks Lotus to
• 41:32
  give him. And they have a really
• 41:33
  interesting conversation there as well.
• 41:35
  Like, you know that Lanzan is like why?
• 41:38
  Why do you keep, you know, doing this?
• 41:41
  Like why do you keep just taking everything upon yourself?
• 41:44
  And those two scenes are really good ones.
• 41:47
  So because he just kind of like, at this point, the ghost journal
• 41:50
  is just like, look, you're being a complete idiot, being a dork.
• 41:56
  Stop it. Can't you see, Can't you see
• 41:58
  that, you know, your brother, like, literally gave his most
• 42:02
  precious thing up to you? Yeah.
• 42:05
  Like, don't you think you've become a little bit more, you
• 42:09
  know, what's the weather? A little bit more powerful.
• 42:12
  Yes, I love that. When he said that wedding, so
• 42:15
  was like, oh man, he had some good lines there where he said
• 42:19
  he really did. Yeah.
• 42:20
  He said, like you were never supposed to like rise up.
• 42:24
  You're always supposed to be lesser or something like that.
• 42:30
  Like, he said something to that effect.
• 42:32
  And I was like, wow, this guys. General just spitting facts,
• 42:38
  spitting facts at this dude. And yeah, he hasn't, like
• 42:42
  uncheed the sword, which is a whole thing in the show, that
• 42:45
  the swords are like wands, like Harry Potter style wands.
• 42:50
  And they know their owner and they, like, will only unchief
• 42:54
  for the person that they're like imprinted connected to.
• 42:59
  Connected to. Yeah.
• 43:01
  Which is something that Alchemy of souls picked up.
• 43:04
  Yeah. Oh, yeah.
• 43:05
  Oh, yeah. Yeah.
• 43:07
  Do you know what that's just clicked?
• 43:09
  Oh yeah, 'cause they can't. And she they, their swords also
• 43:11
  work in the same way. Yeah, I feel like I've seen that
• 43:14
  in other dramas as well. I can't remember with it.
• 43:19
  This sounds so familiar to me. It probably of like you can't
• 43:23
  use that weapon cuz it's yeah, yeah yeah whatever.
• 43:27
  So this was very I mean alchemy assaults totally stole it from
• 43:32
  sea dramas but. But yeah, I like that scene that
• 43:37
  he makes him unsheet the sword and then he's like, you're
• 43:40
  lying, you're lying. And it's like, how can you not
• 43:43
  see it? I think it's because at that
• 43:46
  point he's just like, have I really kind of, like just done
• 43:50
  all of this to my brother? He did everything wrong.
• 43:53
  And The thing is, he could have, not easily, but with a little
• 43:58
  bit of effort he could have investigated and figured out bet
• 44:05
  he doesn't have his golden core or he just physically cannot
• 44:10
  wield his sword anymore. But I think at that point, did
• 44:15
  he really want cuz he's so selfish to figure it out?
• 44:18
  Yeah, he's so selfish. I can't get, I can't heap enough
• 44:22
  terrible things on the brother. It's easier at that point.
• 44:27
  Everybody kind of hates waning so weighing.
• 44:31
  So it's kind of easier for him to go with, you know, the flow
• 44:39
  of, Oh yeah, absolutely. He succumbs then.
• 44:41
  It is for him to stand up. First of all he was like a
• 44:44
  teenager when he when his dad and mom were killed and he
• 44:48
  became the Klan leader. And then he's there with a bunch
• 44:51
  of old fogies who are extremely vocal.
• 44:54
  They're the loud majority and he just comes to groupthink really
• 44:58
  fast, real fast. He does not put up a a fight at
• 45:04
  all. When they start slandering Wei
• 45:06
  Ying. When they start like hooking up
• 45:08
  all these crazy stories about oh he's gonna he you know he's got
• 45:13
  the Yin iron and he's our enemy basically and they just make up
• 45:19
  this like villain even it suits their narrative even though is
• 45:24
  it true. So I liked Wei Yang going back
• 45:29
  to yeah just going a little so we like that yeah there's like a
• 45:35
  tangent on the brother but anyway so I really like Wei
• 45:37
  Yang. I love that he's this tragic
• 45:40
  figure. I love that he, even though he
• 45:44
  is so reasonable and stands for justice and truth and
• 45:50
  everything. No one in the sex likes that.
• 45:55
  He is constantly poking holes in their theories, in their bogus
• 46:00
  explanation for explanations for events, and you just sympathize
• 46:08
  with weighing so much. I think that anybody in his
• 46:11
  position who had a semblance of morality would have done the
• 46:15
  same. Yeah.
• 46:16
  And I think it's quite interesting because technically
• 46:20
  you kind of can't call him an underdog because he's not like
• 46:26
  the weaker or anything. The fact is he is a heck more
• 46:31
  powerful. And that's why people fear him.
• 46:33
  It's not, you know, people don't like that he can, you know, poke
• 46:39
  holes in their theories and he can back it up with power and he
• 46:42
  can and he backs it up with, you know, logic, which they don't
• 46:46
  seem to have a lot of these characters so.
• 46:50
  And he has a way of speaking that can kind of like get people
• 46:53
  to his side. So yeah, so I feel like, you
• 46:59
  know, that's what makes him, that's what makes, you know,
• 47:03
  other people fear him. It's not necessarily that he's
• 47:07
  evil, which he isn't. There's not an evil bone in his
• 47:11
  body. It's just that people push him
• 47:13
  to do things that they deem evil, even though you can
• 47:17
  obviously see they are exactly the hypocrisy of the whole
• 47:21
  thing. That and there were, you know,
• 47:24
  during that whole big sequence at the end of the flashback
• 47:28
  where he's like sitting on the roof and they're all like
• 47:32
  resolved to kill him. And he shows up to to break up
• 47:37
  the party. And they said, oh, like, why did
• 47:40
  you kill all those people in, like Tongling past and why did
• 47:44
  you kill all these people here? And first of all, he didn't kill
• 47:47
  them. He didn't kill them.
• 47:51
  And #2 and #2, he was like, so if you guys come against me and
• 47:58
  try and kill me, I can't do anything.
• 48:01
  I can't defend myself. Like, y'all asked for this
• 48:04
  because evidently I it's unreasonable for me to defend
• 48:08
  myself in such situations. That's literally what he's doing
• 48:12
  throughout the whole drama. He's just defending himself.
• 48:16
  Like people just choose to like go against him and he's like,
• 48:19
  well, am I supposed to? And then they get mad that he
• 48:22
  fought back. Exactly.
• 48:25
  But you would fight back. Like, I don't understand the
• 48:28
  mentality, right? It's like aggressive stupidity.
• 48:33
  Yeah. But I feel like this is
• 48:34
  something that often occurs in like this genre or in the genre
• 48:38
  of shant or anything like that. It's like that people get really
• 48:41
  mad that like somebody that this why didn't you let me kill you.
• 48:46
  Exactly. That's exactly the thing.
• 48:50
  That's exactly the thing. Yeah.
• 48:54
  So he OK so let's talk about Wang Yibo as lunch on because
• 48:58
  this is also where my complaint have a huge complaint which is
• 49:02
  he had he had, I I can already tell where you're going with
• 49:06
  this because he was giving me nothing girly like there was
• 49:11
  nothing there. There was only one expression he
• 49:14
  was very stern and stoic and he barely broke and maybe and again
• 49:23
  maybe it's because I'm coming off of watching till the end of
• 49:26
  the moon with Loyoung Chi who's doing the most.
• 49:29
  He's like a micro expression king.
• 49:31
  He is very expressive. And then also coming off of love
• 49:34
  like the Galaxy, which is not a Shansha or Lucia, but just like
• 49:38
  a pure historical and the acting.
• 49:41
  And that even though the male lead in that is very hard and
• 49:47
  stern, he still was giving way more than Wang Yibo does as Wong
• 49:55
  T And that was a huge problem for me because I'm also trying
• 50:00
  to read as much into this romance as possible.
• 50:03
  And like as as through his actions you can definitely tell
• 50:09
  that he loves weighing, that he cares for him, that they're soul
• 50:12
  mates, that they belong together, that they're whatever,
• 50:15
  whatever the list goes on. But I'm not seeing it in his
• 50:22
  face in the way that he like interacts with him.
• 50:29
  So I feel like when it comes to this, this is often a dividing
• 50:35
  pointer for a lot of people. A lot of people believe that
• 50:40
  actually. So when this first was casted,
• 50:44
  people were not happy with either Shaozan or Wangibo.
• 50:47
  They were both very unknown actors.
• 50:51
  Although Wangibo is an idol, he comes from a dance and likes
• 50:55
  rapper background. So that's, you know, his
• 50:59
  background. And I don't, Yeah, I think he
• 51:03
  had done a couple of dramas before, but this was like one of
• 51:07
  his, like more, you know, the one that kind of like threw him
• 51:11
  into. Yeah, stretches break out again.
• 51:15
  Yeah. And I feel like now watching it
• 51:19
  again, I feel like I picked up a lot more on his expressions than
• 51:23
  I did the first time around. And yes, there aren't many
• 51:27
  there. But actually he's playing, he's
• 51:30
  playing the character much like the book describes the
• 51:35
  character. Like, he that that is the
• 51:37
  character that's being described in the book is this completely
• 51:41
  stoic character for pretty much the whole thing.
• 51:44
  Like, he's very, very stoic. And I feel like he doesn't show
• 51:50
  a lot of emotion, but that's just the character that comes
• 51:53
  with it. I didn't mind, you know, wanky
• 51:59
  boy that much. I haven't really watched him in
• 52:01
  a lot of things. And actually when I watched him
• 52:03
  in The Legend of Faye, completely different character,
• 52:07
  completely different character. Is it The Legend of Faye?
