Untitled

[seoinquk]

NAM JOO HYUK as GU CHEON The East Palace 동궁 (2026) dir. Choi Jung Kyu

[dangermousie]

He's about to die and he's oddly at peace with it...

That was so badass.

But more badass? Susu coming back, killing all these men! She came back for him!!!!! Mutual saving!!!!

I was wondering what the number was but I went to my trusty calculator and it's the three years he spent in prison!!!

And then some surviving flunkie lifts a gun and she realizes she is out of bullets so MRQY is about to be shot and she covers him with her own body omg!

[xueplanet]

kong xueer as li shu in princess zhaoyang's trailer — 2026

[xueplanet]

kong xueer as li shu in the shadow sovereign — 2026

[how-are-you-migraine-thank-you]

First time in a show did one of them start gloating "were you not able to forget me" and then the other agrees and then they actually start having sex...

Hooked up in ep1 - expected normal, it's the set up for the story

Hooked up in ep2 - OMG!?!? After 3 months?!? After gloating?!?

[yingtan]

Overdo 这一秒过火 (2026), Ep. 10

[mostlyfate]

That one is called Ggeomeoksali. It is no ordinary creature. It attaches to the living, not places, feeding on Yang energy. Those drained of it see terror and die. It is a terrifying creature.

When did you get in here? Stop. You. Who said you could act cute?

THE EAST PALACE 동궁 · 2026

[seodongjae]

동궁 / THE EAST PALACE (2026) dir. Choi Jungkyu

[kdramastuff]

[nexttimeisnotthesame]

双强博弈⚔️，棋逢对手，生死相依 Mu Wanyao & Yan Shang TIGERS SNIFF THE ROSE (2026)

[fake-married-my-dead-fiance]

Okay, I'm not even watching this show but I've seen screenshots of this guy choking his wife and telling her death threats...

"such a standard for cdramas green flags"

The flag? 🟥

[alipeeps]

The whole green flag / red flag discourse is utter nonsense anyway but honestly if you're not even watching it then you're not really qualified to comment on the content or context?

I am watching it and at no point (up to ep 16 of 28) has he choked her and the closest he has come to death threats is pretty early on in the show when she was accusing him (entirely unjustly) of being all manner of horrible things and he, somewhat understandably, told her that - to paraphrase - if he were anyone else, saying such things would land her in a whole heap of trouble. Did he do so in a rather threatening manner? Absolutely. Did he genuinely threaten to kill her? Absolutely not.

As far as cdrama MLs go he is fairly standard - he is definitely manipulative and somewhat unhinged (he kills people but ofc they are bad guys and deserve to die) and he absolutely started off seeing her as just a pawn in one of his (with noble purpose ofc) schemes... but he is also the only person in pretty much the entire show who respects her as a person and respects her agency and insists on her being free to make her own choices (even if that choice means she will leave him). Something literally no-one else - not her dad, her mum, or her original sweetheart - has done.

It's fine if the show is not for you and not something you want to watch... but out of context screenshots alone are not sufficient to have an informed opinion on the show or the characters.

[fake-married-my-dead-fiance]

Okay, I'm not watching it but I have eyeballs and this is choking and death threats right here:

Source: https://www.tumblr.com/dangermousie/822230333316628480/he-is-surprisingly-toxic-for-an-idol-drama-ml-in?source=share

[dangermousie]

I am someone who IS watching the show and am up on all the eps out and while he's definitely better than her terrible adoptive father and better than her first love is gonna end up being, in no way is he a good husband material/choice/green flag/not problematic on anything but a curve compared to the other men:

forced her into marriage as part of his political plans, with no opinion or interest as to whether she's OK with it. Just because he may have gone in with 'ah, I will give her a divorce later' does not negate it in any way. Even if we go with 'oh this is not really historical' doesn't help - if this is a proper period setting, he's fucking with the woman's most important choice/action in life but if it's ahistorical modern dress up and marriage matters less, then all the murder/choking/death threats/etc is not excusable because in a modern person playing dress up they are definitely not good.

repeatedly physically threatens her. He may mean some of it, he may not, fact remains, she's a woman half his size and with no battle skills.

is rude and insulting to her and just acts awfully to her whenever he thinks she's meddling into his family affairs (she is his wife, mind you.)

All the threats culminate in him freaking out she'd reveal his temporary blindness, choking her - literally grabbing her by the neck - threatening to kill her and to destroy her reputation.

his other wife justifies all of this by saying hey at least he's not worse and it doesn't matter if he has a temper as long as it's with his loved ones (which reminds me of the old Russian folk saying "if he beats you means he loves you.")

