Anyone who understands entertainment has marked it with a star.
Stop treating love dramas with a casual attitude.
Text | Liu Nandou
Editor | Zhou Yabo
Let’s put aside the numerous gossips outside the drama and the controversy over the actors. Let’s just talk about the plot itself. There are too many interesting things. People regretfully unfold. When it first aired, the type of highway and the shaping of character groups were discussed as the highlights of domestic dramas. However, as the plot progressed, the highway narrative came to an abrupt end, and the group of characters often served as the emotional line of the male and female protagonists. Conceding, so that many viewers said, "As soon as the emotional line is reached, they will be persuaded to give up."
is not necessarily criticizing "Yi Nian Guan Shan". Judging from this year's drama market, this is obviously not just a problem with this drama.
looked through this year's list of high-reputation dramas, and most of them have weak emotional lines, such as "The Three-Body Problem", "The Long Season", "Hurry Up" and so on. Even if we put aside these popular products that break the circle, compared to "Lotus House", "I Have a Friend", etc., which are mainly aimed at young audiences, the emotional line will not take the spotlight. Whether it is content portrayal or publicity and marketing, the keywords are also martial arts. , comedy, etc.
For a time, "romance dramas disguised as XX" seemed to be getting further and further away from us.
But domestic dramas have two worlds. From the perspective of popularity and commercial return, love scenes are still the mainstay. According to the Yunhe report, among the new domestic dramas released in Q3 this year, the number of love themes accounted for 37%, an increase of 12.5% year-on-year, and the effective broadcast proportion of feature films reached 56.9%, an increase of 12.6% year-on-year. The first among all themes, the price/performance ratio is evident.
Source: Yunhe Data Report
As a result, a strange phenomenon of domestic dramas appeared - a group of viewers began to be dissatisfied with the sloppy emotional lines in domestic dramas. Only by hiding or shrinking the emotional lines can they get more benefits. The possibility of word-of-mouth; while another group of relatively silent audiences are still firmly consumers of love dramas, making the platform and creators repeatedly realize "who is the guarantee of market popularity." Love has become a boundary between Chu and Han, with popularity on one side and word-of-mouth on the other. Creators seem to have to be mentally prepared to choose one or the other.
It seems that things should not be like this: love is an eternal topic and the most special and dramatic emotion in human society; as one of the most enduring categories in the history of domestic dramas, dramas surrounding "love" have been popular in different Every era has strong vitality. Is it that the current audience really doesn’t believe in good love, or is good love still on the way to being created?
"Aesthetic fatigue" about love
The reason why "One Thought Guanshan" can be an excellent sample to observe the public's attitude towards the love line of the drama is because it is not a "bad drama" in the first place, but the positioning is a bit awkward. .
If it is positioned as an idol drama, then it will establish a clear expectation for the audience that "love dramas will account for the majority". Most users who come to watch the drama also have clear needs for this, even if the "sugar spreading moment" is relatively deliberately designed. You can also gain the reputation protection of "I am a local dog and I like to watch it".
But if it is positioned as martial arts, road adventure, group portraits, etc., then when the audience discovers after watching the drama that these labels need to make way for a long and deliberate "sugar-sprinkling moment", they will naturally feel deceived beyond expectations.
has the B station UP owner to innovatively put forward the concept of "semi-puppet drama" to describe the state of "wanting to be a puppet but not wanting to be a puppet" in "One Thought of Guanshan", which is quite subtle.
The essence of "wanting to be an idol but not wanting to be an idol" is actually to not only hope to have the popularity advantage brought by idol dramas, but also hope to create a quality other than idol dramas to ensure reputation at the same time.
Objectively speaking, the efforts made by "One Thought Guanshan" in these two directions have achieved some results. In the "I don't want to be a partner" part, the martial arts scenes are clean and neat, and they no longer use slow motion to solve the problem of unsightly fighting like previous domestic martial arts dramas. The portrayal of group characters is not just about treating the supporting characters as tools to fulfill the protagonist's love like traditional idol dramas. The settings and character arcs of characters such as Yang Ying and Li Tongguang are relatively rare in domestic dramas.
In the "Wanting to Doll" section, both the male and female protagonists used actors with considerable traffic. Although the role of Ning Yuanzhou is not satisfactory in terms of reputation, it does bring a lot of popularity. According to Aiman data, since the launch of "Yi Nian Guan Shan" on November 28, Ning Yuanzhou has been in the top two in the daily popularity rankings of characters in the drama, ranking first for 11 days and second for 8 days.
Aiman data: Popularity ranking of characters in dramas airing on December 17th
Unfortunately, there is still a gap between "wanting to be a partner" and "not wanting to be a partner". The two protagonists are originally designed to be "double strong". Not only are they highly skilled in martial arts, but their years of common experience in running intelligence agencies have made them independent, sober and mature in character. But when it comes to emotional scenes, there is always a phenomenon of "forcibly subduing one's wits", completely abandoning the original personality characteristics of the two characters, and getting jealous over some trivial things or repeatedly tangled over whether a sentence is too important or too light.
