TV and movies

[sophinisba]

So, in general, being a married person I usually end up watching shows my partner and I agree on, but we don't really agree on any shows at the moment, and also (as explained in locked entries) I've recently had occasion to spend a lot of time lying in bed/on the couch, so I've watched a little more TV on my own and that's been kind of fun.


Shows I'm watching by myself
Two or three episodes into the teen comedy/drama Never Have I Ever on Netflix she said it was cute kind of boring, I thought it was hilarious, so I kept watching and found it to be pretty brilliant. It reminds me a bit of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend for its depiction of life in suburban southern California, with less sex and obvs without singing, but sort of a similar irreverent humor with feminism. Heads up the show deals with grief for a dead parent.

Last night we decided to try out The Baby-Sitters Club, also on Netflix, and here it was immediately obvious that B was bored out of her mind. After like 15 minutes I released her, and I watched the rest of the episode later by myself. Some of my friends on Twitter adore this show and I did feel the wholesome girl friendship vibes and mild nostalgia (I read some of the books but don't remember them well). But I also thought it was a little boring and (sorry but) found Kristy, the main character and narrator of the first ep, to be a little grating. So I wasn't sure if I would continue, but today I heard that the episodes rotate through the different characters so I will plan to watch more.

Uh, okay, when I went to Podfication last October a bunch of people were talking about "Ancient Chinese Gays" and I thought, okay, I guess that is nice for them but I don't think this fandom is for me. I have never gotten into any East Asian shows and even, like, I speak and study a whole bunch of languages that are not Chinese so if I'm going to go to the effort of watching a show in a language not my own it should be one I'm trying to learn. Also, like most popular fandoms, it seemed to be dominated by a single m/m pairing that involved a lot of pining and that is not what I need in my life.

Then this fandom really blew up, was all over my Tumblr and Twitter feeds, was all the rage at Voiceteam, and The Untamed was easily accessible on Netflix. (Is this the same as MDZS? I guess there's also a novel and a cartoon and some other stuff? Is MDZS the larger story or just this show?) and I still said no thank you and started to feel some mild resentment although I did listen to a couple short podfics that were nice.

Then, a little less than two weeks ago, I was having a bad night, uncomfortable and unable to sleep, and I knew one of my favorite podficcers, exmanhater, had recently posted a podfic of more than 3 hours, and I put it on and she kept me company through the night and that was very nice, though I didn't know who any of the characters were and slept through big chunks of the story.

A few days after that I decided to watch an episode.

IDEK, friends, I'm twelve episodes in (there are 50 of them omg) it's been growing on me slowly. In some ways it's super different from anything I've watched before, but also in some ways it reminds me of Merlin. Like it has wizards and this fake setting sometime in the distant past, and similarly cheesy effects. It is similarly focused on a bunch of young men who give each other a lot of significant looks, and one of them is cheeky and unbelievably pretty. I feel a similar level of like, the showrunners and the actors knowing that I want this young man and a certain other young man to confess their feelings for each other, but also withholding that from me.

I often find these episodes to be sort of slow and soothing and sometimes they've been helping me get to sleep. I've been told to expect a lot of pain and suffering, and I guess a lot of it is going to come up fairly soon, but from what I can tell it's a kind of pain and suffering that I sort of dig, so that will probably be okay. I haven't tried reading any fic yet, though I guess a lot of it is AUs and not spoilery.

Let's see, am I watching anything else by myself? I watched an episode of the Korean show Chicago Typewriter a few weeks ago and it was neat but also the episodes are very long and I haven't felt like going back yet. (I've been doing Korean on Duolingo for like two months but understand pretty much nothing.)

Shows B is watching by herself
I feel the same way about Nadiya's Time to Eat as B does about Never Have I Ever and BSC, that it's cute but boring, so she's going to continue to watch that one without me. We watched an episode each of The Mandalorian and Umbrella Academy and B wants to watch more of them and I SUPER do not.

