#actually no i couldn't bc after like 2 minutes it would dissolve into inhoherent wailing

[softcannoli]

you are the person who got me to watch the untamed and now I am BEGGING you to tell me what guardian is and where I can watch it.. is there time travel because sometimes I see two gifsets that do not seem like they're from the same show

ooohhhhhhhhohohohohohohohoohohhooo ohhhhhhh boy where do i even start

so uhhhhh Guardian is an on-fire trashcan of a show and also the only thing I've been able to think about for like a month. It's based on the novel of the same name by Priest, which I have not yet read but have heard is very good.

I say "based on" bc I have been given to understand that it is a VERY loose adaptation, bc the novel is pretty much entirely about That Gay Shit™, the undead, reincarnation, and literal gods, all of which IIRC are big no-nos under censorship laws. So the show had to get a little creative, and so now it's about aliens? and time travel? sort of? It's weird, but that's okay, because the show is far more interested in the homoerotic subtext, of which there is OODLES.

So basically our two main characters are:

Zhao Yunlan, who is a regular human dude who is in charge of Special Investigations Department, or SID, which is essentially the department of Supernatural Monster Cops, who are responsible for making sure superpowered underground alien people don't come up to the surface and run roughshod over regular humans, and

Shen Wei, a mild-mannered university professor who is Actually Ten Thousand Years Old, and is also secretly a superpowered underground alien person. He knew a dude 10,000 years ago who looks exactly like Zhao Yunlan for unknown (timey-wimey) reasons, and was very obviously in love with him, so when he meets Zhao Yunlan he is IMMEDIATELY lost in the yearning.

There's also a bunch of other people who work under Zhao Yunlan in the SID, and they are all absolutely delightful and have a whole found-family sort of dynamic going on.

Is this a good show? I think if I'm being totally honest I would have to say no? But is terrible in a bunch of truly delightful ways. The CGI is literally shit-tier. Some of the props could not more obviously be made out of craft foam and paper-mache. The quality of the dubbing work is really uneven, and by the last 15 episodes or so they seem to completely give up and some of the lines are dubbed over by someone who is CLEARLY not the same voice are the person speaking. A lot of the writing choices make NO sense, and the plot starts to go completely off the rails somewhere just past the halfway point. (there's also some stuff that is bad in like, a bad way, but I'll talk about that a bit at the end of the post)

The thing about this show is that it's gay. Like GAY gay. Like The Untamed was pretty gay, but I could conceivably see someone cover their ears and shut their eyes to all the gay subtext in that show and convince themselves there's a heterosexual explanation for everything. Not so with Guardian. Like, I really, legitimately cannot fathom even the most willfully ignorant person not picking up on the vibes between Zhao Yunlan and Shen Wei. I simply cannot picture it. There is, in fact, NO heterosexual explanation for them.

The show throws in the most flimsy, half-hearted nods to the idea that Zhao Yunlan and Shen Wei are just Good Platonic Buddies, and then in the next scene will just drop in a 5-10 minute sequence of Shen Wei taking a sick Zhao Yunlan home, tucking him into bed, staring at his sleeping face with a face full of tenderness and longing, and then cleaning his apartment and folding his laundry for him. It's fucking unreal.

The show was very clearly trying to push the limits of subtext to see exactly how much they could get away with, and as far as I can tell the answer they got was "not that much", bc I've heard some suggestion that the show was pulled shortly after broadcast for another round of edits.

So it's on Viki, but if you don't want to pay for a streaming service and don't mind sliiiightly sketchier subs, it's also on Youtube! It might be some other places too, but those are the ones I know about.

I'm going to stop now bc this post could seriously be like 5 times longer but please watch Guardian and join me in my daily cries about Shen Wei (Zhao Yunlan can come too I guess, but it's mostly about Shen Wei, bc of the inherent eroticism of loyalty and life debts)

Lastly, bc I would be remiss not to mention it, here's some warnings about the worst things I can remember off the top of my head. I personally still think the show was well worth watching, but there's a few things I sort of wish I had known going into it, beyond the vague warning "the ending sucks". It's gonna be spoilers, so read at your own risk.

There's some talk about suicide in the first arc which isn't really that bad in the grand scheme of things, but can come across as dismissive and/or insensitive. There's an arc somewhere in the mid-20s that leans on some really ableist "split-personality" tropes. I will fully admit that the only thing that kept me watching at that point was the knowledge that this would be over in an episode or two, and the fact that the youtube subtitles translated comments about other character's behavior as "cringe", which I found an extremely funny translation choice.

And lastly, the finale. The finale is bad in a number of ways, but the biggest and easiest to explain is that the show goes full Bury Your Gays and kills off both Shen Wei and Zhao Yunlan. ( and then another entity takes control of Zhao Yunlan's body?? so the general public doesn't actually know he's dead?? which I found pretty uncomfortable) But like basically my view of the ending is that if something bad happened, No It Didn't. Which seems to be the general opinion, since apparently Priest went back and wrote an extra epilogue chapter to fix the drama's ending.