#Guo Mowen | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

purplehanfu · 2 years ago

Text

A League of Nobleman: Episodes 1-10

notes: Spoilers! This drama suddenly appeared out of nowhere giving us all unwarranted hope for Immortality and Winner is King. Master list of all recaps

This ridiculously good looking man is Lan Jue.

Lan Jue is the Vice-minister of Rites. He is a competent official although he really shines when he is relaxing at home engaging in a variety of prissy hobbies.

But he has a dark secret. When Lan Jue was a child, his father was wrongly accused of treason, exiled and eventually executed. Now Lan Jue wants to find out the truth of what happened and clear his father's name. So basically the same dark secret as every other drama. Unless he has another, darker secret lurking behind that first one. Which I doubt.

No Vice-minister of Rites is an island, as they say, and Lan Jue is no exception. His squad consists of his personal assistant/bodyguard Xu Dong (seen here suffering no nonsense)

and his bestie from back in the day Wang Yan (Mowen).

Mowen is a total chad and I love him. He is in charge of the Capital Guards which is super convenient if you're going to be solving crimes with your new boyfriend...

Zhang Ping. Zhang Ping is a poor, orphaned scholar from the countryside who has both a scientific mind and a magic water bowl that lets him see into people's minds (no, really). He is very inflexible about the concepts of justice and truth, and will probably make a great detective and a terrible official or husband.

Zhang Ping is accompanied by his roommate/aspiring playwright/perennial hype-man Chen Chou.

Chen Chou is played by Guo Cheng whom you will immediately recognize from his role as the sassiest junior in Cloud Recesses, Lan Jingyi. He is a bright light in this as well.

Other Characters

Yet to appear is Gu Qing Zhang i.e. my boy Wang Duo. Where is he?! As you can see from my blog design, he is a personal favorite. It's episode 10 and he's still not here which unfortunately means he will likely be the childhood friend who turns out to be the bad guy. Sorry Gu Qing Zhang, I'm just hoping that it won't be Mowen.

The Emperor who is a total broski and not very interested in the mechanics of governance. I can totally see this guy crushing cans on a frat house porch.

The only estrogen in this thing so far is provided by the Empress Dowager who is a bad bitch and secretly ruling the nation with her incompetent son as a puppet emperor.

She has a supporter in the Chief of Astronomy who unveils his proposal for a public works project that's ostensibly a giant clock, but let’s be honest it’s probably a giant bomb. I predict we will spend at least part of an episode running around the construction site for this thing, trying to defuse it.

your tax dollars at work

Foreshadowing

So how are Zhang Ping and Lan Jue connected? In episode 8 we see the young Lan Jue give his father a sachet to take as a remembrance on his journey to exile. Then in episode 9 we see Zhang Ping dream about the same sachet. Coincidence? Probably not.

And the mysterious woman that came to visit Lan Jue's father before he left just might be the same young woman that Zhang Ping is calling for in his dreams.

The Bad

Even though the novel this was based on is not BL, this drama was filmed post-Word of Honor and pre-danmeipocalypse which means in its original state it probably leaned pretty hard on the gay. To be released, a whole episode's worth of material was edited out (my conjecture, because 29 episodes?).

This puts the viewer in the position of having to do a little detective work of their own. For example in a scene in episode 8 Zhang Ping and Lan Jue get caught in a c-drama cave-in which means light rubble and just enough exit blockage so we can pause for bonding and exposition.

Zhang Ping has an arm wound which Lan Jue notices. In the next shot, Zhang Ping had the wound bound which means the scene of Lan Jue tenderly rendering medical assistance was cut.