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This thread may contain spoilers!
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Ice Fantasy & Bloody Romance
I can’t remember that the dialogues were too long, not longer that in historic dramas XD
But at the beginning it was boring because first the brother was a kid and then the one fire son just died short after he appeared (I didn’t like him at all) and then they were escaping. So I likedit more when the brother became an adult (cool actor too).
They weren’t blood relatives and Ying Kong Shi was not really evil at all. Almost everthing he did, was for his brother (he is only evil in the novel).
It was interesting because of the many layers the story had, but when the subtitles were bad they may be wrong as well.
The story was so tragic in many aspects. In the end Ying Kong Shi left alone to rescue his brother and the viewer got the solution from the start scene, when the ice bird flies to that rock and dies, creating red crystals on the ground. To save his brother (=bringing him back to conciousness) he sacrified himself to be caught in an endless circle of being born, dying and being reborn. His stepbrother of course knows that, but he is unable to do anything. So even though he got the woman he loves, he can’t be really happy because his brother has to endure this as long as Ka Suo lives. (It’s more cruel than being dead). In the end the symbol of freedom (the ice bird; Ka Suo wanted to be free as the bird and Ying Kong Shi wanted to fullfil his brother’s wish) became the symbol for pain and his great loss.
To create such a dilemma and something that’s worse than death has the tragic of old Greek legends, e.g. the one with the eagle that eats the liver every day of someone who is bound to a rock, but he doesn’t die because the liver regrows every night. Or the one who is caught in a realm where he suffers endless pain of thirst and hunger but even though there are trees with fruits and a river, he can’t drink nor eat because the trees move their branches and the water disappears when he tries to reach it.
It’s quite rare to see a modern story (= a story that was written nowadays) that is able to keep the deep tragic of ancient Greek legends.
That’s why I liked Ice Fantasy and appreciate the writing skill of the screen writer. (I don’t say novel author because the novel is different, e.g. the human bodyguard Ka Suo loves dies in an early chapter of the novel and Ying Kong Shi kills and rapes several characters there. He has no conscience in the novel. I don’t know if the end with the bird is the same, since I didn’t read the end yet. Maybe that was the author’s idea and not the screen writer’s. I should check that at some point).
About Bloody Romance:
The novel is also different to the drama. The novel has a much more logic behaviour of the female lead. She is not a shy girl there but a woman who had no other choice and can be cruel because of what she experied. Ah Chang is also different, but more similar to the drama. Gong Zhi is similar, he is also cool and interesting in the novel, maybe that’s why he is cool in the drama too. The novel itself is too much of some kind of dark & bloody fantasy version of 50 Shades of Grey, quite perv.
For the drama they removed both core aspects of the novel: sex & violence/revenge.
So in the drama the female lead wants to be and stay pure, not killing anyone while in the novel her motive is revenge and she’s able to act cruel because she survived (she’s gone through more in the novel than in the drama).
I don’t know why the drama producers sometimes chose such strange novels instead of writing an original script or using a novel that is actually a well developed story (I guess that the Three lives Ten Miles Blossom novel is well written, so the drama is not that puzzled like other dramas).
I hope you understand what I mean, was not so easy to explain.
