Try this one doesn't work,
try that one doesn't work,
try that one doesn't work
Okay, could only be this one
There is really four words to describe the whole thing.
which is
WHAT IS THE POINT?
Hello, you're watching AvenueX
where a junkie on good storytelling shares her thoughts,
knowledge and occasional weird ideas
on stories and how they're told
luo yang has finished airing when the last week of 2021 came,
iqiyi just decided we're gonna update all the rest of the episode
left on the wednesday to make sure that everything wraps up.
Before the end of the year,
whoever is in charge of this particular project
is desperate to get all the kpi possible.
I don't know if that counts towards the annual
performance of anybody's end of your bonus,
but it just feels like that.
So this 39 episodes,
period drama that since day one of its airing has had a lot of drama.
outside of the drama going on
has finally finished and i'm dressed more like
a woman with neutural gender style of that time plus
a 21st century (glasses)
So let's talk about this drama.
First. I'll give you a final rating based on the whole drama
and it's gonna be a very weird rating.
If I disregard a couple of things,
that's the production's fault,
I would give it a one gold mine drama.
But if I take that into consideration,
which is rather embarrassing episode of plagiarism of this production,
then i'll lower it to one gold mine slash one land mine
If you're not aware of that,
i'll let you know first.
And then you can make up your own mind about whether
that should impact your opinion on the drama.
First is on the wedding scene of Song Yi and Wang Yibo's
character which happened rather early in the drama,
it got spotted that the fan that Song Yi is holding
the design is exactly copied from an individual designer's stuff.
The production just copied it to a t without giving that person credit
or not even let them know they did it.
That got discovered on the day it came out and the
production did come out to apologize for that.
So that's the episode one of plagiarism,
although it also happened very early on in the drama.
Later it got found out that the really cool fighting
sequence with song qian in the middle of the city,
right from the beginning of this drama that i've talked about.
I was impressed by its choreograph
turned out that's completely copied from an animation
3d animation done in china called
Fan Ren Xiu Xian Zhuan
that entire sequence
first is the choreograph of the fight itself,
how each step is taken,
how she is facing off all the bad guys
that fight sequence plus the camera movement
and then editing of all the shots connecting together,
the entire sequence is copied from that animation series.
There's no excuse, no matter how you try to explain that way, you can't,
because it really is exactly the same.
The animation studio came out with a very long post on their social media,
explaining the sequences of how they made that in animation,
which took a lot of people,
months and months of work with real people fighting it off on camera, design it,
motion capture it,
and then put it into the final rendering of the animation.
That episode came out july (2020)
and the drama didn't start shooting until november(2020).
Time wise, there's no way to explain that away either
it clearly is a case of plagiarism,
even till today the official account of
this drama never sends out an apology.
It is the production company liu bai (留白）
which did the drama sends out a kind of
apology recognizing their similarity in it.
they also said because they gave the sequence's design to their hired,
fighting, choreograph team,
martial arts designing team.
So it's that team basically copied the animation and production itself.
Is not aware of that kind of suggesting that.
And throughout their whole apology,
they never even mentioned once.
The animation's actual name,
I think it's pretty stupid.
And there just is no excuse.
It has nothing really to do with a lot of other departments of this drama.
They probably have no idea that this happened in the background.
But honestly, if any more one just boycott this drama,
simply for this one thing,
I think they are very reasonable,
you should not encourage this kind of thing in creative world
disregard that i'll put it as a one gold mine
regarding that I'll lower it to the middle ground,
whether it's as a one gold mine or gold one slash land mine.
It's, in my opinion, not a very good drama
so i'll first talk about the good things,
things that are basically still pleasurable to watch.
First is, like I said, in first impression,
very rich production.
It has a visual richness and quality,
although not accurate to history in pretty much everything.
It still looks pretty nice.
It's definitely not on the cheap end.
So if you are looking for visual pleasure,
this drama still has it.
Parts of the plot is nice.
This rama has the problem of some sections of it is exciting to watch and then.
It just falls and goes into the land where you just want the triple speed it.
Then the third thing is,
some of the characters are rather lovely,
and their performance is quite nice for all the supporting roles.
I would say I really like the Shen Fei character.
I also like that not showing up much later in the drama,
servant girl for song yi.
She's just adorable.
