Super visually pleasing eye candy people,
it's better than Snow Sword Stride
challenges my basic understandings of the human world.
Hello, you're watching AvenueX
Where a junkie on good storytelling,
shares her thoughts, knowledge, and occasional weird ideas
on stories and how they are told
Qie Shi Tian Xia, Who Rules the World
is produced by Yang Xiaopei, directed by Yin Tao,
which makes up this team that actually produced last year's
Ancient Love Poetry.
It is led by Yang Yang, Zhao Lusi,
this is also another based on an existing web novel production
written by the author Qing Ling Yue and same title.
This is a 40 episode drama and i've watched the first 12 episodes.
So this first impression is based on that
Before I throw out my rating and then talk about it in detail,
I wanna first mention couple of things.
You probably are aware or not aware of this project,
which is really funny during the production of this project,
the previously working together and had a relationship
and created Qian Gu Jue Chen, Ancient Love Poetry together.
Lady producer and guy director broke up
and they had a really bad fallout.
As the result,
while this drama was promoting
a couple of days before it went life,
you would find no mentioning of the director's name
under any of the official posts.
And now if you go and check the title song of this drama where it
will list the important people
when it comes to the director's page,
it'san image of like chinese water color painting style,
thousands of swords coming down,
piercing the name.
There's no way that it happened randomly.
I'm just saying when you're a producer you really can be
very inventive with your revenge on anybody on the crew.
So that's the side story of this production that
I find just really amusing,
more kind of dramatic than the drama itself.
Now let's get back to talk about this drama.
I'll give it right now at one gold mine rating on the positive end,
but not so impressive.
As usual, first,
let's talk about the positive end of things.
I went to check out this drama the first moment it went live
I watched it blindly.
So I didn't look at anybody's review.
I didn't turn on live comment,
and i've never read the original novels.
so I know zero about the story and anything.
I just went straight in and watched about 3 episodes before I
stopped and checked on the production information
looking online, see what people are talking about it.
So I have about 3 episodes of un-interrupted attention.
I think this drama on the positive end
it's a relatively good production quality drama of its kind
the type of based on ip produced by tencent.
Has wu xia, fantasy element period drama that's led
by traffic actors, Last year's Ancient Love Poetry
this year's Mirror Twin City
last year's Pearl Eclipse.
I would lumpsome them into one category
in comparison to those dramas.
This one comes out better than the others.
I'm not a huge fan of, its styling the color palette.
It's still only very light colored,
very light fabric side of things.
It's just been a trend for too long.
i've expressed my tiredness of that for too many times in my videos.
So that part,
I don't like it very much,
but at least on the positive end of that,
is the look of it is overall very coherent.
There's no significant roughness when the closeup is really close
and looking at details of props and costumes and all that.
And you look at other aspects of visual storytelling,
such as the shot design,
how you connect scenes together, set design, props, lighting,
everything considered,
it's actually better than a couple of other projects
I have seen in recent one year or two.
The second thing, interestingly enough,
it will stay on my positive and my negative,
because this thing has two aspects of it.
So on the positive end of this point,
which is its fighting scene
I know a lot of people in china rant about it,
but it's actually to do with how they promote it.
That doesn't actually fit what you see.
So that will stay on my negative end or things.
But on the positive end,
I think it's actually not bad.
you know t his is actually not a wu xiao drama before you go into it.
It's led by two top traffic actor and actress and it's a romantic story.
It's just happened to be set in that kind of setting
where there will be a lot of fighting scenes
but it's not a wu xia.
so I come in with the right expectation of it
and i'm pretty entertained by the look of it.
It does cut the fighting scenes into
thousands of pieces and millions of angles.
And there's hardly one coherent full shot of the main leads fighting
a complicated choreographed scene
because that usually means you have to train the actors before
you start shooting for months to get that one scene done.
Usually.
When you involve very top traffic actors, there's no time
their schedule wouldn't allow that to happen.
So what they resolve to is using stun doubles with the actors
with a lot of shot changes to and angles camera movements and
then in post production using a lot of cg
to make things look energetic
in that department, they did a pretty good job.
It's a type of fighting thing that is suitable for this story.
As long as you don't promote it as traditional fighting scene
which is the negative thing,
so I'm actually entertained by the look of it.
I know all the Zhao Lusi's fighting with the white fabric,
99% cg-ed
but it looks really good like they did a good cg with those fabric.
And if you have to find some other dramas to compare it to,
it's better than Snow Sword Stride
Then the third positive point for me is the two leads are
very good looking people
super visually pleasing eye candy people.