Now, do I care he's red flag/toxic/ other term du jour? Heck no. My favorite character last year was possibly Di Lin from Eternal Brotherhood 2, who massacred whole villages of civilians on his march to rescue his brothers so the news wouldn't leak. I don't even care if the characters are toxic vis-a-vis a partner. I love me toxic fictional dudes - I am salivating for Overdo to drop and both ML and FL in this one make this dude seem a saint (and the same goes for every FWSC adaptation ML and some FLs) and I enjoy my minis where half of them appear either ML is torturing FL or FL is torturing ML. One of my top 5 cdramas this year was Generation to Generation and ML is a certified headcase; we are not even going to get into what kind of games the bulk of characters of Veil of Shadows, my favorite drama this year and probably in my top 5 of all time, got into.

But! He really is a toxic dude and by any sane, non drama standard, not a great partner. And that's fine, that can make for a story with teeth (my issues with Key are many but ML being toxic ain't one of them) especially if the drama does not try to claim he's green like I am color blind (which this one is rather guilty of) but one can't possibly say he's an ideal dream boat and a great partner! The moment there is choking and a death threat, the man is automatically excluded from sweetheart safe choice label.

[alipeeps]

Lbr, NO cdrama ML in a non-problematic green flag guy! I can't think of a single one from recent years can you...? 😂

But as you say, that's not relevant (to me) to enjoyment of the drama and to whether he is an interesting character.

My point was more that you can't really make any kind of accurate judgement about a character (or a drama) based on a couple of out of context screenshots. I mean... sure you can make the judgement that it's not for you and that's entirely valid... but any opinions you have as to the nature of the characters or the story is going to be woefully ill-informed...

[cageyworld]

I will just add, regarding the screenshot in question, (spoilers), he’s threatening her because she just rightly identified that he lost his sight, a fact which could doom the empire if it gets out (because Cdrama). He panics and lashes out. Then, directly after this, he follows her lead in protecting the secret and she takes command in helping him accomplish his goals while blind.

As for his nastiness in the beginning, one of his primary traits is willingly playing the monster in other people’s stories if it helps the greater good. There’s a reputation he’s protecting. That’s not to say it’s okay, but rather to point out it’s based in a character flaw that is being criticized and interrogated by the narrative.

I, too, was and still am uncomfortable with the ages of the leads. What is making it work for me (so far) is that the ages match the characters’ relative life experiences (no more 19-year-old grizzled generals, please) AND ALSO a primary theme of the entire show is the young woman, Jiayu, being able to make her own choices and live a life she picks for herself.

This is not to say the show doesn’t have dodgy moments, but like everyone is saying: screenshotting those dodgy moments out of context isn’t a great way to gauge the show.

(Bonus: the ML of the show is surrounded by more platonic female relationships than I think I’ve ever seen in a Cdrama before and I’m personally loving it.)

[fake-married-my-dead-fiance]

I'm not saying anything about the show itself or it's quality. I said the character wasn't a green flag and I actually stand by that. You know just one choking and death threat makes a person not a green flag, context be damned. You can impress the importance of something on someone without putting your hand around their windpipe, it's totally possible.

He can be a cool and interesting character with all the justification in the world, but in the actual definition of red flag, is this a warning for possible domestic abuse, is yes.

[planb-is-in-effect]

The way the flag discourse has degenerated to it being an intrinsic quality of a person rather than a description of an action is frankly frustrating and ridiculous.

The conflation of overall likeability (this person is a green flag/not a red flag) with their specific actions is the reason we get people trying to offer apologia for standard abusive actions like strangling someone -- because they like the character doing it.

As we can see from this chain, this conflation leads people to using a term for analysing real-world behaviour for warning signs for intimate partner violence with the norms and tropes of fiction, introducing a moral relativism ('no cdrama lead would be a green flag then!') which is antithetical to the initial purpose of the term.

Strangling someone is a red flag action.

It doesn't matter if it is a common action by cdrama male leads, or if those actors make it look sexy, or if there are cdrama characters who are more extreme in their violence. If 90 percent of men in a society strangle their romantic partners, the fact that it is the norm would not negate the fact that such an action is intimate partner violence.

And personally, I find added context* which boils down to 'but he was really upset at the time' more than a bit stomach-turning given the origin of the term red flag when assessing men in their romantic and sexual relationships with women.

