#tvb dramas

[innocent-diamond-2090110]

TSFR09 + "Funeral Disaster" Video

!!! EMAIL ALERTS ARE NOT WORKING AGAIN !!!

There's no NCIS again this week (because next week will feature the 1000th & 1001st episodes), but I got to watch the live solar eclipse news coverage! Once again, I updated another depressing chapter of TSFR:

As to why I was so eager to release the funeral scene... It's based on the original funeral scene in "Two Steps From Heaven" (episode 23), but the entire story behind the drama's funeral scene is a lot worse than what I wrote in today's chapter due to blatant infidelity (which I could never include in any of my fanfics @_@). As seen below, only family members may wear white flowers at a [Chinese] funeral, so you can probably deduce who's at fault & not welcome here...

I repeat—EMAIL ALERTS ARE NOT WORKING AGAIN!!!

[xinyuehui]

Can you distinguish what's true and what's false?

新聞女王 The Queen of News · 2023

[itmethanh]

self portrait inspired by the moon goddess chang'e

[don-dake]

河國榮 Gregory Charles Rivers

(30 April 1965 — 2 February 2024)

Posted this on my Insta Stories a couple days back but decided I'd do a post here too because I realised I'm still feeling saddened by Mr Rivers's passing.

For people of certain older generations, especially those who grew up in the 1990s watching Hong Kong TVB series, Mr Rivers, aka 河國榮 (Ho Kwok-Wing) to HK TV viewers, was an easily recognisable and familiar face, having been (at that time) the only foreign/Caucasian face to appear consistently in HK television armed with an impressive fluency in Cantonese.

I guess his passing has affected me more than I thought it would because firstly, I'd admired him for his proficiency in Cantonese and subconsciously looked to him as an inspiration.

As someone who grew up being terrible at Chinese (both Cantonese and Mandarin) and got teased for being “the banana” (i.e. yellow on the outside but white on the inside), the constant presence of this Caucasian guy on TV who could speak better Cantonese than I, partly spurred me on to learn Cantonese better myself.

Secondly, he represented an age when HK and by proxy, Cantonese, was flourishing; Mr Rivers's story of coming to Hong Kong purely motivated by his love for Cantopop and the Cantonese language is (sadly) not the kind of story one will hear very often again…

With his passing, it's like yet another bit of the shine of “Golden Age” HK being taken away…and this “Golden Age” was part of my childhood, so it means another part of my childhood is gone…

Anyway, I'll end this post with this video of an interview Mr Rivers did (c. 2007), sharing briefly his thoughts on his experiences as a foreign actor in HK.

河生，對於學緊廣東話嘅我嚟講，

您畀咗我唔少不知嘅鼓舞。

呢一點，我會喺心裏永遠默默感激。

希望您而家搵到了安寧，同妻子一路走好！

[teafiend]

A show I rewatched every decade or less for the main romance and relationship. I love, love Maggie Cheung Ho Yee and her character here (and her short hair was stunning), and while the stories could be much better, they were still okay. The show aged quite well. I learned a few useful things from this show.

The main pairing here is still one of the healthiest, most mature and egalitarian (modern) relationship I have had the pleasure to feast onscreen, and some of the tropes are my favourites too, e.g., the main male character feeding his lady love with his excellent cooking skills, relatively straightforward commmunication/confession etc. The visuals were gold too (though am/was not much of a fan of Gallen Lo, they made for a beautifully striking pair).

The main pair’s dynamics were made even better by their contrast with the somewhat - not particularly healthy and often annoying - ‘stereotypical het’ relationship of the second leads.

A favourite which stood the test of time.

[evilpenguinrika]

Florence Choi Moodboard (a Candela Obscura character)

i'm a dork and made another Candela Obscura character AND moodboard--mainly as a backup to my first one in case my first character dies in the session I will be playing with my friends lol. I finished writing her bio so it'll be under the cut if you're curious! Just please mind the tw tags I put because it gets pretty dark!

Name: Florence Man Zing Choi (蔡文靜) Age: 32 Occupation: Doctor Role: Scholar - Meticulous Notes Specialty: Doctor - Patch Up

Catalyst: Florence joined Candela after discovering there is some sort of demon entity tethered to her after she tried to kill herself.

Personality:

Florence is meticulous and straightforward. She is blunt and direct with her thoughts and words and it can sometimes come off as rude.

She feels deeply that it will often make her act irrationally. She tries to reign it in when that happens, but there are still times when Florence will get too much and become so overwhelmed with her emotions that she becomes dangerous.

