The Dream of the ‘90s is Alive and Well in Dragon City
Guardian is a 2018 Chinese web drama based on a danmei webnovel of the same name by priest. It was made on a budget of like three dollars and a ham sandwich. Its production was fraught with financial problems and plagued by eleventh-hour censorship decisions. Start to finish, all forty episodes were filmed in about a three-month span.
The crew members working on the props and sets obviously worked their asses off with sub-minimal resources, creating an absolutely wild aesthetic that a friend described as like what would happen if China had invented the Renaissance. So much of this was absolutely, positively never meant to be paid this much attention to, much less seen by the eyes of native English-speakers.
Please understand that any fun that gets poked at anyone here is meant only in the most loving and affectionate spirit. Except for Zhujiu, because he’s a tool.
UNMARKED SPOILERS ABOUND. If you haven’t seen the whole show yet, tread with caution.
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10000 years ago
the four macguffins
(And if you want to talk danmei or any other nonsense, find me here at @ladysisyphus or on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ladysisyphus!)
Welcome to another round of W2 Tells You What You Should See, where W2 (me) tries to sell you (you) on something you should be watching. Today's choice: 镇魂/Guardian
Guardian is a 2018 drama about an underfunded government agency that investigates escaped ghosts aliens, the bisexual disaster that runs said agency, and the ghost king alien emissary posing as a mild-mannered professor who has loved him for a very, very long time.
I had to do this rec because Guardian is my favorite c-drama ever. I love it with every fiber of my being. I have seen it a stupid number of times. It brings me endless amounts of joy to contemplate. It is both a legitimate piece of art and a complete train wreck.
Before we start, you have to realize this about the show: It source material is an explicit gay romance, so of course the adaptation had to scale everything back to friendship. More than that, the original source material is about deities and reincarnation, which was never going to fly, which meant the filmable concept had to trim those concepts into a time-travel thing and half-invent an antagonist. Then the show had its budget dry up after it had already splurged on the score, to the point where many of the characters' outfits came from the actors' own closets. Then, after filming everything, the censors said, you know how your show is all about ghosts? Yeah, you're not allowed to have ghosts. They can be aliens, though! Now go back and redub all the lines about ghosts to be about aliens, but don't worry about matching the sound quality; I'm sure no one will notice.
There are a thousand reason you should not watch this incredible mess. I'm going to give you five reasons you should.
1. The Ship
Are you sick of mere tepid bromance? Do you want to watch two beautiful men who are completely unhinged about one another, played by two actors who absolutely knew what they were doing?
Aired in mid-2018, Guardian snuck in juuuuuust as crackdowns on the gay shit started to get real cracked down. It is of course not nearly as gay as the source material, but it goes about as close as it can. You can censor individual moments all you want, but you can't stop the whole thing from being a love story -- and you can't make the two of them stop looking at one another like that.
The pairing goes like this:
Zhao Yunlan: canonical (in the book) bisexual, ADHD king, absolute trash gremlin, terrible boss, nepo baby, questionable cat owner, the absolute worst at taking care of himself -- this is a man whose life is held together with duct tape and hideous instant ramen. In the book he's a heavy smoker, but the show has to replace that with a lollipop habit, which is honestly much cuter. Exhausting man. All the Daddy Issues. Parks like an asshole. Infuriatingly kissable.
Shen Wei: mild-mannered professor of some sciency shit for a local university, but secretly an astonishingly powerful thousands-of-years-old being from beyond the stars who doesn't have a cell phone, but can be summoned by burning some very nice incense. Easily flustered. Hopelessly romantic. Marginally bad at being a real human person. Always just about to McFreakin Lose It.
A huge amount of how incredibly well this pairing works comes down to the talented actors, who are both kinda playing themselves? Which is to say that Bai Yu is a charismatic gremlin and Zhu Yilong is an ethereal creature who interfaces with the real world awkwardly, and they make good use of their natural tendencies to create chemistry the likes of which I have hardly seen before or since.
(Also, no joke, Zhu Yilong is the most Understood The Assignment Actor that has ever lived. My favorite story about him from the set of Reunion is that he insisted on spending an extra hour in the makeup chair every day, because he had read the entire book series and knew that his character had a throat scar, and despite how that scar is not once even acknowledged in this installment of the franchise, he was not going to chance that the camera might catch a glimpse of Wu Xie with an unscarred throat. The fact that he has gone on to have a critically acclaimed career is to me no surprise.)
