◎ Li Zhuang
As a sequel (a prequel in terms of content), the opening credits of "Dragon Family" continue the aesthetic style and creative approach of the "Game of Thrones" title. Family crests, gears, castle models that open up layer by layer... Including the music, the excitement brought by the reproduction of the theme song, almost a muscle memory, a full-body knee-beating reflex: as soon as the familiar melody sounded, I seemed to be ready instantly, "Ah, another batch of characters are going to receive a box lunch" "Ah, strange creatures are about to appear"...
Indeed, the impact and impression brought to us by a "phenomenal" drama such as "Game of Thrones" is too strong, so that all sequels that can be directly linked to it will not be too low. But then the problem is "pearls and jade in front": the charm of the main lord is too strong, I am afraid that it is difficult for everyone to have too high expectations for the sequel, and no matter how bad it is, it is good not to "ruin childhood" - this is really not unfounded, you see the "Lord of the Rings" prequel launched at the same time, isn't it word-of-mouth on the street? At this level, "Dragon Family" is definitely still qualified. The drama is a good-looking drama, and the production is also excellent. But as I had originally expected, what I saw was a "no surprises" qualified, a "stick to the line" panting posture. Now that the first season is more finished, the rating seems to be quite high, and the bottom line is of course held. But looking back, especially when compared to "Game of Thrones", I always feel that it feels "yes and no", and there is some hidden atmosphere "not quite right".
- How to say it? It's as if you're deeply in love with your beautiful but early first love girlfriend. Then one day, you meet your first girlfriend's big cousin. The eyebrows are similar, even very similar. However, there are some of the most important and unique things that you may not find in your eldest cousin. So today, do not retell the plot (it is estimated that there were originally many viewers who were holding back and waiting for the drama to be more complete, saving up to watch it in one breath, I will try not to specialize in the lack of virtue such as "spoilers"), nor do I do a bird's-eye comment on seeking perfection, mainly to talk about the "big cousin" of "Dragon Family".
From "Water Margin" to "Zhen Huan's Biography": a palace fighting drama that is publicized in advance
First of all, on the "root" of temperament, "Dragon Family" is destined to be a "dimensionality reduction version" of "power play":
If "Game of Thrones" is about how one person (in fact, many people) chokes the throat of fate and crawls out of the bottom of fate bloodily with his nails, then "Dragon Family" is about how a group of people bring down their court opponents in political and military struggles; If "Game of Thrones" is about the problem of survival and life, then "Dragon Family" is a high-purity palace fight; If in "Game of Thrones", the characters constantly lose and then give everything they have to take back, it is dignity, honor, "Tao" and "qi", then in "Dragon Family", what the characters constantly lose and then give everything they must take back is power, a crown, and the Iron Throne. "Game of Thrones" is talking about not accepting fate and "disobeying the week", and "Dragon Family" is performing wrist-wrestling and engaging with each other.
——Good fellow, isn't the tension and excitement of the story of "Dragon Family" the most powerful thing to dissolve and criticize under "Game of Thrones"? This is like a scene that often appears (or is mentioned) in two plays: the head of a traitor is cut off and tied to the tip of a spear and shown to the people, "Look, this is an ugly thing." ”
For example, there is no Jon Snow or Daenerys in this story, and only "Littlefinger" Berishi and "Octopus Spider" Varys compete for control of the kingdom at the pre-royal council.
For example, we are obviously looking forward to reading the sister chapter of "Water Margin", but what is on the table is a hardcover gilded commemorative version of "The Legend of Zhen Huan".
——I do not mean to disparage "The Biography of Zhen Huan". I also like "The Biography of Zhen Huan", I also speak "Zhen Yan Zhen Yu", and even achieved good results in the "Zhen Xue" exam on the Internet. "The Biography of Zhen Huan" is wonderful and beautiful, but I really don't think it is what a great literary and artistic work should be. What can be called "great" is the spiritual strength of man and his sense of dignity (or, even if it is full of tragedy full of dignity), not the lust for power and the talent for intrigue.