• 52:10
  Yeah, isn't it? Yeah, yeah.
• 52:12
  And so complete. He's like this cheerful,
• 52:15
  mischievous kind of character and he's done it like pretty
• 52:20
  well. So I feel like at that point,
• 52:24
  when they did the intained, that was a directing choice and not
• 52:28
  necessarily like a him. No, you make a good point that I
• 52:34
  don't think I was upset that he like upset at him that he can't
• 52:40
  act. I'm upset that they did this
• 52:43
  choice that there was, this was a choice.
• 52:47
  Yeah, I get what you mean. I am.
• 52:48
  I think like I like I said, I didn't mind it.
• 52:51
  I feel like there was enough there to keep me enjoying it.
• 52:58
  Also, this wasn't like the first BL adaptation that I kind of
• 53:04
  watched for China. So going in I had like
• 53:07
  expectations for things that I knew were going to be a certain
• 53:10
  way. And one of the things is that
• 53:13
  tends to be one of the characters tends to be a lot
• 53:16
  more stoic. Like this classic of a very
• 53:20
  bubbly character with a very stoic character seems to be like
• 53:24
  the norm within the BL that I've watched for China.
• 53:29
  And even like Word of Honor from two years ago, same thing.
• 53:33
  You had like quite a bubbly character with like quite a
• 53:35
  stoic character. Although they kind of like
• 53:38
  developed a lot faster. Like Word of Honor has a like it
• 53:43
  threw a lot more to the point. When it was airing, people did
• 53:47
  not think it was gonna air to the end.
• 53:50
  People thought it was gonna get pulled, so Oh my gosh, well,
• 53:55
  this one's the same like this. This is the only drama and what
• 54:00
  of honor that I have the DVD's for?
• 54:02
  Because I'm pretty sure once like, the licenses expire, I'm
• 54:07
  not sure they'll be coming up back up on on platforms.
• 54:12
  So, so yeah, but diverged from what we were talking about.
• 54:17
  No, no, this is all good. No, but this is a rambles.
• 54:21
  It's a Rambles today. But yeah, it's definitely this
• 54:25
  is, it's fine going back. I mean, what do I talk?
• 54:32
  I mean, I just people were seeing a lot of chemistry.
• 54:36
  I think I wasn't seeing that much chemistry.
• 54:43
  I don't know. I kind of was.
• 54:45
  I don't know. I was I I don't know because
• 54:48
  there's scenes that you can kind of see them in.
• 54:54
  I think like, like, for example, that scene after, you know, you
• 54:58
  kind of like the general kind of like tells, oh, no, no, that's
• 55:01
  great. They're on the boat on the
• 55:03
  Lotus. Yeah.
• 55:05
  There's another scene when. Yeah, he's like, holding him.
• 55:10
  That's great. Yeah.
• 55:11
  Piggyback. There's a piggyback or.
• 55:13
  No, no, it's not the chicken. The chicken, See.
• 55:16
  OK, OK. So there's a bunch of, like,
• 55:20
  little things that happen that I'm like, OK, good, More.
• 55:27
  I'm like, don't stop there. I feel like The thing is, when
• 55:32
  you look at this as well, you've got to think of it, you've got
• 55:37
  to put your headspace into 2019 Worlds, right?
• 55:42
  They were kind of even more strict.
• 55:44
  So the first kind of BL adaptation that really, really
• 55:48
  made it was kind of was drama called Guardian.
• 55:52
  And then after Guardian we have The Untamed and it's kind of
• 55:56
  like Guardian started to push a little bit and then the Untamed
• 56:00
  pushed it even further and then word of what it came in and
• 56:04
  pushed it even further, if that makes sense.
• 56:06
  So they kind with kind of like each BL adaptation that's coming
• 56:11
  out, they were kind of like testing the waters to see what
• 56:15
  they could get through without like censorship being like, no,
• 56:21
  do you know, do you get what I'm trying to say?
• 56:23
  No. Absolutely do.
• 56:25
  And then so. But then like, a year ago, they
• 56:29
  just said no, that's it. And that's because like, the end
• 56:32
  time blew up and word of honor blew up.
• 56:34
  And if you think about it, like the end time came out in 2019,
• 56:37
  was it? Yeah, 2019, there was not like a
• 56:40
  huge BL adaptation until like, Word of Honor three years later.
• 56:45
  So it's not something that's very common.
• 56:49
  And now you just don't get any at all because they've just put
• 56:53
  out the rule that you can't, you can't have them at all right
• 56:56
  now. There's a bunch of them that
• 56:57
  like, are on the hold because you, you know, they just won't
• 57:00
  air them. So I feel like it's always good
• 57:05
  also to put it into perspective of the time and like you know,
• 57:09
  for us watching it like especially like through a
• 57:11
  Western eye audience, I think that's my issue, right?
• 57:15
  Like, yeah, right. You need to put yourself into
• 57:17
  the fact that like as a Western audience if we see two guys
• 57:21
  kissing on screen, whatever, like that's that's not you know
• 57:25
  it doesn't that's allowed. I'm putting this, you know I'm
• 57:28
  doing like finger as if people can see me air quotes aloud.
• 57:33
  But like for China, that's like you can't have that.
• 57:38
  You simply can't. They will not pass censorship.
• 57:41
  They will not air and you will have repercussions like throwing
• 57:45
  upon you. So they have to figure out ways
• 57:48
  to do it that will agree with censorship but still sell you
• 57:54
  something, if that makes sense. So they do it a lot through.
• 57:59
  For example, they have a scene where they're playing with
• 58:01
  Bunny. No, no, there's a whole mess of
• 58:03
  things. So we could talk about the Bunny
• 58:05
  is this one. Do you want to talk about the
• 58:07
  bunnies first, right, for it. So they're talking about like,
• 58:10
  you know, they're talking about like the bunnies.
• 58:12
  And you know, they're, they're isn't, they're playing with the
• 58:14
  bunnies. And they find the bunnies.
• 58:16
  Yeah, exactly. And that it has become that.
• 58:18
  I feel like, isn't that like a signal of a gay, you know,
• 58:22
  relationship and whatnot? And there's things like, for
• 58:25
  example, the headband, the, you know, lands and wears that is
• 58:31
  not supposed to be touched by anybody but your spouse.
• 58:35
  And who the heck touches that time and time and time again?
• 58:39
  It's where Ying, like, he literally rips the band off his.
• 58:42
  Yeah, like it is. I really like those.
• 58:46
  I don't know what to call them, but like L GB TQ Easter eggs, so
• 58:50
  to speak, where yes the white bunnies are is sort of they have
• 58:57
  like a deep L GB TQ plus significance and it's seen as a
• 59:02
  symbol of queerness. And what is it?
• 59:07
  The rabbit God is a Chinese God, such guardian of homosexual
• 59:11
  relationships, all these things wrapped up into, they just have
• 59:14
  white rabbits like in the show that are adorable and they
• 59:18
  interact with the headband thing, which they clearly stated
• 59:23
  that only his like family or his significant other can touch the
• 59:28
  headband and he's caught like weighing is constantly touching
• 59:33
  the headband and saying like, oh can I have your headband for
• 59:36
  like different things? And I love all that.
• 59:40
  You have that boat scene where we mentioned it before where
• 59:45
  weighing is like passed out and he's got him in his lap, like
• 59:51
  holding him very intimately. That's very.
• 59:53
  I love all that. And I think like even one of my
• 59:57
  favorite quotes, I'm just gonna find it in my notes because I
• 1:00:01
  wrote this one down and it's like it describes them really,
• 1:00:07
  really, really well. And it's like it's from episode
• 1:00:12
  25. And he says, I think this one is
• 1:00:20
  the one. Oh yeah, it So what?
• 1:00:23
  I'm getting my tongue twisted now Weighing, says Lanwan G,
• 1:00:28
  Lanwan G, Who am I to you anyways?
• 1:00:31
  Can you not mind my business? And Lanzan says, what do you
• 1:00:35
  take me for? And there's like this dramatic
• 1:00:38
  pores of, like just tension. And then they kind of go, and
• 1:00:42
  then Wei in goes, I once took you as my soul mate.
• 1:00:45
  And Lanzan says I still AM. And it's like, no, because all
• 1:00:51
  that is great. All of those, I'm still
• 1:00:55
  surprised. All of that past censorship, to
• 1:00:58
  be honest. Yeah, the piggyback ride, the
• 1:01:01
  the fact that he he loses his flute and he carves him another
• 1:01:06
  one. It's like really cute things
• 1:01:10
  that add up. But it's like not.
• 1:01:17
  It's just a passing grade for me.
• 1:01:19
  Other people are like, oh, this is a plus.
• 1:01:21
  Plus, yeah, yeah, yeah. Going back to their relationship
• 1:01:26
  and how long. G is like very stoic and hard
• 1:01:32
  and weighing is not. I think that you're touching on
• 1:01:38
  something that I don't know if it's just a it's not a criticism
• 1:01:42
  of this particular show. It's a criticism of the whole
• 1:01:45
  like fanbay genre which is they still, they still work within
• 1:01:52
  heteronormative roles. And that's, I mean, because
• 1:02:00
  Danby is most like the clientele of these Danbys are, you know,
• 1:02:06
  heterosexual women. They still have these sort of
• 1:02:14
  cliches that fall within very heteronormative roles.
• 1:02:22
  And if you think about how long G is basically the typical,
• 1:02:29
  like, masculine character, the male lead versus, you know, Wei
• 1:02:36
  Ying, who is has so many characteristics of being, like
• 1:02:40
  traditionally feminine. Yeah.
• 1:02:42
  The bubbly. Yeah.
