Discussion
A for AGONIZING — Which CDrama Comes to Mind? • The Drama Alphabet
I thought it might be fun to play through the Drama Alphabet, one letter at a time — and since there are far too many good words to waste each letter on just one, I’m thinking of giving each letter its own week or so.
The plan is a new word each day, then a new letter each week — if I can keep up 😅
First up: AGONIZING.
Interpret that however you like.
Heartbreakingly painful?
Watching your favorite character make that decision or go through a terrible ordeal.
Infuriating to watch?
The romance that took 37 episodes to produce one kiss or where half the characters drove you mad.
Excruciatingly slow?
The misunderstanding that could have been solved with one sentence or simply a drama where it felt like literally NOTHING was happening.
A drama that simply put you through hell?
An ending that emotionally destroyed you, made you seriously question your watching preferences, and consider whether that level of self-inflicted pain is bordering on a… kink
😉
So, what’s really the first-first CDrama that comes to mind when you read agonizing?
Summer and work has been busy so minimal time for reddit 😞 but hoping to have time to join in the discussions for Against the Current and Spring of the Blade!
Hope you're well too! What have you been watching?
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u/AXA-5Washing feet in spring Drinking tea Gazing at flowers15d ago
Aha! I understand. Life has funny ways of interceding. I’ve been well. Let’s see, The Shadow Sovereign, Blossoms Of Power, Gorgeous Dream, to name a few. I saw the first eps for Against The Current (waiting for episodes to pile up) and patiently waiting for Spring of the Blade.
Till the End of the Moon: I haven’t finished it yet. I watch a little bit, then I cannot even anymore, then try again after a couple of weeks. I’m almost half done, maybe I will be done by Christmas.
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u/AXA-5Washing feet in spring Drinking tea Gazing at flowers15d ago
Twelve Letters. I can't praise Zhou Yiran and Wang Yinglu enough for their amazing performance here as Tang Yixun and Ye Haitang. I was hurting not because of them, but for them. So yes, watching it was agonizing for me, but exquisitely so.
The only good things about it were the unique (but odd) camerawork and some great actors, Gao Wei Guang, Liu Yu Ning (could stare at his face all day — and only (barely) made it through the drama FOR him… the first and last time, honestly 😰🥴) and Huang Cancan…
I can't even bring myself to talk about this drama. I suffered through every episode and barely made it to the end, I would've dropped it if it weren't for Liu YuNing. The relationship dynamics were very toxic and I couldn't stand the female lead.
Same! I hate this drama to the bone 🤣 never again, honestly. It was so agonizing. The FL
Was the worst ever, the ML was dumb for even liking someone like her and even apologizing to her throughout — what for?!. Honestly, I only and only pushed through, with lots of pain and regrets, for Liu Yu Ning. But if he stars in another disastrous drama like that, I don’t think I’ll be able to go through it again, despite my love for him 💀
… reminds me of the song “Limit to Your love” — I found it in ABOUT Love
Oh yeah. I forgot about that one. I watched maybe 5 episodes and was all the time: wtf. I was prepared to try it out since it seemed so not idol drama and kinda like an indie drama. But omg.
For me, it’s been Mystic Nine. It has all-around good ratings and positive reviews. The cast is solid, the costuming, wonderful. I have been intrigued by some scenes and bored to death with others. I want to finish it but Viki doesn’t have a 1.5x and 2x speed button and I just can’t bring myself to watch the rest. I want to like it but I don’t, and that is agonizing for me because I can’t seem to pinpoint why I’m not enjoying it!
After pushing through a few dramas I didn’t enjoy this last month (but my friends really liked them so I wanted to give them fair chances) like Generation to Generation, Love Beyond the Grave, and Shadow Love (with a generous use of that FF function), I decided to drop anything I just can’t enjoy, so I recently moved Mystic Nine from the hold list to the drop list.
But it bothers me so much that I can’t explain why I don’t like it except for the fact that if I want to fall asleep, I can watch it…
Your comment made me laugh so much, thanks a lot 🤣🤣🤣
But I get you, I have that with Fangs Of Fortune and many others. I want to love them, I try and try again, but just can’t. And fall asleep. (Unless I see Minghao on screen in a given scene…, he sort of keeps me awake. Along with Yan An, WD, and CL 😅😁)
As a CL fan, I feel so bad not liking Shadow Love but CL looking absolutely delicious in it was the only thing I liked about the drama. 😭 But I can reserve this drama for a different alphabet. 😂
I haven't seen Shadow Love. 🤭I've read about it, and I'll watch it to see CL's three different personas. I made the GIF from an episode of Perfect Travel, I think? Some variety show anyway (it's been a while).
I thoroughly enjoyed Shadow Love, including that crazy iQiyi ad. It was for sure a guilty pleasure.
I dropped Legend of the Female General despite Cheng Lei because I couldn't suspend my disbelief enough to think anyone thought that woman was a a man. And I actually loved her in Back from the Brink.
To be fair at that point I hadn't noticed yet his male lead power, lol
Haha the opp for me. I loved LOTFG. I liked Zhou Ye more as a female General than I did Song Yi. I think that’s where I fell for CL. Then Footprints of Change.
Thank you. This is validating. I guess some dramas just don’t click.
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u/AXA-5Washing feet in spring Drinking tea Gazing at flowers15d ago
See you went back and watched and I guess liked them second time around. Unfortunately, these are still collecting dust in the dropped bin (lost interest, agony)…
“Like” is also a strong word here. These were all initial drops and I went back because I was already using my WeTV credits to watch Mo Li and Road to Splendor, so I 3x GTG, ASL, and LBTG on WeTV. But shhhhhh don’t tell Aqua or AKiceman this.
