There are many lines that really only happens with female authors.
He's such an ideal man.
From a female perspective,
it can only come from a production that actually cares about the script.
Yu Ci Xiao Wu Zuo, The Imperial Coroner, has officially finished airing.
And this is my second video on this drama.
And you know this is the final review.
So what's the verdict from AvenueX?
2 Goldmine!
This is by far the best detective drama that you've seen in 2021 from china.
And before this drama showed up,
nobody expected it
to give you an idea.
This drama was rated within Tencent as a B level
The highest rating usually would be S+ and then S
and A and B
Word of Honor was an A within Youku
But as the drama started to air and people start to
appreciate the content as soon as the vip airing stopped,
they turned all the episodes from episode three onwards into vip
so you have to be a subscriber of the platform to be able to watch it at all.
This is how tencent treats it suddenly became
successful without expectation content
You bloody crappy shitty penguin platform.
Let's talk about this drama.
I will first talk about the stuff that brought down
its rating from the highest possible rating from
AvenueX and then i'll talk about all the good things.
I love about this drama.
First point on the negative side, frankly,
production quality
as it is a B level production,
it has very limited resources.
If you've watched through this,
you probably would agree that towards the end
it starts to get a little bit too rushed.
Some of these scenes are cut in such a way that becomes confusing,
although you kind of can fill in the holes with your own imagination,
you can tell they're really trying to rush
that also shows up in costumes.
I've rant about that in my first video, on sets, on possible
big scenes that could look more epic on screen.
This drama has none of that.
The second thing is, although it is a really good standard detective drama,
it is not brilliant for detective dramas for it
to knock on your head and give you a !!! moment.
It's hard.
It really tests how good the script writer is, here,
how many steps ahead they can think against the audiences.
The stories you have in this drama is not body anyway,
but if you are a very seasoned detective story reader or drama or film watcher,
there's really nothing new that this drama can provide you
Also this drama does have very comical bad people,
the store front,
the flag bad guy is a little bit too comical.
You do feel as the story progresses as things gets more serious,
the eunuch bad guy and his kind of student and the
general that later turned on to the good people side.
They are so funny as even they're not taking
the business they're doing seriously,
which is literally can result in their head being chopping off
your heroes.
And your main characters are only ever as good
as your bad guy and your anti heroes,
You have to have really strong enemies to make your leads look
impressively clever or strong to win whatever game at the end of it.
So the relatively weak,
eunuch and his gang and then the pretending to be our male lead's
teacher all his life and actually a bad guy behind the scene.
None of them is really good enough.
As an anti hero to pose enough threat for our main leads at any point, really,
you always know that the lead is gonna be fine.
Every trouble they seem to get into immediately gets resolved.
There's hardly any time gap between, oh they are in trouble.
oh, It's done
oh, they're in trouble.
oh, It's solved
emotionally.
It lacks the punch,
it lacks that revenge energy.
It lacks that oh shit.
How are my lovely main characters gonna get out of this trouble now?
Now it lacks that hooks.
One final thing on the negative side personally, very personally is
although I enjoy watching this drama, I enjoy the characters, I love them.
I think they're so well written.
The story overall is quite satisfactory,
but I realize it has no addictiveness
after watching the whole thing for once.
I'm not eager to go back and rewatch it at all.
Or while it was airing,
I was in no eagerness to check out what's the latest episode and waiting
for the hour that the drama releases new episodes
it never happened to me
I never for one moment really got hooked to the point
that I just can't wait to find out what happens next.
And it's very personal,
but I do need a drama to at least work on me and make me worry about.
its characters' fate or whatever to say
ok, you won
if the drama is something trying to win your attention
production, you did something right to grab my attention,
but for imperial coroner,
it didn't work on me in that way at all.
So that's all the things that I can't think
of that will lower my rating for this drama
Now, good things about this drama
First foremost.
So many lovely,
normal human characters,
so rare these days in chinese dramaland
regardless web drama, tv drama, contemporary drama,
romantic drama,
period drama, xian xia, wu xia, whatever genre
it's just so hard to come across normal people where they
know in that particular setting that time,
whatever their own identity,
what is the most important thing?
Under a particular circumstances,
what is the second most important thing?
What's the third and how should we order it?
And how do we do it
Logically
you know like that's just what normal people do in real life.
But season watchers of chinese dramaland
YOU KNOW
you know, so many dramas just give you absolutely ridiculous scenarios and characters
who just do not do things like normal human would do
this drama.
Everyone is so proper, normal, clever,
fitting of their position.
No one is intentionally dumbed down so that
they can make the main character look cleverer.
Usually you see a male second who is made to be stupid so
that the male lead is clever-er, whereas in this drama,
our male second is pretty much as clever as our male lead
although in very different styles and they collaborate,
i'm better at doing this and you're better at doing that.
So let's go and do the job together.
So we can get it done
and female lead /female second, similar things.
Nobody is jealous over stupid reasons.
There's no female second trying to get male lead's attention
or male second trying to grab the female lead from
the male lead,
you know, like the *^^((^^%^$ crap that is in chinese dramaland
None of that happens in this drama
OMG everybody is just so clever and normal.
Because I am so used to and tortured by crappy writing and
things that just does not make sense in chinese drama land,
that now a drama so normal that comes my way.
I'm like.
Thank you so much.
dont' know what else I can say about that.
People work, people actually work.
They don't just go around and have romantic
relationships and don't care about anything else.
In this drama, they work and they work to their death,
they work till dawn.
Okay, they don't sleep.
