SCI Intro Post with a Few Meta Ramblings
ETA: Made some minor edits July 2, 2019. I'm out of practice on long-form fannishness. :P
I have multiple, active fannish loves at the moment but one of them is SCI. When I first fell for it, I had absolutely no business falling head first into anything given I was up to my neck in physics at the time along with so many other fannish things. There was a vid linked on Twitter (Sweet but Psycho by Custom-Made-Heart) that I watched though and it was instantaneous. The show is pretty, yes, but the vid pulls out the thing that makes it absolute Bluenip, which is the relationship between the two central characters and the way they see each other. The excess of competence kink between the two of them doesn't hurt anything.
SCI is a Chinese detective drama set in Hong Kong and based on a BL webnovel. LGBT content is censored in China, so it's been adapted with a brotherhood relationship but everyone knows what's up and the veil is VERY thin, it's just not as explicit as in the novel. In the webnovel, Bai Yutong and Zhan Yao's mothers were good friends and neighbors before the boys were born an hour apart, so the two of them were always going to grow up together whether they liked it or not. Their history in that context is of best friends and primary competition in a way that "frenemy" doesn't quite seem to cover, with later separations as Zhan Yao went off to New York for grad school and Bai Yutong spent time in the military. The show generates some further artificial distance in recent years with the actual script in service of explaining things to the audience and, presumably, opening things up for character arcs, but it sacrifices making some sense in the process. If it weren't the age of social media, if their families weren't so close, if the two leads weren't so comfortable with each other, it might work, but as it is, I just mentally edit it to somewhere between show canon and novel canon.
Bai Yutong chipperly making trouble for Zhan Yao
Those flaws aside, it does also seem to have gotten hit a bit hard by China's censorship stick. Bai Yutong, Zhan Yao, and Gongsun Zhe all three were name changes post production (the novel originals were Bai Yutang, Zhan Zhao, and Gongsun Ce), which was the main thing that led to a full dubbing of the series. There's some scenes that are either missing or cut-off - one of the earlier and more obvious is a bed wrestling scene that abruptly fades to black… but the actors and crew blocking the original version shows up in the end credits behind-the-scenes (pretty sure that's code for "We tried! They wouldn't let us air it!"). I believe Bai Yutong calling Zhan Yao "cat" was scaled back further post-production too, although there's still plenty of visual references along with Bai Yutong being "mouse". They're childhood nicknames for each other from the novel: Bai Yutong the mouse (or, often, "lab rat") to Zhan Yao's sneaky cat (or "kitten")*.
*Slightly different connotation from English; I'm wondering if it isn't a moderation of Xiao (little or younger) + "cat", vs a name? So little Cat or young Cat becomes kitten?
Cast of [Main, Younger] Characters Wherein I Get Distracted
Bai Yutong is very physically capable and an excellent tactician, with the awards and upward trajectory to prove both. He has also grown up as the youngest in his family and, bless him, he acts like it. Neither the Bai family nor their neighbors, the Zhan family, are poor; Bai Qintang spoils her little brother and keeps him in the style to which he's accustomed (literally canon) including a near half million dollar sports car (not kidding). He has neat freak/germophobe tendencies and you can find him in pristine, virtually head to toe white at all times. In the second episode, Chief Bao literally orders him to move into Zhan Yao's police dormitory apartment in a highly amusing conversation, ostensibly for Zhan Yao's safety and general well-being. Only slightly paraphrasing, the conversation went like this:
Bai Yutong: Zhan Yao sprained his wrist.
Chief Bao, nodding: You're moving in with Zhan Yao as of today.
BY: Wait, wha-
CB: He's terrible at taking care of himself.
BY: But-
CB: Also, you're too emotional.
BY: *offended face*
Zhan Yao is a genius, an incidental artist, and a criminal psychologist**. He's also an awful shot, a hazard in the kitchen, and generally terrible at self-preservation. He gives Bai Yutong heart palpitations on the regular but, to be fair, the reverse is also true.
**[Initial disclaimer: This show has terrible psychology top to bottom. We're going to run with what the show more or less intends, not objective science. The latter would just be a bunch of question marks - both for my own lack of knowledge and the absolute certainty That's Really Not How It Works.]