Let's be honest, the reason that people go and check out this type of dramas,
apart from if you're a fan of either of the leads,
the other two things I can think of heavily motivating you
would be either you are a fan of the original novel,
you just want to check out what the drama version is like.
Then you are Yan Fen
the fans of the good looking people
and in that department i'm super super entertained and satisfied,
at least it's not one of those dramas, period dramas,
that forces ugly people to dress up in terrible wigs
and costumes and scare people off
and wouldn't even allow you to criticize how ugly they look like,
particularly Zhao Lusi
I have to praise her for her effort since the days of Chen Qian Qian (Tiger & Rose)
till now, she has greatly improved.
Her posture, her shoulder,
her chest has changed.
I don't know if it actually involves certain injections of her muscle here,
but it reduced muscle so much,
and she managed to push her chest up when she just naturally stands there.
It looks so much better okay posture is important.
And i'm not doing a very good job today, but hey,
whatever
she looks so much better now with that posture change,
and then Yang Yang has always been known to ..
as if he has a piece of like metal tied to his back.
It's always like, so these two people,
they have the similar, super straight posture, long neck,
and a very proud chin.
So when they are talking in those two shots over the shoulder,
whatever you know one shot to you one shot to me and that kind of scene
It's just like facing off see whose neckline is prettier
whose back is straighter and whose chin is higher.
And I can't imagine any other two people doing that apart from them.
So very entertaining, very eye pleasing,
those are the three major points that I think made me watching
the first 12 episodes and didn't feel too much of a pain.
But it's not to say I enjoyed it that much,
because there are also things about this drama
that would make it a rather difficult watch.
So on a negative end point number one,
the second half of the positive fighting scene is they
promoted it in a such a stupid and wrong way
in china. Usually this type for drama goes live,
weibo goes crazy with trending hash tags that's actually
bought by this kind of production and it's normal.
Every drama pretty much does it, when they have budget,
but they use the wrong trending hash tag and
that offended a lot of people which is (see screen)
Wu Xia Dramas, Zhi Leng 支棱, it's like something that
erects.
okay So it means previously it's like
flappy, dead and flat.
Now it stands up,
but the thing is this is not a wu xia drama.
And traditional wu xia drama requires the actors to actually
do a significant amount of fighting themselves like
Wu JIng 吴京
Jiao Enjun 焦恩俊
even Xie Tingfeng 谢霆锋
old days when they fight a big scene in a full shot
that you cannot see any cut,
it's literally done by the actors.
This drama didn't do it in that style.
So it's not a Wu Xia fighting style.
So that hash tag just literally offended the entire drama review community,
I think.
And a lot of people who love wu xia dramas.
So I think it's a stupid thing they did.
If you wanna add a little bit on that is
honestly I think Yang Yang should have done more work
at the fighting because he has the good training basics,
like he was a professional dancer,
a lot of things other people cannot do.
He can.
And it would be great if he can provide more
fighting scenes that are not just ha ha ha,
like that you know being cool
and just hold a couple of poses and it ends.
He could do so much more
2 days ago.
I was like, yeah i'm about to make that review video,
but I still haven't practiced my fans.
So let me see if I can learn this.
And I did
it's not so hard.
So for a guy,
I would like to see him doing that because his character
uses a paper fan as the main weapon and think of
Zheng Yecheng's Fu JIuyun
in killing of three thousand crows
he has so many tricks with his fans
He is a 武生 (BJ opera) so he had that training
before he even got into dramaland
But it's not hard to learn.
I literally learned this.
And that like in last 2 days,
and it's way too big for my fingers, actually this fan, but I can do that.
So for a guy...
i'm not very good at it, but I can do it.
And last year because of Word of Horner
I learned this just just
so that I can I can show it off in my review videos.
I'm just saying, you know
if they just put a little bit more effort,
It will make it look so much better, but
Then the second thing on the negative end not
so negative actually works okay for this drama,
but it's still full dubbing
and it's dubbed by so many familiar people,
another big collaboration between all the familiar
dubbing actosr and actresses working today in china.
and the thing with that is
it depends on personally if you accept that
if you feel comfortable about that or not,
I put it on the negative and I wish I could hear their real voice,
but
probably it's more money to get them to dub themselves in post production,
then the most important negative thing about this drama.
It's rather boring.
There really isn't that much interesting things going on at all
You don't quite know who wants what.
