Like a lot of tv shows.
Like... especially those cop shows, "police proceduals", booorrring. Also copaganda.
When I wanna find something new to watch, I basically have this routine where I start reading the plot summary of the thing on wikipedia, and if it sounds too boring, I'll just skip it. If I read like a few sentences and it sounds exciting, I stop reading the rest of the plot and just start watching.
I remember watching a lot of Hong Kong TV shows, those were sometimes fun, but its very like... I can almost predict the plot sometimes, like I just see a character and I know they're gonna flip sides.
But then we get to the Mainland Mandarin TV Shows... omg, okay so this was before I really got into western media.
So the Mainland stuff, its either:
- Romance... boring, never watched those, cuz that felt very "adult" to me, not really appropriate for me as a kid, i thought (its always cringy to me)
- Ancient China... royal courts... schemes... coups... enunichs... one of the emperor's wife plots against the concubine or some weird shit, some of the emperors sons fight each other for the throne... blah blah... ugh, boring, idk how I even stand watching those as a kid
- Resistance against japanese-invasion... I mean I kinda used to like the espionage thing and morse code stuff, but like... now looking back, its so repetative... they have like so much of stuff about the japanese invasion, like... lol, they really want to instill the anti-japan hate into young Chinese kids
like... I don't think there are even shows or movies from China that are even interesting. I think the politics has to do with it. Like, you can't make anything originak and intriguing without getting censored, so they just stick to "safe" formulas. Thus the boringness.
Like. I tried to watch 3 body problem in the Tencent version.
Omg, why is it so boring?
I'm a native Mandarin speaker and I got to like episode 8 out of 30 and I just gave up... too slow, too boring. I liked the Netflix version better, especially the Cultural Revolution and Struggle Session scene they cut out, cuz Pooh bear said no.
So... I have Cantonese and Mandarin as my languages... that I just have no fun content to watch in... ugh...
But it felt good watching 3 Body Problem Netflix edition, and like being able to hear and understand everything said in both languages, perks of being bilingual xD