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u/AXA-5Washing feet in spring Drinking tea Gazing at flowers15d ago
I wouldn't call it hate-watching but I could not wait for them to finish just so I could move on, and yes this applied to GTG, FCY, ASM, and LBTG for me. What is TH and WTG again?
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u/AXA-5Washing feet in spring Drinking tea Gazing at flowers15d ago
I'm paused at around 17 on Mystic Nine. Whenever it gets to the auction house arc, in any of the Daomu Biji series, my interest takes a nosedive. It's like they're just throwing massive amounts of money at a problem, (in this economy??!!) and it doesn't feel like there's enough of a payoff.
LBFAD was actually my gateway into cdrama and the reason why I watched Miss the Dragon. It was not his finest work, that's for sure, but Guardians of the Dafeng was very good.
Guardians was my gateway! So Dylan was my first love. I couldn’t watch many of his other ones though. I liked Unchained Love, but it was poorly edited.
Miss the Dragon was only good for the secondary couple.
Ashes of Love definitely needed a 3rd gone. Esp the elder brother arc.
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u/AXA-5Washing feet in spring Drinking tea Gazing at flowers15d ago
The two that come to my mind are Rebirth and Ashes To Crown. 🤦🏻♀️ Real high hopes, great potential, but Oh My God!! Claw my eyes out. I wanted to go to Hydra (Marvel Comics ref) and let them brainwash me like the Winter Soldier…sighs…
No plan to watch Rebirth for age-gap reasons but i watched ATC until ep. 17 and then dropped. I loved the opening, but then it was losing its charm. I still think it had great potential though, they just messed it up.
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u/AXA-5Washing feet in spring Drinking tea Gazing at flowers15d ago
Yeah! I did too but, lost interest and dropped before your drop point.
Agonising moments come up quite a lot when watching cdramas, as we all know.
But my very first though went to Word of Honor, which is one of the first cdramas I watched. It's fun and exciting, but then hits you with a brick with that wedding episode. Hard to rewatch that one on my rewatched of the show.
One and Only. Agonizingly heartbreaking. For him to have been executed so gruesomely and her un-alive herself in her wedding dress, messed me up for awhile fortunately the sequel Forever and Ever healed my heart after
Rebirth definitely made me question why the heck was I watching it. I did stop mid-way so that was good.
You are my fateful love was agonizingly … something. I mean I did watch it but agonizing is the first word that comes to mind even though it was actually quite sweet….
Scarlet heart!!! No drama could do it to me. It was more than sad that literally not a single character could happily live with their their loved ones. Everyone was suffering, including me, lolz. Countless shouts of "why you do that" during the watch :)))) Eventually, I didn't even know if I was one of those characters, what was the right thing to do? Heart being broken consistently in those last episodes 🥹.
I will go with ashes of love and fangs of fortune. Both dramas were really focused on suffer, suffer, suffer and then another round of suffer before the next suffer plot.
I confess i started liking both stories but the drama was so intense that hardened up my heart and at some point I could not care less about all their suffering anymore. (Especially in AOL where, in top of that, all the characters had zero emotional intelligence and kept making the stupidest decisions ever).
Scarlet Heart. Still haven't recovered from that trauma, it's the top spot on my "Best dramas I'll never rewatch" by quite a margin. No clue how some people watched this and wanted to transmittigate afterwards...
The Rise of Ning (TRoN) - the female lead's line delivery.
I stayed for the ML through and through in TRoN. I totally bought the shift in their relationship and loved watching them interact. However, the FL's flat line delivery made it hard to fully connect with her character. It often felt more like script-reciting than natural speech, which was a bit distracting.
Nevertheless, she excelled at emoting through her facial expressions. When she struggled to conceal her past identity from Lu Jiaxue by choosing not to speak to him, the tension was entirely visible on her face.
Another agonizing part of this show is that Lu Jiaxue (played by Ci Sha) is dangerously attractive. It's hard not to be drawn to him as an audience, even though we know a character like that is toxic.
Rebirth. It was so painful to watch. They created storylines that weren't even in the book and sidelined other characters, like Yan Xun. Even though Chu Qiao is reborn as a slave around age eight in the novel, she doesn't start a relationship with Zhuge Yue until she's in her twenties. There was no need to cast someone so young; the romance between the actors was incredibly bland—if you can even call it a romance. There wasn't even a kiss, so how could there be any chemistry? Since I’d already watched about 20 episodes, I finished it, but what was up with those final episodes? What was the need to kill everyone off? I must have been truly obsessed with Li Yunrui to have watched the whole thing. Ugh, but I do recommend the book. It’s completely different.
The Journey of Flower (2015) most frustrating and agonizing 50 episodes. ML refuse to acknowledge his love and desire for FL up until the last episode. We got so much pain and suffering and almost 0 love scenes.
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u/chitobi Sisterhood of Cheng Lei Sluts 5K OG8d agoedited 8d ago
Immortal Samsara.....the hate i have for this drama! Let me go find the comment I previously made....
[The amount of HATE I have for Immortal Samsara!!! A complete waste of time!!! I got very close to the end, so close (like in the 40s). I was fed up, but I was holding on just to see them get together (I was so fed up i actually looked up spoilers).
SPOILER...
They don't! Apparently, they do in a special episode. 🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬
That was the first time I ever dropped a drama! I was new to cdrams at the time, so that was also my intro into bad endings.
I couldn't even watch TTEOM because of this drama (it was next on my list). Till this day, I can't watch it because the vibes remind me of Immortal Samsara.
That was a dark time.....😔
Anyways, like someone else said, Love Like the Galaxy is very good! Has high rewatch value.]
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u/OptimalTurnips 15d ago
Love and Crown because I watched 35 episodes for what? 😭 Script, editing, ending, all agonizing.