Zhao Jin Mai and Song Wei Long Land the Coveted Leads in C-drama Adaptation of Gu Man Novel Blazing Sunlight

View Comments

• Hmm zhao jinmai is good, but song weilong…

• Both two are boring.

  • Said someone with an agenda

    • You got that right

• The story itself is boring.. I think this story blazing sun seems the most boring of all of Guman's novels. Not sure why these two signed up..

  • ZJM had done Admidst a Snowstorm of Love, so the boringness of this drama isn't too out of left field for her. Whether an actor is considered good or not, there just isn't enough good scripts or productions out there.

  • I actually thought "Blazing Sunlight" was a little bit off the beaten track, or at least Volume I was, because both contenders for the FL's heart could have been the ML in their own story (in terms of character complexity, personal strength, professional competence, "stage presence"; in fact the college love ML in "Blazing Sunlight" was pretty much the same archetype as the "My Sunshine" ML, while the boss ML was the "Shan Shan Come Eat" ML archetype--which wasn't exactly original, but it's not like we read/watch Gu Man stories for the originality. We watch/read for the feels, and that was very much on point here).
    Anyway, imo, in Volume I one couldn't really tell who was the "Romantic Hero" (I don't want to use the words ML and SML, as the two men were only that as pertains to the love triangle, but in all other aspects they both felt like main characters). Even though the college mate (whom the FL loved) went off-stage for a long time after the first part (the college years), there were many lingering feelings (for the FL, and the reader too) and so much unresolved mess (misunderstandings etc.), that it was clear his return was going to be a significant turn point. I can't guess what exactly went in the author's head, if she herself hadn't yet firmly decided when she wrote Vol.1 how the triangle would be resolved, or if she just wasn't sure how to express why her final pick was absolutely the right choice for the FL--but it's undeniable she experienced a serious writing block and took a very long time, after Vol.1, before she felt ready to put pen to paper for Vol.2.

  • Finally someone like me... Never really liked the novel its over rated imo

    Im kinda glad not my faves are casted so I wont be bored with drama version lols

• Uh, no. SWL is just a bad actor.

  Watermelon herself is a boring character. Zhao JinMai wont have a problem to deliver this role.

  After reading the book 2, BS was boring. But i used to love the book 1. Probably because i was young back then, story like this attracted me more, lol

• I never knew why Gu Man’s books are so popular in the first place. They are so boring to me, and her writing isnt even any thing special.

• this project was long rumored to be ZLS iirc. So I wonder what happened that it didn’t proceed.
  Gu Man also has some rumor very recently about her sleeping with YY.

  • Whaaat?
    That's a joke right, Gu Man sleeping with YY? As in Yang Yang?

    • YY was casted in a big project so all kinds of malicious rumours are fabricated now.
      I follow CEnt for over a decade and each time an actor who is famous enough get casted in some big project all kinds of malicious rumours come up. Seriously, it's crazy.
      It's practically a hugely well profitable industry by people who are very well paid to do smear and hate campaigns. They're like marketing and sales agents gaining bonus and commission for performance.
      It happens to every actor or actress.
      Nobody is safe.
      That's why I can't be a fan of anyone. The stress is way over too much to handle, real life is stressful enough to make me ill so adding unnecessary stress is not good for my health. lmao

    • @ humanareterrible, u speak fact. It only gullible people who believe all personal rumours on this c actors, fans who have followed them already knows this is the patterns involves in c ent. C ent is not for the faint of heart. I always think the stars have a strong mentality or they know how their entertainment industry works.

    • TJCHot is a troll that repeatedly posts libels using initials and part of words thinking this will keep them out of trouble. Don't pay any attention.

    • @/ You are terrible
      Why ifans are so obsessed with spreading fake hype about their fave? YY was not under attacked and yes although his upcoming drama is under Daylight but the filming crew is composed of entrants. This drama will be the 1st drama that the director will direct alone after he assisted a couple of daylight dramas with Daylight and c-ent prime directors. If this YY upcoming drama is ‘big’ as u claimed then Daylight will give this drama their prime directors and not their trainee, right? 😂
      It’s a fact that YY dated all his female costars except for 88. Even his fanclub knows this and even troll him during April’s Fools. Also the rumor about YY sleeping with Gu Man is rumor for now but well even those lore about P Diddy were nothing but rumor before and look what’s happening now

    • @TJCHot
      You centainly can't read a whole comment from the beginning to the end. I already said it in my first comment but I'll repeat anyway. I'm not a YY's fan and I'm not a fan of anybody.
      I do know the background of this project and I do know the people behind it are not the best in Daylight.
      I just said it's a big project so that makes you very much bothered and very much interested to the point of caring about YY to the point of knowing all rumours about him. You're not a fan of YY but you're certainly a hater so his life is very much one of your favorite hobbies.