• 1:02:45
  Yeah, I definitely can see that. Actually, I feel like, I don't
• 1:02:51
  know. I wouldn't be able to say for
• 1:02:53
  the whole genre. I mean, I haven't watched enough
• 1:02:56
  of it. Like, I think I've watched only
• 1:02:58
  a couple within the genre to, you know, and that seems to be
• 1:03:02
  what they kind of go for. And but I also feel like, you
• 1:03:07
  know, there's a point where Wei Ying kind of becomes because
• 1:03:13
  he's forced to. He kind of becomes that, like,
• 1:03:17
  what's the word I'm looking for that child?
• 1:03:20
  Like almost innocence is kind of like driven out of him.
• 1:03:26
  No. Yeah.
• 1:03:26
  No. There's a lot of innocence.
• 1:03:28
  Yeah. For him to become this, you
• 1:03:31
  know, much closed off character and actually see if this was a
• 1:03:36
  drama that was able to air, you know, as it's supposed to.
• 1:03:43
  The ending is really, really nice.
• 1:03:46
  Like the book ending for the Don May is really, really nice.
• 1:03:51
  Would you like to die? Oh, yeah.
• 1:03:53
  I know. Say it.
• 1:03:53
  Yeah. So basically like how the book
• 1:03:55
  ends. I'm still reading through it,
• 1:03:57
  but I love spoilers in general. So I looked it up basically how
• 1:04:01
  the book ends, you know, the little kid that then grows up to
• 1:04:05
  be that. So yeah, that lands and cut.
• 1:04:08
  It's like takes under his wing. Yes.
• 1:04:10
  So that becomes. Yeah.
• 1:04:11
  So that becomes their adoptive son.
• 1:04:13
  And they kind of like they have a house together and they live
• 1:04:16
  their life like with their kid. And that is like how the book
• 1:04:20
  kind of ends, wraps up and they just assume that they are, you
• 1:04:24
  know, just any normal kind of family.
• 1:04:27
  And yeah, they kind of settled down in Landsand's sect.
• 1:04:33
  And way wishing goes back to being this very vivacious, very
• 1:04:37
  happy person that he was. But now he's matured and he has,
• 1:04:42
  you know, a lifelong partner and they both have a lifelong
• 1:04:45
  partner. And landsand becomes this very
• 1:04:47
  like, much more like chilled character.
• 1:04:50
  You know, he becomes happier. And the fact is, is there's
• 1:04:54
  lines in the book that, you know, people will ask Landsand
• 1:04:58
  to do something or they want him and he never does.
• 1:05:01
  Like he never goes with. But as soon as Weiying asks him
• 1:05:04
  to do something, that's it. Like he will give him anything
• 1:05:08
  he wants. And it's kind of like like the
• 1:05:10
  relationship that they build over time.
• 1:05:13
  So yeah. And there's very like, when I
• 1:05:16
  say explicit, Oh yeah, there's very, very explicit content.
• 1:05:21
  Like they put out like extra chapters.
• 1:05:25
  And those like Apple, they're not Apple likes.
• 1:05:27
  They're extra chapters that are like just like Smutch.
• 1:05:30
  Like, like I yeah, those those chapters are not for the faint
• 1:05:37
  of heart. I will say, oh Lord, yeah.
• 1:05:40
  It's more than just Lanjan gets drunk and steals 2 Roosters and
• 1:05:45
  gives them too. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:05:48
  Clothes are flying off kind of thing.
• 1:05:52
  Well, I think I'm somewhere in between, right?
• 1:05:56
  Like for airplay, like for television.
• 1:05:59
  I feel like I'm somewhere in between.
• 1:06:01
  Like, I don't want like the porn.
• 1:06:02
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I don't want like this like
• 1:06:07
  will. They won't.
• 1:06:08
  They are, they aren't they like relationship.
• 1:06:12
  See for Bl's I've just come to accept that that's what I'm
• 1:06:16
  walking into when I walk into a Chinese BL adaptation is that
• 1:06:21
  I'm gonna have to read between the lines.
• 1:06:23
  I'm gonna have to take these little moments.
• 1:06:25
  And that is just like, if you want to watch Chinese BL
• 1:06:29
  adaptation, that's just something you're gonna have to
• 1:06:31
  like work your mind around it. If not, then it's not something
• 1:06:35
  for you. Because if if you look at even
• 1:06:38
  like Chinese dramas in the romance genre, it's rare for you
• 1:06:43
  to find one where the chemistry is like ridiculous.
• 1:06:47
  And like you get really good, like kiss scenes.
• 1:06:49
  And that like, develops a bit more.
• 1:06:52
  Because I don't want to see like you like I don't.
• 1:06:54
  I don't want to see you nice sex on screen like you because
• 1:06:56
  that's not, that's not what I, you know, tend to enjoy in my
• 1:07:01
  if. If you do, then more power to
• 1:07:04
  you. But for me personally, that's
• 1:07:05
  not what I enjoy. But um, you know, if I'm walking
• 1:07:10
  into a BL, then I definitely lower my expectations because I
• 1:07:13
  know that's not what I'm at least let me rephrase that.
• 1:07:16
  Chinese BL adaption. Right, right, right.
• 1:07:18
  The Chinese. Because if we're talking, you
• 1:07:20
  know, BL time, if we're talking and then Jesus Christ, then you
• 1:07:25
  know, expect all of it because you will get it.
• 1:07:28
  But if I'm talking like Chinese BL adaptations, then I lower my
• 1:07:33
  expectations way down because I know there's only like a certain
• 1:07:37
  line that they can, you know, thread, you know, walk on and
• 1:07:42
  it's very precarious, you know, which way.
• 1:07:46
  If they swing the other way just a little bit too much, then I'm
• 1:07:50
  not going to get to watch that drama.
• 1:07:52
  So, you know, that's what it is for BL adaptations.
• 1:07:58
  Yeah, you keep saying how successful the unteamed was.
• 1:08:01
  It was the highest earning, one of the highest earning dramas in
• 1:08:03
  2019 and people were talking about it being a critical and
• 1:08:08
  commercial success that both locally and internationally.
• 1:08:12
  And critics were saying oh praising its strong plot and
• 1:08:16
  well-rounded characters and elaborate clothing and makeup
• 1:08:19
  and some of these elements I don't agree like I think
• 1:08:25
  well-rounded characters for sure.
• 1:08:29
  I feel elaborate. Clothing not.
• 1:08:32
  I don't feel like the clothing was that elaborate.
• 1:08:36
  And the makeup again 5. Like nothing to write home about
• 1:08:42
  the plot again, I had so many questions and it was very hard
• 1:08:47
  to follow. Not my fave so again like I'm
• 1:08:53
  not not sinking my teeth necessarily into it.
• 1:08:57
  And again, the musical score. I just got off watching Love
• 1:08:59
  Like the Galaxy, which had one of the most amazing musical
• 1:09:02
  scores I've ever heard in a C drama.
• 1:09:04
  This one was just flute music. And I've never heard so much
• 1:09:09
  flute music in my life. I do think, like, I agree with a
• 1:09:15
  lot, you know, with a few things that you're saying.
• 1:09:18
  But I do think we need to take one thing into consideration,
• 1:09:22
  and it's the fact that the budget that Love like the Galaxy
• 1:09:26
  had is definitely not the budget that The End Time had, I'm sure.
• 1:09:30
  And it's like love like the Galaxy was filmed.
• 1:09:33
  What 2? I think it was two years ago.
• 1:09:37
  No, a year. Well, films.
• 1:09:39
  Two years ago, yeah, films. Probably about two years ago.
• 1:09:42
  So a lot has changed since. Like The Untanged has, you know,
• 1:09:49
  recorded, filmed compared to, you know, when love like the
• 1:09:52
  Galaxy is filmed. But I feel like it, definitely.
• 1:09:56
  They definitely knew how to commercialize this hit because
• 1:10:02
  it is one of the easiest Chinese dramas for an international fan
• 1:10:07
  to get much, you know, hold of. Much really.
• 1:10:11
  Like, I have pins. I I love collecting like pins.
• 1:10:15
  I have a bunch of like BTS ones and whatnot.
• 1:10:19
  And I have like a love between fairy and devil.
• 1:10:22
  I think I have what two love between fairy and devil.
• 1:10:27
  I have like 5 or 6 for the unchanged.
• 1:10:29
  It's super easy to get hold of, like stuff for the unchanged,
• 1:10:35
  whereas like other Chinese dramas, it's not.
• 1:10:38
  It's really hard to get a hold of much.
• 1:10:41
  So I feel like they were really smart in the way that they, you
• 1:10:46
  know, got stuff out there, but also there's a lot more like fan
• 1:10:52
  creating stuff. So a lot of like the pins that I
• 1:10:55
  get, they're just fans making art and making things.
• 1:10:59
  And that's you know, something that just is a lot, lot, lot
• 1:11:03
  easier to get a hold of when it comes to The Untamed in
• 1:11:06
  comparison to any other drama that I've watched, regardless of
• 1:11:09
  it being so. For example, Till the End of the
• 1:11:11
  Moon can be held as a very successful drama, but you it's
• 1:11:17
  really hard to get a hold of like merch for that drama.
• 1:11:20
  So that that's I still think to this day internationally, the
• 1:11:25
  untained is still one of the easiest dramas to get ahold of
• 1:11:28
  things from, if that makes sense.
• 1:11:30
  So I feel like that speaks a little bit to the power that the
• 1:11:34
  drama kind of had when it came out and still does, I think,
• 1:11:39
  yeah, I think it it was just not for me.
• 1:11:46
  And maybe in a few years I can return to it and glean something
• 1:11:50
  else from it and maybe have a more positive take on it.
• 1:11:52
  But it was not. This was not a binge of my own
• 1:11:56
  volition. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:12:00
  And I wonder. I wonder.