And then there's this highlight role Yao Niang
who is an assassin and in the middle of the drama,
she'll come out and show you know what her real identity is and xxx
that particular moment between this role and Huang Xuan's role is
probably the most highlight point,
emotionally speaking for the entirety of the drama
so sporadically, right? There's interesting plot and then.
There are a couple of rather cute supporting roles.
Then the final thing is,
if we disregard all the script level problems of this drama
that really there's nothing actors can do about it.
Huang Xuan did a really good job
as the leading actor of this drama,
if it wasn't for him being able to hold it together throughout this 39 episodes,
I probably wouldn't continue watching this drama
with what he's given.
He has proven again.
He is a really good serious actor and clearly the
production knows they needed him
without an actor like this
this whole thing would just
crumble.
Now, good things aside.
Let's talk about the couple of very significant problems with this drama.
First, the part where every time I see it come up,
I speed through
cringy
toe grabbing on the carpet parts of the drama.
Totally me, okay
it may not work for you like that.
The female lead and male lead's love line,
the romantic line is so unnecessary cringy to watch,
even though Huang Xuan is a good actor
and Song Qian has improved from,
say when she was first in drama land,
but still it's not enough
on the writing end of things.
It hasn't been worked out well
so no matter how hard the actors try,
you know there's only that much you can do
why these 2 fall in love.
Has never been quite convincingly built up
every time there's this emotional love kind of romantic scene coming up.
It always comes up at the cost of just dragging
the pacing of the story down
on the logical level it doesn't make sense,
and then the acting doesn't help.
And then we wanna see what happens for the other important things.
Every time they have those emotional scenes
I had to speed through it.
If you're watching this, I guess you've watched the whole thing.
I'm gonna spoil it for you.
She just died at the end
like in 1 second,
and it's done
for their whole romantic arc.
There is really 4 words to describe the whole thing.
which is
WHAT IS THE POINT?
It really did nothing for the story in comparison,
Song Yi and Wang Yibo's
storyline is much more palatable,
even though I would agree,
WYB's acting needs a lot of improvement
still because of the set up of the characters
and how it's depicted and how they slowly slowly,
very slowly got to a better place than when they first started
makes much more sense than the lead couple.
So that's the biggest problem I have with this drama.
The second thing about this drama that is problematic is the mystery part.
The trying to find who is the bad guy,
what they're aiming at,
how are the good people going to defeat the bad guy
This poor line is very child's play,
the way that the main characters follow the bread
crumbs trying to solve the problems mostly happens,
not because they're clever.
It happens because
well we have like ten options out there.
Let's just try them out 1 by 1.
Let's go down this route
okay doesn't work, lead to nowhere
okay let's pick the next one
pai chu fa
exclusion
It's like doing a mathematics problem
without actually using the clever,
elegant way of solving the problem.
You literally go.
There's only ten possibilities.
Let's just try them one by one.
And eventually we're gonna find the right one.
yeah Cool.
How is that helping you to show that characters are like clever?
You're doing a drama supposedly with three very capable people
solving a big case
and they literally did it with let's try this one doesn't work,
try that one doesn't work, try that one doesn't work
Okay.
Could only be this one.
Then because the drama is set in realistic world
chinese history of a part.
So there's a lot of limit of what things can be
for this drama big conspiracy going on.
There really is two possibilities of the ultimate goal of the bad guy.
One is they wanna destroy a city.
Like they wanna bring armageddon to the ancient city.
Like Chang'an (longest day in Changan),
we're gonna blow everything up,
we're gonna destroy it.
This is like whatever our weird cult's belief of whatever.
That's one version.
The other version is literally assassinate the emperor,
imperial china.
Like, how bad can it be?
So right from the beginning,
you already know
there really is no other thing they can do.
It's not like 21st century you know we can do
alien invasion
or some kind of like super bug.
Then about the story itself,
the last thing I think is really anticlimax and buzz kill is
I already guessed who is the bad guy
probably around the teen number episodes,
just because after a couple of things,
you can clearly see there really is no other option.
Apart from this guy been the final big boss
in the process of elimination.
First, you definitely take out the main characters
because they're not the bad guy,
otherwise it wouldn't make sense.
Then there are people who just in no way in their abilities or in
their social status or like whatever that they can be the bad guy
like the servants.
song yi's character,
you know there's no way that they are the bad roles
There are only a couple of options you are left with,
and it cannot be somebody who shows up last episode
and you've never met throughout the whole thing,
and they just turned out to be the bad guy like that,
will be the worst thing as script writer can do,
and then even the worst scriptwriter would not do that.