"Dragon Family", at least from the first season, is permeated with a sense of intrigue and power in most lines and details, and these are the most attentive and forceful parts of the work. The most typical is the passage in which "bent legs" Laris exchanges intelligence and conspiracies, and treats the "queen's foot" as self-desecrating: I have always been very receptive to erotic dramas and even erotic dramas, but the repression, distortion and perversion of this paragraph really make me feel uncomfortable. Of course I know that this paragraph is all about acting perverted and twisted, and it's right for me to feel uncomfortable. But "perversion" and "distortion" should not be the main dish of literary and artistic works after all, just like if you invite a friend to eat hairy crabs, you can't just put vinegar on crabs - your vinegar smell is no longer enough.
Even putting aside the too grand topic of "what should a powerful literary and artistic work look like", a very realistic question will be: how much can Chinese audiences buy it if you shoot like this? In the final analysis, Chinese audiences have seen the "genuine" "The Biography of Zhen Huan", and "fighting with heaven and earth and people" is not only "endless fun" in terms of Chinese, but also "deep experience". Didn't see the news from the front? A group of grandpas and aunts remade "The Biography of Zhen Huan", which turned out to be too popular and caused copyright disputes. For the narrative of this way, the vast number of Chinese audiences are not only "happy to see", but probably also "professional readers". Thinking about it all the way, I can't help but pinch the sweat for "Dragon Family": for example, the source of all contradictions and conflicts in the play, "girlfriends become stepmothers", probably the old aunt deconstructed it with melon seeds: "The old man marries a young wife, and the children are uneven, right?" Alison and Renira publicly turned their faces because of the contradictions between the children, which is treated as the climax of the plot in the play, but it is easy to be "grounded" in an instant when it comes to us: "Isn't it like this for a big family!" You see, this is the same as the second family of Wang next door, and the in-laws have never been good. ”
According to this analogy, the dragons who are about to die in the follow-up series are afraid that they can't be blinded.
The pseudo-epic of "forcibly lighted"
Compared with "Game of Thrones", the "palace fighting dependence disease" of "Dragon Family" is a prominent manifestation of "big cousin sex": the youth's heroism is gone, the sky is high and the earth is gone, the Fengxue Mountain Temple and the upside-down weeping willow are gone, and only a group of middle-aged people are left whispering and weighing calculations in the castle secret room with the curtains closed. There is only a group of people who are crushed by the cruelty and vulgarity of life. There is no light in their eyes, and what we see in them is mostly the dregs of earthly life.
Of course, I must state here that "big cousin" is just a metaphor, and I have no prejudice against any big cousin, and women of any age. "The big cousin of the first love girlfriend" can also be the "big cousin of the first love boyfriend", and "big cousin sex" is fake than "big cousin sex". Men and women are absolutely equal, without discrimination in the same symptom.
It's not just a literal "solemn statement." Actually, that's what I'm going to talk about next. "Dragon Family" obviously also wants to overcome the "small pattern" caused by "palace fighting dependence". This drama undoubtedly wants to pursue "epic". So, what if there is no light in the character's eyes? I had to force the light. How to fight exactly? It is nothing more than "meaning" and "value". The two most common "lights" in "Dragon Family" are women's rights and responsibility.
Light is good light, but unfortunately, the brightness is not enough, and the degree of integration with the environment is not high.
Let's start with women's rights. How did the Dragons get into a civil war? To put it simply, the eldest daughter was made the heir, and after a long time, the king continued to give birth to a younger son, and as soon as the king died, who should ascend the throne, and everyone's opinion was divided. The bottom line: people think that women can't be kings. Princess Rhaenyra's hatred for this idea was written on her face. The older generation of "uncrowned queens" also humiliated the aggressive Queen Alison with very modern-minded feminist discourse. But in my opinion, such a session is indeed more like a "politically correct performance": women finish saying similar lines, and then turn around like men to kill and fight, conspire to woo. This is nothing more than a formalized feminine consciousness: is a seat on the Iron Throne necessarily a victory for women? No, it's just a woman turned into a man. All the rules and logic, still masculine in the bones.