I cannot stress enough to you how meaty and delicious this love story is. These two freaks are Not Normal about one another on a nigh-unimaginable scale. 'I would die for you' meets 'how about you live for me instead, jackass?' except that it goes both ways. I cannot say anything more about it without running the risk of spoiling you, and you should go into this as unspoiled for the progression of this romance as you can be. The payoff is so worth it.
2. The comfiest goth
I have already written at length about how much I love Chu Shuzhi, aging homosexual, but here's the short version:
This terrible scary ex-convict is the old man of the main cast, and by "terrible scary" I mean that he puts up a rough exterior to hide his incredibly tender heart. He's the kind of attack dog who will kill without hesitation to protect the people he loves, and then will turn around and growl at the people he loves because he doesn't really know how else to show affection.
He has also Been Through It. His tragic backstory is pretty fucking tragic. (It's also very muddled and not written super-well, so you never entirely know What Really Happened, but whatever it was, it was rough.) I haven't counted, but I'd wager he cries more often than any other character in the show.
He is half of a gay ship that not only is great on its own, but actually manages to get away with being so much more textually affectionate than the main pairing (on account of both being a side pair and having "they're like brothers!" as a deflection). You won't believe how much they get to hold hands and emotionally grip one another's faces. If you lose your shit when the grumpy one loves the sunshiney one, then you are in for a treat.
He's also stupidly hot. Like, damn.
I also have to say: I love his voice. I love it so much. Whatever you are expecting his voice to be, you're wrong. It's just delightfully incongruous with how you expect they'd choose to dub such a Tough Guy. Like, imagine the baritone you'd give him if he were an anime character -- that's the voice he doesn't have. He has the actor's real voice, which is a somewhat nasal, slightly bitchy tenor. The first time I heard it, I laughed aloud with surprise. It makes me so happy.
Oh yeah, and he's got a puppet. God, I can't believe I nearly forgot to mention the puppet. He is a grown-ass man who carries around an inexplicably size-changing puppet like it's normal. It's absolutely unhinged. Imagine the scariest man you've ever met, and he's tenderly brushing the hair of some fucked-up off-brand American Girl doll. You would piss yourself. And you'd be right to.
He's just so unexpected in every possible way. I once wrote a whole post about how he is one of those gays of a certain age that @dngrcpckwithmurdericing turned into a podfic. He is quite possibly my favorite character in any c-drama, period.
It's so hard to play favorites, though, because of how much I love...
3. The whole damn found family (derogatory)
Guardian's is not precisely an ensemble cast, but much of the show focuses on the SID crew and their interactions, so you're going to develop a (sometimes grudging) affection for the whole bunch.
Ordinarily my objection to workplace found families is, don't you people have lives outside of your job? Well ... no, a lot of the members of SID don't, and for good reason. Two of them literally can't leave the building, and a third basically doesn't anyway. More than half of them are in some way nonhuman. Those that do try to pursue interests outside of their weird secret alien-hunting careers just wind up getting dragged back into the world of magical fugitives regardless.
So yeah, sometimes all they have really is each other. And sometimes that's fucking messy! There is a one-sided romance that becomes a real problem at one point, as well as some betrayals and tragedies -- be warned, this show has a body count. It's a family in the sense that you love people even when you don't like them, and you sometimes want to kill them but you definitely don't want them to die.
And it's not just the SID crew! Are you a sucker for demi-villains who have solid reasons for what they do and who can be convinced to join the good guys when those reasons run out? Great, there's plenty of that too. The above picture, left to right, features a snake, a flower, another snake, Zhao Yunlan, a cat, a crow, and two DILFs in a trenchcoat. About half of them have been mildly to moderately evil at one point or another. But wouldn't you know it, Zhao Yunlan is just so charismatic that even the bad guys can't help taking a liking to him.
The show has a huge cast -- the first half is kind of shaped like a police procedural, so there are plenty of people who show up for their little story arc, then disappear afterward. Except when they don't! There are actually lots of characters who come back in multiple stories and/or rally at the end for the big boss battle! And then you're like, oh, hey, it's that guy! Which is always a fun feeling.
Guardian is often very funny, too, and much of that comedy comes from group scenes and multi-character interactions. There's all kinds of goofball moments that really shine from a bunch of people who feel safe enough around one another that they've largely stopped being nice. So when I say found family, stop picturing saccharine Hallmark heteronormative perfection, and start picturing a bunch of ill-behaved littermates who show love through chewing on each other's tails. That's the way the Guardian crew rolls.
