HIStory Season 1: My Hero
Time to go back to the beginning, with HIStory Season 1: My Hero, the very first instalment.
Summary: Student Lan Xi dies in hospital, with her boyfriend Ying Xiong by her side. An angel of death (for some reason, this is translated as 'genie' in the subtitles I viewed) takes her soul to Limbo but realises he has made a mistake, so he sends Lan Xi back. She possesses the dying body of a young bookish male student at Xiong's university called Gu Ren. The angel gives her one condition for her rebirth: she must receive a kiss of love from Xiong in 7 days, or her soul will be taken back and Ren will die.
The first thing that strikes the viewer who is familiar with some of the brilliant season two series is how low-rent the production is. The sets and costumes are ordinary (the angel wears a sort of bedsheet like a toga), the dialogue is amateurish, the acting is average at best, and the direction is confused and ponderous. It's hard to believe it was made in 2017, its look and feel is so washed out and dated. Fortunately the story itself has a great dumb-fun premise and - setting aside the homophobic assumption that people can be persuaded to be gay - lots of potential (girl dies, girl is reincarnated as a boy, girl must turn her boyfriend gay in order to continue her existence).
The actor playing Xiong is model-beautiful Aaron Lai, and he does ok work in the more straightforward of the two lead roles. Really, he's only called on to look generally handsome and hot when shirtless, and he certainly manages to do that without any difficulty. I wish the actor playing Ren was more adept, he had a great chance to shine in a challenging role of a man acting as a woman acting as a man. Unfortunately he just sticks with being a slightly more feminine version of himself.
Once the story gets going - and it takes about three of the four episodes to do so - there's not much narrative drive that sustains it except for the ticking clock. There's clearly some sort of attraction between the two men, and the screenplay does the absolute minimum in the time it has to push the leads towards a resolution. The angel of death hovers and encourages Lan Xi onwards. Lan Xi reads Ren's diaries to get a better sense of what he was like, and comes to pity his sad solitary life. Lan Xi learns to appreciate the difficulties of being a man, especially when she is confronted with using a urinal (yep, the story even goes there).
However the best work of My Hero is its subversion of certain BL tropes, and the emotions they create as a result. There's not enough time to delve too deeply, and come on, it's BL not de Beauvoir, but there's some interesting intimations about the different treatment of male and female characters in a BL drama, and the gender-blind nature of romantic affections. The boys openly talk about feelings and about missing Lan Xi, which ends up producing a very sweet few minutes of shared tenderness for both each other and Lan Xi (who is of course also present in the conversation). There's the well-worn BL device of the 'indirect kiss' when the two men share a bottle of water - but, in a lovely laugh-out-loud moment, the writers extend the scene and merge its latent romantic eroticism with something wonderfully comic and adorably pathetic instead.
Will Lan Xi succeed in time and get her man, but as a man? It's a very odd question when you think about it, but it's the only question to ask when watching My Hero. The final episode, however, does an absolutely brilliant backflip with a twist that turns the question upside down. Without divulging any spoilers, there's very little that's predictable about this "happy ending" and it won't be anything like you anticipate. (I'd love to hear from you if you were able to guess the twist coming, and what gave it away for you.) It's wonderfully subversive of one annoying BL trope in particular, and such a genuine surprise after the mundanity and deadly slow pace of the first episode. But when seen in the wider context of the whole series and whether it works or not, this scene is crucial, so if you predict its twist or dislike it or find it insincere, then there's not much chance that you'll like the rest of the series either.
I can certainly see where Season Two gets its smarts from. Someone in the HIStory production and storyboard team has more than enough imagination and humour to elevate an ordinary show above any of its shortcomings. Having said that, My Hero is probably the weakest entry in the HIStory series I've seen so far - though Stay Away From Me gives it a run for its money by being far more generic.
Rating: 11 out of 20
Ending: Extremely difficult question to answer! Judge for yourself.
