Welcome to my weekly blog post where I give thoughts on dramas I’m watching but not recapping.
This week I finished recapping Utsukushii Kare Season 1/My Beautiful Man Season 1 and made it through the first 3 episodes of recent favorite On A Starry Night/Hoshi Furu Yoru ni. Next week I plan to start another recent favorite, Thai slice-of-life BL Moonlight Chicken which I already mentioned in the weekly reviews.
Other drama-watching went slow this week and it feels like I’m in the middle of half a dozen shows.
I finally finished:
Under the Microscope – 显微镜下的大明 – China 2023 (Pictured)
A recently completed Chinese historical mystery drama with 14 episodes.
The show features a man who’s good at math and not much else getting caught up in a tax case that no one wants to deal with.
A mystery about taxes may not sound exciting but the acting and characters kept this show moving even when I got lost in the math, field sizes, documents, taxes, etc. The secondary characters almost stole the show, they had strong personalities and motivations and interesting character arcs.
There were a lot of great verbal-sparring scenes between the characters, with their arguments twisting and turning in order to entrap one another. I enjoyed those scenes more than the ones with physical fighting and danger.
I appreciated that while our main lead is undisputably played by an attractive actor, there wasn’t an attempt to make him sexy and accepted by society. He managed to be sympathetic and interesting without ever being ‘cured’ of his neuro-divergent qualities. At times what was going on in his head was still part of the mystery.
The ending was satisfying and interesting.
I also found it fascinating that it was based on real events from the Ming Dynasty era, and it moved me to watch a documentary on China. While I can’t really judge it, I felt like this drama gave me more insight into the genuine history of china than most.
If you’re up for a historical mystery about taxes, I recommend it.
I also binged through a short web series:
Our Dating Sim – 우리 연애 시뮬레이션 – 2023
A Korean BL web series with 8 short episodes.
A young man gets a new job with a game design company and discovers his high school crush works there too.
This was cute with some moments of depth, but also a premise that never quite worked for me. The way they’d parted, how long they’d been apart, and how they ended up back together didn’t seem to fit the rest of the story.
Of course, I watch many a Thai BL with unlikely set-ups, but those shows are longer with more time to explore the characters. With hardly more time than an average movie, this show vacillated between extreme and realistic, showing one character’s over-the-top actions in comical ways but then realistically showing the painful after-effects, without giving much insight into his motivations. It didn’t seem to fit his overall personality. Similarly, the other main character had gone to interesting extremes that felt like a one-time thing for him.
I would have preferred it stuck to over-the-top or gone fully realistic rather than sat between the two. Maybe I wasn’t in the right mood for it, or am taking it too seriously.
On the positive side, the actors were cute together and had nice chemistry. The characters felt real and their dynamics went beyond BL stereotypes. If all you want is something short and sweet that you can enjoy in one afternoon, this could be the right show for you.