• 1:12:01
  I wonder what you would think of, first of all, like the 20
• 1:12:05
  episode version. But also I do wonder.
• 1:12:09
  So I feel like to me, this is a very again Wusia, his Wusia.
• 1:12:15
  And I am not exactly right. That's what I was about to say.
• 1:12:19
  Like Wusia for me, does it necessarily hit right all the
• 1:12:24
  time? It's not like I feel like we're
• 1:12:26
  all entitled to liking our own genres, because if we're all to
• 1:12:29
  like the same thing, God, that'd be boring as heck if like,
• 1:12:33
  everybody just like exactly the same thing.
• 1:12:36
  So, like, it's totally cool for, you know, some people to like
• 1:12:40
  one thing more than the other. And I feel like the Wusia genre
• 1:12:43
  has been a little bit starved for, like, fans of Wusia.
• 1:12:46
  There's not as much of it being produced nowadays, yeah, so when
• 1:12:51
  you do get one, if you're a fan of Wussia, you would love this
• 1:12:54
  drama because that's what it is at the end of the day.
• 1:12:57
  So, but if you're already like, like you and me, like, I can
• 1:13:01
  still very much love this drama and appreciate this drama, but I
• 1:13:05
  don't hear all the politics and that's very much a wooshier
• 1:13:07
  thing. So yeah, I can see both sides.
• 1:13:10
  There was a lot of politics, a lot of fight scenes, a lot of
• 1:13:13
  choreo. And I love fighting.
• 1:13:15
  I love choreo. I love swordplay, Fucking love
• 1:13:20
  all that shit. OK, Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's
• 1:13:21
  great. I own Crouching Tiger, Hidden
• 1:13:24
  Dragon on Blu-ray. Like, I love, like classic Lucia
• 1:13:32
  content. I just and I appreciate the
• 1:13:36
  show. I do.
• 1:13:37
  I just don't think that I would necessarily rank it high.
• 1:13:41
  Some people like really preaching the good word of the
• 1:13:44
  untamed, and I am not. I don't subscribe to that.
• 1:13:50
  I would. I do.
• 1:13:51
  I do think it'd be interesting in a couple years time right,
• 1:13:55
  for you to come back and do and they like not do the 50 but do
• 1:14:00
  the 20 episode version. Yeah.
• 1:14:04
  The special edition, which I think they cut together all of
• 1:14:06
  like their best scenes is right like the exactly the ones with
• 1:14:09
  the chemistry and stuff. So they they take out, they take
• 1:14:14
  out a lot of the politics that doesn't necessarily.
• 1:14:19
  So here's my thing about that and this is might be a little
• 1:14:21
  tangent, but I am not a person that likes to skip over things
• 1:14:29
  in a show. I'm not one to, especially on a
• 1:14:32
  first watch. I am not the person that's fast
• 1:14:35
  forwarding through scenes and and character arcs and things
• 1:14:40
  like that, that I don't care about on a rewatch for sure.
• 1:14:45
  But I think there's something to be said for people really
• 1:14:48
  gravitating toward certain characters or certain scenes.
• 1:14:54
  The the couple, the central couple, obviously of the drama
• 1:14:58
  versus what the drama is as a whole.
• 1:15:03
  And I tend to really put weight on what was the intention, what
• 1:15:09
  was the whole thing taken together versus, oh, I really
• 1:15:15
  liked this stuff, right. Because it's not about like you
• 1:15:20
  can't discount all of the other time and and effort that they
• 1:15:24
  put into telling all of these other stories and putting
• 1:15:27
  together all these other scenes and hiring all these other
• 1:15:30
  actors and players, Right. I feel like you have to really.
• 1:15:35
  I mean, I'm a I guess a whole, I come from it as a holistic
• 1:15:39
  approach versus, you know, just kind of pinpointing the best
• 1:15:45
  stuff. And this is a tangent.
• 1:15:48
  But I had a good friend of mine, Chris, I don't think he's ever
• 1:15:51
  listened to this. But my good friend Chris had
• 1:15:53
  never seen the Star Wars movies. And I was like, well, Chris, we
• 1:15:58
  got to remedy that this summer. So I bought all, I had not owned
• 1:16:02
  the Star Wars movies. This was before Disney Plus
• 1:16:03
  existed. And I bought all the Star Wars
• 1:16:07
  movies and we started watching them and I we watch them in
• 1:16:12
  order, which is like wrong, right?
• 1:16:14
  Like you shouldn't watch episode 1234 like in that order.
• 1:16:19
  But I had warned him ahead of time, like the prequels are
• 1:16:22
  generally not that good. I personally don't like the
• 1:16:25
  prequels. And what I did was I fast
• 1:16:28
  forwarded through all of the saggy political mumbo jumbo of
• 1:16:35
  the prequels, and all he got was like the important bits that he
• 1:16:39
  needed to know and all the romance between Anakin and
• 1:16:43
  Padme. And guess what?
• 1:16:45
  He fucking loved the prequels. Exactly.
• 1:16:49
  Because sometimes you don't need, like, all of it.
• 1:16:53
  But that's not the prequel. Like, you know what I'm saying?
• 1:16:56
  Like, just so you can get to the next bit of the Star Wars movies
• 1:16:59
  and the original trilogy and all that stuff, you need to know XYZ
• 1:17:04
  and here's this romance that's the central like thing of this
• 1:17:08
  whole thing that falls apart later.
• 1:17:09
  Whatever. But he did not watch the
• 1:17:13
  prequels. He watched it like the footnote,
• 1:17:17
  right. And that's the thing.
• 1:17:18
  And that's what I mean by you cannot come and tell me or I,
• 1:17:24
  you know, he can't come to me and with with all his heart and
• 1:17:26
  say I love the prequels. He didn't watch them.
• 1:17:28
  Watch them. Yeah.
• 1:17:29
  Yeah, yeah. You need to watch it like the
• 1:17:31
  beginning to end, right. I actually had a conversation
• 1:17:36
  with. I can't remember who it was.
• 1:17:39
  I think it was like just somebody online and they had
• 1:17:41
  kind of said that they would skip hold chunks and dramas and
• 1:17:45
  like, they would consider that they had finished that drama.
• 1:17:49
  And I'm like, no, you need to watch like from beginning to
• 1:17:52
  end. I will.
• 1:17:53
  I am. I'm not like, I won't.
• 1:17:55
  Fast forward, but I am very like precious of my speed change on
• 1:18:03
  the Oh yeah, no, I watched the show on 1.25 speed and I
• 1:18:07
  wouldn't have finished it in time otherwise.
• 1:18:10
  But yeah, but I feel like that's different because you're still
• 1:18:14
  watching everything. It's just going a little bit
• 1:18:17
  quicker, right? A lot of the time I watch a lot,
• 1:18:21
  not a lot like it. If it's dramas that I really
• 1:18:24
  love then I will watch. Those are very much normal time.
• 1:18:27
  But there's dramas that I just feel like just need that little
• 1:18:31
  like quickness and that I will very gladly.
• 1:18:35
  I also actually just discovered very side tangent, but I just
• 1:18:40
  discovered that there is like a oh, the plugin, yeah, for crime.
• 1:18:45
  And it works. It works on Vicky and I'm like,
• 1:18:48
  this is brilliant. Yeah, I hardly ever use Vicky
• 1:18:52
  because I hate the fact that you can't control the speed on
• 1:18:55
  Vicky. And it drives me nuts because
• 1:18:58
  there's dramas that like the the the longing looks are just a
• 1:19:02
  little too long. So even.
• 1:19:06
  Right. Even the kiss scenes, some kiss
• 1:19:08
  scenes will even be better if you like, speed them up, you
• 1:19:14
  know. But anyways, going off a touch,
• 1:19:17
  we were saying, yeah, that like they would say, oh, yeah, finish
• 1:19:21
  the show. I was like, no, you haven't
• 1:19:22
  because you haven't watched all of it.
• 1:19:24
  So And it's like it's the same thing that drives me nuts.
• 1:19:27
  It's like reading a few chapters of a book and saying you
• 1:19:30
  finished the whole book. No, you did, baby.
• 1:19:32
  And it's like, do you know what drives me even crazier?
• 1:19:35
  It's when people like you know, that do that will, you know,
• 1:19:40
  click it as completed and they will rate it, or they will drop
• 1:19:44
  a drama and they will rate it. And I'm like, don't.
• 1:19:46
  Why? Why?
• 1:19:48
  I never. I never rate a drama that I've
• 1:19:51
  dropped this. I don't.
• 1:19:53
  Because if I've dropped it, there's a reason I've dropped
• 1:19:55
  it. Like, I'm not gonna have a good
• 1:19:58
  opinion of it. Like, so what's the point of me
• 1:20:00
  rating it? But there's people that will
• 1:20:02
  watch like 3 episodes and they will rate a drama.
• 1:20:05
  There's people that will like rate a drama even before, like
• 1:20:08
  on episode one. This is bonkers to me.
• 1:20:11
  This is absolutely yeah. And then it's like, you know,
• 1:20:15
  it's the same thing. People will know straight away
• 1:20:18
  from episode one whether they want to drop something or not.
• 1:20:21
  I'm not that type of no. You have to give it a few.
• 1:20:23
  I need a bit more. But yeah, it just, it's, I don't
• 1:20:28
  understand the I, you know, I can skip through and just watch
• 1:20:32
  the best bits. If you're doing a rewatch, then
• 1:20:35
  you know, by all means do that. Like you know the story, like
• 1:20:37
  you've been through it. But if you're going first time
• 1:20:39
  in, then This is why I always say if people want to watch the
• 1:20:43
  Entamed, you need to watch the 50 episodes, right?