4. Pure '90s low-budget TV trash scifi aesthetic
I'm going to post some screenshots now so that you can laugh. Go on now, get it out of your system.
We good? Okay.
Please note how the creatures and wigs and backgrounds and effects in these images are not conceptually bad; the exact same shots, with sufficient money, would have looked fine. The ideas behind the production are generally solid. The execution is ... well.
I have tried to sell Guardian to friends of mine who did not spend the '90s watching Star Trek and Babylon 5 and Xena and Buffy and their ilk, and to those friends, it can be a hard sell. And I get it. When you're used to speculative television that doesn't look like shit, it's hard to not be repulsed immediately by the aesthetic.
So if you grew up on Odo blobbing back into the Great Link and the Mayor trashing Sunnydale High after his evil graduation speech, then you will have no trouble watching this. In fact, it will feel warm and nostalgic. This section is here for you. All those images up there, they were all for you. Honestly, you can just skip the rest of this rec post and jump down to the links at the end that'll tell you how to watch it. You're welcome.
I'm talking now to the rest of you. If you are not already primed to enjoy things in spite of (and sometimes because of) this kind of bargain-barrel bullshit, then yes, the cheapness of the production quality will likely be a barrier to entry. You may have to just rough it through the first couple episodes until you start to get the vibe of it. And you will eventually get the vibe of it, because despite how damn near everything was made on the shoestring-est budget possible, it somehow manages to be an incredible show, and that is because this entire drama is, from start to finish...
5. A chaotic labor of love
Are you sick of consuming things nobody wanted to make? Media where everyone, from the creators to the performers to the production team, seems to have been phoning it in? Anodyne garbage where the finished product looks like it was designed by committee to be appealing to everyone and therefore wound up being appealing to no one?
My friend, Guardian is a sight for your sore eyes.
It is obvious that everyone involved in this production threw their whole Dixingussy into it. Now, does this mean they were all good at what they did? Oh, heavens no. As alluded to earlier, the screenplay is at times incoherent even without the censorship. Many of the minor actors are community-theatre-grade at best. Props are shoddy and Mod Podged to hell. Some of the outfits literally make no sense. The set designers were all maniacs. Every one of those sound engineers should find a different line of work immediately.
And yet.
In an age of playing it safe, you have to love an audacious failure. Guardian is like someone attempting to build a Porsche from popsicle sticks, where you know it's never going to succeed, but fuck, whatever they do wind up building, it's going to be interesting. As a show, it is trying to do something different. Censorship and budgetary restrictions were always going to doom it from the start, but damn it, it's going to try.
I am on record as loving low-budget disasters that are so much better than they had any right to be (e.g., Legend of Fei), and that is because the only thing that can elevate a cheap production is love. You can feel the love through the screen. Sometimes it is a befuddled, blundering, catastrophic love, but it is love nonetheless.
Look, I have spent [redacted] hours of my life staring at screenshots from this show, enough to the point where I had to create an entire blog for it -- that would be @dragoncityinteriordesign, though please, beware of spoilers -- and every time I look at them, I discover something new. There's just so much detail that went into the production that it deserves to be savored. The batshit maximalist aesthetic of Dragon City alone is worth the price of admission. This is a show that flipped off Coco Chanel and put on thirty more things before leaving the house. Do those thirty things go together? Absolutely not. That's what makes it great.
I love how if all you had to go on were the screenshots from this post, you would have no idea what this show is about. I love it so much.
I'm not going to spend time here listing all the problems with the show. No one in this fandom believes this is a flawless show. But (most of) the problems are interesting. They bring character. They are the problems of a thing punching far, far above its weight class -- except for how, son of a bitch, it almost works? It should have been a pile of smoldering, unwatchable wreckage, except that a handful of incredibly talented people brought their A-game anyway and elevated about half of it to an amazing place.
I'm always very hesitant to recommend Guardian to people, because my basic pitch comes down to this: If you can ignore everything that's terrible about it, it's spectacular.
Many people cannot ignore the terrible. Maybe you will not be able to ignore the terrible. I know I'm going to get at least a couple people commenting on this post about how they tried to watch Guardian but bailed because it was just too clunky, and, like, I get it. I do.
And yet.