A few months ago we had both enjoyed the first two episodes of Stumptown, starring Cobie Smulders (who we both think is hot) as a Portland-based private investigator. We came back to it this past week and I decided it's kind of boring and more pro-police than I would prefer from my entertainment at this time. B is planning to keep watching because of Portland nostalgia.


Movies
We had a good time watching the filmed version of Hamilton the night it came out on Disney Plus. I'd been listening to the cast album since 2015 and had read and listened to a ton of discussion and a few fanworks, whereas B had just sort of seen glimpses and was waiting. So it was fun to see her experience it for the first time, and there were also some nice thrills and surprises for me since I'd never seen it on stage. We came back the following week but, with less excitement, split it up over three evenings. The first act is more fun to watch than the second.

I'd seen the romantic comedy The Big Sick in the theater and had been trying to convince B to watch it for a while, and she finally agreed this month and liked it okay.

We both liked the movies The Old Guard and Lovebirds though they were more violent than I would have preferred. TOG was very smart and had interesting characters, and I'm pleased to see people are making fanworks for it. Lovebirds was very silly but the two lead actors, Kumail Nanjiani and Issa Rae, are both so charming and it made me laugh a ton.

On my own I watched Ant-Man, an MCU movie I'd skipped before, and it was fun. I like the Michael Peña character a lot and the main character well enough. The Michael Douglas character and the bad guys were boring.

I watched Newsies, which I'd seen as a teenager, and it is still very hokey but sweet.

Comments

[shirebound]

Wow, I haven't seen ANY of those! Glad you're finding enjoyable viewing. :)

[sophinisba]

Ha! I think you'd like the first two shows I mentioned.

MDZS vs. The Untamed

[revolutionaryjo]

I am here to help!

Mo Dao Zu Shi / The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation is the title of the original web novel by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu (aka MXTX). Frequently it's abbreviated to MDZS. It's the title used for the novel, the animated series (donghua), the audio drama, and the comic (manhua). So references to it might mean one of those versions or it might be a person referring to the property as a whole, depending on the context.

Meanwhile, Chen Qing Ling / The Untamed specifically refers to the live action series. It also gets abbreviated to CQL.

Your early experiences of this fandom sound pretty similar to mine, which was that I felt sort of oversaturated with it before even starting, watching the Untamed was an uphill battle since I had no familiarity with the conventions of the xianxia genre, and I didn't have anyone I felt comfortable asking questions to at the time. But oh boy, when I got there I sure I got there. Worth the investment. I'm not anything resembling an expert but if you have any questions or aren't grokking something that's happening on the show or around the fandom I'm happy to be a person who you can ask.

Re: MDZS vs. The Untamed

[sophinisba]

Thank you, I had had the names of the different versions explained to me before but still wasn't sure about what MDZS meant and I guess... it just depends? But it reminds me a bit of LOTR where on the AO3 we would tag everything for the Tolkien books and also for the Peter Jackson movies because we were inspired by both.

I've been chatting a fair amount with themadlurker as I go along (see her comment below, written at the same time you were writing yours) so that helps but I appreciate your offer also, and am likely to hit you up for help with names at some point. :)

Re: MDZS vs. The Untamed

[revolutionaryjo]

Ah, that's good! I wasn't certain. Yeah, it's really a mishmash of meaning and canons, since there are so many and they overlap quite a bit. Happy to help with names for sure. 👍

[themadlurker]

mdzs (Mo Dao Zu Shi/grandmaster of demonic cultivation) is the name of the novel/animated series, cql (chen qing ling/the untamed) is the live action series. I don't think the animated series is finished yet, there's still at least one more season to go? There are a bunch of other adaptations (comic, audiodrama...) but those are the main ones you'll come across in fandom

the novel is explicitly gay; the live action drama is restricted in what it can show onscreen by censorship laws - this means ofc no kissing/sex/explicitly romantic scenes (though damn do they do their best to push the bounds of plausible deniability) but also less explicit necromancy than in the novel. anyway it's not a question of the showrunners/actors withholding emotional reveals, more a case of them throwing everything they've got into giving us a love story without being allowed to use the words. idk censorship is frustrating but it feels very different to me than queerbaiting shows, bc in this case they're really trying v hard to give us queer content despite restrictions.

