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superborbThe plan for the kawas (gods) to leave after the last rain falls is disrupted by a human girl. According to some random Taiwanese blogs, they used general concepts from Amis mythology, but any particular story/kawas is fictional.
The good:
The worldbuilding is TIGHT, very cleanly done.
It started very strong, doing a great job of subtly setting things up without explicitly overexplaining.
The arcs that did get resolved, where they revisited earlier scenes from new perspectives, were incredibly satisfying.
The reveal of the motivations of the character you're set up to think is the villain is VERY good; in only a few minutes, it totally recontextualized everything in a believable, yet unexpected, way.
Toem, a character who's written to be ambivalently evil, is also incredibly acted and has great scenes (and outfits! and earrings!).
Generally, the other world set is used to great advantage, as are subtle special effects, though the male lead's fortress/house is uh, hilarious.
Early on, the otherworldliness of the kawas was subtly contrasted with humanity's concerns in how they handled problems, though this got dropped in the genre shift (see below).
The folktale at the beginning of each episode is really interesting: sometimes clever, sometimes overextended.
For some reason, they seemed to have a very large music budget, with many new pieces appearing towards the end of the show.
The bad:
The plot is extremely unfocused as a result of trying to tackle too many elements: one of the reasons the ending feels unsatisfying, as noted byhalfcactus is because it changes from a story about the female lead, which is shaped like a family centric story, to one about the male lead, which is shaped like a romance.
Certain subplots were very draggy, in particular the romance (in retrospect, makes more sense since that was the story they were trying to tell), the guilt arcs, and when they were trying to do something clever with a slow reveal (made it hard for the watcher to participate since so much was omitted).
I really, really hated the henpecked storyline; it was a bad relationship in a boring way.
There are some interesting implications of the memory tampering allowed by the Comb of Memories, which they... didn't fully explore and they didn't even lean into how fucked up it was.
halfcactus summed up the ending well as a fix-it fanfic (in a literal, not figurative way). This left SO MANY dangling, important plot threads?
Overall, when it hit, it was VERY good, but there were major pacing issues because it spent a lot of time on things that weren't important and ended up unresolved. Still, I would recommend it overall, as the worldbuilding was fantastic and the way they tried to tell the story ambitious.
The good:
The worldbuilding is TIGHT, very cleanly done.
It started very strong, doing a great job of subtly setting things up without explicitly overexplaining.
The arcs that did get resolved, where they revisited earlier scenes from new perspectives, were incredibly satisfying.
The reveal of the motivations of the character you're set up to think is the villain is VERY good; in only a few minutes, it totally recontextualized everything in a believable, yet unexpected, way.
Toem, a character who's written to be ambivalently evil, is also incredibly acted and has great scenes (and outfits! and earrings!).
Generally, the other world set is used to great advantage, as are subtle special effects, though the male lead's fortress/house is uh, hilarious.
Early on, the otherworldliness of the kawas was subtly contrasted with humanity's concerns in how they handled problems, though this got dropped in the genre shift (see below).
The folktale at the beginning of each episode is really interesting: sometimes clever, sometimes overextended.
For some reason, they seemed to have a very large music budget, with many new pieces appearing towards the end of the show.
The bad:
The plot is extremely unfocused as a result of trying to tackle too many elements: one of the reasons the ending feels unsatisfying, as noted by
halfcactus is because it changes from a story about the female lead, which is shaped like a family centric story, to one about the male lead, which is shaped like a romance. Certain subplots were very draggy, in particular the romance (in retrospect, makes more sense since that was the story they were trying to tell), the guilt arcs, and when they were trying to do something clever with a slow reveal (made it hard for the watcher to participate since so much was omitted).
I really, really hated the henpecked storyline; it was a bad relationship in a boring way.
There are some interesting implications of the memory tampering allowed by the Comb of Memories, which they... didn't fully explore and they didn't even lean into how fucked up it was.
halfcactus summed up the ending well as a fix-it fanfic (in a literal, not figurative way). This left SO MANY dangling, important plot threads?Overall, when it hit, it was VERY good, but there were major pacing issues because it spent a lot of time on things that weren't important and ended up unresolved. Still, I would recommend it overall, as the worldbuilding was fantastic and the way they tried to tell the story ambitious.
no subject
Date: 2022-07-16 06:11 (UTC)I really just wish the ending addressed the gods' blind spots when it comes to fixing human situations and being unable to learn or change--they did so well in the first half!
Agree 100% with the henpecked storyline. I think it would not have been as bad if they actually treated Hsieh Tienti better, but since they undid her entire emotional storyline, I'm more sensitive to commonplace sexist narratives. I don't even mind the shift from family to romance, but more on the show's inability to make found family storylines and romance storylines coexist? The ending kind of made me feel that blood relations were most important in a family, which, again, would make sense if it was acknowledged as a consequence of gods not understanding the intricacies of human relationships. (Or if they'd just dropped Hsieh Tianti's foster family subplot altogether.)
no subject
Date: 2022-07-17 18:42 (UTC)Yeah, I /think/ that was dropped with the genre shift, but why? It would have made a more interesting romance story (even if it's p standard generally), if 'Orad had to overcome that.
I guess it's common to all Sino dramas, that emphasis on blood relationships, but I dislike it when it comes at the expense of adoptive family relationships. It didn't help how they never addressed Ai-ting and Ai-yu's mom's guilt directly either.