In the midst of everything that goes wrong, here's what it does right: It creates a powerful, complicated love story played by two talented actors, surrounded by an incredibly endearing supporting cast, set in a beautiful, crazy world that has never ceased to be fun to look at. It makes you laugh, it makes you cry, and it makes you sit around and think about how the hell it got made. Odds are good you will finish the last episode and go immediately back to the first to rewatch with new context. You will never skip the opening song. You will feel feelings. And you will never see anything else quite like it.
Want to see this beautiful disaster?
Well, here's the problem: It's not easy. It used to be easy! It used to be everywhere! Then Some Damn Thing happened a couple years ago, and its availability evaporated overnight. So for a while, all you were left with is KissAsian, which is a not-unsketchy site, and Youku's YouTube playlist, which is missing 13 of the 40 episodes. Neither is ideal! And so, I sadly left this rec post half-finished for nearly two years, because I wasn't going to get folk all excited about something they plum couldn't see.
But wait! Youku's now got it all up on their site! That means that if you subscribe, you can watch Guardian to your heart's content! (Also you can buy it on Amazon -- but it's missing an episode? I can't even tell which one, because the synopsis of every episode past the first one is "Continue watching the evil who bears no small resemblance to Shen Wei. You'll see if the heroic duo's unique talents - and special bond - help them outwit the forces of darkness." So don't do that.)
And when you're done watching, go read the book. It's similar enough that you'll enjoy the familiar characters, but different enough that it'll feel like a whole separate adventure. Besides, the last extra that priest wrote for it is in direct response to the show and its ending. So, you know, if you feel like doing something about that.
I'm not going to get on Team Censorship Can Be Good, Actually!, but I will say that censorship forced the show to make a number of changes that actually worked for it. Zhao Yunlan is more endearing as a serial lollipop addict than as a chain-smoker. Chu Shuzhi is better as a futch goth MMA fighter than as an emaciated jianghshi. Love him or hate him, Ye Zun is a way more interesting antagonist than Gui Mian. SID is more charming when it's just ten weirdos housed in what's maybe meant to be a Ghostbusters-referencing decommissioned firehouse. I cherish Da Qing's boy mode. And I actually like the goof-ass time-travel love story better than the reincarnation one, there, I said it, sue me.
When I win the bajillion-dollar lottery, I will commission an American remake that sticks closer to the book but keeps all the good decisions that the show made. So, you know, look forward to that, I guess? But in the meantime, watch the show as it exists now. I can't guarantee you'll fall as hard for it as I have, or even that you'll fall for it at all. All the jank might, in the end, be too much. You have to admit, though, that in an age of Instagram filters and AI-generated slop, there's something nice about being able to see the fingerprints in the clay, the smears in the paint, the strings holding up the little rubber bats. It makes everything feel a little more, well. Human.
Hey, Guardian fans! Got something here you might like!
And that something would be Kaleidoscope of Death (the 2018 gay webnovel) and the Spirealm (the 2024 drama based on it). You can read the more detailed rec posts for both Kaleidoscope of Death and the Spirealm (as well as for some other media, all of which you can read here), but I wanted to come in and do a specific post about why I think fans of Guardian would really have a good time with these two.
This isn't just my observation -- other people who are fans of both have commented on how they scratch the same itch. They're just similar enough to one another to feel familiar, which still different enough that nothing feels repetitive/derivative. It's also funny to me how much the relationship of Guardian the book to Guardian the show is like the relationship of Kaleidoscope of Death to the Spirealm. They're both spooky gay stories that lose a lot in the adaptation to television, but also gain a lot in the process, until it's hard to say which one is the superior telling of the story.
So I'm coming in here with an extremely quick, spoiler-free-as-I-can-make-them five reasons why fans of Guardian in particular might be inclined to enjoy this book/show combo.
1. These boys are not normal about one another
I know you love it when the boys are not normal about one another. Ruan Nanzhu (cunty, well-dressed, on the left) and Lin Qiushi (sporty, cat dad, on the right) are extremely not normal about one another.
(Guardian lucked out in that when the drama was made, shows hadn't yet started doing the bullshit of changing the danmei boys' TV names. Zhao Yunlan and Shen Wei are Zhao Yunlan and Shen Wei no matter where they are -- but these two are Ruan Nanzhu and Lin Qiushi in the book, and Ruan Lanzhu and Ling Jiushi in the show. I'm going to be using their book names just because I've seen them written more often and they look more correct to me now.)
There's a Reason they're together. Maybe they don't go back as far as Ye Olde Haixing, but rest assured theirs is not a random encounter. Also, just like in Guardian, the Reasons in the book and the show have some surface similarities, but play out very differently.