Best scene: the grand finale scene when the angel's seven-day countdown hits zero.
Summary: Student Lan Xi dies in hospital, with her boyfriend Ying Xiong by her side. An angel of death (for some reason, this is translated as 'genie' in the subtitles I viewed) takes her soul to Limbo but realises he has made a mistake, so he sends Lan Xi back. She possesses the dying body of a young bookish male student at Xiong's university called Gu Ren. The angel gives her one condition for her rebirth: she must receive a kiss of love from Xiong in 7 days, or her soul will be taken back and Ren will die.
The first thing that strikes the viewer who is familiar with some of the brilliant season two series is how low-rent the production is. The sets and costumes are ordinary (the angel wears a sort of bedsheet like a toga), the dialogue is amateurish, the acting is average at best, and the direction is confused and ponderous. It's hard to believe it was made in 2017, its look and feel is so washed out and dated. Fortunately the story itself has a great dumb-fun premise and - setting aside the homophobic assumption that people can be persuaded to be gay - lots of potential (girl dies, girl is reincarnated as a boy, girl must turn her boyfriend gay in order to continue her existence).
The actor playing Xiong is model-beautiful Aaron Lai, and he does ok work in the more straightforward of the two lead roles. Really, he's only called on to look generally handsome and hot when shirtless, and he certainly manages to do that without any difficulty. I wish the actor playing Ren was more adept, he had a great chance to shine in a challenging role of a man acting as a woman acting as a man. Unfortunately he just sticks with being a slightly more feminine version of himself.
Once the story gets going - and it takes about three of the four episodes to do so - there's not much narrative drive that sustains it except for the ticking clock. There's clearly some sort of attraction between the two men, and the screenplay does the absolute minimum in the time it has to push the leads towards a resolution. The angel of death hovers and encourages Lan Xi onwards. Lan Xi reads Ren's diaries to get a better sense of what he was like, and comes to pity his sad solitary life. Lan Xi learns to appreciate the difficulties of being a man, especially when she is confronted with using a urinal (yep, the story even goes there).
However the best work of My Hero is its subversion of certain BL tropes, and the emotions they create as a result. There's not enough time to delve too deeply, and come on, it's BL not de Beauvoir, but there's some interesting intimations about the different treatment of male and female characters in a BL drama, and the gender-blind nature of romantic affections. The boys openly talk about feelings and about missing Lan Xi, which ends up producing a very sweet few minutes of shared tenderness for both each other and Lan Xi (who is of course also present in the conversation). There's the well-worn BL device of the 'indirect kiss' when the two men share a bottle of water - but, in a lovely laugh-out-loud moment, the writers extend the scene and merge its latent romantic eroticism with something wonderfully comic and adorably pathetic instead.
Will Lan Xi succeed in time and get her man, but as a man? It's a very odd question when you think about it, but it's the only question to ask when watching My Hero. The final episode, however, does an absolutely brilliant backflip with a twist that turns the question upside down. Without divulging any spoilers, there's very little that's predictable about this "happy ending" and it won't be anything like you anticipate. (I'd love to hear from you if you were able to guess the twist coming, and what gave it away for you.) It's wonderfully subversive of one annoying BL trope in particular, and such a genuine surprise after the mundanity and deadly slow pace of the first episode. But when seen in the wider context of the whole series and whether it works or not, this scene is crucial, so if you predict its twist or dislike it or find it insincere, then there's not much chance that you'll like the rest of the series either.
I can certainly see where Season Two gets its smarts from. Someone in the HIStory production and storyboard team has more than enough imagination and humour to elevate an ordinary show above any of its shortcomings. Having said that, My Hero is probably the weakest entry in the HIStory series I've seen so far - though Stay Away From Me gives it a run for its money by being far more generic.
Rating: 11 out of 20
Ending: Extremely difficult question to answer! Judge for yourself.
Best scene: the grand finale scene when the angel's seven-day countdown hits zero.
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