• 1:20:47
  You just need to if you're doing every watch or you wanna go back
• 1:20:50
  in and then take advantage of the 20 episodes special.
• 1:20:54
  But that's what it is. It's a 20 episodes special.
• 1:20:58
  It isn't the entamed as a whole. So yeah, OK jumping back into
• 1:21:04
  just the characters but let's talk really fast about Yang Li
• 1:21:10
  and that's the sister that was killed.
• 1:21:13
  I think that I like to Her character was only frustrating
• 1:21:19
  because she got with that jerk from the from the gin clan.
• 1:21:23
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like he did not deserve her.
• 1:21:27
  He was like terrible to her and was really Moody and foul for a
• 1:21:31
  lot of the show and just a Snooty elitist.
• 1:21:36
  And she apparently loved that. So I was like questionable taste
• 1:21:42
  in men for Youngly, but I think that the drama really hit.
• 1:21:47
  It's high point for me when, you know, weighing was really
• 1:21:52
  dealing with a lot of the fallout of losing his core and
• 1:21:56
  gaining this new sort of power with the flute and everything
• 1:22:00
  and the whatever relic that he had.
• 1:22:03
  I don't even care. It's Digian Tiger Seal.
• 1:22:06
  It's like, I just call it a Tiger amulet and call it a day,
• 1:22:09
  the Tiger Amulet thing. So that was really the high
• 1:22:13
  point of the show. And then especially that final
• 1:22:16
  battle in the, like, last flashback sequence.
• 1:22:21
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then she does throw.
• 1:22:24
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Throws off the.
• 1:22:25
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. He falls off the Cliff and all
• 1:22:29
  of that was like, amazing because it was so angsty, right?
• 1:22:32
  And I've said this before. I'm an angsty bitch.
• 1:22:34
  You are. You do love.
• 1:22:36
  You do love angst. I love it when why?
• 1:22:38
  I was like, this is not angsty enough for just like that.
• 1:22:42
  No, there's not angsty at all. And I kept thinking, like, I
• 1:22:47
  knew it from the beginning, like I was like, I'll let her ride
• 1:22:51
  this one out. But I know this isn't a drama
• 1:22:53
  that I would particularly recommend to you.
• 1:22:56
  And this is the thing. This is the thing that I find
• 1:22:59
  right Whenever people like recommend dramas, you need to
• 1:23:04
  think about the person that you're recommending dramas to.
• 1:23:08
  And a lot of people don't know. A lot of people will just
• 1:23:10
  recommend, this is what I like things they love.
• 1:23:13
  But that's not necessarily gonna translate to everyone.
• 1:23:17
  I've recommended dramas that I hate.
• 1:23:20
  Exactly. Because that's not.
• 1:23:21
  It's not for me. I'm not recommending, but it
• 1:23:23
  might be for the person. Yeah, exactly.
• 1:23:26
  And I think, like a lot of it, like whenever people sometimes
• 1:23:29
  will like, drop me, drop into my DM so they'll be like, oh, you
• 1:23:33
  know, and what, you know, what's your top dramas?
• 1:23:36
  What do you really love? And I always say I love these,
• 1:23:41
  but they are, you know, my personal favorite for this, this
• 1:23:44
  and this. But I always question and my
• 1:23:46
  favorite thing to do is to just ask people what is currently
• 1:23:50
  your favorites like. Tell me what your favorites are
• 1:23:53
  and I will recommend based on what you already like, because
• 1:23:57
  then you have a baseline, like like people are more likely to,
• 1:24:02
  you know, enjoy a recommendation that you're making if you're
• 1:24:05
  making it for that person specifically, if that makes it.
• 1:24:09
  So yeah, tailor it exactly like The Untamed is one of those
• 1:24:14
  that, like I said, I personally really, really enjoy it.
• 1:24:17
  But I also know that it isn't like a something that I would
• 1:24:20
  recommend to everybody because I know there's people out there
• 1:24:22
  that, you know, it just isn't a drama that would necessarily
• 1:24:26
  appeal to them. Yeah, this test generally low on
• 1:24:31
  angst. But when it peaked, I was like,
• 1:24:33
  oh, yeah, this is great. And it was so easy to get
• 1:24:35
  through those episodes and to see all of these things sort of
• 1:24:39
  culminate and for waiting to be so defeated and heartbroken
• 1:24:46
  about the state of affairs, the loss of the Wen clan that he
• 1:24:49
  had, you know, fostered in this really dark place, like the
• 1:24:55
  burial grounds thing. He was like they they were on
• 1:24:59
  borrowed time. They were living on graves.
• 1:25:02
  Exactly. It's very poignant.
• 1:25:06
  And I really appreciated those episodes.
• 1:25:08
  They were like a gift to my angsty little heart.
• 1:25:12
  And you know, the way that it sort of fractured his
• 1:25:15
  relationship with, Oh my God, I'm forgetting it 1G Lanjan as
• 1:25:22
  well. And how Lanjan was so really
• 1:25:25
  caught between, you know, duty and honor and respectability and
• 1:25:31
  following the rules, My God, that was another theme.
• 1:25:34
  Following the rules or not following the rules.
• 1:25:37
  That was really hard to watch and I loved watching it.
• 1:25:42
  But you see that like when he does then come back.
• 1:25:46
  You see that like LAN Jan always takes like weighing side when he
• 1:25:52
  does come back. Oh no, there's no question.
• 1:25:55
  So when that I really loved that part of it is that like the
• 1:25:59
  first part. He's a suckler for the rules.
• 1:26:02
  He's, you know this character that kind of like.
• 1:26:05
  But then when weighing does come back he's like there is no
• 1:26:08
  budging that man from being like, you know and I love that
• 1:26:12
  backup and I love that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:26:14
  And you know, stepping in front of him, super constantly,
• 1:26:18
  stepping constantly, constantly, that sort of thing.
• 1:26:23
  Great, great A+. Plus he sort of, he has so many
• 1:26:28
  regrets from that, you know end of the flashback sequence that
• 1:26:35
  he won't live like that again and even.
• 1:26:38
  And The thing is he gets punished for, you know, three
• 1:26:43
  years of punishment. That's a really long time like
• 1:26:46
  he has. And that's, that's one of the
• 1:26:48
  scenes that, you know, I feel like him going off the Cliff is
• 1:26:53
  a really big scene. I mean, it's the opening scene
• 1:26:56
  of the drama. And then, you know, you get to
• 1:26:59
  see it again. But the second time you see it,
• 1:27:01
  you have all of this, like, background story.
• 1:27:04
  And I feel like it hits you even more because like, you know why
• 1:27:08
  he's doing that? Like, you know why he's, you
• 1:27:10
  know, going off that Cliff and you just kind of see, I feel
• 1:27:14
  like, right. I don't know if you're gonna
• 1:27:16
  agree with this, but even in that moment you see like LAN Jan
• 1:27:21
  just kind of like, you know he's trying so hard to not to get it
• 1:27:25
  to pull him back up. No, I agree with you.
• 1:27:28
  And that scene, it's kind of like it really does hit because
• 1:27:31
  by then you've seen where they started, you've seen where like
• 1:27:35
  what they've gone through, and it's kind of like it hits in a
• 1:27:38
  whole different, you know, level.
• 1:27:42
  So yeah, if you've seen you feel their bond, you feel the, I
• 1:27:50
  don't want to say love, 'cause I feel like Love's too short.
• 1:27:53
  It falls short of like the yeah, what it is like they're that
• 1:27:57
  moment and Lanjan not wanting to let him go cut.
• 1:28:04
  I mean they they just fulfill so many things in each other and I
• 1:28:11
  I do love them. I like I root for them.
• 1:28:15
  But yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, it's all the all the
• 1:28:18
  other things, I guess, that sort of drag it down.
• 1:28:22
  The brother character. Uh.
• 1:28:26
  Zishan. Zishan.
• 1:28:27
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Who is Linetran's, like sworn
• 1:28:30
  brother or something? I don't.
• 1:28:32
  I don't think they're related. Right.
• 1:28:34
  They're not. Oh, is that his?
• 1:28:38
  Do you mean his uncle? Is it his uncle?
• 1:28:40
  OK, the uncle. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:28:43
  I know what you mean. Yes, I know the character.
• 1:28:44
  You mean now. Yes, yes, yes.
• 1:28:46
  So I think he is. That is his uncle Zishan.
• 1:28:48
  The uncle was another frustrating character to me
• 1:28:52
  because at first, during the whole squabble squabbles over
• 1:28:57
  the yin iron and people like turning against each other, the
• 1:28:59
  Wing clan going crazy because they were like the original
• 1:29:02
  Nazis of the whole thing. And then everyone else starts
• 1:29:05
  exhibiting really crazy evil tendencies toward this thing and
• 1:29:12
  this power that it represents. And he tells Lanjan, there are
• 1:29:19
  no rules, right? Like, what are these rules?
• 1:29:23
  That means nothing in the, in the grand scheme of this, you
• 1:29:26
  know, plight that we have. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:29:29
  And then later he goes and talks with Wei Ying and says you have
• 1:29:34
  to follow the rules and says the complete opposite.
• 1:29:37
  It's almost word for word, the complete opposite of what he had
• 1:29:41
  told Lanjan. I don't know if, like he was
• 1:29:45
  trying to hate to the speech to the person in a sense because
• 1:29:53
  like, but he said it with his whole chest both times.
• 1:29:56
  Yeah. And I'm like, what are you like?
• 1:29:59
  I don't understand. Do you still believe that
• 1:30:02
  they're they should follow these strict rules or what?
• 1:30:07
  Like, I understand like the general, like decorum, right.
• 1:30:10
  Like, that's because their claim is so strict, really strict,
• 1:30:15
  really the strictest one of all of them.