This is a slow-burn gay love story that's a freak4freak relationship featuring two completely different kinds of freak. Lin Qiushi is the only person Ruan Nanzhu's ever let get close to him. Ruan Nanzhu's the only person who's ever pierced Lin Qiushi's cat-loving veil of obliviousness. Theirs is the true love of being willing to burn down the world for the same person you love annoying the pants off of. They're hot-and-cold messes who can't live without one another.
Obviously, as in Guardian's case, the boys-kissing parts are textual only in the book, not in the show. But keeping them from kissing actually ends up making them way less normal about one another. Yes, tell the guy who's technically your boss to platonically call you "daddy." What's not heterosexual about that?
2. Fun horror(-ish)
Both books have fantastic worlds and weird metaphysical conflicts, where terrible and unsettling things happen. They have ghosts and ghost-like things that can scare you and even kill you. Both contain some really unsettling passages about gore, violence, and body horror, and both include at least a bit of background cannibalism from one of the party members.
...And both shows have had those elements totally nerfed by censorship. Just as the ghosts of Diyu become the aliens of Dixing, the mysterious door worlds of Kaleidoscope of Death become the eeeeevil American video game of the Spirealm. It's exactly as silly and nonsensical as it sounds, and I know you can laugh your way through how stupid the adaptation choices are, because you already have.
Does this destroy the horror of it? Eh, yes and no. No, because there are still fundamentally some horror-esque things going on. But also yes, because having all these killer doors be part of a video game is about as nonsensical as having a lot of aliens living in the center of the earth, and it all winds up being a bit ... well, silly. At least Guardian had the excuse of having to do a last-minute scramble; the Spirealm was committed to this from the start. (What the Spirealm also has that Guardian the show lacks is the occasional hilarious, perfunctory digression into how eeeeeeevil capitalism is, which is its own form of both cringe and comedy.)
The book is legitimately creepy, though. There were a couple points I found myself reading it late at night, right before going to bed, and thinking, hm, maybe I should not be doing this. I love it so much that I actually read it the first time, got to the very important information in the first extra, turned right around, and read it a second time with that new context. It's not so horror that a casual reader couldn't enjoy it, but maybe leave the lights on while you do.
3. We're not co-workers, we're found family.
You know how the SIU/SID crew is the best and the most wonderful and you want to pick them up and hug them all and put them in your pocket and carry them around with you? Yeah, it's likely you're going to have a similar reaction to the Obsidian members and their associated friends.
Both SIU/SID and Obsidian have similar qualities where they're organizations operating under the radar of normal society, doing jobs that do not respect 9-5 boundaries or lunch breaks, where things are dangerous enough that you have to trust your co-workers with your life on a very regular basis. But while only the Guardian ghosts live at headquarters, everyone in Obsidian shares the same house. They eat meals together, watch movies together, play board games together, hang out and read in the TV pit together, decorate the house for New Year's together, barge into one another's rooms together...
Did you love it when Shen Wei and Zhao Yunlan wound up living in apartments conveniently across the hall from one another? You're likely going to feel a similar kind of way when Ruan Nanzhu immediately moves Lin Qiushi (and his cat!) into the bedroom across the hall from his own.
As with Guardian, the book has more characters than the show does, but that's because it's cheaper to write a new character than it is to hire a new actor. And it's also easier to write off a new character than it is to get rid of a main cast member, so the book and the show have slightly different lists of who lives and who dies, and when. Take my "be careful who you get attached to" warning seriously.
4. A similarly batshit television aesthetic
Okay, okay, so nothing will ever be like Guardian's thrift-store maximalist approach to set dressing. The Spirealm is more intentional about its choices, and less like all it can afford to do is to keep reusing the same dozen objects repositioned slightly. The Spirealm is what it looks like when you actually have all the money you need and still choose to decorate like Guardian did.
Because of the story's supernatural main conceit, a lot of the environments are bizarre, impossible worlds that do not rely much on petty little things like logic or accuracy or the laws of physics. They're basically dreamscapes, filled with things that don't make sense but also don't have to.
The whole thing is also beautifully shot. I know that a lot of the screenshots emphasize the extremely yellow Wong Kar-wai color grading that I honestly wish weren't there, but it's fine in context. Really, the framing, the motion of the camera, the composition of scenes -- it's just all lovely. I've been watching it with no sound or subtitles on to do screenshots, and I keep being astonished by how nice it is to just look at.