So taking all those possibilities out,
whatever you're left with,
no matter how impossible would be the right answer
from Sherlock Holme's words.
So I was like yeah it's her brother.
That's the only option you're left
who looks like a good enough person
who has enough power amd position to do certain things
who probably would have the strongest,
dramatic revelation effect at the end.
So I already knew.
And then every episode I watched was like yeah
just further confirms it has to be him.
The next episode
okay has to be him
by the time the Li Beiqi role got disposed.
It's like clear as daylight.
It could only be our female lead's brother.
And it's really just boring.
So it's not a very clever,
bad guy versus not very clever leading team and and ending up with a,
trying to fake it as really exciting ending.
But still, it's like very anti-climax.
And then if you really wanna scrutinize at the logic at
all the steps that the bad guys have taken to get to where
they are and what they wanna do
pretty much at every link,
you can argue that that logic doesn't work
such as they burned the site
destroyed all those hundreds of silos,
the stores food for this big city to run,
not as the ultimate goal,
as like penultimate move to their ultimate goal.
But then Wu Siyue (song qian) goes in
and finds out all the rice that got burned are actually,
not the new rice
They are old already, bad quality.
So the good rice have been moved away before
they burned the bad rice
If you go and check historical record about how large the site is and
how many big silos they have and the amount of food stored there,
how can you move the good rice away secretly
without people noticing that entirely of it
and then replace it with bad rice,
then with nobody noticing it and burn it down?
Where did you move the good rice?
Where did you store it?
It's physical, it's like a huge amount of stuff,
like where?
oh and that guy who shot the arrow out of the a crossbow,
his entire purpose of existence is as a tool throughout this narrative.
To eventually do that
to kill the female lead.
I mean you can't be more irresponsible as a writer for a character.
When he was like on the roof and trying to shoot, i'm like,
oh my god
bad writing in my face
shit,
and then when he shoots out the arrow
how many slow-mo shots did we get?
we get the arrow flying slow mo
We get everybody's reaction like the brother's, song qian, huang xuan
They're so trying to just make you like feel
emotionally moved by that moment.
But honestly,
everybody who's watched this drama,
that i've talked to
got laughing at that moment.
and particular, how the camera language,
the editing style
the music,
the slow mo
Everybody is like oh my god this is just so cringy
So all those points are the major things that makes it &*^&*^*(
even without the plagiarism thing.
It's not a good enough drama.
If we jump out of this one drama and look at 2021 dramas
and dramaland in general in recent years
you cannot quite blame Luoyang to be a drama that has this type of problems,
it's so standard,
so classic and so many dramas have similar problems these days.
Every aspect of this drama that has gone wrong
is reflecting what is going on in this industry.
It really is a great case to reflect the rather cruel but
rather true reality applicable to drama making industry,
but probably to every industry,
which is if the entire environment of a particular industry is not good,
and it has a lot of intrinsic problems that hasn't got solved.
It will leak through,
and it will end up in every individual,
whether it's a person or a group of person
or specific product out of that industry.
It will leak through it and.
It will come up in everything.
And I kind of caught the beginning of the crazy
descend into the valley when I started this channel
Back in 2017 March,
that was the last golden year, let's say,
of traffic means everything,
more and more problems show up every year after year
So now we're at 2022,
as much as this industry means a lot to me.
And as much as I like storytelling,
I have to recognize that it is not the most
essential industry for human existence.
Storytelling is the nature of humans,
but it doesn't have to be taken fully by drama making
if one day like Chinese dramaland just like crumbles and dies away
and hardly anybody's left in the industry.
There are other ways of people figuring out how
they can express themselves telling stories.
It doesn't have to be this industry.
Obviously I don't see it completely dies,
but I am I guess practical enough and logical enough
and rational enough to realize it is not the
absolute necessity of human race.
But it's very sad for me to see it.
Being like this.
Let's just try to live as long as possible.
Each individual who can watch this video up to this point.
Our aim is,
huo jiu jian
the longer you live,
the more you're gonna see
Hey, who knows
What's gonna happen
Magical things may happen in this world
since we already have the ticket on this boat
let's just stay as long as possible.
Thank you for watching AvenueX
I'll see you in my next video.
Meanwhile, with long and happy drama watching.