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Review: "Who Rules the World?"
- I don’t hate this show, I’m just mad that it wasted so much of my time and its own by squandering a lot of good ideas and talent. For me, this show epitomises both the issues with web novel composition and the pitfalls of an overly-faithful adaptation of a story composed in that form.
- I initially back-clicked out of “Who Rules the World?” because the first line of the summary is 'The hunt for the Empyrean Token—‘ Please, no more MacGuffins, I'm done.
- Ultimately, perhaps I should have left it there. The show was initially very fun and did have a lot of good points, but the overall arc is a mess and the back-half dragged. The following notes are a mix of live-tweet reactions and later thoughts.
- Episode 3: Why does the female lead think her boyfriend ain’t shit? “Oh, Black Fox, you suck so much. I know you’re only doing this innocuous or benign-seeming thing because of how much you suck.”
Black Fox: *makes a sandwich*
Girl: USING THE DEVIL'S MUSTARD YET AGAIN, I SEE!!
Whatever backstory brought them to this point in their relationship was never that well-explicated on-screen. It ultimately didn’t matter much, because the story got too big and went too many places. I honestly forgot all about this fairly random initial hostility, seemingly thrown in here to get a character dynamic going. I kept waiting for them to say more, here—the first of many times where I extended the narrative trust it did not repay.
- Pour one out for this rich guy on the floor who has to watch the leads almost make-out while he's incapacitated by acupressure. I hope he's into that shit. Feelie suggested he might deserve the psychic damage, and find himself randomly texting a friend later to apologize for all the times he and his girlfriend got drunk and horny at a party. 'I see now that this is not fun for the sober bystander.’
- The heroine’s sect master pretends that his disciple hasn't returned until she does a proper formal greeting. ‘Mm, no, I'm deaf to sass. Can't hear it.’
- Episode 8: The things a cdrama believes will fit on a medieval boat continue to astound me: there truly is trunk in that junk. This sucker makes the “Mary Rose” look like a pedalo. It’s the interior scenes that truly throw me. My ass cannot stand up in 90% of the “Victory”, whereas this has twelve-foot ceilings. Feelie reminded me that Wen Kexing’s triple-decker floating pagoda in “Word of Honor” is also a trip. (So well-catered: so many nuts.)
- “Who Rules the World?” truly said, “by 35, you should be two of the four Finest Gentlemen, have faked a ten year convalescence and be really overly-invested in a martial artist who probably will not commit to you”.
- The male lead’s dad: “You are weak like your mother, but smart like me!” Thanks, fucko, I’m sure he appreciates that.
- The male lead/second prince’s urban palace (the pale green one, with the wall paintings) has some really great architectural features.
- Why does this old uncle who works for the second prince hate Bai Fengxi so much? She only has to breathe for him to be like, “THAT WHORE BAI FENGXI!”
- The Prince’s reaction when Gentleman Yu initially comes on the scene and Bai Fengxi thinks he’s great is truly choice. “Excuse me, I just killed four men for you? I am 1/2 of the Finest Gentlemen in China??”
- Episode 11: I can’t believe we’re just letting the first prince off for killing like six waitresses to hide his epilepsy, because he’s otherwise a decent guy. SIX! WAITRESSES!! Fuck this ho, the waitresses were just There, they did nothing. Meghan observed that the first prince basically becomes obsolete in the story, but that is not a consolation so much as yet another issue with this plot. Besides, are the waitresses going to come back to life? No.
- Tragedy: You are played by the Jiang Yanli actress, but they gave you sexy lipstick this time. The guy you confess your feelings for lets you down gently. Then his real girlfriend shows up and saves your life. She is the coolest bitch you have ever met, is huge into Sisterhood and is impossible to properly hate. The couple does not seem down for a three-way.
- Work Wife and Fake Identity Work Wife/Actual Girlfriend: Rather than have weird tension, we’ve decided to become best friends. Without you.
Guy: …guess I’ll die.
Work Wives: It’s best, yeah.
- Me, at this point in the story: if they end up having to live ‘tragically apart’ because of their different life goals, I’m going to be mad. But I’ll also be low key annoyed if they run off together to be wanderers, because people always do that in wuxia and it’s so …okay, so someone else will deal with these problems, I guess?
Me, having finished the show: Whelp.
- Why do dream catchers keep showing up in historical cdramas? What is going on?
