#number one wang zhuocheng fan

[chevalierlorraine]

You have not seen perfection untill you have seen Wang Zhuocheng

[cerusee]

I've never watched any Chinese dramas but I really enjoy your posts/gifs about them and it's got me interested in trying some! Do you have any recommendations for somebody who's totally new to them? Any tropes/background context I should be aware of? The historical/fantastical ones seem the most appealing to me.

Oooooh! My first thought on reading this ask was, “oh, I’m hardly qualified”; I’m only on my *stops to count on fingers* eighth cdrama, not counting the one episode I watched of the Wang Zhuocheng xianxia where he falls in love with a rock. (Long story.) There’s a lot of cdramas out there, and I myself have not even scratched the surface of what’s out there! That said, if you’re interested in historical/fantastical dramas, those ARE the ones I’ve been watching, so I still have some opinions despite being a total noob myself.

Do not start with The Untamed/Chen Qing Ling. Twas my first cdrama, like a lot of western fans, who were drawn to it in part because of the big censored-but-still-very-evident gay love story between the male leads, but honestly, as much fun as it is for the slash fans, it’s not a great jumping off point for either Chinese television in general, or even for its own wuxia-inspired genre setting. I say this as some who is still deep in the fandom four years later, and has immense love for the show: the first two episodes are flat-out bad, the overall pacing is bad (episodes frequently stop MIDSCENE), the worldbuilding is thin (a carryover from the novel it was based on), and without a larger context for why it’s made the way it’s made (stylistic choices, industry conventions, government censorship, genre conventions) a lot about it is confusing as hell to cdrama newbies, which is…so evident…a lot…in fandom wank I mean in the discourse about what story this story is trying to tell. Like, if you came to me and asked specifically, “I’m thinking of watching CQL. Should I watch CQL?” I would say yes, absolutely! It’s so much fun! I’m obsessed with the characters! I’ve written a lot of fanfic about the purple guy! But it’s not a good first cdrama, nor it is the best example of what the Chinese TV industry has to offer.

A MUCH better first cdrama especially if you like the historical/fantastical: The Legend of the Condor Heroes (2017), which not coincidentally was my second cdrama. It’s one of about a dozen television adaptations of the classic 1957 Chinese novel of the same name by Jin Yong, generally considered to be the inventor of the genre known as wuxia, which is a blend of history, fantasy, and martial arts. (One of the most well-known examples of wuxia in the west is Ang Lee’s Oscar-winning 2000 film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which you have probably at least heard of.)

Legend of the Condor Heroes (hereafter known as LOCH) has it all: romance, revenge, evil plots and daring deeds, people jumping off a burning mountain and being rescued by the worst CGIed eagles known to television or cinema, boat adventures, mountain adventures, grasslands adventures, a weird cult leader who lives on a spooky flower island (there will be math), murder, baby kidnapping, more murder, one guy inadvertently racking up a ridiculous number of martial arts teachers, sworn brotherhoods which invariably end with one guy stabbing the other, lots of VERY good martial arts fights, and, of course, Genghis Khan. Technically there are no magic/supernatural elements in this show—no ghosts, ghouls, magic, angels, devils, gods, etc—although the martial artists do have l33t skillz that might qualify as superhuman depending on how you slice your genre conventions, and are awfully fun to watch.

I’ve actually seen two LOCH adaptations (there was one in 2024 I liked a lot, with my favorite Guo Jing so far), but 2017 is a much better adaptation for newcomers as it tells a fuller version of the story and doesn’t skimp on or rush through or rewrite as many elements of the plot as other versions do; it’s meant to be a LOCH for people who haven’t seen half a dozen versions of LOCH already. It has a WONDERFUL cast, including my one of my favorite cdrama leading men, Chen Xingxu,* as the lead antagonist, Yang Kang, who is a trash fire of a person you just can’t root for, but he also can’t help it because he was raised by Wanyin Honglie. You can catch it on YouTube (I recall that there are couple of missing episodes from that playlist, but you can search on YT for those when you get there, to find them subtitled from other channels.)