• 1:30:19
  But at the same time, besides, like, being generally nice to
• 1:30:23
  people and cordial and practicing decorum, I don't
• 1:30:27
  understand why he's giving them two separate speeches, different
• 1:30:32
  speeches about rules. Can I be honest?
• 1:30:35
  Yeah, I don't think I remember this.
• 1:30:38
  OK, well, so we'll set that aside, cuz you don't remember.
• 1:30:42
  But the uncle character then from the get go I thought that
• 1:30:48
  he was in love with the villain Mung Yao and I think he was like
• 1:30:53
  I still think 100% they were. He definitely was.
• 1:30:57
  Yeah. And there is actually just, you
• 1:30:59
  know, you've touched on the villain.
• 1:31:01
  There is like a little interesting thing that you would
• 1:31:04
  never pick up on the 1st watch but and what are you about to
• 1:31:08
  tell me? No, no, no.
• 1:31:09
  It's nothing like major, but I cut the he they kind of actually
• 1:31:14
  reveal who the villain is right in the first episode.
• 1:31:19
  So because there is the guy that's paying the storyteller
• 1:31:24
  and there's like the storyteller is telling the story of Weiying
• 1:31:27
  and like you know, getting people riled up about, you know
• 1:31:30
  Weiying story and whatnot. And you know how he's the, you
• 1:31:34
  know, Demonic Cultivator and all of this.
• 1:31:37
  And there is somebody who is behind a screen and it is the
• 1:31:41
  villain of the whole drama. Oh, and you kind of And you kind
• 1:31:44
  of like see his silhouette and you kind of like you see you
• 1:31:48
  would associate that silhouette with like that character.
• 1:31:51
  So they kind of give you that like from episode one.
• 1:31:55
  Right. So that's like like nicely.
• 1:31:58
  Yeah. The first.
• 1:31:59
  He's like the baby faced villain.
• 1:32:02
  He literally looked like a baby head on a adult body.
• 1:32:09
  Oh my God. But the the scene, the scene
• 1:32:13
  where he made his father pay? No, let's my God, my God talk
• 1:32:20
  about this villain depraved. Oh my God, like insane.
• 1:32:27
  This guy was insane. Like he, he does not know the
• 1:32:31
  meaning of the word love in any sense, shape or form at all.
• 1:32:37
  And it is insane because also, do you know what it is as well?
• 1:32:41
  It's kind of like he's this like quiet, demure character for a
• 1:32:44
  lot of the drama. So I didn't like him straight
• 1:32:47
  away. No, I never liked, I've, I never
• 1:32:50
  liked the villain. I really was like, oh, that's
• 1:32:52
  the villain. Like, my head was always going
• 1:32:55
  through this and I find this really funny because you're
• 1:32:57
  telling me, I guess this is my logic.
• 1:32:59
  There's like 70 plus guys in the show.
• 1:33:02
  Yeah, one's gonna be only one with dimples.
• 1:33:06
  Has to be the villain. The villain, Yeah, not the
• 1:33:09
  dimples, not the dimples. And The thing is, I find it
• 1:33:17
  quite interesting because there are people who've watched it and
• 1:33:19
  they're kind of like, oh, I never saw that villain coming.
• 1:33:21
  And like, I saw it a mile away. Like, it's pretty obvious he's
• 1:33:26
  gonna be the villain. But I find for some reason, I
• 1:33:29
  find a lot of this with a lot of dramas that I watch, people will
• 1:33:33
  be like, oh, I never saw that coming.
• 1:33:34
  And I was like how baby, there were signs like he was a red
• 1:33:39
  flag this was happening. Yeah.
• 1:33:41
  And so, so yeah, but I think it's quite interesting that I
• 1:33:48
  felt like there was quite a interesting, like I can't say
• 1:33:51
  the word, but anyways, so weighing he is, I'm going to go
• 1:33:55
  this way. Weighing, he's kind of like the
• 1:33:58
  nice person that people want to be evil, whereas the villain
• 1:34:03
  here is like the evil person who pretends to be nice and
• 1:34:08
  everybody follows that person over weighing.
• 1:34:11
  And I felt that was kind of like a nice play on like
• 1:34:14
  expectations. And you know, what people
• 1:34:17
  actually see as evil? The juxtaposition between them
• 1:34:21
  was really like the facades. The facades you put onto the
• 1:34:23
  world, right. Because with how that what you
• 1:34:26
  saw was what you got. Exactly.
• 1:34:28
  And people don't like that. People don't like that.
• 1:34:31
  Yeah, they want the. They want the smoking mirrors.
• 1:34:34
  Yeah. And I find this really
• 1:34:35
  interesting because even in, like real life, not generally
• 1:34:39
  just in dramas, but in real life, people always say, oh, you
• 1:34:42
  know, I really like somebody who's honest.
• 1:34:45
  And it's great when you find people that actually mean that
• 1:34:49
  because like a lot of the time when people say, oh, you know,
• 1:34:53
  you know, honesty, but then you are honest with those people and
• 1:34:55
  those people like, oh God, you're mean or this or that.
• 1:34:58
  And I feel like this is the double standard, exactly like
• 1:35:03
  this is what this drama kind of encapsulated a little bit, is
• 1:35:07
  that, you know, they prefer to see a nice facade than what
• 1:35:11
  people really are. Yeah.
• 1:35:14
  So, Meng Yao, I said. So the final three episodes are
• 1:35:20
  basically just his villain talk. My God.
• 1:35:23
  And I couldn't believe they did that.
• 1:35:24
  I was like this. I don't can't tell this is bad
• 1:35:26
  writing or if they just decided to reveal everything at the last
• 1:35:29
  minute, Every single detail of how he did this at the last
• 1:35:33
  second. I thought that was maybe a miss.
• 1:35:36
  I feel like it was a little longer than I needed it to be
• 1:35:40
  because to me, I feel like you could have threaded it
• 1:35:43
  throughout the whole story so it could like read better in a
• 1:35:48
  sense. And I will be interested to see
• 1:35:50
  because I will eventually finish this book that, you know, this
• 1:35:55
  is based on. I got sidetracked because BTS
• 1:35:58
  released their book, cannot be reading that instead.
• 1:36:01
  So, but I will be interested to see if like in the book there is
• 1:36:05
  like any like Inklings or, you know, threads throughout the
• 1:36:08
  story. Because in the drama there
• 1:36:10
  obviously isn't because apparently there was people that
• 1:36:12
  didn't see that one coming. But you know, I'm not sure how
• 1:36:17
  it was Super Suss the whole time.
• 1:36:20
  I feel like we didn't need the, you know, big, big, long
• 1:36:26
  monologue. It felt like it felt like you've
• 1:36:29
  seen Psycho, right? Hitchcock's Psycho.
• 1:36:32
  I don't think I have what I feel.
• 1:36:38
  I feel like this is becoming a recurring thing where you just
• 1:36:41
  expect me to know these things and I just disappoint you.
• 1:36:45
  So watch Psycho the first of all.
• 1:36:48
  But second of all, for those who have watched Psycho, you might
• 1:36:51
  recognize that the end of the movie has this big God.
• 1:36:55
  I don't want to spoil it now, but how do Oh my God, how do I
• 1:36:59
  say this without spoiling the end of Psycho?
• 1:37:00
  I don't mind spoilers, so go ahead.
• 1:37:02
  So at the end you see that he, Norman Bates is his mother.
• 1:37:08
  He thinks he's his mother, right?
• 1:37:11
  And it's this whole thing, right?
• 1:37:12
  It's a big jump scare and you have the music that then after
• 1:37:17
  that you get this wildly, you know, dated explanation of what
• 1:37:24
  is happening in his psyche from the psychiatrist who comes in
• 1:37:27
  and talks with him after he's been taking in to police
• 1:37:30
  custody. And it's almost like, here's
• 1:37:33
  what you missed, in case you didn't get the ending right.
• 1:37:39
  Like for the audience, it's explaining to the audience like
• 1:37:42
  what's going on with him, like what's wrong with him, right?
• 1:37:47
  In that sense, it felt very much like the psychos psychologist
• 1:37:53
  coming in and explaining the beat for beat, what's going on
• 1:37:58
  with the plot and what you missed.
• 1:38:01
  And you know all the connective tissue that you wanted
• 1:38:04
  throughout the show. You're getting it all the way at
• 1:38:06
  the very end. See, I don't.
• 1:38:09
  I I'm very much a person that I I would rather you show me than
• 1:38:13
  you tell me. Correct.
• 1:38:15
  And there, Yeah. That monologue just doesn't hit
• 1:38:19
  for me because I'm like, you could have shown me like Peppers
• 1:38:23
  of this throughout the story. And like, they could have done
• 1:38:26
  it in a way that if you threaded it enough through the story, it
• 1:38:30
  would have been just as horrifying.
• 1:38:31
  Yeah, exactly. You'd still have the same
• 1:38:33
  impact. Better pacing going.
• 1:38:36
  Yeah, I think they were going for like, oh, this big reveal
• 1:38:40
  impact at the end. Yeah, they were going for the
• 1:38:42
  shock factor. Yeah.
• 1:38:44
  For me it does miss it, miss it a little bit because by then I
• 1:38:46
  was like, I know this is going to be the bad.
• 1:38:48
  Like I've known this is the bad guy.
• 1:38:50
  But you know, however many do we ever find out what he was trying
• 1:38:54
  to dig up in the because in the final.
• 1:38:58
  So they go to this. They figure out where he is
• 1:39:01
  because of a land deed. Land deed that he had in his
• 1:39:05
  secret treasure room. Yeah.
• 1:39:08
  In his house. Yeah, they do.
• 1:39:10
  So then they go to this behind one of the masks temple.