One of the things I find... interesting? is the way everyone treats Zhan Yao like a dangerous weapon. Which he is, but at least in American TV it would be Bai Yutong who'd be the hothead, the loose canon. The one everyone makes an obvious effort to manage. Zhan Yao isn't a hot head, he's the exact opposite, and it's a big part of what makes him dangerous. The important part of that being it's widely acknowledged from the beginning and he's being intensely managed by people in his life in ways the show makes explicit. The Chief's method is to give him enough room and resources and string to amuse himself. His father tries to protect him by undercutting his ego. Other people would encourage his worst tendencies for their own ends.
Gun range trope? Gun range trope.
But if Zhan Yao is a loaded weapon, then Bai Yutong is the safety mechanism. They have a long history and have had long separations; according to the show, for all that everyone mentions both their names in the same breath, they haven't spent significant time together since secondary school/undergrad(?) and they had apparently been orbiting each other mostly from argument distance for a while prior to SCI being established. In fact, when the show opens, Zhan Yao is on the cusp of returning to New York for further study and research, presumably walking back out of the periphery of Bai Yutong's life again. And yet anyone who's known the two since they were children acknowledge - again, explicitly - that Bai Yutong's presence is a significant boon to Zhan Yao's well being. Or, more precisely, to everyone else's.
Some use Bai Yutong's presence to keep Zhan Yao under control, Chief Bao in particular. He deliberately throws them together either by playing their competitiveness off each other or through direct orders. It's a little hard to tell strictly from canon, but I would also argue that managing Zhan Yao and keeping him in close proximity to Bai Yutong is actually his main motivation for creating SCI. Others, like Zhan Yao's father, use Bai Yutong's absence as a threat: At one point he issues the ultimatum that unless Zhan Yao toes the line, he'll forbid Zhan Yao from seeing Bai Yutong. It's an empty threat for multiple reasons, but Zhan Yao doesn't necessarily know that and he looks rattled.
Ultimately the two of them are yin and yang, Bai Yutong's ordered light standing in contrast to Zhan Yao's moral grayness and darker inclinations. They balance each other, Bai Yutong tethering Zhan Yao to the light when others would drag him down. The older generation is very invested in that balance because they've seen first hand what happens when someone with Zhan Yao's gifts falls into the darkness: namely, Zhao Jue. He is the cautionary tale, the once friend that became the boogeyman in the closet. So the previous generation fear for Zhan Yao, and are afraid of him, and even care for him, but it is Bai Yutong that accepts him, and that is why it works.
Bai Qintang and Gongsun Zhe
Oh, god, they're both terrible in their own special ways. They have their redeeming moments, and I actually do love Bai Qintang as a character, but by the end of season one I'd just thrown up my hands and decided they deserved each other. Bai Qintang was gender flipped for the show, but she gets played as a hair more of a loose canon than her novel counterpart, which doesn't work as well against a more tepid version of Gongsun. In the novel, they're better matched in the middle (Gongsun is meaner and less predictable, Bai Jinting is a bit more controlled in his actions although more physical with little brother Bai Yutong).
Freshly-Back-From-Europe Qintang and Hong Kong Business Qintang
Bai Qintang is vice-president of the multi-national Bai Enterprises*** and is perpetually shadowed by two identical bodyguards, Ding Zhaolan and Ding Zhaohui, who are fully on board with their role as observers of Bai Qintang/Gongsun Zhe daytime drama. She was sent away for schooling relatively young for canon related reasons and has been overseas virtually ever since. The show does a poor job setting her history up, but the most coherent version is that besides serving as company executive, she also serves as a consultant for the International Commercial Crime Bureau division of the Hong Kong police with occasional detective duties. It would be a big improvement if she had more of her own storyline with minimal to no Gongsun, but obsession is one of Bai Qintang's things, and she's obsessed with Gongsun, so here we are. She's blunt, demanding, comes with a wicked temper, drinks too much, knows how to handle a weapon, doesn't know the meaning of the word "no", adores Zhan Yao, and loves her baby brother more than anything.