- There’s a singing performance in this that strikes me as unpleasant, but everyone in the drama responds to it like it’s very good. I wonder if maybe there’s a quite different aesthetic regime in play, here. I think I just don’t Get Classical Chinese theatrical singing. (Jane said something about “compositino differences”?)
- Around here, I started to really sense that this show needed a stronger through-line arc plot, a la “Untamed”, “NIF” or “Word of Honour”, to keep it from becoming a series of court drama incidents with MacGuffin interludes (an issue that was only exacerbated by the show’s Katamari Demacy-style accumulation of genres and registers). I don’t care if you love or hate those shows: idol drama aspersions aside, compared to “Who Rules” they were driven, narratively focused and elegant web-novel adaptations with a sense of emotional unity. I needed “Who Rules” to breathe, to do more with less. These problems here only worsened as the show progressed, acquiring yet more Plot MacGuffins.
I understand that cdrama reception circles are still waging some kind of ‘high art vs low art’ battle because their academic culture didn’t engage the huge global conversation, which has rendered the question really moot for any scholar with a western reception background for a generation or two now. The above discrepancy is partly why I found Peking University’s digital lit department’s contention that MDZS isn’t a ‘good’ cdrama weird. Admittedly I’m not very versed in the mainland’s aesthetic reception categories and immediate contexts, but having watched a fair amount of cdrama, in technical terms I don’t think that’s correct. MDZS’s story-shape holds up better than a lot of comparable low and even high brow examples. At its best, “Who Rules” is very fun! But it inarguably sucks at offering the coherence and resultant emotional heft that come to “CQL” quite natively. It’s easy to ask “what’s the core story?” or “what’s the argument/point?” of “CQL”, and far harder to determine that of “Who Rules the World?”
While “Who Rules” isn’t prestige either, you might maintain that higher art’s import is less easily articulated because it’s more complex. Honestly, no: this is a question of whether a cohesive authorial design has been carried out thoroughly, with intention. I can summarise “War and Peace”, for example, real fuckin’ easily. I think Peking understands the question of “is this a good cdrama?” as “is this a good example of high art, is this an opera?”, whereas to me as a critic, the question is more, “is this a good pop song, or opera, or whatever it’s trying to be?” Also, the fact that they centre ‘is it Good?’ when considering an analytic cultural object is strange to me. That’s not what I asked, and it never would be, in an academic rather than critical context, because it’s just not a common approach in any but the most hyper-conservative Western scholarly contexts. We’re generally more concerned with ‘what does it tell us about the context in which it was made and received, how does it work?’ The “Left Behind” series is important and worth writing about because of its impact, who gives a shit that it’s terrible? (It is, it is terrible, trust me.)
- How do we know this isn’t a ‘prestige’ cdrama? Well often, you can go by Helena’s ‘is the emperor hot’ dividing line (except, as Douqi observes, in the case of the boring adaptation of Song Renzong with Wang Kai). This show throws you a curve ball there though, because the emperor is not at all hot. Nor are his vassal kings (with maybe one exception, but Bai Fengxi’s dad is only attractive in a dignified old man sort of way that feels appropriate). Like four hot people want to be emperor, however, and thus the difference is split.
- Male Lead: This is it, the day I make my big love confession! Henchman, get her to come over to my house!
Both work wives: *not home, having a hot pot party without him*
- His actual girlfriend!work wife is now telling his minister!work wife about her daoist feminism and convincing her to cross dress and patronise courtesans with her. “I hope you don’t fall for me when you see how handsome I am dressed as a man!” Dude I’m sorry, the subs have unionised, it’s all over for you.
- Now actual girlfriend!work wife has won a poetry contest, the favour of the top courtesan and a night with her. The second prince comes to fetch her and freaks out at her rambunctious shenanigans. Bai Fengxi is full-on “I’m sorry, did you RAISE your VOICE to me? Did that happen? I must have imagined it because that CANNOT be what just occurred, here.”
Bai Fengxi: Huh, fireworks. lol, is some asshole trying for a ‘fireworks!!’ love confession? That shit is so lame.
Him: I WOULD LIKE YOU TO LEAVE!! *leaves himself*
Her: *looking around at carefully arranged potted flowers* …oh, fuck.
