Hello, you're watching Avenue X and um, today let's talk about a drama that I really shouldn't have clicked open.
That is the drama Xing He Chang Ming, previously known as Jiu Zhou Zhu Yan Ji, currently English title is Shining Just for You.
Who the hell knows why they give it such an English title?
One of those Novoland stuff, if you still remember, Jiu Zhou was a group of authors many years attempt to create a Chinese
fantasyland, they write different books that's roughly based on this idea of this magical continent.
We've already had quite a few dramas that are based on novels that are based on this idea, such as Novoland Eagle Flag, such as Tribes and Empires.
More specifically, this drama was shot from October, 2020 to February, 2021, slightly short of 120 days.
To my knowledge of how fast Chinese dramas usually get shot, and this type of drama usually get shot.
It should have ended up being a 40 to 50 episodes period drama.
But as we see, the drama finally airs more than a year and a half later.
On Youku, it's only 25 episodes.
I'm not even sure whether they've divided it into two parts.
I don't care.
Anyway, the number right now is 25.
If that's the case, that means they've cut it out like 40% of this whole thing.
Honestly, uh, I am not very curious about what happened in post production or when they sent it to censorship.
Anyway, fantasy, period drama led by Feng Shaofeng abd Peng Xiaoran, and Zhu Zhengting.
Who had this genius idea of putting Feng Shaofeng and Peng Xiaoran together thinking that's gonna work for a period idol type of drama.
Honestly, aren't people in those dramas for good looking young couples, fantasizing romances that cannot happen in our real life.
Therefore, we project that onto pretty people.
I've watched five episodes, more specifically, 5.3 episodes.
I was like a third of the six episodes and I can't continue anymore, so I stopped, and I'm not going back.
There's no structure of this video.
I'm just gonna talk about anything and everything I can think of while I was watching, the pain I've suffered.
I'm just sharing that with you so that you don't have to, or you can have a good laugh and forget about its existence.
The first obstacle I had to hop over to actually being able to watch 5.3 episodes is the dubbing problem.
Everyone is dubbed.
They're dubbed by voices that are way too familiar to my ears for me to enjoy the drama.
Female lead Peng Xiaoran is dubbed by Xu Jiaqi,.
She is the often used voice for pretty much everything that Ju JingYi does, by default, she sounds like Ju Jingyi.
This year she has also been dubbing Pei Xijun from Strange Tales of Tang Dynasty that I've recently just finished watching that drama.
So imagine my pain of watching this drama and feeling all the other actresses faces are layered on top of Peng Xiaoran.
Then Feng Shaofeng is dubbed by Wei Chao.
Heavens.
This veteran dubber who I really, really like.
To me his Default face is Cheng Hao Feng's face from Nirvana in fire.
But he also has been Xu Kai's role in Shang Shi this year.
He also was Feng Delun's role in An Ye Xing Zhe, so another sort of added, on pain of multiple faces layered on top of Feng Shangfeng's face when
I watch . Then Zhu Zhengting, although i haven't really seen much of his screen time, but he's dubbed by Su Shangqing, I love that guy's voice.
He's been dubbing Wang Anyu, he's this year been dubbing Zeng Shunxi and many other people.
So basically, while I was watching this drama, even when in one shot there are just two leads looking at each other, I see 10 people.
That's a big crowd.
Okay.
Very hard for my brain to compute, and unfortunately, I'm just that type of auditory animal, I can deal with it.
My brain wouldn't shut it down.
Also, just because I know what Feng Shaofeng sounds like in real life.
Okay, and Wei Chao just does not fit him.
Pain number two, I guess everybody who's got eyeballs can see that this drama is cashing in on Peng Xiaoran's popularity
after the success of Dong Gong, Goodbye My princess.
She even look almost the same with her styling, the tribal look, although less pretty, let's be honest, because there's less filter.
She is a tribal woman whose clan got erased and destroyed by the middle kingdom power represented by the male lead, "Ding" for similarity.
Second, she ends up being pulled into the middle kingdom's culture and then start to serve the most powerful man or being very close to him.
And that guy is the emperor and ruler of that place, whereas in Dong Gong,
the male lead is gonna be, you know, he's not yet, but he will inherit the throne whatever.
So that's like pretty much the same thing.
And they become a couple eventually.
And the thing is, Don Gong worked because it was Peng Xiaoran and Chen Xingxu, and it was the skinnier version of Chen Xing Xu.
Okay.
And he plays that type of, um, bad guy really, really well, had it been him in Condor Hero drama where he plays Yang
Kang, where he has like at least 20 more pound on him.
It wouldn't have worked.
It's a cruel world.
It's idol dramaland, people needs to be looking super skinny and pretty for those ridiculous plot to work I mean come one, if Li Chengyi look
any worse than he looks like in the drama, we as audiences would not have empathized with him at all and being able to finish the drama.
Peng Xiaoran is still Peng Xiaoran, but Feng Shaofeng, he's not at that age to be able to pull that off.
Let's be honest, he's uncle.
Why make it, you know, you already have that one.
It just makes the motivation of making this drama very, very questionable.