***The show calls it her multi-national company but also makes her vice-president and a detective with the ICCB of the Hong Kong Police. It does still establish she's spent most of her time overseas since she was a child or since her teens, those ages depending on whether you're looking at the ages of the actors or reading the subs. It makes the most sense that she had a life altering injury as an older child but went overseas in her teens a few years later, so that's what I go with. The police connection is just mentioned a few times without anything really coming of it, but it works if one assumes it's more of an intermittent role she fell into through her family connections. Those connections include the plot-dependent fact that Bai Yutong's and Zhan Yao's fathers were both on the force with Chief Bao (and in the novel there have been 5 generations of Bai policemen), but, as mentioned before, both families are well off. Given that and and Bai Qintang's age, I head canon that the company itself is run by the matriarchs. Note: This conflicts with show canon, but show canon doesn't make a lot of sense on the subject, so I do what I want. Hilariously, the writers clearly don't know what "Bai Enterprises" entails because neither do Zhan Yao OR Bai Yutong. Although this harkens back to the novel to some degree, and they try to sell it as "no one says no to her" and "I'm afraid to ask", I maintain neither of them having any idea is a characterization misstep regardless of whether it's strictly her company or the family's.
Gongsun Zhe is theoretically SCI's medical examiner but, in the grand tradition of certain types of shows, he's fills the roles of medical examiner, forensic specialist, field medic, and surgeon. I… really prefer his novel counterpart, to be honest. In the novel he's part of the too-pretty-for-their-own-good triumverate of Bai Yutong and Zhan Yao, but still older and, in fact, taught one of their classes at the academy. Everyone is vaguely - or explicitly - terrified of novel!Gongsun's very Addams Family aesthetic.
The Rest of SCI
I always find this sort of thing helpful when I first start watching a show or reading fic, so as a public service, the other initial members of SCI are:
Jiang Lin - The computer/tech expert with all associated cliches [gender flipped from the novel].
Ma Han - The sniper. Seems relatively inexperienced at detective work, per se, but smart with a superb hit rate [also gender flipped from the novel].
Zhao Fui - He seems the least qualified of all of them but has extensive undercover experience and is most likely to be assigned the unobtrusive eyes and ears kind of jobs.
Wang Shao - He loves food and has connections everywhere. He's Zhan Yao's source of information in Bai Yutong's department prior to the founding of SCI.
There's a few other important people that show up over the course of season one, but even mentioning their names would be spoilers, so I'll have to leave them mysterious for the purposes of this post. :)
You can find the various English subtitled eps linked here: SCI Eng Subs
And the translations of the first novel arc here: Novel English Translation
That's the only bit of the novel that I know of as translated, so if anyone has any links to further translations, let me know. <3
Crossposted to Dreamwidth. Comment here or there. ♥ Blue :)
I have multiple, active fannish loves at the moment but one of them is SCI. When I first fell for it, I had absolutely no business falling head first into anything given I was up to my neck in physics at the time along with so many other fannish things. There was a vid linked on Twitter (Sweet but Psycho by Custom-Made-Heart) that I watched though and it was instantaneous. The show is pretty, yes, but the vid pulls out the thing that makes it absolute Bluenip, which is the relationship between the two central characters and the way they see each other. The excess of competence kink between the two of them doesn't hurt anything.
SCI is a Chinese detective drama set in Hong Kong and based on a BL webnovel. LGBT content is censored in China, so it's been adapted with a brotherhood relationship but everyone knows what's up and the veil is VERY thin, it's just not as explicit as in the novel. In the webnovel, Bai Yutong and Zhan Yao's mothers were good friends and neighbors before the boys were born an hour apart, so the two of them were always going to grow up together whether they liked it or not. Their history in that context is of best friends and primary competition in a way that "frenemy" doesn't quite seem to cover, with later separations as Zhan Yao went off to New York for grad school and Bai Yutong spent time in the military. The show generates some further artificial distance in recent years with the actual script in service of explaining things to the audience and, presumably, opening things up for character arcs, but it sacrifices making some sense in the process. If it weren't the age of social media, if their families weren't so close, if the two leads weren't so comfortable with each other, it might work, but as it is, I just mentally edit it to somewhere between show canon and novel canon.
Bai Yutong chipperly making trouble for Zhan Yao
Those flaws aside, it does also seem to have gotten hit a bit hard by China's censorship stick. Bai Yutong, Zhan Yao, and Gongsun Zhe all three were name changes post production (the novel originals were Bai Yutang, Zhan Zhao, and Gongsun Ce), which was the main thing that led to a full dubbing of the series. There's some scenes that are either missing or cut-off - one of the earlier and more obvious is a bed wrestling scene that abruptly fades to black… but the actors and crew blocking the original version shows up in the end credits behind-the-scenes (pretty sure that's code for "We tried! They wouldn't let us air it!"). I believe Bai Yutong calling Zhan Yao "cat" was scaled back further post-production too, although there's still plenty of visual references along with Bai Yutong being "mouse". They're childhood nicknames for each other from the novel: Bai Yutong the mouse (or, often, "lab rat") to Zhan Yao's sneaky cat (or "kitten")*.