Shen Wei's clothing choices seem tame compared to the high strangness Ruan Nanzhu considers fashion. He'll see your arm garters and raise you a coat that somehow has three lapels. No, I don't know how it works either. But if you like seeing a beautiful bitchy man in bizarre outfits (and I know you do), the Spirealm's got you covered.
And are there inexplicable English-titled books, both generically fake and perplexingly real? Baby, you know there are.
The Spirealm's set design is ultimately not nearly as interesting as Guardian's is, but it's definitely more engaging than most. If you (like me!) enjoy pausing and squinting at the backgrounds of shots, this will bring you hours of scrutinizing entertainment.
5. Not not the same endings
By this I mean, the end of Guardian the book is to the end of Guardian the show as the end of Kaleidoscope of Death is to the end of the Spirealm. I don't mean the exact same things happen, and I can't tell you exactly what happens without spoiling some major things I don't think should be spoiled. What I do mean is that they feel very similar in the relationship between source and adaptation.
Now that I've said this, you're going to be thinking, oh, I know how it ends! No, I promise, you really don't. But when you finally experience said endings, you're going to understand what I mean. Xi Zixu, writing Kaleidoscope of Death in 2018, could not have been responding to the ending of Guardian the show, which was airing at the same time the novel was being released. However, I'd be willing to put down a not-small amount of money that the production team on the Spirealm was at least passingly familiar with Guardian. I don't think it's accurate to say the Spirealm's ending is a direct response to Guardian the show's ending, but I do believe it understands that it's contributing to a conversation to which the endings of both Guardian versions already belong.
And that's all I'm going to say about that! You'll get it when you get there.
bonus: kitty!
This is Chestnut. Chestnut is perfect.
I find it charming how much Xi Zixu, the author, loves cats. She talks about her cat in her author's notes. She waxes poetic about how great cats are in the prose. She has obviously chosen to make Lin Qiushi a cat dad for reasons of writing her own favorite personal traits onto her blorbos.
Of course Ruan Nanzhu is jealous of a cat. He's jealous of himself. He's a one-man jealousy machine when it comes to Lin Qiushi's affections. He's being so normal right now.
Have I convinced you?
Scroll down to the bottom of the rec posts I mentioned earlier to find all the information you need to read Kaleidoscope of Death and all the information you need to watch the Spirealm.
My final verdict is that Guardian the show is substantially better than the Spirealm, and Guardian the book is also better than Kaleidoscope of Death -- but by a much, much narrower margin. I don't even have strong feelings about which one of them you should experience first; I actually started the show, jumped to the book, read it while I was watching the middle episodes, and then finished the show, and even that broken-ass order was not a bad way to approach them. But be prepared to do both! You'll want to do both. Trust me.
Anyway, after you're done watching/reading, come find me at @thirteenthdoor, which is where I'm putting all my Kaleidoscope of Death/Spirealm analysis, reblogs, and shitposting. But only after, because I'm not being careful about spoilers at all over there.
I’ve already gone on about how much I hate this wedding decor, but it’s just so bad. So bad. No matter what it’s trying to do, it’s failing.
This production still, however, is magical. It’s got the saturation set just right, so that Shen Wei’s suit matches the blue flowers, and Zhao Yunlan’s brown jacket and boots go so nicely with the wood and upholstery. It’s taken at such an angle that you can almost forget the tacky-ass balloons and streamers are there (though the less said about that rug, the better).
Shen Wei never sits down in the actual scene, so the seated, crossed-arms pose captured here is a particularly fine sulky treat. He has completely run out of lies to tell about his not being Little Black Riding Hood, and as such has given in to the last-resort tactic of invoking Jurassic Park dinosaur rules, declaring that if he can’t see Zhao Yunlan, Zhao Yunlan can’t see him. It’s not working.
It’s also amazing the way they embody their respective furniture choices. Shen Wei brings to the party all the formal fun of a brocade armchair pulled up too close to the coffee table. Zhao Yunlan is nothing if not a fringed couch.
Guardian fans, you should see this transcendent set of tags.
And @sketchy-scribs-n-doods, you should know a) the name of the show is Guardian, b) they are boyfriends as much as Chinese censorship will allow them to be, c) you nailed like 95% of the dynamic right out of the gate, and d) the person Zhao Yunlan texts shit like that to at 1AM is his cat.
