《成化十四年》- episode 5 to 8

Wow, that went to shit real fast. So uh...

• What happened to the mystery? Why is the show suddenly concerned with government corruption and balancing state powers and managing relations with neighboring countries?

• The detective spends 4 episodes moving his home, making a nuisance of himself in the kitchen, and chasing a girl down in revenge for his chopsticks. Meanwhile, co-lead is getting tortured by corrupt local official while the morally gray eunuch is negotiating multilateral trade agreements with neighboring countries...

• Characterization is all over the place for every major character. It feels like there are multiple writers with varying interpretations of the characters so the personality changes from scene to scene with no rhyme or reason.

• The story can't decide if it's serious or not. The tone swings wildly between grave discussions about foreign invasions, the problem of human trafficking by corrupt officials, and slapstick rom-com hijinks.

• The acting have slid from middling to being outright bad.

• I'm baffled by why the show dragged Jackie Chan into its production because...uh...other than two fight scenes, it's been pretty much just dialogue.

TL;DR - the show is bad now. Do not recommend.

My instinct is to stop now, but I'll probably watch a bit more because hope springs eternal, but my expectations have plummeted.

景枫 rec

【景枫/景恒】旖旎月迷
Jing Yuan gets roofied, Dan Feng helps out.

Pros:

• Top!Jing Yuan

• Protective!Dan Feng

• Semi-classical writing style (during the non-porn bits)

• Using medical gel as lubrication.

• Dan Feng is offended that Jing Yuan is using his medicine for butt sex. 😆

Cons:

• Not sure why Dan Heng is tagged because he doesn't show up at all in this story.

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I realized that in my attempt to distract myself from HSR, I got sucked into a fandom that has even less activity, so now I'm treading back to 景枫 because even a slow trickle is better than nothing. But thanks to 王砚×兰珏 shipping, I've gotten even more picky over the writing. Because frankly the fanfic in 《君子盟》 fandom is shockingly well written on average. At least what little of it exists.

Also, stylistically, modern Chinese is so much less literary than classical Chinese. Something just feels...bland about modern vernacular Chinese when it's written down. It feels like I'm reading children's writing. Which I am. But I'd like to stop being reminded of that fact.