Oops!
😳 Little Miss EXTREMELY Distracted is reporting in, albeit at silly o’ clock (@this moment in time as I type 03:56), on this thread after, I CANNOT BELIEVE IT!, 2 weeks after my last post on here on 31/07/22!!!
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A Very early Very Good Morning to you all & have a Wonderful Day!
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I’m not posting a reading today as I’ve just literally eaten some soup before going to bed now & I forgot to test before having the soup: I’ve hardly eaten ANYTHING this past week as I keep forgetting to; I remember when I start to feel faint from long hours of not eating! My sleeping pattern is all over the place & my BS is a bit erratic as my ears have kept bugging me on & off! I seem to be fighting off, for some time now, the triple whammy of shingles, ear infections & Bells Palsy although, that HASN’T shown up yet & I really hope it doesn’t as I can no longer take the steroids needed to fight that off since my severe bout of it in 2017 when they gave me hallucinations: it’s ALL down to me to fight it off if it shows up; have had to a few times post 2017 without steroids & already learnt the only other thing to take is anti-virals as soon as my GP is sure it IS Bells Palsy & won’t prescribe them before that as they can harm me if it’s not!
At first I could only stay awake for 6 hours as I couldn’t sleep longer than 2 hours but, I’m able to sleep for longer now so, able to stay awake for longer too: was dependent on my one anchor of daily meds & Tresiba around lunchtime; the midday alarm has been changed a bit now & then to accommodate my current sleeping pattern at the time with a few late reactions to or just slept through the alarm anyway but, that’s gotten better too & it’s currently at 12:30; was at 16:30 at it’s worse at one point!
Oh! The rest is pretty long winded, you know by now how obsessive I can be, & can be skipped: I won’t know!
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When awake I’ve watched a LOT of Chinese Mandarin drama of varying degrees of like or hate: I definitely can’t handle contemporary Mandarin of “today” & always watch the historical ones!
BUT, I made an exception for the one I’m watching now that I read about on the internet of 2 rising stars with an incredible on screen chemistry in a semi contemporary drama, certainly set at least 200 years later than any historical one I’ve seen, “Arsenal Military Academy” & I thought that the chemistry was a gem between the two leads in Love Story of Court Enemies: this one melts the screen AND it’s severely censored, director was heartbroken to have to cut out about 90 minutes across the 48 episodes & told fans not to keep asking for release of those cut scenes, by the Chinese government with not ONE scene of kissing & not that many intimate moments either! But, when chemistry works it’ll show through any censorship: Marilyn Monroe did through the censorship era before age certificates came into being! It’s set in 1911 when China started drafting young men into military schools after the fall of the Qing dynasty & the steady rise of foreign powers tearing the country apart, with the Japanese being the biggest threat, that lead up to the creation The Peoples’ Republic of China! Of those military schools the best of the best is The Arsenal Military Academy that trains classes of army officers with each class taking 2 years of training. It’s an adaptation of a novel & it aired in 2019 in China during the marking of the 70th anniversary of the creation of The PRC: hence the severest censorship I’ve seen of any Chinese drama!
The story is about a young girl who had an older brother that got into the AMA but, died in an accident before he attended. She decided to attend in her brother’s name, cut her hair & disguised herself as a young man. She’s good at kung fu & not in anything else coming last, or almost last, in everything else but, as kung fu & sword fighting instructor said during the 1st day of training, why train in those skills in this day & age of guns?: it’s about facing the fear of death & having the intention to kill before you even use a gun! She’s hard working continues training at night when everyone else is in bed, doing loads of laundry for her classmates to get them to train with her to learn, gets better & along the way gains the classes respect. She’s paired with a rich bratty, handsome guy, that’s SO narcissistic that he can’t believe that ANY female can resist him as her dorm roommate that’s been expelled from every school he’s attended & his father, a very important senior minister in the government, gets him in the AMA as a last resort to sort him out! You can probably guess the classic gender bender type rom/com right? But, it’s almost all comedy & very little romance until pretty much near the end of the 48 episodes of this drama: the censorship of SUCH sensitive material about the army, politics & patriotism; he works out pretty early on she’s a girl, has it confirmed later, is very protective of her, starts falling for her but, ALL his charms just doesn’t work on her & he doesn’t know what to do? She falls for another classmate that’s everything her roomie isn’t: pretty much EVERYONE in the class is there for the right reason, out of choice & earned their place; the male & female leads being the exception in that she took her brother’s place & his father pulled strings to get him in!
In between all of the usual love triangle stuff there’s all this overt propaganda of army & politics in the real missions that the students are taken on: indeed they CAN be killed & towards the end, episode 43, the first fatality happens during a mission; about half of the class is killed or severely wounded on the final mission, episode 47, before they graduate! The rest of the class left alive & able get their revenge in taking out the Japanese villain with the just the a little “walking off into the sunset”, literally male & female leads holding hands with the sun setting on the horizon, with an unspoken resolution of the triangle!
Nope! The politics and patriotism is centre stage here & not the romance! BUT, when chemistry between two actors works: it works; NOT a hit, though, in China & it’s a MASSIVE hit globally outside despite censorship and political agenda!
It’s not at all the type of Chinese drama I’d ever watch & gave it a go because it KEPT getting mentioned!
It was very slow going for me, though as I could only HEAR about, 25% of it, to start with, as almost all of the different historical eras’ spoken language I’ve learnt to hear just wasn’t used in 1911! I skipped most of it, politics, as that was the heaviest to go through the first few rounds & only now, after retraining my ear for a more recent era of language, am I watching all of it on round 4! I’m learning more & will keep watching each round of 48 episodes until I can’t learn anything new: I always do that!
There’s no doubt about it! Actor Xue Kai & actress Bai Lu will be MASSIVE stars now & indeed they’ve been paired together in 3 tv productions now & I’ll watch “The Legends” an historical fictional fantasy next that was aired in China earlier in 2019 that’s not so censored, all productions are & it’s worth bearing that in mind, where apparently they “set the screen on fire”! There’s one other production that began airing in 2021, I don’t know anything other than that yet, & I’ll check in on it in about another year or so for the subtitles to come through & will watch that one too! They’re contracted to the same tv company & they’ve certainly taken note in pairing them up in more!
The subtitles are very good, by the way & the best I’ve seen so far: it’s just ME determined to HEAR as much as I can; it’s slowly teaching me Chinese grammar as the “weird Chinese” as our older generations of the family have always said about my younger siblings & I is Chinese with English grammar and syntax!
WOW! That was a LONG post!
😱 It’ll be shorter tomorrow; I promise!