*Context for red flag behaviour in a cdrama is only relevant if the threat/violence/coercion between a romantic pairing is a) a performance both participants are in on to convince a third party; b) the offender is under an external influence such as poison/mindcontrol; or c) someone has assumed one of the main party's identity via facestealing etc. (I haven't included the enemy phase of enemies-to-lovers because someone trying to kill or maim you is a red flag, even if your families/states/organizations are at war and your dynamic otherwise is delightful.)

[fake-married-my-dead-fiance]

Thank you

[dangermousie]

Yup!

But also - I keep wondering how much conflation of action and character has to do with the newfangled tendency to assign moral value to your entertainment and to treat fictional people like real people.

I think a lot of “but no, X is a green flag” I see around stems from “I like this character/I am sympathetic to them/I think they should have a happy ending etc etc” tied together with “I have to like only moral characters because only immoral people like immoral characters.” So a character has to be a good person and in that view a good person also only does good things. So people try to justify as to how the character they like does only green flag actions and is a green flag and all around good person for that reason and that’s how we get comments like “Xie Wei from Kunning/Xiang Liu from LYF etc etc is a green flag” (while at the same time contorting yourself into a different pretzel as to how the character you don’t like is somehow problematic and a bad person.)

And I always found that bizarre. It’s fiction. No real people were harmed. What kind of set up you like in your fiction says nothing about your real world values. I don’t find anyone in Key particularly interesting but I am currently enjoying the hell out of Overdo and both of our mains are terrible people who’d definitely earn the red in any discourse. So what? They are fictional, so who cares. I am rooting for those crazy murder and choking kids to get out of it alive and mess with each other for eternity. (And sometimes when I am super into a character who does awful stuff, I don’t even wish that! Li Chengyin of GMP is one of my favorite male leads ever and I only wish I could erase GMP from my brain so I could watch it for the first time again. He’s also a monster and a rapist and I both ship him and hate him and am so so so delighted by the ending he gets which is a punishment that might as well have been perfectly tailored to him.)

Conflating fiction with real life and what tropes you enjoy with real world morality is how we get all the beige entertainment but also people patting themselves on the back for being good people for enjoying unproblematic fiction and therefore not feeling they need to do anything more in terms of actually making the world better in real world terms.

PS I don’t really care if people only like fluff or sweet mains - I have rl friends who do that. But the mislabeling!!!

[alchemyofsouls]

Pursuit of Jade (2026)

[andoqin]

literally me rn augh why does it still hit so hard.

[andoqin]

I don't know why this is making me tear up, but this hits harder after Mo Ran's horrifying little Oxherd story and augh, of course MR doesn't know how to deal with charity, or genuine kindness.

I love that the little kid gave the smaller bite first and then changed his mind, it feels like such an inherently human trait?

This is such a small scene but it hits me really hard for some reason, idk I guess I love small beats like this, especially with impending doom looming ahead.

I've been loving the way that CWN and MR have been able to just be together thanks to Xia Sini, both able to open themselves up in a way they never could before, thanks to their original positions (and outlooks). Also the fact that XSN is a 5 year old? Meatbun you keep threading in these glorious little crumbs.

[andoqin]

I have reached the Xia Sini section of 2ha and oh man seeing all these "Chu Wanning smiled" "Chu Wanning grinned", my heart overflows???

Truly he deserves to be happy and relaxed so much!

The comedy of errors with Mo Ran and Xue Meng treating him like Just Another Disciple is so good and another avenue for Mo Ran to show off his encyclopedic Shizun knowledge lmao.

It's also so lovely to see Mo Ran and Xue Meng's relationship? They are such siblings and it's so fun to see Mo Ran needle Xue Meng who puffs up like a little porcupine. It really is amazing to see how quickly Mo Ran went fron suicidal evil overlord (back?) to bratty little loudmouth teenager.

[andoqin]

hahahaha haha.

QAQ I've just started 2ha Vol 2 and ah yes. Meatbun sharpens her knife and aims it right at my heart immediately.

I was surprised that Shi Mei came clean about it not being him in Gouchen's illusion though, but yeah it is overshadowed by Chu Wanning suffering from debilitating self doubt and depression.

And then my best boy Xue Meng(meng) breaks through the suggestive whispers of the Heart-Pluck Willow because he doesn't get tricked by shit like that, not even when it promises him his deepes desires. He truly is his father's son ❤️❤️.

[dangermousie]

I am getting to the "get off my lawn, whippersnapper" stage of fandom experience.

HMMMMMM