• 1:39:13
  And then inside the temple, he's got all these subordinates
• 1:39:16
  trying to dig up something. Was he, like, digging up?
• 1:39:20
  Is it like a body of like there's a sword in.
• 1:39:23
  Yes. There's the NIA clan head, the
• 1:39:28
  leader that he murdered and decapitated.
• 1:39:33
  Yeah, there's a sword in. So then there was, yeah, that
• 1:39:35
  guy. No, actually the sword wasn't
• 1:39:38
  even in there. It was like somewhere else.
• 1:39:40
  And then what's his name? When Ning found the sword and he
• 1:39:47
  was, like, possessed by the sword.
• 1:39:50
  Yes, he was. Yes, he was.
• 1:39:52
  Lenny combusts in and starts like wreaking havoc, and the
• 1:39:55
  sword is on the loose. But I don't know what the
• 1:39:59
  villain was trying to dig up back there, because it wasn't
• 1:40:02
  supposed to be the body. No, is quite like, they never
• 1:40:06
  answered that question for me. I don't know what he buried
• 1:40:09
  there. He must have like buried
• 1:40:11
  something that he'd wanted and then someone, some other player
• 1:40:15
  swapped whatever it was with the with the body wanted.
• 1:40:19
  Yeah. So if you guys remember anyway,
• 1:40:22
  so but then they say that the other player was that friend,
• 1:40:26
  that bumbling friend who sort of kept passing out during big
• 1:40:32
  moments. I don't know if you remember
• 1:40:35
  because there's so many freaking boys in the show.
• 1:40:38
  This is, well, exactly. This is one of the things.
• 1:40:40
  There's so many characters, so many characters.
• 1:40:43
  And I will say I don't remember all of them by any stretch of
• 1:40:47
  the imagination. I remember like the main one.
• 1:40:50
  Anyway, it's fine. They basically say that all of
• 1:40:53
  the stuff that sort of made the villain Mong Yao come to light,
• 1:40:58
  all of his misdeeds come to light, was because of this other
• 1:41:02
  player and it was their friend. He got him killed.
• 1:41:05
  Yes, yes, yes, yes. He got Mungyo killed because he
• 1:41:08
  was like, Oh yes. And he's about to, actually.
• 1:41:11
  So there's a lot of theories that he's the true like hedge
• 1:41:16
  behind Ming Ming Yao. So people assume that Ming Yao
• 1:41:20
  is like more the obvious villain, whereas the true player
• 1:41:25
  behind it all is like that mumbling French.
• 1:41:28
  A lot of people say that. I I can see it though.
• 1:41:33
  Yeah. So a lot of people did like go
• 1:41:36
  down that theory and that route and see that.
• 1:41:39
  And I think the show like tried to thread that a little bit.
• 1:41:42
  It's the fact that because actually when even they have a
• 1:41:46
  discussion, it's it's all coming back to me.
• 1:41:48
  Now they have a discussion. They have like kind of a
• 1:41:51
  discussion at the end. And I can't remember who that
• 1:41:55
  mumbling friend is talking to, whether it's weighing or
• 1:41:59
  whatever it is. It's both of them.
• 1:42:00
  It's weighing and, Yeah, and. And they kind of like in that
• 1:42:04
  discussion you kind of see that he's been threading things
• 1:42:07
  together for quite a while. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:42:11
  They were like, I think it was weighing.
• 1:42:15
  He walks off, like the mumbling friend who's maybe the grand
• 1:42:19
  grand villain walks off and then weighing says, oh, there's a
• 1:42:23
  bunch of questions that we don't have answer, but it doesn't
• 1:42:25
  matter because I think I think I know who did it, basically.
• 1:42:29
  Yeah. And I think rattles off a bunch
• 1:42:31
  of questions that are unanswered.
• 1:42:34
  Yeah. And it's all probably this guy
• 1:42:36
  who was doing it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:42:37
  And actually, I'm thinking back now and I'm wondering if it was
• 1:42:43
  either behind the curtain. See, I'd have to watch that
• 1:42:47
  particular scene again. But behind the curtain, I wonder
• 1:42:50
  if it's like, you know, the villain that we've come to
• 1:42:53
  assume with Ming Yao, or if it's like that grand villain, the
• 1:42:56
  mumbling friend. And I feel like, you know, the
• 1:42:59
  mumbling friend is somebody who nobody paid attention to, and
• 1:43:03
  yet he's probably the one pulling all the puppets.
• 1:43:06
  See, I don't. I think he was just bidding his
• 1:43:09
  time, yeah. And was paying attention and
• 1:43:14
  very observant and was collecting evidence when he
• 1:43:18
  could. And then when Meng Yao was like,
• 1:43:22
  at the end of his rope and was time to jump in, yeah, then he
• 1:43:28
  jumped in and sort of took him down.
• 1:43:31
  That would make sense. But that guy again, despicable,
• 1:43:36
  nasty. He married his sister, got her
• 1:43:40
  pregnant, killed his rapist father because the sister was a
• 1:43:45
  child of rape. And then he was like, well, I'll
• 1:43:49
  just kill my dad. And then he killed his dad by
• 1:43:52
  hiring. What was it like 20 old haggard
• 1:43:57
  washed up prostitutes to come and, like, rape him to death.
• 1:44:02
  Yeah, that's basically what I did.
• 1:44:03
  That's what I heard. That's what I got it from it.
• 1:44:06
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what you.
• 1:44:07
  And I think pretty much everybody gathered from that.
• 1:44:10
  And that is sick like that. Is sick.
• 1:44:13
  Sick. To have somebody, like rape you
• 1:44:16
  to death, that's like a. Snake sick.
• 1:44:19
  It's so nasty. Yeah, those scenes are like, I I
• 1:44:22
  don't even want to. And The thing is, but The thing
• 1:44:24
  is they went so hard there. Yeah, but then they didn't go
• 1:44:28
  hard anywhere else. I guess I was surprised that
• 1:44:32
  they actually went so far with the villain.
• 1:44:37
  And The thing is like, he just has this look on his no, because
• 1:44:40
  he just wanna. And then I'm like, OK, there's
• 1:44:42
  so many chances because he's talking for three episodes and
• 1:44:47
  they can't get the jump on him. Yeah, I was confused as like
• 1:44:52
  they, I understand they all lost.
• 1:44:54
  They have sealed their powers or whatever because he's threatened
• 1:44:58
  them and whatever. But you're telling me you can't
• 1:45:01
  pick up a stick, You can't like do anything at all, y'all have
• 1:45:05
  swords? You can still use the swords as
• 1:45:08
  just swords versus I don't know if they could.
• 1:45:11
  The thing is, I don't know if they could actually in chief
• 1:45:13
  their swords without, you know, their power because their swords
• 1:45:17
  are directly linked to. But then Long John still had his
• 1:45:19
  sword, and then he sealed himself.
• 1:45:21
  But then he still was like, unchieving it and whatnot.
• 1:45:25
  Then then in that same scene, so like, there he goes out the
• 1:45:29
  window. My theory goes out the window.
• 1:45:31
  Then I was so confused. I was like, no one's gonna get
• 1:45:33
  up and just deck them. Obviously not.
• 1:45:36
  Obviously not. That monologue was really
• 1:45:38
  important. He's so smart, actually.
• 1:45:42
  Actually, I don't know if that was on purpose because they
• 1:45:46
  wanted to know all the details. I don't think so.
• 1:45:50
  No, I'm stretching here. OK?
• 1:45:53
  I'm stretching. Also, I didn't like.
• 1:45:58
  There was that villain that they kept referring to the whole
• 1:46:02
  show. Shui Young, who was that guy
• 1:46:05
  that killed this clan singlehandedly And he had the
• 1:46:09
  last Yin iron piece and was using it and then he terrorized
• 1:46:16
  that, that couple. Do you remember?
• 1:46:19
  One was like all in white and the other one was all in black.
• 1:46:22
  Oh yeah, they like the Scorpion. I call him Scorpion.
• 1:46:25
  He's not Scorpion King nickname for this character.
• 1:46:30
  Yeah, the Scorpion. No, no, the guy all in black
• 1:46:32
  because he plays his Scorpion King elsewhere.
• 1:46:35
  And that's just kind of like, oh, so sorry.
• 1:46:37
  OK, yeah, it didn't realize. So yeah, OK And yes, I do
• 1:46:41
  vaguely remember this storyline. See, this is the problem.
• 1:46:44
  Badly told to me. They could have been a lot
• 1:46:47
  better. That story could have.
• 1:46:48
  I feel like it could have been a lot more intriguing.
• 1:46:52
  And again, for me, right. I love this story for the main
• 1:46:56
  couple, so whenever it diverges, it's hard.
• 1:47:00
  Yeah. And like when I was watching it
• 1:47:03
  back again, I was like skipping a lot because I don't really
• 1:47:07
  care about this. I don't really, you know, is it
• 1:47:10
  really? Do I really need to watch this
• 1:47:11
  again? I probably don't.
• 1:47:13
  So yeah, I'm very much of the thing that I love the main
• 1:47:18
  couple, and I love the iconography of Wei Yang playing
• 1:47:22
  the flute. What's that word mean?
• 1:47:26
  It's like the time now. Every time he showed up and he
• 1:47:30
  was like, silhouetted against the sky.
• 1:47:32
  OK, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Moon and darkness.
• 1:47:35
  And then he's like wreathed in, like all of this black smoke
• 1:47:39
  coming emanating from him as he's playing the flute.
• 1:47:42
  All that is great to me. Beautiful, beautiful.
• 1:47:46
  And actually, I feel like we Shaozan is one of those people
• 1:47:51
  that actually looks really damn good in period.
• 1:47:54
  Oh yeah, he does. He looks really, really good.