But aside from that, Florence is very caring and full of love underneath it all. She doesn't care about the glamour, glitz, and glorious life that she's familiar with. She's more interested in the simplicity of things and the simplicity of life.

Background:

Florence grew up in The Eaves with her parents--both doctors. Her father was renowned for his research and cure for a disease affecting many of the Fairelands residents. She aimed to follow in her parents's footsteps and worked hard to become a doctor. However, many peers stay clear away from her or look down on her because they conclude she got to where she did through her parents's connections and not from her hard work and merit.

One day, she had been in her father's study looking over her notes when she came across her father's research of the disease and the cure he had created for it. She decided to look it over as a way to gain more knowledge about the topic as a whole. But the more she read, the more she realized there was something strange about his notes. There were too many scribbles, too many unidentifiable symbols, and a name that was underlined one too many times. Florence set his notes aside and figured she would ask him about it when he came home that night.

It was around midnight when things went terribly wrong.

Florence awoke to screaming coming from downstairs. She was afraid, understandably so. When she reached the main floor, she was greeted with a pool of blood. When she followed the blood, she found her mother's body lying on the floor cut up. She then heard her father's voice and found him in the other room, kneeling in more blood and rocking back and forth. He was muttering under his breath while holding a bloodied surgical knife in his hand--he had specifically been repeating a name over and over again, a name she remembered seeing in his notes being underlined so many times. Florence didn't even get a chance to ask him the plethora of questions that ran rampant in her head when her father killed himself.

The police came over soon after and announced that they had found her Aunt, Uncle, and Grandparent's bodies in another section of the estate, also cut up and lying in their blood. They concluded that Florence's father had a psychotic break. Florence was only nineteen when this happened.

News broke out and people shunned her for her father's crimes, or they pitied her. Both acts frustrated Florence and made her sick to her stomach. She moved out of The Eaves and into The Soffit, bringing along her father's notes so she could look them over and figure out what happened.

By twenty, Florence opened up a secret clinic in The Soffit, mostly meant as a way to keep practicing medicine and helping people while staying under the radar. She tended to patients who couldn't or wouldn't go to hospitals and had an "ask no questions" policy when she did.

One day, a suave and cheeky young man no older than twenty rushed into her clinic banged up and bruised. He had been running away from a group of unruly men--men that he had pickpocketed on the street. Florence didn't want him to stay because she was afraid he was going to bring trouble into her clinic, and she couldn't afford that. But the young man was too charming and persuasive that she eventually allowed him to stay and tended to his wounds. He was very flirtatious toward her and Florence was put off by it, but she couldn't deny there was an attraction there. He later introduced himself as Kensington Thompson, but many called him Kennie.

Since then, Kennie would visit Florence every day, no matter what she was doing at the clinic. He would come to talk, bother, or flirt with her. On days when the clinic was busy, Kennie would help her with the patients despite being absolutely TERRIBLE at it. But Florence appreciated it and was pretty endeared with him.

It was Kennie would made the first move and asked Florence out. She was hesitant at first, mostly because she was still busy with work and still thinking about what happened to her father, but in the end, she agreed to the date. Their first date went disastrously terrible, but Florence had one of the best times of her life. She hadn't remembered enjoying herself so freely like this, not since what happened to her family and her father. Florence ended up asking Kennie out on a second date.

Florence was twenty-three when she and Kennie wed, along with being pregnant with their first child, Abigail Thompson. A year after that, she gave birth to their second child, Malcolm Thompson. She was incredibly happy with her little family and was living an absolute fairytale. But she couldn't help but feel a tether to something sinister lurking in the shadows. She chalked it up to stress from overwork and her research into her father's notes.

At twenty-nine, Florence lost her family again.

She came home one night after work and was met with a pool of blood on the floor. The trauma from a decade ago flashed in her mind and she ran deeper into her home and found both her children's bodies lying on the floor, dead and cut up. And just a few feet away she saw her husband, doing the exact same thing her father did all those years ago. Kennie was kneeling in the pool of blood, rocking back and forth, muttering words under his breath with a bloodied knife in his hand. Florence reached to him and tried to help, but Kennie kept muttering the familiar name that she saw in her father's notes being underlined so many times. She saw the tears in his eyes before he killed himself.

The police were called and they gave the same report as they did a decade ago: Kennie had a psychotic break and that guilt from killing his kids made him kill himself.