@sketchy-scribs-n-doods it is absolutely imperitive that you know
d) section i.) the cat is a 10,000 years old transitionally housed man trapped in perpetual emerging adulthood with dementia
section ii.) with whom zhao yunlan basically has a fanfic-style soulbond
i know it’s been like two years (and manyyy must have moved on by now lol) but given that i’ve got hella free time now and need new shows to watch, i’m seriously considering actually giving the whole ‘record/liveblog my reaction’ thing a go kinda like @swan-orpheus suggested lol
Please do let me know if you decide to do this, as I sense there would be a number of people here interested in watching your magical journey through Dragon City.
"My coworkers!" I exclaimed aloud as I pulled out the sticker sheet.
Anyway, if you're wondering if the special edition of Guardian vol. 3 with all the extra stuff is worth it, the answer is yes. And if you're wondering if I'm going to put these up around my workspace like the dignified professional I am, the answer is also yes.
"My coworkers!" I exclaimed aloud as I pulled out the sticker sheet.
Anyway, if you're wondering if the special edition of Guardian vol. 3 with all the extra stuff is worth it, the answer is yes. And if you're wondering if I'm going to put these up around my workspace like the dignified professional I am, the answer is also yes.
Part of being a jock-goth hybrid is that the aesthetic concerns of a goth must be balanced with the practical needs of jock life – goth form meets jock function, if you will. The goth side speaks to the theatrical, while the jock side favors the practical. Goth idealism will happily drop several hundred dollars on a single pair of good stompy boots, yet jock pragmatism declares the $10 six-pack of Hanes briefs a solid, economical choice.
Anyway, the frame-by-frame confirms it: Chu Shuzhi wears white undies.
It's the two-year anniversary of this ridiculous blog! Thanks to all of you for humoring me in my nonsense here.
Let's celebrate by spending too long looking at the tiny sign way up at the top of the front of the Dixing Bar!
It's shaped like a U.S. route road sign, but where the road sign would have "U.S." or some other designation, this sign says 酒馆 (bar, tavern). It's got a flame design on the bottom where the road number would otherwise be. Because the bar is, you know. In hell.
While idly browsing for a reference image when I was thinking about my "glasses" bingo prompt, I made a discovery: Shen Wei has two different styles of glasses frames!
Style 1 - Wire rims with black temples that narrow and change to gunmetal toward the ears, a uniform wire bridge, and very little visible end piece/hinge:
Style 2 - Wire rims with thicker black temples that widen toward the ears, a tapered bridge that is thinner in the center, and a more pronounced black end piece. The hinge is also set back farther on the arm:
If you were wondering (as I naturally did), Ye Zun wears Style 2:
(Now go forth, fandom, and write a billion fics that explain the reason for the style change!)
Nice catch! I don't have an in-universe theory for why Shen Wei changes glasses, but I do have a production theory:
There are very few scenes in Shen Wei's apartment, and in all of them, when he's wearing glasses, he's wearing Style 1. All of these scenes are unconnected to other events and outfits ... except for the one in episode 7, where he brings Zhao Yunlan back to his place to rub his arm semi-tenderly in gratitude after defending him in the alleyway -- where he was, in fact, wearing Style 2.
Same outfit, different glasses.
Since we know that that episode 7 scene was their first scene together, and since I'm pretty sure that all the other scenes in Shen Wei's apartment got shot first too (before it got struck and redressed as Zhao Yunlan's apartment), it stands to reason that the Style 1 pair got lost/broken at some point and replaced with the Style 2 pair.
So when did the switch happen? Pretty early, I'm guessing, considering he only seems to be wearing them a) in his apartment, b) in the hallway outside his apartment, c) outdoors on the Dragon City University grounds (but not on the roof), and d) in his office. (If there's another place he's got them on, it's so minor that it slipped my notice.) These must have been the earliest of his scenes that they shot, with everything else coming later in production order.
Here's a couple more instances of same outfit, different glasses:
I'd say that if you're trying to find an in-universe explanation, you'd have a hard time creating a reason for how he gets thrown off a building wearing one pair of glasses and lands wearing a different pair of glasses -- but the truth is, he gets thrown off a building wearing one pair of glasses, does a whole magical girl transformation into an outfit that doesn't even have glasses, and then lands wearing a different pair of glasses, which is by some rights even harder to explain. Let's split the difference and say the glasses are part of the same shadow stuff as his cloak and his hair are, yeah?
I don't know if I've appreciated just how spectacularly extra Shen Wei's wallet chain is. It's not simply a chain, which would be extra enough on its own. It's a beaded chain, with what looks like an angry face on one of the silver beads. Each end is attached by a lobster claw clasp to one of his belt loops. There is no wallet involved.