*If you, like me, come away from LOCH 2017 with your mouth slightly ajar at how great CXX is, I have wonderful news for you! He’s been a lead in at least two other very good cdramas: the 2023 xianxia** The Starry Love, where he gets to play, like, five different characters (huge acting flex, and he’s great, although I would rush to stress I loved a ton of things about this show besides CXX himself), and the 2019 semi-historical drama Goodbye My Princess, which might actually be my favorite cdrama I have seen to date, and arguably THEE best well-made on a technical level, with phenomenal acting, a great script, and editing and directing I am constantly swooning over, but I am not entirely sure I can recommend to you unless you are a Tragedy Enjoyer.

(If you are a Tragedy Enjoyer, please stop whatever you’re doing and just start watching Goodbye My Princess right now, it is phenomenal. It is also available on YouTube. Watch the Director’s Cut, not the regular one! This is important. In its haste to get the main leads on screen together ASAP, the regular version does a Reader’s Digest version of stuff the Director’s Cut spends like five episodes carefully setting up, and it doesn’t make a lot of sense, nor does it flow well.)

**Speaking of xianxia! Xianxia is the high fantasy genre, full of magic and gods and demons and people dying and living multiple lives and whatnot. Important to note: xianxias are soap operas (complimentary). They tend to feature female protagonists, sweeping, epic romances, and put enormous emphasis on exploring the nuances of relationships and emotions. I have watched three that I loved (Love Between Fairy and Devil, The Starry Love, and Eternal Love: Ten Miles of Peach Blossoms), and while technically I could recommend all three, if you were going to watch just one, especially as a cdrama intro, I have to recommend Eternal Love, which really is the quintessential xianxia, the one all other xianxias are kind of shaping themselves around. I have watched it 1.5 times and I can say that it does not properly take off until like, episode 10, or whenever it is that the main couple finally, properly meet. IT IS WORTH THE INVESTMENT. This show made me want to spit blood. I cried multiple times watching it. It made me feel things. It has a wonderful immersive quality that’s hard to describe except to say that the entire show sort of vibrates on its own frequency. The casting is just kind of…perfect? Props to Maggie Huang for portraying the most perfectly hatable xianxia villainess of all time. Absolutely no one is doing it like Su Jin. No one should try. I believe this is available on YouTube, but after an abortive start, I realized it was on US Netflix, and watched it there.

As for tropes and background context: ehhhhhh. I mean, it’s an entire industry? I know substantially less about how it functions than I do about, like, American TV and film. I know government censorship is a not-inconsiderable factor, but I don’t know much of the nuance of how that plays out in terms of filming and airing. Tropes will vary according to subject. Idol dramas (shows built to showcase media personalities regardless of their ability to act) are a thing. Most cdrama audio is still dubbed (this one surprised me!), usually by professional voice actors and not by the original cast, for a confluence of reasons, some of which historically make sense (noisy filming lots rendering original audio useless), and some of which are really stupid (fans throwing hissy fits if lead actors don’t have the “right” kinds of voices for their characters).

Anyway! My recommendations are this: try The Legend of the Condor Heroes (2017) to start with, UNLESS you would prefer having your heart ripped out of your chest, in which case watch Goodbye My Princess (Director’s Cut, 2019), or UNLESS you love soap operas as much as I do, in which case watch Eternal Love: Ten Miles of Peach Blossoms (2017). All three are great shows, but they all hit differently/scratch a different itch.

Oh! Lastly! @dangermousie is a great source of cdrama recs. I should note she prefers dramas and tragedies and mostly does not vibe with xianxias. But she watches like eight million hours of dramas a week and reports her findings to us because she is a river to her people.

[eigwayne]

One of the things I do when I don't have the wherewithal for creative works, which is often lately, is work on a database spreadsheet for my C-drama watching. The scoring records are one sheet, and there's another for actor stats that I'm working on. Because after a while you start to recognize faces among the supporting roles and can't flippin' remember where they're from, or where you first saw them.

