Rants and Weekly Raves (RAWR) #390

Anne: My boring life continues to be filled with work and an unending series of meetings. I am going through a HanFu buying spree, and gifted myself I think about 7 different outfits! Unfortunately, I have at least 3, that despite my buying the biggest size they had, is still about 2 inches to small. Ugh! At some point I have to admit that I probably should actually get a treadmill to be installed at my desk. I have never sat so still doing nothing but computer "work" for hours on straight. I wonder if corporate will pay for this as encouraging a healthy life style for their staff. On my birthday, I'm working from home and will be wearing one of my Hanfu just for the heck of it!

On a different note, I watched the Netflix documentary on the Tinder Swindler...WTF! So...there are technicaly no laws against personal fraud? The only thing they could charge him with is the fake passport. Seriously!? And why are people still giving him money!?

Shining for One Thing

Everything ended with that one line, "Your future is behind you." It's not like I don't understand, but can we at least have the visual happy ending instead of some implied version of it? And did we ever understand what actually happened at the light house? If she didn't change anything in her current time, then he did fall off and somehow survived? I guess if we accept that she can cross into an alternative universe, then it isn't that far off that Wan Sen survived a fall and decided to disappear for a few years? I liked everything about the drama, but there was ONE thing that really bother me...The English lyrics written, obviously, not by someone with enough fluency to do the job. It's not in all the songs. Some of the half Chinese and half English are ok. But there is one song that really bothered me. I don't know why the song called "The Whole World is Behind Me" makes my teeth hurt.  Great show.

Autumn Ballad

This show has taken over my life. This is a little of everything that I like: costume, crime solving, a ML who is a little of an A-hole and knows it, a FL who relies on herself to better her life and who isn't gaga over the ML at first sight, second, third, forth, or even the hundredth time. The best thing is, this FL went after the man she wanted, which is NOT the ML. Some refreshing differences is that Qiu Yan's best champion isn't even her own birth mother, it is her father's main wife. Her own mother left her to starve to death because she wasn't born a male. 

Qiu Yan is the eldest daughter's of the Second House of the Yan family. The second house is the second son's family, who controls the entire family's finances. The show starts with her wedding, and her husband dying during the ceremony. Of course, she is now accused of killing her husband due to her just being born a natural "bad" luck girl. Resisting all efforts of her husband's family to force her to be buried with her husband, she started to investigate the real reason why he died, to force an annulment. 

Liang Yi is in charge of some sort of investigational bureau. He does not like Qiu Yan, whom he considers too scheming, and doesn't want his best friend, Qin Xuan, to marry/like her. Through all of this, Qiu Yan actually finds out that Liang Yi was the one who saved her 6 yeas ago, and who was the reason that she wanted to learn to read and gather knowledge in order to being able to choose her own life. However, the Liang Yi she meets now, is nothing like the boy she idolized, and she purposely kept this information from him. 

I like the ML and FL's interactions. Their bickering, and their slow understanding of each other. At episode 12, Liang Yi, who choose to marry Qiu Yan's younger sister, Qiu Min, for no other reason then the fact that the family fit his purposes and randomly choose one. Granted now he is also under the mistaken belief that this younger sister is the girl he rescued 6 years ago. Despite not liking Qui Yan, he is  finding himself starting to notice things in Qui Yan. And on Qui Yan's side, she is still perfectly happy with her Qin Xuan, although someone else is starting to intrude into her thoughts. 

Now...as with most crime solving dramas...this is not really the point. And more than once, I don't understand how their tail-gating remains completely undetected by their target. So...keep your expectations of the crime solving part low, but the story of love/friendship makes up for a lot of it. The feel of this drama is like The Story of Minglan, but not as good.

Here is my Exclusive Indulge

I have no idea why I got so caught up with this silly show, which is not new. It's ~3 minutes per episode and hilarious! I understand that this is a rebirth story, but it is a little hard to follow sometimes. And they spend needless minutes on the whole pop-in-the-face thing. Oh well... it is fast and cute and ridiculous. 

That's it for this week. I also watched Mirror: Twin Cities, but I probably won't do a review until I finish it. The show is a little slow, but I like the two MLs a whole lot. So far, ZhenLan seems like a really good support for BaiYing. I get the feeling that he would have been fine to let her go, if she asked him to.

Have a great week everyone!