*Slightly different connotation from English; I'm wondering if it isn't a moderation of Xiao (little or younger) + "cat", vs a name? So little Cat or young Cat becomes kitten?
Cast of [Main, Younger] Characters Wherein I Get Distracted
Bai Yutong is very physically capable and an excellent tactician, with the awards and upward trajectory to prove both. He has also grown up as the youngest in his family and, bless him, he acts like it. Neither the Bai family nor their neighbors, the Zhan family, are poor; Bai Qintang spoils her little brother and keeps him in the style to which he's accustomed (literally canon) including a near half million dollar sports car (not kidding). He has neat freak/germophobe tendencies and you can find him in pristine, virtually head to toe white at all times. In the second episode, Chief Bao literally orders him to move into Zhan Yao's police dormitory apartment in a highly amusing conversation, ostensibly for Zhan Yao's safety and general well-being. Only slightly paraphrasing, the conversation went like this:
Bai Yutong: Zhan Yao sprained his wrist.
Chief Bao, nodding: You're moving in with Zhan Yao as of today.
BY: Wait, wha-
CB: He's terrible at taking care of himself.
BY: But-
CB: Also, you're too emotional.
BY: *offended face*
Zhan Yao is a genius, an incidental artist, and a criminal psychologist**. He's also an awful shot, a hazard in the kitchen, and generally terrible at self-preservation. He gives Bai Yutong heart palpitations on the regular but, to be fair, the reverse is also true.
**[Initial disclaimer: This show has terrible psychology top to bottom. We're going to run with what the show more or less intends, not objective science. The latter would just be a bunch of question marks - both for my own lack of knowledge and the absolute certainty That's Really Not How It Works.]
One of the things I find... interesting? is the way everyone treats Zhan Yao like a dangerous weapon. Which he is, but at least in American TV it would be Bai Yutong who'd be the hothead, the loose canon. The one everyone makes an obvious effort to manage. Zhan Yao isn't a hot head, he's the exact opposite, and it's a big part of what makes him dangerous. The important part of that being it's widely acknowledged from the beginning and he's being intensely managed by people in his life in ways the show makes explicit. The Chief's method is to give him enough room and resources and string to amuse himself. His father tries to protect him by undercutting his ego. Other people would encourage his worst tendencies for their own ends.
Gun range trope? Gun range trope.
But if Zhan Yao is a loaded weapon, then Bai Yutong is the safety mechanism. They have a long history and have had long separations; according to the show, for all that everyone mentions both their names in the same breath, they haven't spent significant time together since secondary school/undergrad(?) and they had apparently been orbiting each other mostly from argument distance for a while prior to SCI being established. In fact, when the show opens, Zhan Yao is on the cusp of returning to New York for further study and research, presumably walking back out of the periphery of Bai Yutong's life again. And yet anyone who's known the two since they were children acknowledge - again, explicitly - that Bai Yutong's presence is a significant boon to Zhan Yao's well being. Or, more precisely, to everyone else's.
Some use Bai Yutong's presence to keep Zhan Yao under control, Chief Bao in particular. He deliberately throws them together either by playing their competitiveness off each other or through direct orders. It's a little hard to tell strictly from canon, but I would also argue that managing Zhan Yao and keeping him in close proximity to Bai Yutong is actually his main motivation for creating SCI. Others, like Zhan Yao's father, use Bai Yutong's absence as a threat: At one point he issues the ultimatum that unless Zhan Yao toes the line, he'll forbid Zhan Yao from seeing Bai Yutong. It's an empty threat for multiple reasons, but Zhan Yao doesn't necessarily know that and he looks rattled.
Ultimately the two of them are yin and yang, Bai Yutong's ordered light standing in contrast to Zhan Yao's moral grayness and darker inclinations. They balance each other, Bai Yutong tethering Zhan Yao to the light when others would drag him down. The older generation is very invested in that balance because they've seen first hand what happens when someone with Zhan Yao's gifts falls into the darkness: namely, Zhao Jue. He is the cautionary tale, the once friend that became the boogeyman in the closet. So the previous generation fear for Zhan Yao, and are afraid of him, and even care for him, but it is Bai Yutong that accepts him, and that is why it works.