So I started a sheet, with the rows as actor names and the column headers as shows I've seen. It's... very large. And very tedious to fill in. I cannot recommend this to anyone, ever. But it keeps me busy when I can't make myself function with anything else.

Now, I'm filling this in in order of the shows as I watched them- or my nearest guess because I forgot when I watched some things, especially for those actors I saw on Happy Camp or Chuang before I saw any of their shows (which was a lot, actually- I saw Cheng Yi, Tan Jianci, Bai Lu, Hou Minghao, even Zhao Liying on Happy Camp before I got around to any of their shows). So I'm only at King's Avatar, but I do have some stats. This does count the shows I've started but haven't finished yet, and the ones I've dropped, so not all of them are "actually seen in this show and can evaluate their performance", some are "I started a show they're in and fuck if I remember if I saw their part yet." But!

The people I've seen most so far are He Zhonghua and Zhang Fan at 10 shows each.

I've started 6 Xiao Zhan shows but only 5 for Wang Yibo, Wang Zhuocheng, and Meng Ziyi. Also at 5 is Huang Youming, Hei Zi, Liu Xueyi, Cheng Yi, Han Chenyu who is probably in all the Cheng Yi shows, Zhao Liying, Canti Lau, Ji Chen who has some DMBJ movies in there, and Dong Li Wu You, who is like fifteen, tops, but is in everything.

Liu Yuning's count is at 8 but at one point I was jotting down OST and writing contributions and then stopped because I was bored, so who knows (Nanpai Sanshu is at 9 because of the writing creds, with higher than expected but still incomplete numbers for Zhou Shen from soundtrack creds. No idea why Mimi Lee is at 5 but I like her so it's okay for now). Anyone in 72 Floors of Mystery or any movie that isn't an Untamed spin-off is messed up because I added variety shows and movies halfway through and haven't caught up yet. Happy Camp stats are a disaster.

Zhang Tianyang is at 7 shows, and that is most likely correct. He was in almost every show I watched last summer, lol~ He's my accidental darling.

[aliasblack73]

Ooh, I’ll take this on. FTR, I’m a multishipper when it comes to any characters but wangxian, so I enjoy fanfics and art that pair Jiang Cheng and and Lan Xichen with others, I just happen to love them together the most.

To me it’s very similar to mystrade in the Sherlock fandom - little onscreen interaction between the characters, but for those that love Lestrade and Mycroft individually and see how melancholy they are and feel like they deserve some love - we think their personalities would balance each other very well and so it has become a popular ship. 

In this same way, Jiang Cheng and Lan Xichen are loved by fans individually, and both could definitely use some love, so a lot of us think that their personalities would balance each other well. It’s common in most cases to ship them post-canon, because (at least I) think that is the period in their lives when they would most benefit from getting together. 

PS - as I’ve only watched the tv show, I can’t speak to whether book fans ship them together or not. From what I’ve read, JC is a lot less sympathetic in the book, and Wang Zhuocheng did such an amazing job with bringing JC to life, that it’s increased the number of fans his character has. (I could be talking out of my ass, but this is my impression)

Here’s a short but cute and fluffy xicheng fic I have bookmarked where JC is turned into a cat and ends up keeping LXC company in seclusion:

Bell the cat by MissSanguineOus

Here’s a really long angsty one that I read last week that I haven’t been able to get out of my head:

Running Our Hands Through Embers by MarvelousMar

(basically all the characters keep getting reincarnated, and only JC keeps his memories of his past life, and he has to watch LXC get his heart broken by JGY over and over again while he deals with his own lingering trauma re his brother and parents and especially his choices)

Out of interest, that ship you mentioned as being confusing - in the sense that it didn't seem to have much canon evidence despite being so popular - was it Xicheng? (Zewu-Jun x Jiang Cheng)?

You are correct, sir and/or/nor madam. Is it like a book thing or...?