cdrama: Paladins in Troubled Times eps 9-16
So, I was going to have a nice, big picspam, but am having trouble uploading the pictures. It went something along the lines of “Women are badass, Tae is a dork, hair flutters in the wind when inside, and people in pretty clothes stare at each other angstily and for a variety of reasons, and everyone has that unique brand of upbringing where trying to kill each other/the other’s commander is a common courtship ritual.”
Actually, that’s basically the plot, once you throw in villains who think they’re Cesare Borgia and protagonists who are sometimes borderline sociopaths due to being basically good people raised by bad people, and so having no real moral compass for a while. (This is changing.)
The last few cdramas/wuxias I’ve watched haven’t really been “proper” wuxias, and so I forgot how wuxia makes me like all sorts I normally don’t. Like how straightup “enemies as lovers” rarely works for me outside of certain historical periods, but works for me 99% of the time in wuxia. I think I actually get disappointed if it happens and they don’t stab each other at least once.
-So, Mo Le may occasionally make me want to thwack him (gently-and I think it’s at least partly not so much because of Mo Le himself but because Victor Huang is obviously at least a decade older than Mo Le is supposed to be so it’s like “Gosh, you’re being a bit immat-no, wait, you are just acting your age. Which is not your actor’s age.”) but I do appreciate his immediate assumption that women can handle anything. He gets locked up in a dungeon and someone he can’t see starts taking out all the guards? Must be Yan Yu. (It wasn’t but that she was his rescuer was his immediate assumption.) KongKong’er is trying to assassinate generals? That’s ok, he can’t get away with Ling Shuang around. (This is actually true. They both seem pretty ok with her being smarter than them and being the only one “wearing pants,” so to speak, in any room she’s in.)
-I actually am firmly convinced that trying to kill Ling Shuang’s seniors really is KongKong’er’s idea of a proper courtship ritual, what with the whole “let me spend all day trying to kill your general then ask you out for a midnight stroll while we’re taking a break from that.” thing. He did it on the island and did it again at the camp. Though he seems to be letting her and Mo Le boss him around now instead of following bad advice from other people.
-Speaking of Ling Shuang and her suitors, I’m rather sad that Kong Le and Ling Shuang didn’t interact. I love her “WTF?” at his flirting. (Which is very different from her reactions to KongKong’er…probably because one is like a mischievous monkey who thinks pranks will get him a banana and does not understand the concept of consequences, and the other is a Machiavellian killer.)
-There are no words for how happy I am that Yan Yu isn’t wallowing in Guilt over betraying Mo Le. Particularly because that “betrayal” was actually her not betraying her brother for a guy that she’d only known for a couple weeks. (Mo Le is right that she has little concept of good/evil-but then, she was raised by Kong Le, so I’m not sure what you can expect there-but it wouldn’t hurt him to realize that pretty much everything she’s done that wasn’t helping her brother has pretty firmly fallen into the “good” side of things, including rescuing him multiple times. I also find it inappropriately hilarious that it took a fake fridging for him to go “Gosh, maybe there’s a reason I can’t make myself kill her and basically look for her everywhere I go…” Also hilarious is that they were both wandering around An Lu Shan’s garden for, like, an hour and didn’t see each other. I mean, until they turned around and saw each other, I thought she’d been there before and he’d just missed her. How big is that place, anyway.
-Also, I adore the scene where Kong Le asks Yan Yu if she’s in love with Mo Le, because she really should tell him so he knows to just capture Mo Le and not kill him. She, of course, was intelligently going “this…is some sort of trap, isn’t it?” But the funny thing is that even though he’s pretty ruthlessly used that affect in his plots, he actually does seem to be trying to just get Mo Le captured and/or out of the way since then, instead of actually killing him. For a Machiavellian sociopath and a recovering quasi-sociopath, they actually have a pretty healthy relationship.
In short, China, please adapt more of Liang Yu Sheng’s stuff to series and movies, because I’ve liked every one I’ve seen so far.