Florence didn't believe that. She didn't believe that was what happened to Kennie or to her father. So she dived deep into research to figure out what was going on. But the stress and trauma of it all were so much for Florence that she didn't see the point in continuing to live.

She tried to kill herself but was unable to do so when a demon entity prevented her from ending her own life. The entity revealed himself to her and stated that he still needed her life and would not allow her to dispose of herself like such. He continued by stating how her father promised Florence to him as a trade to develop a cure and to reach notoriety. Florence belonged to him and he did not like his things to act so rashly like this. He vanished soon after, leaving Florence collapsed on the floor sobbing.

[lautakwah]

lau ching-wan in drag????

[fuforthought]

A quick dose of Shaolin action from the 1983 Chinese drama, Tiger Hill Trail.

[alectoperdita]

no one will ever know or watch any of the TVB dramas that inspired some of my fics 😔

[linggluu]

been rewatching a lot of old tvb dramas lately

anyways, favorite tvb dramas of KC, +wing, the Kevin Cheng :) (my beloved ivan was THIRTY NINE FLKFJDLSK)

it speaks volumes and it's an actual credit to his face because that i spent a week looking for specific scenes that burned into my core memory. and note that in burning flames 2/ point of no return, he was just a minor character but he was so hot that i can still remember him years later?!

honorable mentions/non tvb:

1999 / Legendary siblings/ 30 years old 2001 / Shaolin Seven Sets / 32 years old

2011 / Bu Bu Jing xin /42 years old <3 2013 / Red Dust/ 44 years old

[innocent-diamond-2090110]

PUM07 + Demonstration GIF

Happy Leap Day! Originally, I planned to publish ANOTHER story today, but I got carried away from vacation, so PUM07 is all I can offer for the rest of February!

I also included a GIF of the magic trick thread demonstration from "Our Unwinding Ethos" (episode 12) in case the chapter wording was less clear than I expected:

Next chapter is when this arc/case will be solved! (I haven't forgotten about updating FC or AOI... Just busy with life, that's all...)

[xinyuehui]

EP3 - Fibrous Lovers · The Threat of Love (2000)

[seawherethesunsets]

A STEP INTO THE PAST (2001)

[don-dake]

Meaning: If you have something to say, say it already!

Literal translation: Say it quickly if you have something to say, fart it out fast if you're full of gas!

Seeing @xiangqiankua 's 「有話快說，有屁快放」 post brings to mind for me, of 楊過 saying this line (more than a few times too, if I recall correctly) in 《神鵰俠侶》. Here's a version of the (almost) same line, for anyone curious to know how it sounds in Cantonese (sorry for the low volume):

In vernacular Cantonese:

🇭🇰🇲🇴 「你有說話快講，有屁快放！」

nei⁵ jau⁵ syut³ waa⁶ faai³ gong²，jau⁵ pei³ faai³ fong³

Standard Chinese (Mandarin) subtitles:

🀄 「有話就快說，有屁快放」

ㄧㄡˇ ㄏㄨㄚˋ ㄐㄧㄡˋ ㄎㄨㄞˋ ㄕㄨㄛ，ㄧㄡˇ ㄆㄧˋ ㄎㄨㄞˋ ㄈㄤˋ

yǒu huà jìu kuài shuō，yǒu pì kuài fàng

P.S.: It's usually enough to just scream 「有屁快放!」 at whichever unfortunate soul who has to bear your contempt and impatience! (笑)

[lindalung]

Meet the Lungs: TVB’s Very Own Roy Family

I’m not sure how many people watch both Succession and Come Home Love: Lo and Behold, but I wanted to write about the similarities between the Roy family and the Lung family on the respective shows. In fact, I’ve made 4 parody trailers featuring clips from Lo and Behold paired with the audio from Succession trailers, and they fit pretty damn well. (See below)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVCL2G43zbk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDacsg3rnGA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_brbg6kLDu4&ab_channel=lotuspond

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMFx2EFAccI&ab_channel=lotuspond

At first glance, it is pretty easy to spot the striking similarities between the two families. The Roys have Waystar Royco, the fictional American media conglomerate powerhouse, while the Lungs have Zip Lung, a company that started out as the Wai Lung Department Store, and now has ventures in practically every industry. Both companies are spearheaded by the paternal figure, Logan Roy (Brian Cox) and Lung Kam Wai (Law Lok Lam) respectively. Even their family names are meant to reflect power — Roy, deriving from “Roi” meaning “King”, and Lung, meaning Dragon, the symbol of imperial power in Chinese culture.

