My first Luo Yunxi drama was Till the End of the Moon in 2023 and I adored that drama (still one of my all-time favourites!) and loved him in it so when I heard he was acting in another drama with the same production company - and same costume designer - I was excited. I was eagerly checking out behind the scenes clips and stills when it was filming back in 2023-2024 and it has a been a loooooong wait for it to actually air so when it finally did air in 2025 I was READY. It was my most anticipated drama of the last few years, basically.
And it was everything I had hoped for! It is a gorgeous drama - just visually stunning. The costumes, the scenery, the actors… everything is so pretty! And Luo Yunxi is of course amazing in it - his character Tang Lici, and his journey, really is the driving force behind the entire narrative. And he plays this complex and contradictory character so well. And looks incredible in every scene! The supporting cast is also top tier - what I would consider a breakout role for Fang Yilun as Lui Yan (this guy needs to be getting ML roles off the back of this performance!), Jeremy Tsui incredibly creepy charismatic as Gui Mudan, Xiao Shunyao as Shen Langhun, Ao Ziye as Chi Yun, oh heck I could list the entire cast cos they were all so good in it!
And the story itself is complex and poignant, with themes of grief and loss, of found family, of redemption and sacrifice. The story structure kept me intrigued, as we slowly learned more about the past events that led to the current conflict… Zhoudi Tower era will live in my heart forever, with the little feral fox finding a home and a family with Fang Zhou and Liu Yan and Fu Zhumei (and howwwww did Luo Yunxi - a man in his 30s - manage to so convincingly play a younger and more naive version of his character? He somehow even managed to LOOK younger?!!)
The show also gives us so much room to create - it's so beautiful that I want to draw and paint every character and every scene. And there is SO much more to explore about the characters and their past… I could read or write a thousand Zhoudi Tower era fics and never tire of it. And, needless to say, there is an abundance of Luo Yunxi doing what he does best… looking impossibly, ethereally, elegant whilst fighting/suffering/spitting blood. 😊
Whispers of Fate is everything we expected and wanted from a Luo Yunxi costume drama - beautiful, elegant (that ballet training making the wire work fight scenes a thing of beauty), and exquisitely painful in all the right ways, and I don't think I will ever be over it. I was making fanart for it before the show was even over and I ended up deciding to change the fandom I was intending to paint for the zine because this show had taken over my brain and I just HAD to paint Tang Lici. - @alipeeps
Throughout the zine's preorder period, we are going to be featuring posts about the dramas that our participants have chosen to create for. For our post today, Alipeeps recommends Whispers of Fate!