it's funny you mention the language thing as (dis)incentive bc getting into the show gave me some motivation to start the chinese duolingo course (bc learning mandarian has been on my list of 'hmm... maybe?' things for a while now), and I've been enjoying that a lot though it doesn't exactly increase my understanding of the show to be able to go "Aha, I recognized one word in that bit of dialogue and it was 'yes'!" i.e. I totally get your interest in a given language correlating to media in that language, it's just that this show happened to align with my interests

eta: ahaha whoops in the time I was typing this up revolutionaryjo already clarified the different titles for the novel/live action so I guess that's redundant now! anyway, I'm glad you're giving the show a try :)

[revolutionaryjo]

Ha, no worries! You're correct in that the animated series is unfinished, as is the comic. I'm reasonably certain the Chinese audio drama is done, but I'm only two episodes into it myself. Last I checked the Japanese audio drama was still going. So many adaptations, so little time. 😅

[sophinisba]

Naw, that's an interesting distinction you make about censorship vs. queerbaiting. I'm not mad at the people making either show. I guess like, it's not so much that I want explicit gayness (I don't expect it) as that I want explicit confessions of care and friendship and devotion, à la Frodo and Sam, which I hope and sort of expect I will get in this show eventually. I understand that there's some pleasure to the delay but also maybe I take less pleasure in that delay than some other viewers do? Like when that meme about favorite tropes sitting at the lunch table was going around a couple months ago I was honestly surprised at how many people picked pining and slow burn because, idk, I feel like I take pining and misunderstanding as part of the path to the reveal but not as a thing to enjoy on its own. This is not to say I don't appreciate the looks WWX and LWJ have been giving each other because I do, but I find it to be drawn out in a way that is sort of silly and frustrating.

In the case of Merlin of course I also wanted an explicit confession of sorcery that the showrunners chose to delay until the end of season 5 whereas most of us agreed it should have come at or towards the end of season 1. I'm not sure if these Untamed characters are keeping other secrets from each other.

[themadlurker]

Yeah, I like my pining/slow burn in moderate doses, but I like characters just openly caring about each other even more. I mean I will read all the au's where they figure their feelings out earlier and are just happy together! but I also appreciate what feels like a very genuine character arc of needing some time to get from 'angry conflicted teenager ignores unexpected feelings in hopes they will just go away' to 'adult in touch with own emotions' along with a lot of intermediate stages.

Ahahaha I remember being so frustrated when the reveal in Merlin just kept NOT HAPPENING, and by the time they actually got around to it I'd just given up on watching the show anyway. There will be secrets in the Untamed but I don't think you've really come across them yet? You'll know when you do. idk, I enjoyed the emotional payoff but that doesn't mean I wasn't yelling 'JUST TELL HIM ALREADY' at the screen sometimes (probably not about the things you think).

[sophinisba]

I was remembering how you were also a Gus/Shawn fan, and that was such a good pairing because they were super different but also had all this history and just, knew where the other stood all the time. Character arc of learning how to talk about their emotions also sounds good though.

[sophinisba]

PS the word for "mountain" comes up a lot on this show and it's 山 or "shān", which sounds similar to the Korean word 산/"san", which I've learned from Duolingo. Duolingo says Korean has a ton of words in common with Chinese but that's the only one I've heard and recognized so far. :)

[claudia603]

Have you seen I Am Not Okay With This? I enjoyed it a lot.

[sophinisba]

I don't know anything about that one but will check it out, thanks.

[semperfiona]

I am 10 episodes into the Untamed, because I'm the only one in the household that wants to watch it, and I don't tend to watch TV by myself when other people are up and about, so it's kinda "when I want to stay up late and everyone else went to bed" watching.

But I generally agree with all your comments about it.

[sophinisba]

I've watched two more episodes since I made this post and the h/c is intensifying. I'm really digging it.