• 1:47:56
  He looks really cute. Yeah.
• 1:48:00
  Yeah. So I feel like he can pull off
• 1:48:04
  those characters really well. I do love or like the flute.
• 1:48:07
  See like the even though he wasn't playing.
• 1:48:09
  Because those flutes technically, let me just say
• 1:48:13
  that the flute playing itself questionable.
• 1:48:17
  So questionable, so bad, so bad. And I have a huge admiration for
• 1:48:24
  anyone who can play an instrument, especially the flu.
• 1:48:26
  I used to have a really good friend who played the flute and
• 1:48:30
  amazing in in Hispanic music. There's a lot of flute in like
• 1:48:35
  Cuban music and stuff. And so she would always play
• 1:48:40
  really nice on the flute. And I I don't think that these
• 1:48:47
  guys took any lessons in how to play the dither, how to play the
• 1:48:52
  flutes. There was no semblance, not
• 1:48:57
  fooling anybody. They did not have the playback
• 1:48:59
  on set for these poor guys to try and fake it.
• 1:49:03
  But actually if you see like them perform and sing together,
• 1:49:08
  it's actually really good performance.
• 1:49:10
  Shellzan's a really, really damn good singer.
• 1:49:12
  Yeah, I read that. So you have to look into it.
• 1:49:16
  Definitely. He's like, his singing is
• 1:49:19
  really, really good. And would they?
• 1:49:21
  The main OSD is sang by both of them and they they do, you know,
• 1:49:26
  they do sing really well together.
• 1:49:28
  So bless less. Like, yeah, the instrument.
• 1:49:33
  But then again, the instrument playing is always like, I
• 1:49:35
  haven't seen a drama, at least of the ones that I've watched,
• 1:49:40
  that I'm like, Oh my God, they're definitely playing.
• 1:49:42
  Like, it's always questionable whether somebody's playing or
• 1:49:46
  not. I admire people who can fake it
• 1:49:49
  really well, they can't. They.
• 1:49:51
  I mean, there's no way, there's no way they can figure it.
• 1:49:55
  One thing that was funny because there was a lot of comedy in
• 1:49:58
  like in the 1st 25 episodes or so.
• 1:50:01
  Yeah, Yeah. Let's talk about the animatronic
• 1:50:04
  dog that they had. Do you remember this dog?
• 1:50:10
  It was a giant black dog animatronic that was in the wet.
• 1:50:15
  The Wen clan prison because they imprisoned him.
• 1:50:18
  I do remember this, OK? And it like keel over laughing
• 1:50:27
  because it was so bad and they pull like a bunch of petroleum
• 1:50:33
  Jelly all over. It's like mouth to make it seem
• 1:50:35
  like it was drooling. Oh my God, get the fuck out.
• 1:50:38
  My sister walked by. As you know, my sister makes fun
• 1:50:41
  of me for watching Asian dramas. She still thinks they're all
• 1:50:44
  shit, but then she walks by during this scene and she goes,
• 1:50:51
  Bella, how the hell have you been Loca?
• 1:50:53
  Because it reminded her of Twilight and the wolves in
• 1:50:59
  Twilight. Yeah, it was really bad.
• 1:51:02
  It was really, really bad. Oh, sorry.
• 1:51:07
  I need to comport myself because really it's kind of like, it's
• 1:51:11
  kind of like the statue that like when Wei Yang does come
• 1:51:15
  back and they have like, this statue tracing that that was not
• 1:51:19
  either. You know that.
• 1:51:20
  Yeah. I don't even get.
• 1:51:21
  And then I didn't even get like, who was doing it.
• 1:51:24
  Why weird. That dancing statue.
• 1:51:29
  Yeah, yeah, the dancing statue. I don't even know.
• 1:51:32
  So that could night that connected with the young girl
• 1:51:35
  the I don't yeah one big eye roll after another.
• 1:51:40
  But I like the name of his sword and the design of each sword in
• 1:51:48
  this. It was really pretty.
• 1:51:49
  It was really, really pretty. And his sword had like it came
• 1:51:52
  from bark. It looked like it was encased in
• 1:51:54
  bark. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:51:56
  From a tree. And it was called Swebian.
• 1:52:00
  Yeah. And I looked it up.
• 1:52:01
  That means whatever. Slash, do as you please slash.
• 1:52:03
  Casual, which makes a lot of sense.
• 1:52:07
  Casual. Yeah.
• 1:52:08
  Casual. Well, that does actually suit
• 1:52:09
  him. Yeah.
• 1:52:11
  And they were like, did you name it that?
• 1:52:13
  And he was like, well, it just kind of like happened.
• 1:52:15
  And I liked it. I liked to sword.
• 1:52:19
  I like to, yeah. Lands and sword is like very him
• 1:52:23
  as well, like very, you know, clean cuts and whatnot.
• 1:52:27
  So yeah, Did you have anything else you wanted to add about the
• 1:52:33
  show? I don't think so.
• 1:52:37
  I think I've said everything that I wanted to say.
• 1:52:40
  Okay cuz I told you beforehand I did not come in with any notes I
• 1:52:45
  have. So I basically have come to the
• 1:52:47
  end of my notes cuz I didn't have any.
• 1:52:50
  I think I had. Let me see if I had any notes.
• 1:52:52
  Okay. I think I've talked about most
• 1:52:55
  of the notes that I had, actually.
• 1:52:58
  Yeah. I I like, I just picked some
• 1:53:00
  scenes that I really enjoyed. So like, you know episode 35
• 1:53:04
  Piggyback Time. That's.
• 1:53:08
  And and I think that was about it.
• 1:53:13
  And yeah, I think I actually have talked about all of it.
• 1:53:18
  So. So, yeah, OK.
• 1:53:20
  Well, I think if you come to the end of the episode and you'll
• 1:53:23
  listen to us for these couple of hours.
• 1:53:26
  Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.
• 1:53:28
  You know where to find us at Tibuck, Pod and Liliana.
• 1:53:31
  Please share your socials in case they haven't listened to
• 1:53:33
  any of the other episodes with you.
• 1:53:36
  You can find me on all the socials at a T and Soju Pod and
• 1:53:41
  that is, you know, Twitter, Instagram, even now.
• 1:53:45
  TikTok. You know, because apparently
• 1:53:47
  I've joined the TikTok craze now.
• 1:53:49
  And so, yeah, you can find me on all of those, but I mostly hang
• 1:53:53
  out in Instagram and whatnot. Yes.
• 1:53:57
  So please talk to us about the unteamed.
• 1:53:59
  If you have any questions or if you have some something you'd
• 1:54:02
  like to share with us, please do.
• 1:54:03
  We're all ears. You know Liliana liked the show.
• 1:54:07
  I did not. But that doesn't mean that, you
• 1:54:09
  know we can't have a conversation, OK?
• 1:54:11
  I'm always a fan of Discourse. I'm always a fan of talking
• 1:54:15
  through differences or or sharing the same opinions.
• 1:54:18
  That's totally fine. And if you have anything you'd
• 1:54:22
  like to like us to review, that's great.
• 1:54:24
  Please send in all of your requests.
• 1:54:27
  I love to hear them. I do have a running list of
• 1:54:30
  shows that you'd like us to review.
• 1:54:33
  And I don't know who knows, maybe we might meet up for a
• 1:54:35
  word of honor like, Oh my God, I think you would have, I'm not
• 1:54:40
  gonna lie, would have a better time I think so lower your
• 1:54:44
  expectations on the romance. But there is a but but they
• 1:54:48
  pushed a lot more in Word of honor.
• 1:54:51
  And I feel like you would love, like Wekushing's character,
• 1:54:54
  'cause he's just, he's a hoot. He really is.
• 1:54:58
  And again, second couple is a hetero couple.
• 1:55:03
  And they, they deliver. They're good, too.
• 1:55:06
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:55:07
  Yeah. So I feel like, I feel like you
• 1:55:10
  might enjoy word of what it might be more to your speech.
• 1:55:13
  But then again, now you're kind of like are expecting a bit, You
• 1:55:16
  know, you might go in with different expectations.
• 1:55:18
  I yeah, I honestly like, I got a lot of it.
• 1:55:23
  I understood and I appreciate the show.
• 1:55:26
  I just don't think I. It was For me, Yeah, I think
• 1:55:31
  it's like I said, it's not one that I would personally
• 1:55:34
  recommend to you. It wasn't satisfying.
• 1:55:37
  Yeah. For me it's not like it's not.
• 1:55:40
  I don't know. It's just one of those shows
• 1:55:41
  that like I don't see. I didn't see you enjoying, you
• 1:55:46
  know, that much. All right.
• 1:55:50
  I'm not sure what kind of friend that makes me that.
• 1:55:55
  I just know you get me that you just get me.
• 1:55:57
  And I think, I think now that we've done this, we've just
• 1:56:00
  become closer. Well, thanks so much for
• 1:56:05
  listening. And thank you, Liliana, again
• 1:56:08
  for coming on the show. As always, you are such a
• 1:56:10
  wonderful friend in the drama world, and I can't wait to share
• 1:56:14
  more dramas with you. And that's, that's it.
• 1:56:17
  That's been our show. I'm Jessica, and this has been
• 1:56:19
  the Tebaki Rambos. Podcast.
• 1:56:47
  So, so sugar doll from here should go straight here here
• 1:56:54
  when she's shouting. So she should go will, shall to,
• 1:57:09
  We will, shall feel faith when she's shouting.
• 1:57:13
  Oh you turn turn down the leave you for her love.
• 1:57:19
  Yeah, yeah she go Oh yeah she's she's shouting along and here is
• 1:57:31
  your for light your world oh you turn down.
• 1:57:43
  Yeah, yeah, yeah.