Bai Qintang and Gongsun Zhe
Oh, god, they're both terrible in their own special ways. They have their redeeming moments, and I actually do love Bai Qintang as a character, but by the end of season one I'd just thrown up my hands and decided they deserved each other. Bai Qintang was gender flipped for the show, but she gets played as a hair more of a loose canon than her novel counterpart, which doesn't work as well against a more tepid version of Gongsun. In the novel, they're better matched in the middle (Gongsun is meaner and less predictable, Bai Jinting is a bit more controlled in his actions although more physical with little brother Bai Yutong).
Freshly-Back-From-Europe Qintang and Hong Kong Business Qintang
Bai Qintang is vice-president of the multi-national Bai Enterprises*** and is perpetually shadowed by two identical bodyguards, Ding Zhaolan and Ding Zhaohui, who are fully on board with their role as observers of Bai Qintang/Gongsun Zhe daytime drama. She was sent away for schooling relatively young for canon related reasons and has been overseas virtually ever since. The show does a poor job setting her history up, but the most coherent version is that besides serving as company executive, she also serves as a consultant for the International Commercial Crime Bureau division of the Hong Kong police with occasional detective duties. It would be a big improvement if she had more of her own storyline with minimal to no Gongsun, but obsession is one of Bai Qintang's things, and she's obsessed with Gongsun, so here we are. She's blunt, demanding, comes with a wicked temper, drinks too much, knows how to handle a weapon, doesn't know the meaning of the word "no", adores Zhan Yao, and loves her baby brother more than anything.
***The show calls it her multi-national company but also makes her vice-president and a detective with the ICCB of the Hong Kong Police. It does still establish she's spent most of her time overseas since she was a child or since her teens, those ages depending on whether you're looking at the ages of the actors or reading the subs. It makes the most sense that she had a life altering injury as an older child but went overseas in her teens a few years later, so that's what I go with. The police connection is just mentioned a few times without anything really coming of it, but it works if one assumes it's more of an intermittent role she fell into through her family connections. Those connections include the plot-dependent fact that Bai Yutong's and Zhan Yao's fathers were both on the force with Chief Bao (and in the novel there have been 5 generations of Bai policemen), but, as mentioned before, both families are well off. Given that and and Bai Qintang's age, I head canon that the company itself is run by the matriarchs. Note: This conflicts with show canon, but show canon doesn't make a lot of sense on the subject, so I do what I want. Hilariously, the writers clearly don't know what "Bai Enterprises" entails because neither do Zhan Yao OR Bai Yutong. Although this harkens back to the novel to some degree, and they try to sell it as "no one says no to her" and "I'm afraid to ask", I maintain neither of them having any idea is a characterization misstep regardless of whether it's strictly her company or the family's.
Gongsun Zhe is theoretically SCI's medical examiner but, in the grand tradition of certain types of shows, he's fills the roles of medical examiner, forensic specialist, field medic, and surgeon. I… really prefer his novel counterpart, to be honest. In the novel he's part of the too-pretty-for-their-own-good triumverate of Bai Yutong and Zhan Yao, but still older and, in fact, taught one of their classes at the academy. Everyone is vaguely - or explicitly - terrified of novel!Gongsun's very Addams Family aesthetic.
The Rest of SCI
I always find this sort of thing helpful when I first start watching a show or reading fic, so as a public service, the other initial members of SCI are:
Jiang Lin - The computer/tech expert with all associated cliches [gender flipped from the novel].
Ma Han - The sniper. Seems relatively inexperienced at detective work, per se, but smart with a superb hit rate [also gender flipped from the novel].
Zhao Fui - He seems the least qualified of all of them but has extensive undercover experience and is most likely to be assigned the unobtrusive eyes and ears kind of jobs.
Wang Shao - He loves food and has connections everywhere. He's Zhan Yao's source of information in Bai Yutong's department prior to the founding of SCI.
There's a few other important people that show up over the course of season one, but even mentioning their names would be spoilers, so I'll have to leave them mysterious for the purposes of this post. :)
You can find the various English subtitled eps linked here: SCI Eng Subs
And the translations of the first novel arc here: Novel English Translation
That's the only bit of the novel that I know of as translated, so if anyone has any links to further translations, let me know. <3
Crossposted to Dreamwidth. Comment here or there. ♥ Blue :)