So this C-drama doesn’t have an English sensible title yet so the Chinese title is just Xian Yu which translates to Offering Fish. It’s adapted from the C-novel Offering Salted Fish to Master and I haven’t read it so have no clue what the reference entails. I don’t see any fish or offering of said fish in the new character poster released with leads Chen Fei Yu and Wang Ying Lu, who are too tiny to give off strong impressions but the poster framing itself does deliver a very distinct xianxia mood. I like that the mood is not rainbows and unicorns not the mention the two leads are definitely X-factors in what each can deliver onscreen.
I don’t know whether it’s related to the drama, but in Cantonese there is a saying, Ham Yu Fan Sang–a salter fish coming back alive, which is a miracle–a dead man becoming alive again.
I first heard it when Patrick Tse the old HK actor, who was famous playing bad guys in the 60s, got a role on HK TVB and suddenly became a popular male lead. The saying in the papers was he was a salted fish resurrected.
But, no idea whether that is connected to this drama LOL.
I couldn’t edit. I meant to say, the salted fish didn’t INTEND to be anything but dead, but somehow, without doing anything, it comes back alive. That’s how the saying was viewed–without doing anything, it comes back even higher in rank–a miracle.
The saying is from Cantonese the salted fish like what Gennita said. The salted fish of acting like dead or doing nothing. The book title of offering salted fish to master is a disciple and master with the Master being an evil overlord. It’s a fun read and a dark twist from the middle.
From what I’ve figured out reading C-novels, the “salted fish” is a character archetype, describing a non-striver, someone who isn’t interested in climbing up the social/professional/any kind of ladder or achieving great results in some field — as any of that would require putting in effort, which goes against a salted fish’s life goals, lol. Basically, a salted fish just wants to live the best life achievable with the least effort, but when their easy comfort is threatened, a salted fish may bestir herself to some remarkable actions against enemies threatening said comfort, often achieving stunning results in unexpected (and seemingly effortless) ways. It’s fiction, after all. It may also be used to great comic effect.
For example, the FL in “Offering Salted Fish to Master” (which I have an inkling is a wordplay on the salted fish=FL offering herself to him–albeit unwittingly) is a modern days overworked and thus exhausted gal who transmigrated into a xianxia world, so she just decides to view it as a vacation–an opportunity to stop working and catch up on sleep. So while all the other girls in her group are striving to get close to the shizun ML (for various nefarious reasons) and he sees right through them and kills them, the salted fish FL just draws back as far away from the battlefield (the ML) as possible, lies down in some corner and sleeps–which not only saves her life, but ends up drawing the interest of the murderous ML. Lol. Not that she’s happy about it, at first.
All the leaks look terrible no matter how muxh they pretty up some posters.
I am not used to posters being taken so far away. I liked her in I Am Nobody. Hope this one is good.