- Here we are at the marriage competition. Why is Prince Huang so into Bai Fengxi, he’s hardly even hung out with her?
- Later, after the death of Bai Fengxi’s brother due in part to this princess’s machinations, I’ll wonder why we spent time showing these girls becoming friends. It’s not like we revisit the emotional impact of this betrayal at any point.
- For a hot second it looked like the first prince was going to melt the first time his awful mom was decent to him. Fortunately, he has the memory of a goldfish and knows that she’s probably still a bitch.
- Your boy the second prince has remembered he’s got a plant in his pocket. He’s chewin’ on an herb, he is. He’s OBLITERATING flower petals with his qi. Such yang. Much vital energies. Wow.
- I feel like this evil stepmom queen’s backstory changed hugely over the course of the show. She was a maid or shop girl the king was infatuated with and fought to marry, but then she was someone the king’s dad married him off to who he only later came to give a shit about after they’d been married a while. That first backstory was rather important, though—it shaped her whole MO? Or at least it used to! Seven episodes from the end, I feel like the show’s lost track of its own characters, their backstories and their personalities.
- The five year time skip before the final two episodes is a wild, wild move. The whole thing is rushed.
- Two episodes from the end, I decided this show was too uneven to recommend. It dragged its ass too much in the second half, and the focus was too diffuse. By the end of the story, the layers of identity reveal (fully a third of the characters are ‘living a lie!’ in some baroque fashion) have created several soupy characters who I don’t really know or care about. People also become their roles as they advance in this show, dropping much of what made them identifiably particular by the wayside. The cast swells and swells, but we don’t properly know most of them or return to them regularly.
- White hair looks terrible on the male lead, sorry.
- This ending blows: that feeling when you ‘wuxia flight from responsibility!’ so hard that you head to the woods even though you are the king and the queen respectively of two countries, identifying no line of succession and just leaving your people to be subsumed into an empire you’ve left in the hands of the same weird, dumb guy who only just got tricked by the main villain and who also murdered your brother in the course of his weird, pointless power games. Just Wuxia Things.
- The main villain’s method of reaching his goal makes Queen Beryl in “Sailor Moon” look like a sensible, no-nonsense planner.
- I guess someone was finally brave enough to say “no, I need to make “Word of Honour’s” back half look comparatively tidy. I’ll take this one for the team.” Thanks, I guess.
- I initially back-clicked out of “Who Rules the World?” because the first line of the summary is 'The hunt for the Empyrean Token—‘ Please, no more MacGuffins, I'm done.
- Ultimately, perhaps I should have left it there. The show was initially very fun and did have a lot of good points, but the overall arc is a mess and the back-half dragged. The following notes are a mix of live-tweet reactions and later thoughts.
- Episode 3: Why does the female lead think her boyfriend ain’t shit? “Oh, Black Fox, you suck so much. I know you’re only doing this innocuous or benign-seeming thing because of how much you suck.”
Black Fox: *makes a sandwich*
Girl: USING THE DEVIL'S MUSTARD YET AGAIN, I SEE!!
Whatever backstory brought them to this point in their relationship was never that well-explicated on-screen. It ultimately didn’t matter much, because the story got too big and went too many places. I honestly forgot all about this fairly random initial hostility, seemingly thrown in here to get a character dynamic going. I kept waiting for them to say more, here—the first of many times where I extended the narrative trust it did not repay.
- Pour one out for this rich guy on the floor who has to watch the leads almost make-out while he's incapacitated by acupressure. I hope he's into that shit. Feelie suggested he might deserve the psychic damage, and find himself randomly texting a friend later to apologize for all the times he and his girlfriend got drunk and horny at a party. 'I see now that this is not fun for the sober bystander.’
- The heroine’s sect master pretends that his disciple hasn't returned until she does a proper formal greeting. ‘Mm, no, I'm deaf to sass. Can't hear it.’
- Episode 8: The things a cdrama believes will fit on a medieval boat continue to astound me: there truly is trunk in that junk. This sucker makes the “Mary Rose” look like a pedalo. It’s the interior scenes that truly throw me. My ass cannot stand up in 90% of the “Victory”, whereas this has twelve-foot ceilings. Feelie reminded me that Wen Kexing’s triple-decker floating pagoda in “Word of Honor” is also a trip. (So well-catered: so many nuts.)