Let's talk about responsibility. Splitting between "I'm not such a person" and "I have to do such a thing" is clearly the strategy of Dragon Family. But this strategy is a bit fake and repetitive. The screenwriter and director wanted to create a sense of fate and tragedy through this dislocation. It can be counted, and in most cases, it is nothing more than a political marriage. Regarding the fulfillment of this "responsibility", we don't need to watch any epic dramas, just go directly to Baidu to take a look at the history of the European Habsburg dynasty. As for the most "sublimated" expression of responsibility at the beginning of the war, it is a duty to the people and the kingdom: to be merciful, to easily not shed blood, "I do not want to be the queen of ashes and bones." The question is, how does it gain legitimacy and persuasion in a story of needles and arrows on the string? This is actually a big pit.
Not to mention "Dragon Family", excellent as "Game of Thrones" eventually fell into this pit: Varys betrayed the dragon mother to stand on the side of Snow, wasn't it because he followed the principles and insisted on "telling the truth"? Isn't Snow stabbing the dragon mother to death to avoid more bloodshed? As a result, Varys's hasty offline was scolded as "double business is negative", and Snow was even late after the whole drama attracted fans, and directly turned into the number one scumbag. The road is not easy to reason. The method of "Dragon Family" is that we just shout slogans. Again, "politics is correct," but it really doesn't have much power.
A world without good people
At the end of the day, light cannot be beaten. If you want to have light, you must first have someone who can shine.
It's a pity that at least in the first season of "Dragon Family", I didn't see much "The Glowing Man".
In Game of Thrones, there are such characters. Snow has high quality, endures humiliation, endures ups and downs, and dies nine times, and finally "the heavens will come down to people", and the illegitimate son successfully counterattacked, and he was indeed the prophesied prince. As soon as the dragon mother appeared, she was the "bribe" in "sexual bribery", which was completely a pitiful plaything product, and as a result, the monster leveling began all the way, and "revolutionary idealism must be realized." Even the supporting characters are cute, such as Ma Wang, a "domineering president" with explosive male hormones. So our emotions are close to them, and we genuinely want them to win, because their light is similar to ours and is the "ideal" that we may never reach.
In "Dragon Family", this brilliance is obviously too little -
It stands to reason that the heroine Princess Rhaenyra has the most luminous conditions, but unfortunately she entered the "fight" link too early, and the characters were in a hurry to shout the dragon to fight before they could "stand". Moreover, she does have something to blame in morality: "green husband + killing husband" can certainly be said to be a political act, but the earliest lover, Sir Christon Cole, was indeed broken by her; The heroine's husband, Prince Damon ... Well, it's really evil and crazy, probably some girls love to eat him. But his cruelty and violence are really hard to compliment, not to mention the domestic violence in the final episode.
On the other side, Prime Minister Otto, who is a traitorous minister, needless to say, Queen Alison, who pretends to be stupid or really stupid, is not cute, and the Prince Aegon in his sons is comparable to Joffrey in "Game of Thrones" to the extent of death. However, the second prince Emond has a bit of a strange light: he was bullied and insulted since he was a child, cold and withdrawn, strong personality, ruthless temperament, clear shape (long hair and one eye), actually tamed the largest dragon in the world, quite a bit of the mixed version of the elf prince + orc leader in "The Lord of the Rings"; The key treatment in the series is also intentionally adapted from the original work (the plot of "Dragon Killing Dragon" at the end of the first season was rewritten as the dragon itself being out of control, not Emond having to kill), reducing the "brutal element" in him... But it is clear that he has not been a positive figure so far.
As a result, "Dragon Family" became a "world without good people". We will not stand firmly by the side of a character in the play like Ai Snow, the dragon mother or the second girl. Their stories keep a distance from our hearts throughout. People have no light, only the function of chess pieces, just the concept label of "strength and weakness" and "quantity". To us, they really feel like some kind of distant relative. Moreover, it is a "distant relative who is too broad" and "a distant relative who is too wide". This is not an epic, nor a heroic world, this is the history of the imperial family, and we have long been indifferent to it.
Therefore, although it is good-looking, although it is excellent, although it is wonderful, although it is "really happy to have a sequel to watch"... However, it is only "considerable" and "visible", and it is far from being called "love".
Of course, this is a bit unfair, and we finally compared the previous game "Game of Thrones". But what can be done? After all, one of the main themes of "Dragon Family" until now is: there are many things, and there is nothing fair to speak of.