This kind of description perfectly fits the stereotype of the saying that "people become fools when they fall in love." It just happened to coincide with the enthusiastic crusade against "love brain" by netizens this year, and it felt a bit like "hitting the muzzle of the gun."
However, once it comes to the supporting characters, the emotional scenes instantly become much more refreshing. For example, the moment of lust between Yu Shisan and Chuyue, the inability to express the relationship between Yang Ying and Yuan Lu, and Li Tongguang's obsession with Ren Xin for many years are all expressions that are very recognizable or in line with the current emotional status of contemporary people. .
Yu Thirteenth and the First Month
This trend is not uncommon in domestic dramas this year. If we must give this year's domestic drama market a title of "The First Year of XX", then "The First Year of Supporting Actors" should be the one to call it.
Poisonous Eyes has analyzed in a past article ("Supporting roles on the table, the protagonist is jealous?"). Since this year, the phenomenon of "supporting roles on the table" has become more and more common, and pornographic pressure, CP and group portraits have become three sets of fixed templates. Among them, the supporting characters who are presented through CP often have a certain sense of taboo. Directly misappropriating the emotional line of the protagonist will have a certain moral risk, such as Meng Yanchen and Xu Qin's "pseudo-orthopedics" in "My World's Fireworks" "CP. In "One Thought of Guanshan", the same is true for the emotional line between Li Tongguang and Ren Xin based on the "master-disciple relationship".
Li Tongguang confesses to Ren Xin
On the other hand, the supporting characters in traditional idol dramas are still following the old path of "balancing literature". The second male lead and the second female lead fall in love, and the third male lead and the third female lead fall in love. It is originally a very common phenomenon in dramas, but the reason why "balanced literature" has become a hot word this year is because in "Camp with Love", there are five A reporter and five bosses were together. Quantity is not the original sin. The original sin is that most of the series' time is spent on the emotional line of the male and female protagonists, with little care for the supporting characters, but they are forced to pair up near the end, which is difficult for the audience to accept.
Therefore, due to the "aesthetic fatigue" of some viewers towards love dramas, both the protagonist and the supporting role are faced with the dilemma of having too outdated love templates. The relatively new love template is still in the stage of testing the water on supporting characters. It is still unclear whether it can be applied to the protagonist and become the next out-of-circuit work.
It’s not that we don’t want love, we just don’t want “bad love.”
The audience is “fatigued” with love. Is there something wrong with love itself?
This is of course one of the important external reasons. According to a 2021 survey from Renmin University of China quoted by NetEase Digital, more than 40% of college students have no plans to fall in love.
From "love brain" to "sex brain", active discussions on various labels in the Internet field are also reshaping the audience's view of love. It is normal for film and television content that has its own project cycle of two to three years to be lagging behind on the timeline.
The discussion of "love brain" has been around for a long time, especially this year. At the end of last year, I still regarded "Wang Baochuan Digging Wild Vegetables" from ten years ago as a classic negative teaching material. This year, I can find something to chew on in the hit drama "News Queen": "Find a man and marry me" can be used Cursing.
To a large extent, there is interaction between the concept formation between domestic dramas and the audience.Shen Yifei, a teacher at the School of Social Sciences at Fudan University, once mentioned in a video discussing the "Sexual Brain", "I think it may be that we are influenced by current film and television dramas. In film and television dramas, you will find that when you go to school, you will fall in love with the teacher. , you will fall in love with your boss when you go to work, you will fall in love with your instructor during military training, you will fall in love with the doctor when you see a doctor..."
further said, "In these dramas, the so-called teacher-student relationship, labor-employment relationship, Doctor-patient relationship, etc., any relationship must give way to the relationship between lovers. The first consideration is whether they can become a couple, and the person who cannot become a couple is no longer important and will no longer appear in your life."
So in When watching dramas, whenever a male character and a female character interact to a certain extent, there is always a barrage of "I feel something is going on between you two". This is not only a manifestation of the "sexuality brain", but also the result of the increase in the number of drama viewings and the thinking of domestic drama screenwriters - even if nothing happens between such two people in real life, in domestic dramas , the screenwriter will most likely really cause "something to happen" between the two of them.
Stills of "One Thought Guanshan" (Source: Douban)
This is why drama critic Mao Jian once commented that in domestic dramas, love and reality have long gone their separate ways. All people can see is the old and homogeneous love template, "It will always be the same male protagonist riding the same horse, meeting the same woman on the same street...and then in the same bed, the same person gets drunk Speak the same line: I like you, from the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States to today, from the bed and the banquet to the wall, the only criterion for judging the love between men and women is whether they say they love you, love you, love you to death after being drunk. ."
But even if the love template is so outdated, for this market, the moment of complete "de-love" is far from coming.
