cashew | Wednesday, October 16th, 2024

After failing to find good mysteries, I went back to 古装 dramas and started watching 《少年歌行》(The Blood of Youth). The English title is a horrible translation. It's more like "The Ballad of Youth", but whatever.

First six episodes thoughts:

Very shounen. Very manga.
High production value for a web series that's cobbled together through many sponsors. Holy shit.
Liking the music.
Pleasantly surprised at emotive scenes. I was honestly expecting just fight fight fight and more fighting, but shockingly there were emotions and stuff. Am honestly taken off guard given how the first episode went.
Definitely was waffling back and forth trying to figure out who was going to end up being the main character. The show is an ensemble cast, but the attention isn't equally given to the party and has a definite "Main Character". Thankfully, it's looking like 萧瑟 will be the main protagonist. I was worried it would be 雷无桀 (per the shounen tropes), but thankfully, no, it's still a ~~Xianxia~~Wuxia story so the idiot doesn't get to be the main character. (Apparently this series is classified as Wuxia despite the frankly BS levels of superpowers...)
So far I'm liking the main character...so far. I'm always worried with these shows that the story will give me a reason to hate the main character as the series carries on. Hoping the guy doesn't become unbearable later on. There's always a risk with these "cool types" turning into unbearable know-it-alls or emo-angsty woobies.
Really hoping the other brothers will show up and aren't horrible let downs just to make the main character look good by comparison.
The romance is so perfunctory I'm laughing a bit. At least it's not taking up all the oxygen. Thank goodness.
Acting is pretty standard idol acting, which is to say, eh. It's not horrible, it's not great. It's just OK.
Apparently less popular than 《君子盟》 on Lofter, but more popular than 《君子盟》 on AO3. Interesting. Wondering why that's the case, since usually AO3 serves as a repository for fic that can't get past Lofter censors, so relative fandom size shouldn't flip like that. Apparently was looking up the wrong tags. Looking up ship tags turned up more results. Now the numbers match.
The names are soooooo cheesy. Doesn't matter that I've had classmates with same names. Still cheesy.
The writing is very...uh... The really inconsistent grammar is throwing me off. Better than HSR...but like that's a really low bar to be beating. Both 《御赐小仵作》 and 《君子盟》 have much better grammar. However, at least the plot is moving somewhat quickly, so I'm curious...for now. We'll see how long I can put up with the shounen vibes.
Girls are apparently set dressing, as per the usual with shounen (and shounen-esque) series. -_- Can't decide what's worse: no women or token women representation...