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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.

My coworkers!

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