Rants and Weekly Raves (RAWR) #420

Anne: So, how has everyone been lately? I feel like I'm still drowning in the endless sea of paperwork with no shore in sight. 

In order to encourage the 6 year old to read, which he does very well but doesn't like to do, I'm bribing him with MineCraft mods for every book he finishes. Although I will need to re-think the number of words because some of the books he's checking out at the library are a bit on the "thin" side. And I asked him why he keeps checking out geography books, thinking maybe if checked out a "story" book or something it won't be so boring. And he says it's because he likes geography. I replied, then you should be more than willing to read them. 

And now for what I managed to watch during this week.

About Youth

Thus ends one of the sweetest BL stories I've seen this year. There was no violence, no weird abusive relationship (even the parents' turned around quickly), nothing slightly objectionable at all. Even the entire BL theme didn't faze anyone in the show. Everything was treated as completely normal. It was a good story about understanding and being supportive. Of course, being only 8 episodes with a total of maybe 2 hours of screen time, there isn't a lot you can do with it. The tension between Ye Guang and his parents got solved in less than 10 minutes. Maybe all it required was him telling his parent exactly how he felt, instead of just biting his lips and being the good son that he was. 

And the whole class president thing that I see being posted in the synopsis everywhere, barely made a blip. It started the show, but it wasn't how the boys met. Even without the class president "competition", Qi Zhang would still have figured out a way to "introduce" himself to Ye Guang. Happy, happy ending, and I am content.

Poong, The Joseon Psychiatrist

Seriously?! What in the freaking hell was this ending?! What is with all these Korean dramas that are giving me these cliff hangers? We DON'T all need to leave room for season 2! Please let's just STOP this MADDESS... (These all cap words seem really loud...)

Poong and Eun Woo survive being poisoned, where he took an huge dose of the poisonous flower in order to "test" out the antidote. (Can we all just agree that in real life this would not have ended successfully? Most people who use themselves as experimental subjects don't come out intact, or at all, on the other side.) They managed to find evidence to implicate the prime minister and proved that he was responsible for poisoning the previous king. Poong got his name back and got reappointed back at the palace and was allowed to "leave". With a happy-ever-after within grasp, everyone thought that Poong was going to propose, even Eun Woo was getting all dolled up to prepare herself for the eventual scene. And like a one-two punch in quick succession (and it happened in like the last 2 minutes, TWO MINUTES!!!), Eun Woo's dad tells her that he's being transferred and they need to move. And the king's guards come to tell Poong that he is commanded to return to the palace.

WHY?! 

I am at a lost for words... I  loved the show... right up to the last two minutes... No one wants to feel hopelessness at this particular moment. This is NOT the year to demonstrate how heart-ache is a higher form of art. Can we please leave the suffering in real life and not in my entertainment?

The Leaking Bookstore

I actually spend most of the week watching this Taiwanese crime drama. I don't know if there is any subbed version, so if anyone knows, please comment. The reason I started was actually because I was scrolling for something to watch. It was a crime drama, and it started interesting, and I just kept on watching. (And BTW, here's an example of how bad my Mandarin is...I didn't even realize that the "books" were Sherlock Holmes stories because I couldn't recognize them in Mandarin...)

The story is about Gao Chen Wei, who owns a bookstore and is entering a writing contest. He has 3 friends and they have a web channel and broadcast discussing crimes and crime scene and crime theory. In this writing contest, there is a mysterious person who is basically trolling him, saying that his story has a large loophole. In addition, the first place author is an unknown person whom no one has ever met, but is believed to be a writing group. On the other side of the story is Lin Mu Qing, who just joined the police department and encounters her first case that she suspects is more than what it appears to be. 

While trying to deal with a leak in his bookstore that will take a lot of money to fix, Chen Wei, on his way home one night, sees a car on fire with someone inside. He goes to help, and finds the driver already dead. After he calls the cops, they wanted to search his car. Chen Wei agrees, but then he realizes that someone planted evidence in his trunk that would implicate him in the burning car and the dead body. He manages to "hide" the evidence, and the cops releases him. And this starts a massive plot that involves all 3 of his friends, their secrets and their connections to all the people surrounding a sex trafficking ring that also exploited children. This dealt with a lot of very unsavory topics to say the least. But of course, being Taiwanese, they had to make everything more visual than I cared for. 

The mystery plot was pretty good (not perfect considering I still don't understand how no one saw through some really large holes...) But it was not the most comfortable show to watch. The characters are quite complicated, and as the audience, you suspected every single one of them. They made a lot of mistakes, but they do try to correct them. I think I like the show because it wasn't so clear cut. There many twists and turns, mostly involving how every one is linked to everyone else. But there is an END. That is what counts.

So this is yet for this week... I'll have to check out Thousand Years for You soon, and if anyone has, please let me know if I should start it.