Number three, oh heavens, the cgi.
Not only is the CG in itself really bad, but also how they use it.
They had this wolf, which, hey, another thing we've seen in goodbye, princess, it is totally used as a digital
tool to make the male and female meet for the first time.
But everything about that encounter with the wolf, how people reacted, how all the main characters reacted, how the male lead comes out save
the female lead, how they fight that wolf off, that whole sequence.
Not even one shot or one moment or one construction of time and actions and why people do things at the time
and why the wolf acts that way, makes any logical sense.
For example, everybody has run away and then only the female lead and the princess was standing in the middle
of the field waiting for the wolf to attack them.
And when our female lead is very conveniently tripped over and fallen onto the ground and the wolf is about
to come on top of her, the guy comes out of nowhere.
One shot ago.
It's an open field.
You don't see anybody close in her proximity.
This shot, this guy just shows up like a tornado, Chinese kung fu drama with wiring work that typical look and then kick the wolf on its side and he
just managed to kick that wolf off, and the wolf just falls onto the side.
And then you have the shot on the back of this guy and this woman is looking at him and everything is slowmo.
He turns around, they look at each other.
At least the 30 seconds go by.
Nothing happened.
The wolf, I guess it was just waiting for you two to recognize each other, and then we can go to the next shot about how you're gonna kill me.
When the animal is attacking them.
The way that they dodge this wolf is totally for the sake of making that classic slowmo turning in circle shot of two
people looking at each other and falling in love on the spot.
I feel so bad for that wolf, although it looks terrible.
It's just treated with so much disrespect.
Then everything else, like how these two talk to each other, it's like the worst kind of web novel you can think of written
by somebody who just understands nothing about human interaction.
He, without knowing her name, without actually knowing her at all, just immediately start to call her
Feng Ya Tou, heavens, oh heavens crazy little girl.
You know that immediately just gives you all the baggage of the web dramaland Ya Tou Jiao, the cult of little girl thing that, ooh, it just
sits so wrongly in today's any standard and then later the male second will show up and he will have wings, but that CGI looks even worse.
I think a lot of content creators on YouTube who are specialized in special effects or on Bilibili, they can
do a much better job with a lot less money probably.
The guy likes the girl for no good reason.
The girl kind of doesn't have a problem with this guy although he clearly fucked up her whole clan and destroyed everything.
She happily takes the position of predictor, like the astrology department of their empire because she's naturally talented
and she can predict future female leads buff, I guess.
And then Zhang Tielin, this old actor who's been around in Chinese dramaland forever,, shows up and then gets killed like two episodes later.
hardly ever functioning properly during those two episodes.
As either an actor or a character in the drama.
Basically, everybody who's in frame of this drama are just so desperate and eager to finish shooting and get paid and get out.
I still vaguely remember, although not exactly when that was.
It's a long time ago when I first saw this project being announced and saw its posters and the casting.
I was like, this smells like another Quan Qian drama.
Now, obviously I don't have hard evidences and I honestly don't care, but I'm very confident in my audience's
intelligence and with anybody who has a reasonable brain power.
If you go and watch his drama for 20 minutes, you're gonna realize this is probably made for all kinds of reasons
imaginable, other than trying to tell a good story.
This type of crap gets made all the time in drama land.
I just hope as we move into 2023, we're gonna see less of such projects, and it is my sincere wish that even in the future we
still are gonna get a lot of crappy dramas from Chinese drama land.
Can we have them as inventively, refreshingly, imaginatively bad, whether they press on the wrong button of the current social standard
of morality or whatever, or they're just bad in ways that are so unexpected that they become laughing stock, that in itself produces value
to entertain people, and obviously giving me reasons to make videos.
I know crappy stuff are unavoidable, but I want GOOD crappy stuff.
Crappy stuff that are crappy in their very personality way, not like this, where everything that's bad about it is boring.
In its crappy and badness, it cannot even compare to other crappy and badness drama.
So what is the purpose of existence of this type of thing?
Oh, there's one final thing I forgot to mention, which is there's this princess role, um, who is definitely
supporting role and who will be irrelevant soon enough.
But I really don't know what's going on with this particular role and her styling and she just doesn't look like she belongs to this crew.
Her parents in the drama genetically are all black haired and she's got like what, 21st century dye light, brown chestnut hair that's curly.
Definitely doesn't come from her genes.
And then she's got makeup that's just like, did it just got invented on TikTok?
Cause the white eyeliner thing definitely is just so weird and nobody else in the drama of her tribe is doing that.
The drama completely doesn't care about having any type of consistency.
I hope at least this video provides you with a little bit relaxation, uh, close to the end of this week.
It's after all.
December and according to most human society's tradition, it's a month for celebration and happiness and get togetherness and uh, hey, why
not just put that recommendation here for that video on that drama?
That is totally not about that . It's about having all my clans erase and murdered and then I still have to marry you.
Anyway, that's the better drama.
Okay.
Led by her.
I think most of my audiences have already, uh, watched it, but if you haven't, check it out.
Thank you for watching AvenueX, I'll see you in my next video, meanwhile live long and happy drama watching.