• "Gu Man novels You are My Glory, Boss & Me (Shan Shan Come Eat), and My Sunshine (Silent Separation) have all become hit dramas."
  Don't forget Love O2O (Just One Smile Is Very Alluring).

  I really hope the production team sticks to their guns and picks a ML-level actor for the third in the love triangle; this novel/adaptation requires it.
  Also, I hope they have enough brains to hire Gu Man or Mo Bao Fei Bao for the script writing, otherwise it won't be a faithful adaptation. "Boss & Me" was the only drama from those mentioned above that didn't use Gu Man as a scriptwriter, and it shows in that it didn't stay as close to the novel like the other dramas (and the deviations really didn't serve the original narrative well).
  Moreover, I would love it if Gu Man expanded the original plot for the script, like she did for "My Sunlight" to add more tension. The drama would really benefit from a few ML1 vs ML2 scenes, which if I'm not mistaken, the novel's Vol.2 doesn't have (and Vol.1 barely has).

• He can't act to save his life, an absolutely awful actor. What a disappointment.

  • Who are you talking about

  • Who are you talking about?

• I'm glad Gu Man went for the right one for the FL in the end. Maybe 10 years ago the college sweetheart dude would fly but he only treated FL like crap just because they came from different worlds. He still did even after he himself became successful, which is a big F-NO.

  The thing I like about Book 1 was that Lin Yusen (confirmed ML charac. now) was the ML who had that SML syndrome. He was always at the back and u didn't know if he was gonna get the girl. I liked the uncertainty of it. Dunno if SWL can pull that off. FL isn't a complex character so I'm sure ZJM can breeze through her.

  • I agree with you about the FL choosing the right guy in the end, and about liking Lin Yusen very much in Volume 1, even when it wasn't clear that it would be him who wins the girl. And he did feel like the underdog at first--because the FL started out liking the other guy so much, and there were many hints that he liked her too, and that they could fit well together as a couple (that game they played as partners showed surprising tacit understanding). More importantly, there was so much uncertainty about what actually went down without the FL knowing it, why did the first love misunderstand her so deeply, and if there was anything more to it.
    In that sense, I actually feel Volume 2 did the first love dirty. I mean, yes, I wanted Lin Yusen to "win", but not by default! The first love's hidden depths that I was anticipating to see explored after Volume 1 turned out to... just not exist? He was just a guy who felt inferior because of the FL's superior family background while at the same time feeling secure that she would never stop chasing him? Who thought that a few meager crumb of his affection and a couple of specious words would make her run back to him forever?
    In short, Gu Man ended up making the first love a selfish coward who took the FL for granted, and I might be wrong, but I suspect this happened because the author wasn't able to properly develop the initial story outline. She just didn't have what it took to make the first love a complex character without villainizing him. After all, she initially announced that after the latter part of Volume 1 had mainly dealt with Lin Yusen's character, Volume 2 would shift the focus back onto the first love, that he would have many interactions with the FL, and that the unknown facts about their college years would come to light. Alas, it all became a bounced check.

    • where are yall reading these novels? are you reading in the original language? or translated?

    • @mimi
      Google Novelupdates: it's a site indexing the English translations of C-novels. For example, it will link you to "Blazing Sunlight" Volume 1 (you need a free account to be redirected to the translations).

      For "Blazing Sunlight" Volume 2 and others not-yet-translated C-novels, there are the Chinese-literate reading in the original language, there are the Chinese-illiterate but Chinese-speaking listening to audiobooks in the original language, and there are the non-Chinese speakers who use machine translation. There are tools to make the MTL perfectly readable if not always perfectly grammatically correct.

    • @AJ thanks for the clarification! what MTL tools are there to make the text readable? i've tried google translate but the text is often nonsensical. what do you recommend to read non-translated texts?

    • I think Gu Man has already 'villainized' Zhuang Xu the moment he treated FL like crap just because he was insecure of their status. Yes, he did do some good things for her behind the scenes because he cared but why still yank her pigtails face-to-face? I didn't like that. He could've just told her how he felt and instead got eaten up by his insecurity. FL was extra generous with him but he kept throwing that to her face. I didn't even bother with that chapter dedicated solely to give context to him. >.<

    • @mimi
      I use a professional translation software with customized rules.
      For free web translation, try Deepl to see if you like it better than Google Translate. For ancient novels in particular, because of the many complex terms and titles, you really need to do some manual processing of the text (through automatic replacement lists, to transliterate keywords and names that would get translated nonsensically) before you feed the resulting text to the AI translator. It's more work than most casual readers would like to invest.

    • Oooo I always use google translate to read the untranslated novels, so thank you for the tip! Hopefully it wont translate 'concubine' to 'prostitute' like google did, lol

• Gu Man's novel should stay as novel