And when they have work,
they put that first.
when's the last time you see any period drama
when people actually have professions,
do their professional work in chinese dramaland
Can't remember one hey?
for that one point, right?
This drama just deserves attention and love and it did
audiences see that
this drama has hardly any bad thing said
about it apart from the couple of points i've mentioned
really from everyone i've seen made a video about it.
So thank Imperial coroner for good characters creation
and normal people.
And to build on that point
you may already have heard of this, but if not,
it's always good to know.
And it explains a lot of why the drama is like what it is.
Now this drama is based on a novel written by author Qing Xian Ya T
and she is one of the two script writers of this drama.
The other is also a lady Qian Xiaobai
So this drama is written by 2 women.
There are many lines that really only happens with female authors
because of their observation and their sensitivity about a lot of
issues regarding gender that is hot today in the contemporary setting.
But they put that discussion into an ancient time setting and with very good,
reasonable injection into the plot itself.
If you look at our male lead character,
in particular, Xiao Jingyu
he's such an ideal man.
From a female perspective,
he is very decent.
He has great integrity,
he's responsible, reliable,
he's frank and honest,
he respects our female lead very much,
even though socially,
he's at a much higher place.
He never in any way looked down upon our female lead character and whatever
conversation they have about their profession or their romantic relationship.
He always takes that super frank,
honest and respectful approach and they can communicate on a very leveled ground.
And there's a lot of idealism that's imbued into Xiao Jingyu's character
that you just don't see in any period idol fantasy drama anywhere.
Really in chinese dramaland
often you come across things that just make you go
what the heck
what is going on in the script writer's mind?
Are you like straightly teleported from 500 years ago?
Why would you say something that is just so wrong on so many level?
We don't see that in this drama,
we see girls helping girls.
Isn't that just natural that type of line or many scenes that
happened between Xiao Jingyu and Chu Chu about discussing their
profession,
life and their prospect future, their marriage.
Their relationship is just like there's no unnecessary
misunderstandings that don't get explained so that you can
continue conflict.
No
people sit down solve problems and so respectful of each other.
So I highly appreciate the two female writers' effort,
and I think really can only be written by women these days in chinese dramaland
but also just because it's written by 2 girls
don't ... don't think it's only their effort.
The script actually went through 3 years of drafting and
changes and redrafting to finally got a finished product.
And a lot of that comes from the work of the director Lou Jian
this year already 54 years old and he's quite well known in chinese dramaland
He made quite a lot of high rating classic dramas that are
bloody serious stuff
and mostly focusing on the crime on the deduction,
detective genre or on stuff that requires a lot of brain work.
You can tell because of that experience,
he is the perfect person to take the wheel of this production.
And it's really Imperial Coroner's luck
that they got this director
from an interview on line.
That is on the director.
He went through many drafts with the two ladies,
because the original author plus the script writer number two,
neither of them has ever written anything for screen.
And if you never got training and you have no idea,
you need to learn what works for screen and how
you write the script are supposed to fiction.
So he,
as a very experienced script writer director,
particularly in the crime genre,
worked with them on the script for 3 years.
And even by the time they started shooting,
they still argue because the two script writers actually
followed through the entire production process.
They were on set every day in case they need to rewrite scenes
and they still were having argument with the director while they were filming it
It is like we want the scene to be like this and the characters say
this type of lines and directors is like
no, it's not gonna work.
My version will work better.
But they don't agree.
So when they filmed it,
some parts of it is from the directors insisting
that you change the lines
some part.
The script writers won on set
And once they finished the whole thing in the editing room,
the two script writers were also taking part of the process and
when they see how things got put together and they can tell,
yeah.
Yeah, actually you were right director
that scene with your lines,
it will make more sense.
So in this drama,
when you notice a lot of lip dubbing doesn't fit,
it actually mostly doesn't come from censorship.
That's from the interview that i've read.
From the director.
It comes from the fact that in post production,
they change the details of the grammatical stuff and what they say in the line.
So that dramatically it makes more sense and
it's more engaging for the audiences to watch.
It can only come from a production actually cares about the script.
And probably the director is like I have a good reputation of making dramas.
I don't want to destroy it on a web drama,
quality control.
That's the position you should take naturally because you get paid to do it.
But unfortunately in today's chinese dramaland
this normal thing has become a rare thing.
I think that's why this drama stand out so much is because
finally people see the old style of proper drama that's
properly told and responsibly told and just has
been done acceptably at the industrial standard,
not to say that the two script writers are not good, they are very, very good.
And there are also a lot of the content and moments that happened on set
and stuff the script writer noticed and was like
keep that in the final cut
it will make the audiences love it.
taht the director didn't understand because he's 54 years old.
He's not that young, he's not very caught up with the popular internet stuff.
So he doesn't get something
why is this funny?
What would make it interesting for the audiences to see?
But the two girls are like,
keep it! keep it!
It's gonna.... people are gonna ....
Director also said in the interview,
it's like he was happy that he collaborated with
much younger people and learned stuff from them.
So you can tell this crew,
they've had a good time,
they love their story.
They really put a lot of effort into making it a proper normal drama.
And it shows that little glimmer of hope in today's chinese dramaland is there are
still people out there who wanna tell good story
who wanna do it in the proper way.
That is my final review of the drama,
The Imperial Coroner,
Yu Ci Xiao Wu Zuo
hope you've enjoyed this video,
hope you've enjoyed this drama.
You probably have, otherwise
You wouldn't be here.
And thank you for watching AvenueX
i'll see you in my next video.
Meanwhile, live long and happy drama watching.