- “Who Rules the World?” truly said, “by 35, you should be two of the four Finest Gentlemen, have faked a ten year convalescence and be really overly-invested in a martial artist who probably will not commit to you”.
- The male lead’s dad: “You are weak like your mother, but smart like me!” Thanks, fucko, I’m sure he appreciates that.
- The male lead/second prince’s urban palace (the pale green one, with the wall paintings) has some really great architectural features.
- Why does this old uncle who works for the second prince hate Bai Fengxi so much? She only has to breathe for him to be like, “THAT WHORE BAI FENGXI!”
- The Prince’s reaction when Gentleman Yu initially comes on the scene and Bai Fengxi thinks he’s great is truly choice. “Excuse me, I just killed four men for you? I am 1/2 of the Finest Gentlemen in China??”
- Episode 11: I can’t believe we’re just letting the first prince off for killing like six waitresses to hide his epilepsy, because he’s otherwise a decent guy. SIX! WAITRESSES!! Fuck this ho, the waitresses were just There, they did nothing. Meghan observed that the first prince basically becomes obsolete in the story, but that is not a consolation so much as yet another issue with this plot. Besides, are the waitresses going to come back to life? No.
- Tragedy: You are played by the Jiang Yanli actress, but they gave you sexy lipstick this time. The guy you confess your feelings for lets you down gently. Then his real girlfriend shows up and saves your life. She is the coolest bitch you have ever met, is huge into Sisterhood and is impossible to properly hate. The couple does not seem down for a three-way.
- Work Wife and Fake Identity Work Wife/Actual Girlfriend: Rather than have weird tension, we’ve decided to become best friends. Without you.
Guy: …guess I’ll die.
Work Wives: It’s best, yeah.
- Me, at this point in the story: if they end up having to live ‘tragically apart’ because of their different life goals, I’m going to be mad. But I’ll also be low key annoyed if they run off together to be wanderers, because people always do that in wuxia and it’s so …okay, so someone else will deal with these problems, I guess?
Me, having finished the show: Whelp.
- Why do dream catchers keep showing up in historical cdramas? What is going on?
- There’s a singing performance in this that strikes me as unpleasant, but everyone in the drama responds to it like it’s very good. I wonder if maybe there’s a quite different aesthetic regime in play, here. I think I just don’t Get Classical Chinese theatrical singing. (Jane said something about “compositino differences”?)
- Around here, I started to really sense that this show needed a stronger through-line arc plot, a la “Untamed”, “NIF” or “Word of Honour”, to keep it from becoming a series of court drama incidents with MacGuffin interludes (an issue that was only exacerbated by the show’s Katamari Demacy-style accumulation of genres and registers). I don’t care if you love or hate those shows: idol drama aspersions aside, compared to “Who Rules” they were driven, narratively focused and elegant web-novel adaptations with a sense of emotional unity. I needed “Who Rules” to breathe, to do more with less. These problems here only worsened as the show progressed, acquiring yet more Plot MacGuffins.
I understand that cdrama reception circles are still waging some kind of ‘high art vs low art’ battle because their academic culture didn’t engage the huge global conversation, which has rendered the question really moot for any scholar with a western reception background for a generation or two now. The above discrepancy is partly why I found Peking University’s digital lit department’s contention that MDZS isn’t a ‘good’ cdrama weird. Admittedly I’m not very versed in the mainland’s aesthetic reception categories and immediate contexts, but having watched a fair amount of cdrama, in technical terms I don’t think that’s correct. MDZS’s story-shape holds up better than a lot of comparable low and even high brow examples. At its best, “Who Rules” is very fun! But it inarguably sucks at offering the coherence and resultant emotional heft that come to “CQL” quite natively. It’s easy to ask “what’s the core story?” or “what’s the argument/point?” of “CQL”, and far harder to determine that of “Who Rules the World?”
While “Who Rules” isn’t prestige either, you might maintain that higher art’s import is less easily articulated because it’s more complex. Honestly, no: this is a question of whether a cohesive authorial design has been carried out thoroughly, with intention. I can summarise “War and Peace”, for example, real fuckin’ easily. I think Peking understands the question of “is this a good cdrama?” as “is this a good example of high art, is this an opera?”, whereas to me as a critic, the question is more, “is this a good pop song, or opera, or whatever it’s trying to be?” Also, the fact that they centre ‘is it Good?’ when considering an analytic cultural object is strange to me. That’s not what I asked, and it never would be, in an academic rather than critical context, because it’s just not a common approach in any but the most hyper-conservative Western scholarly contexts. We’re generally more concerned with ‘what does it tell us about the context in which it was made and received, how does it work?’ The “Left Behind” series is important and worth writing about because of its impact, who gives a shit that it’s terrible? (It is, it is terrible, trust me.)
