Imperial Coroner
Jul. 12th, 2021 22:15![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
superborbtl;dr An extremely well executed mystery period drama, with an excellent main cast.
Instead of a premise ("mystery period drama" actually covers it pretty well), I'll start by introducing you to the main four characters.
From right to left:
Xiao Jinyu: Prince Goldfish!! (His name is a homonym and early on, Chu Chu mishears his name that way. C-fandom also refers to him as little goldfish.) He is charged with investigating cases and is an excellent detective. Used to getting his own way, but upright and fair.
Chu Chu: Grew up in a family of coroners and has gone to Chang'an to try and become an official coroner. Her knowledge about corpses is vast, but she's occasionally naive. Practical and meticulous, she's set her sights on helping others with her skills as a coroner.
Leng Yue: A doctor and skilled martial artist, she is straightforward and direct. She grew up with both XJY and JY, but her grandfather is outside Chang'an as the military commander of an army.
Jing Yi: A little bit silly, JY often adds a touch of humor to a situation. He and XJY are best friends and often investigate cases together; they don't need to talk to communicate at all! He acts well, and has a silver tongue.
(It perfectly fits a sedoretu. I'm just saying, each romantic pairing of the sedoretu works.)
Where this show really shines is in the internal logic and intelligence of the characters. People don't do stupid things! If they do fall short, there is usually a good reason! Bad guys are (mostly) smart, it's just that our main characters are better. The show will also often seemingly miss an obvious clue-- only to circle back around to it, rewarding paying attention.
The plot is fast and mostly well paced, though the ending is somewhat rushed. I definitely needed the watch party to remind me when the Big Bad was introduced because I completely forgot hahaha, but it's not too difficult to follow. They do fall into an over-explaining trap to make sure you get what happened and end up repeating it a couple times.
That does lead into my biggest (slightly unfair) annoyance though: despite subverting some expectations, it fully falls into the murder mystery + imperial power genre niche. Bad Guys Bad, Emperor Good (even when the emperor doesn't really do anything either way), Everything Fixed Through Investigation, that sort of thing. No questioning of the system, the police state is fine because these upright gentlemen are at the head of it, doing some casual (bloodless) torture and interrogation... But at the same time, that is the genre, expecting more is a bit unreasonable.
My other complaint is that because of XJY's detective skills and JY's ability to follow XJY's thoughts, it ends in the girls needing the explanation more often than I'm happy with. As is genre-typical, explanations of the forensics and such are needed, of course, but it was an annoying trend when they otherwise did a good job of balancing the main characters.
Since I do talk about it a lot, there is a bit of second hand embarrassment in the first ep, but after that, not really. I only remember because it's in the start of my livetweet thread haha. I livetweeted the whole thing under the #imperialborb tag [https://twitter.com/superborb/status/1393711482664271872]! A first for me!
OK Let me end on some more praise! For a young, relatively unknown cast, the acting is quite good; XJY is a bit stiff, but that works for the character. They also had a small budget and did a lot with it: costumes are decent, no terrible CGI. Though there was a hilarious fight-from-the-POV-of-a-sword GoPro moment. Mildly terrible wigs, but what can you do.
Finally, there is an end credit scene at the very end of the show; don't miss it!
Instead of a premise ("mystery period drama" actually covers it pretty well), I'll start by introducing you to the main four characters.
From right to left:
Xiao Jinyu: Prince Goldfish!! (His name is a homonym and early on, Chu Chu mishears his name that way. C-fandom also refers to him as little goldfish.) He is charged with investigating cases and is an excellent detective. Used to getting his own way, but upright and fair.
Chu Chu: Grew up in a family of coroners and has gone to Chang'an to try and become an official coroner. Her knowledge about corpses is vast, but she's occasionally naive. Practical and meticulous, she's set her sights on helping others with her skills as a coroner.
Leng Yue: A doctor and skilled martial artist, she is straightforward and direct. She grew up with both XJY and JY, but her grandfather is outside Chang'an as the military commander of an army.
Jing Yi: A little bit silly, JY often adds a touch of humor to a situation. He and XJY are best friends and often investigate cases together; they don't need to talk to communicate at all! He acts well, and has a silver tongue.
(It perfectly fits a sedoretu. I'm just saying, each romantic pairing of the sedoretu works.)
Where this show really shines is in the internal logic and intelligence of the characters. People don't do stupid things! If they do fall short, there is usually a good reason! Bad guys are (mostly) smart, it's just that our main characters are better. The show will also often seemingly miss an obvious clue-- only to circle back around to it, rewarding paying attention.
The plot is fast and mostly well paced, though the ending is somewhat rushed. I definitely needed the watch party to remind me when the Big Bad was introduced because I completely forgot hahaha, but it's not too difficult to follow. They do fall into an over-explaining trap to make sure you get what happened and end up repeating it a couple times.
That does lead into my biggest (slightly unfair) annoyance though: despite subverting some expectations, it fully falls into the murder mystery + imperial power genre niche. Bad Guys Bad, Emperor Good (even when the emperor doesn't really do anything either way), Everything Fixed Through Investigation, that sort of thing. No questioning of the system, the police state is fine because these upright gentlemen are at the head of it, doing some casual (bloodless) torture and interrogation... But at the same time, that is the genre, expecting more is a bit unreasonable.
My other complaint is that because of XJY's detective skills and JY's ability to follow XJY's thoughts, it ends in the girls needing the explanation more often than I'm happy with. As is genre-typical, explanations of the forensics and such are needed, of course, but it was an annoying trend when they otherwise did a good job of balancing the main characters.
Since I do talk about it a lot, there is a bit of second hand embarrassment in the first ep, but after that, not really. I only remember because it's in the start of my livetweet thread haha. I livetweeted the whole thing under the #imperialborb tag [https://twitter.com/superborb/status/1393711482664271872]! A first for me!
OK Let me end on some more praise! For a young, relatively unknown cast, the acting is quite good; XJY is a bit stiff, but that works for the character. They also had a small budget and did a lot with it: costumes are decent, no terrible CGI. Though there was a hilarious fight-from-the-POV-of-a-sword GoPro moment. Mildly terrible wigs, but what can you do.
Finally, there is an end credit scene at the very end of the show; don't miss it!
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Date: 2021-07-13 23:16 (UTC)