A clear example is that after many years of being criticized for "falling in love under the guise of the workplace", there have also been workplace dramas like "Ordinary Glory" and "Ideal City" that do not fall in love. Douban score It was able to get a pretty good score of 7.5, but its popularity has dropped again. In Yunhe's annual list, neither of these two dramas entered the top twenty.
"Ordinary Glory" and "Ideal City" (Source: Douban)
The disappointment and fear of real love need to be compensated for by virtual products to a certain extent. Therefore, the audience has no interest in the domestic drama "Love Brain" The accusation of "sexuality brain" is not that they are no longer interested in love dramas, but that they need more out-of-the-box love dramas to generate interest.
How to write a good love scene?
The relatively relaxed market environment in the past gave romance dramas a lower threshold for creation, and also gave romance drama creators room to maintain path dependence. But times have changed, and if we don’t write love scenes well, we will no longer be able to keep up with the market.
Once upon a time, the concept of "sweet pet drama" became a hot topic in the film and television market. According to data from Yien, the number of sweet pet dramas has continued to increase from 2018 to 2020, reaching a peak of 95 in 2020.
2020 "The Rumored Chen Qianqian" (Source: Douban)
Sweet pet dramas have relatively lower creative and production thresholds.
In terms of plot, historical dramas need to constantly study historical facts, workplace dramas require a lot of interviews and investigations, and reality-themed dramas even require philosophical thinking about social changes, but sweet pet dramas only need to think about sweet scenes and settings.
In terms of production, since appearance takes up a large part of the drama-watching experience, the actors' acting skills were somewhat compromised, and there were some flaws in costumes, photography, etc., which were regarded as innocuous at the time.
But starting in 2021, as the platform reduces costs and increases efficiency, a large number of waist sweet pet drama projects have been cancelled, and the application scenarios of love dramas can only be more concentrated in head dramas. Under such market conditions, it is difficult for love dramas to be shrunk into small niches to avoid public judgment, and perfunctory and rough creations will be even more difficult to pass.
2021 "Yu Ci Xiaowu Zuo" (Source: Douban)
Therefore, this requires creators to not adopt an attitude of avoidance and resistance when writing love scenes are under greater pressure, and shrink into other safe zones. Instead, I try to write a better love that is more in line with the current audience's concepts.
In the same survey mentioned above, the main reason why young people want to fall in love is "hoping to find a partner to help each other and make progress together", and the proportion is significantly higher than other reasons.
Source: NetEase Digital Reading
This is in line with the core expression of the few remaining high-reputation love dramas this year, which is to gain personal growth in the process of love.
This theme has been presented in several relatively high-scoring "romance dramas" this year. In "It's Just Love", Song Sanchuan, the "Yuzhuan.com" athlete, gains the self-confidence he lacked since childhood. Liang Youan, who has transformed from the president's special assistant to a club manager, has rediscovered his personal pursuits; in "Go Where the Wind Is", Xie Zhi Although what Yao Yao and Xu Hongdou experienced was not a step-by-step career advancement, mutual redemption and self-reconciliation were also another aspect of "growth"; in "The Revelation of Pretending", two masters of "pretending" met for the first time In love, learn to face each other's vulnerability and fatigue sincerely.
Stills of "It's Just Love" and "Go Where the Wind Is" (Source: Douban)
did not delay real life because of love, but achieved the effect of "mutual progress", which may have been the sugar level in the past sweet pet dramas It's not enough, but in today's audience's aesthetics, it may be the right answer.
And the coat wrapped around the emotional core, in addition to various professions, there is more room for imagination. For example, "Ancient Acacia", which plays tricks on the structure of the play, is also a model of using small to win big.
This type of innovation may still seem a bit rare, but if you think outside the box, for example, like "Want to See You", "The Beginning" and even "Twinkle Twinkle Star" in previous years, in the description of love Add some high-concept settings. Although this subdivision is still not mainstream in the drama market, different arrangements and combinations of time and space can bring different chemical reactions to love, and this is precisely a love template that cannot be experienced in real life.
"Want to See You", "The Beginning", "Twinkle Twinkle Star"
(Source: Douban)
Even in the "taboo" part, more attempts to cross the boundary will be more beneficial in the future. The diversity of love samples in domestic dramas has even brought more positive interactions to the shaping of social views on love. For example, "I Know I Love You", which has not yet been aired, is adapted from the Korean drama "Spring Night". In the original setting, the male and female protagonists are cheating parties, and the male protagonist is the "mistress". Compared with some domestic dramas that still adhere to the "double clean" setting, this can be said to be "far ahead in mental state."
Of course, there is no strict template for a truly good drama. As Mao Jian said, "Romance cannot have a format. Romance must be created, not followed." But before romance is created, please believe that it has the ability to unify popularity and reputation. It is worthy of the creation of domestic dramas The author gets rid of the path dependence of the past and climbs up from the bottom of the contempt chain.
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