#SDaboutSpirealm

[sombredancer]

The best cdrama of 2024

is The Spirealm. I love it, love it, LOVE IT! Beware of being heavily spoiled ahead! What I was fond of: 🔑It's a nice story about finding love a true friend and a reason to live even if you are very lonely and abandoned by everyone, and it's full of tenderness and jokes. (Sometimes these jokes were so BL that I thought this drama should have been shot in Taiwan).

LQS: *whispers* I'm a dedicated materialist, I'm a dedicated materialist... RLZ: Yeah, yeah, I got it... RLZ: 👀... RLZ: If you are a materialist, why don't you say it to her? LQS: ... LQS: I'm not a that dedicated materialist! RLZ: ... RLZ: RUN! The main heroes are going the whole way from this:

RLZ: If you are not capable of passing even your first trial, you are worthless. to this:

Calmly accompanying each other on their way to the doom. 🔑 I love its lore and the detective part. As far as I watch cdramas, I try to avoid Chinese detectives because they are very fairytail-ish and don't allow you to participate mentally in the investigation. But it's not that case! (Who knew we would find real detective cases in a horror drama!). You can participate in investigation and even find out the truth before the main heroes will, and it's... pleasant. Btw, the mystical detective cases are so different in their levels of horror and mystics that you def will find something to please you even if you are a horror movies hater like me.

🔑 The horror stories were re-made for the adaptation in a very interesting way. Every monster is related to the inner pain of the main hero: they are betrayed, traumatized, abandoned by people they loved, just like him. So he feels pity and sorry for them and redeems them instead of killing. And, moreover, it makes impact throughout the whole story, on the main hero's 11th door as well on his relationship with his lover.

🔑Speaking of traumatized monsters. The first time I ugly cried over this drama was a story of the 4th monster. The monster! Made me cry!

But of course it wasn't the last time I cried my eyes out. The secondary characters of this drama are lovable, too. And the lore mechanics makes the awaiting of death so unbearable painful... You physically can feel the huge weight of characters' despair when they know that they or their dearest will die in a few minutes and there is ABSOLUTELY nothing they can do about it. This level of pain is something else, indeed.

But the most painful scene, where I cried the hardest, was not a scene of someone's death, but a scene of interaction between the main hero and his mother. She told him not to show up again, because she has a new family now, and was about to throw his school dreams and memories into the dump. What kind of mother she is!!😡

🔑And the most important thing about this drama: all detective cases allow you to restore the main story, piece by piece. And this story is about bone-piercing loneliness. The main hero was bullied in school, abandoned by his family and betrayed (kind of) by his best friend. His life was meaningless before he met his partner, the only person who returned to him the reason to live. But he happened to be a monster made specifically for the main hero to accompany him to the 12th door, a virus that needed to get to the 12th level with the help of the main hero to destroy the game. But the main hero's kindness to other un-humans, his ability to understand their pain despite of who they are, melted even monster's heart and made him genuinely love the main hero. It's truly sad that the main hero refused the real world and spent all his years left to make the world of his dreams and to get his lover back, but it's a story about loneliness, so I can't blame him. In his place, I would do the same.

The first meet

and the last. And the last but not least: I adore the technical part of this drama! I love RLZ's costumes! They are classical yet not really standard, make him conspicuous and give a feeling to a viewer that he is someone special. That he is somehow ethereal.

But he is not the only one whose clothes are saying. The White Deer people have their own style as well, so you can understand almost immediately that the characters in strange and pretentious clothes are related. And the main villain's costumes tell a lot about his personality.

And the set designs! They were marvelous! They gave me a feeling of vastness, as if the characters really were in other, spacious worlds.

And the soundtrack! I love it! It's such a shame that iQIYI didn't publish BGM and OST officially. But I found some of the tracks on YouTube. My favorites are the soundtrack to the 4th case: 森川-佐子 here and the variations of the door theme: 门 (变奏) here and 门 (门中门) here. Love it and highly recommend! 💙

[sombredancer]

Tag navigation in this blog

Longreads, meta-analyses, recaps, lists: #SDaboutLBFAD - about c-drama "Love Between Fairy and Devil" #SDaboutMJTY - about c-drama "My Journey to You" #SDaboutFoF - about c-drama "Fangs of Fortune" #SDabout100dmp - about k-drama "100 Days My Prince" #SDaboutMM - about c-drama "Moonlight Mystique" #SDabouttropes - about tropes, favorite types of characters etc. #SDaboutFilms - about Western (non-Asian) movies and series Impressions of stuff: #SDaboutSpirealm - about c-drama "The Spirealm" #SDaboutBlossom - about c-drama "Blossom" #SDaboutTTEOTM - about c-drama "Till the End of the Moon" #SDaboutDerailment - about с-drama "Derailment" #SDaboutONHCT - about tw-drama "Oh no! Here comes trouble" #SDaboutSL - about c-drama "The Legend of Shen Li" #SDaboutDark - about German Netflix series "Dark" #SDaboutSW - about "Star Wars" Reblogs and picspam: #SDaboutpicspam - picspam, collected by me for no fandom topic #SDaboutSKZ - about Stray Kids K-pop band (mostly Lee Felix) #SDaboutMLC - about c-drama "Mysterious Lotus Casebook" #SDaboutMDZS - about c-drama "the Untamed"

My art and handmade stuff: #SDaboutstuff - my handmade, arts and poems #SDaboutTGCF - about "Heaven Official's Blessing" #SDaboutTolkien - about J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Silmarillion"