He's only wearing it for the Episode 8 sequence of events where he has a conversation with a bush, scraps with Bad Wig Loserboy, hauls his mentor's drunk ass into a cab, hauls Zhao Yunlan's drunk hurty tummy ass into a different cab, washes dishes, messes with his boyfriend's work email, makes breakfast, and generally reevaluates ten thousand years' worth of life choices, which still somehow manages to be not the weirdest night Shen Wei's had all week.
So it turns out that the underground MMA fight club and the Dixing bar are just two redresses of the same space. They even leave a lot of the ropes and barrels behind when they switch from one to the other, which, sure, why not?
I know it's kind of hard to see with only these shots, but here's a shot of what I'm pretty sure is both these spaces, stripped down to bare bones as the Ming flour factory in the Disguiser:
We never see the MMA arena connect to the outside world, but we do see the Dixing bar's entrance, which is absolutely the entrance to the flour factory (and which I don't have a non-spoilery image of in the Disguiser, but trust me on this one).
(Which is also the location where they are that one time Chu Shuzhi and Guo Changcheng are wandering around Dixing, except that it looks absolutely nothing like the rest of Dixing.)
These locations also both have the chest-high green paint on the otherwise grey wall, which is a lot less visible in Dixing (because there's a ton of crap all over the walls), but still there.
I guess this goes a long way toward explaining why the MMA fight club has a fully stocked bar. I'm pretty sure the main part of the bar and the bottom shelf on the backpiece are the same, just repainted. The top part is clearly totally different, though, and the MMA bar has very rounded corners, while the Dixing bar has sharp right angles.
I made the terrible mistake of realizing this right before I was going to go to bed, which meant that instead of being sleepy, I got myself all fired up and had to post about it. Okay, good-night.
(Hi, friends! In the last year and a half, I've watched a lot more shows filmed in Dragon City Shanghai Film Park, so it may be time to comb through my Guardian screenshots and look for more repeating locations like this. I'll let you know if I find anything good!)
Look, we all love the cover, and we're right to. We should love the cover. It's such a delightful contrast to the other (gorgeous, this is not a criticism) danmei covers they've been doing, the ones with swirling gossamer robes and blossoms falling gently from trees. No, this one lets you know from the start that you are in for the catastrophe romance of a bitey man who cannot work a cell phone and a disaster bisexual who makes instant noodles with coffee, neither of whom has a lick of respect for the other's personal space. Also, they fuck.
What I haven't stopped laughing about, though, is the little block of text right over Shen Wei's right armpit:
From the author of Sha Po Lang: Stars of Chaos and Faraway Wanderers comes Guardian, the hit novel series that inspired a live-action TV show.
It inspired a TV show. You know, just a show. No adjectives. You can't watch it anywhere. We're not going to tell you what it's called. It's just, you know, a show. There's some action. It was live. You should be enticed to read this book by knowing this fact, but you should feel no similar draw to the drama it inspired. It's the 'she's everything, he's just Ken' of media cross-promotion.
It seems it's the five-year anniversary of Guardian's airing, and it's been a year and change since I started this ridiculous blog, so this seems like a good time to write down a thought I've been having, and that thought is this: When I first thought about doing making a Tumblr to chronicle all the Guardian weirdnesses that caught my eye, I wondered, oh no, as I watch more c-dramas, will I then feel obligated to do this kind of deep-dive analysis for them as well?
As it turns out, the answer has been ... no. Not because I wouldn't enjoy it, mind you, but because nothing else I've seen has inspired in me the level of head-clutching befuddled awe that Guardian has.
At first I thought it was just that everything else I was watching was a period/costume piece, so of course we're not going to be dealing with random English in odd locations or jackass vehicle choices. But then I started watching some things set in the 20th and 21st centuries, some that are even filmed in Dragon City Shanghai Film Park, and ... nope. There are peculiar choices here and there, sure, but nothing even approaching the level of Zhao Yunlan's inexplicable apartment swing. Plenty of shows have fake books, but how many have fake bookcase walls? Think of how many objects in the main SID room alone I not only can't explain but can't even identify. And that's even before we get to what the hell everyone is wearing.
Truly, the more I watch other things, the more I realize what a unique gem of chaotic wonder Guardian is, 50% heartbreaking work of staggering genius, 50% dumb as a guinea pig in a roller skate, and I'm happy to have all of you fine internet people to share it with.