And the main sort of motivation of everyone
and most of your understanding of the comprehensive setup of the story
comes from the fact that if you've written a novel
on top of the rather not interesting storyline,
you have the problem of if you actually stop and think about
a lot of logics of pretty much everything that happens,
it doesn't quite make sense.
There are types of different "doesn't make sense" happens.
For example,
there's one type where it wouldn't actually
make sense for something to be there.
The female lead falls down the cliff,
the male lead goes to save, next shot
You see that she ... cause she's poisoned.
So she's out
and they were in this cave, a mountain cave,
probably at the bottom of this cliff.
There's a giant bed.
She's sleeping on it,
and it has beddings, it has pillows.
It has quilt,
it has everything
that thing just naturally exists at the bottom of a cliff.
Even if you are a wu xia master of this world, really like,
how did you get that thing in there?
Where does it come from?
No explanation.
you know We don't need that.
And then there are other type of doesn't make sense
things such as you have like the enemy bad people
fighting against the female and male lead.
Four of them were standing there
and they don't come together all at once
trying to fight themale lead off.
They take turns
one goes ahead challenges him gets put down
the other comes.
And also like the kid who got his whole family wiped out and got
saved by the male and female lead
almost immediately recovers.
From the fact that his entire family just go wiped out
in front of his eyes,
he's the Cheng Ling from Word of Honor, right?
Just younger than cheng ling,
pretty much experiencing exactly what cheng ling experienced in
Word of Honor
and see how long it took cheng ling to recover,
and he had his shadow and he had his problems.
It's a much more reasonable depiction of a character's journey,
whereas this kid,
he literally just like,
~~~
in the cart for like 3 seconds and
stopped and ever since then got all well.
Makes a lot of sense.
Another type of doesn't make sense,
which is what you see is not actually what they talk about.
For example, the female lead is dressed in the style
throughout this drama,
and one day the male lead is like your clothes is so ugly.
I'm gonna pay the most expensive costume.
that you can buy in this place that I actually own
and then make over her,
so that she will be prettier.
And she goes away with her original clothes.
She comes back again with the camera language.
You see it so clearly the light comes from the back of her,
the birth of venus light, and then.
She is dressed in the new makeover costumes that only
basically change the color from the grayish to green,
pretty much stay exactly the same style.
As she previously has it just a little bit more fabric
and then she changed her hair style a little bit.
That's all
and our make lead had to stand in the slow-mo shot
and getting~~~~
stunned by how beautiful she is.
But everybody who's watching the drama as
audiences is like
SHE HARDLY CHANGED AT ALL!
These basic, tiny logic things,
they can't even write it properly.
You can anticipate how bad the politics plot can be.
I don't even wanna rant about everything that is to do with war,
politics, the officials, conspiracies, the emperpr,
the kings,
you kno wall those type of plot
challenges my basic understandings of the human world.
If you've watched this part of the plot,
okay I don't even wanna talk about it.
?!%^&%*&$*?
That's enough? Really
What? What?
I don't know, like,
I think primary school students these days will
write a better, more logical script than this,
but, hey,
2022 Chinese dramaland
you see I'm being very sarcastic,
but really it's all there.
If you go and watch it, you'll see all the things i've mentioned.
I didn't say anything that's not really there.
you know
I didn't make it up.
It's in the drama.
I'm not saying you cannot enjoy this drama,
but just don't expect you're gonna get any
enjoyment out of storytelling narrative,
interesting plot setting, interesting character,
all that doesn't exist in this drama.
It just has good looking people.
I hope this video hasn't offended too many people, but if it did,
you asked for it
Why do you keep watching
you should just quit before before it happened
you know I did bother to make this thing.
and The funny thing about this flower that I just made 2 days ago,
I put on community post is,
I didn't know this at all.
Somebody told me apparently, in the novel,
the male lead actually grew a flower by himself blossoms in 2
and one of them is black,
and one of them is white.
Think about the character names in this drama
It's just like, oddly,
I somehow pull that Information out of universe without
knowing at all about what happened in the original novel.
Although my flower is white flower, has one petal of black
and black flower and has one petal of white, it still works.
And then the Lan 兰 part,
orchid part is also the male lead‘s name.
I also had to dye the black silk myself because the silk is white.
And I had to dye it 6 times to get it black enough to make this.
So you know I put effort in my reviews
not gonna get me any extra more views,
but I enjoy the process.
This video is getting way too long,
but it's my honest opinion.
Thank you for watching AvenueX
i'll see you in my next video.
Meanwhile, live long and happy drama watching.