- How do we know this isn’t a ‘prestige’ cdrama? Well often, you can go by Helena’s ‘is the emperor hot’ dividing line (except, as Douqi observes, in the case of the boring adaptation of Song Renzong with Wang Kai). This show throws you a curve ball there though, because the emperor is not at all hot. Nor are his vassal kings (with maybe one exception, but Bai Fengxi’s dad is only attractive in a dignified old man sort of way that feels appropriate). Like four hot people want to be emperor, however, and thus the difference is split.
- Male Lead: This is it, the day I make my big love confession! Henchman, get her to come over to my house!
Both work wives: *not home, having a hot pot party without him*
- His actual girlfriend!work wife is now telling his minister!work wife about her daoist feminism and convincing her to cross dress and patronise courtesans with her. “I hope you don’t fall for me when you see how handsome I am dressed as a man!” Dude I’m sorry, the subs have unionised, it’s all over for you.
- Now actual girlfriend!work wife has won a poetry contest, the favour of the top courtesan and a night with her. The second prince comes to fetch her and freaks out at her rambunctious shenanigans. Bai Fengxi is full-on “I’m sorry, did you RAISE your VOICE to me? Did that happen? I must have imagined it because that CANNOT be what just occurred, here.”
Bai Fengxi: Huh, fireworks. lol, is some asshole trying for a ‘fireworks!!’ love confession? That shit is so lame.
Him: I WOULD LIKE YOU TO LEAVE!! *leaves himself*
Her: *looking around at carefully arranged potted flowers* …oh, fuck.
- Here we are at the marriage competition. Why is Prince Huang so into Bai Fengxi, he’s hardly even hung out with her?
- Later, after the death of Bai Fengxi’s brother due in part to this princess’s machinations, I’ll wonder why we spent time showing these girls becoming friends. It’s not like we revisit the emotional impact of this betrayal at any point.
- For a hot second it looked like the first prince was going to melt the first time his awful mom was decent to him. Fortunately, he has the memory of a goldfish and knows that she’s probably still a bitch.
- Your boy the second prince has remembered he’s got a plant in his pocket. He’s chewin’ on an herb, he is. He’s OBLITERATING flower petals with his qi. Such yang. Much vital energies. Wow.
- I feel like this evil stepmom queen’s backstory changed hugely over the course of the show. She was a maid or shop girl the king was infatuated with and fought to marry, but then she was someone the king’s dad married him off to who he only later came to give a shit about after they’d been married a while. That first backstory was rather important, though—it shaped her whole MO? Or at least it used to! Seven episodes from the end, I feel like the show’s lost track of its own characters, their backstories and their personalities.
- The five year time skip before the final two episodes is a wild, wild move. The whole thing is rushed.
- Two episodes from the end, I decided this show was too uneven to recommend. It dragged its ass too much in the second half, and the focus was too diffuse. By the end of the story, the layers of identity reveal (fully a third of the characters are ‘living a lie!’ in some baroque fashion) have created several soupy characters who I don’t really know or care about. People also become their roles as they advance in this show, dropping much of what made them identifiably particular by the wayside. The cast swells and swells, but we don’t properly know most of them or return to them regularly.
- White hair looks terrible on the male lead, sorry.
- This ending blows: that feeling when you ‘wuxia flight from responsibility!’ so hard that you head to the woods even though you are the king and the queen respectively of two countries, identifying no line of succession and just leaving your people to be subsumed into an empire you’ve left in the hands of the same weird, dumb guy who only just got tricked by the main villain and who also murdered your brother in the course of his weird, pointless power games. Just Wuxia Things.
- The main villain’s method of reaching his goal makes Queen Beryl in “Sailor Moon” look like a sensible, no-nonsense planner.
- I guess someone was finally brave enough to say “no, I need to make “Word of Honour’s” back half look comparatively tidy. I’ll take this one for the team.” Thanks, I guess.
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