While the Roy children and the Lung children aren’t exact equivalents of each other in terms of birth order, the core three (if you don’t count the Connor Roy (Alan Ruck), who has a different mother than the other Roy kids)— Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Roman (Kieran Culkin), and Siobhan aka “Shiv”  (Sarah Snook) can be compared to Max (Hoffman Cheng), King Fung aka “Fung Siu” (Andrew Chan), and Linda (Mandy Lam). There is also the difference wherein the Lung siblings have different mothers, and therefore come from competing “Chambers”, but the comparison still stands nonetheless. They also have similar characteristics as the narcissistic and power-hungry son who desperately wants to inherit his father’s position at the company, but in reality, lacks the skill underneath. Roman may not actually be the youngest sibling, but he exudes the energy of the youngest child. He is the comedic relief with a lack of interest in taking over the company compared to the other siblings, and is actually suffering beneath the jokes and happy go lucky attitude, just like Fung Siu. Lastly, although Shiv isn’t the eldest daughter like Linda, being a woman with great leadership qualities yet the only daughter in the men’s business makes them both targets of misogyny. Both fathers also have a history of treating their wives (plural) and women in their lives poorly. Though Linda has a younger sister Vivian (Katherine Ho), she’s both written out of the show and was never interested in the family business. All three children in both shows crave their father’s approval and validation more than anything, due to the lack of love received from him growing up. In both cases, their father loved the company more than they loved them, which is why they want to become CEO so badly.

(Side note: I’ve written about Linda and her father’s relationship previously https://medium.com/@doneforme/daddy-issues-face-and-filial-piety-in-come-home-love-lo-and-behold-42014bbaeaf ).

Shiv and Logan’s relationship reminds me of Linda and her dad, though perhaps there is more genuine love between the latter due to the nature of the sitcom. Still, every time I watch a scene in Succession where Shiv feels powerless as she seeks attention from her dad, or gets ignored or belittled as the only woman in the room, I can’t help but be reminded of Linda. Both Shiv and Linda have to fight their way to the top, to prove that they are just as, if not more capable than their brothers. Linda and her husband Sung Shui Fai (Jack Hui) aren’t exactly the “fail marriage” trope like Shiv and Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfayden), but there are still some similarities especially early on in the relationship. Tom and Fai both come from lower status backgrounds, and marry into a powerful and rich family, where their wives have more success than them (at least in the beginning for Tom). Both men are frequently seen as accessories of their wives rather than their own person. Fai dips into his darker side briefly, but ultimately Fai and Linda’s genuine love is far less toxic than what Tom and Shiv have going on. Fai would do anything for approval from Linda’s father, but his goal is to be accepted into the family so he can marry Linda, not so he can gain the position of CEO. On the other hand, Shiv had a career in politics and initially didn’t want to get into the family business, whereas Linda was vying for a leading position at Zip Lung since birth. In the final season, Shiv also feels trapped in her unexpected role as a mother, something that she did not ask for. There, Shiv being reduced to a daughter, a wife, and now a mother, is the show’s way of showcasing the misogyny against her. The lighthearted sitcom is different, portraying Linda as a caring and willing stepmother to Fai’s young son Philip (Dylan Leung).

Succession asks the question of whether the cycle of generational trauma and toxicity can be broken. Even after Logan’s death, the siblings are still haunted by his looming presence, afraid that he’s still upset with them for every move they make. They’re so afraid of becoming their father, whether as a leader or as a parent. In the end of Succession, Tom becomes CEO of Waystar, and Shiv is merely the one next to him. Linda always assumes that her chances of being successor to Zip Lung are slim due to her gender, because her father has always favoured sons over daughters. While Lo and Behold hasn’t reached that point in the storyline (yet), there’s no telling what may happen to the future of Zip Lung. Fai may be the Head of the Restaurants department, but I could not see him leading Zip Lung. Of course, there is no telling what will happen and I guess we will have to wait and see…

[vivianstravelblog]

Asian Drama Review: Forensic Heroes 5

Asian Drama Review: Forensic Heroes 5

~ Spoiler Free Hong Kong Drama Review: “Forensic Heroes 5” 法證先鋒V (TVB 2022) ~ REVIEW I have seen all the previous seasons of “Forensic Heroes,” and it has had its ups and downs. I wasn’t sure if I would catch the fifth season because TVB has a current reputation for producing duds. However, I was a big fan of Bosco Wong growing up, and he is the reason why I finished this terrible show.…