My goodness. I certain got sucked into a rabbit hole.
It started with me watching the teaser video, which came up as an extended ad during another video.
This is an extended advertisement for an audio series. You watch the video and then you want to know what happens so you subscribe to the service & pay to watch episodes.
Curiously, the over 80 of the episodes are on YouTube.
This is the highest number episode I watched so far, #86. It's really an audio series, so the video is just stills clipped from the teaser video and applied to different events.
This is the lowest numbered one that I watched, #36
Each episode is about five minutes long. It ends with a bunch of questions that need to be answered in the subsequent videos. It begins with the questions from the previous video, leaving maybe two minutes of action in each video.
During the course of my watching, the time period covered by all the videos was maybe three days. It's very soap opera - like with a lot of melodrama.
The costumes are historical, but the dialog is not. For instance, they use 20th century slang, such as "cool," which are inconsistent with the costumes that look like the 19th century. Also, the young women clearly know the facts of life, which 19th century women in English language culture did not. They were mostly kept ignorant of sex and it would take them by surprise when it happened.
Also the words s*** and f*** are used frequently, which would not have been the case in 19th century culture in mixed company.
I'm pretty sure that these short dramas are coming out of China, so there are awkwardnesses due to their lack of knowledge of our culture.
In any case, it really sucked me in. I binged watched all this stuff over the course of 2 days.
The story is a bit like Cinderella in that the daughter of the first wife is abused by the stepmother and stepsister -- tho, unlike Cinderella, there's only one wicked stepsister, not two, and the father is depicted as abusive as well. Moreover, the mother of the lead is reputed, not to be dead, but to have run away. One wonders if she may show up at some point.
In any case, the lead female -- why has her name escaped me? -- has a scarred face and has to hide it with a mask. Also, the subsequent abuse is focused on the fact that her face is scarred.
The lead male, Edgar Collins, is not a prince, but a duke, who is, nevertheless, fabulously wealthy and a close friend of the king. He is, at the beginning, the most eligible bachelor in high society -- and there is a lot of pressure on him to marry, but he is repelled by the women who pursue him. He is mysteriously struck with the masked woman, despite knowing that there is some deformity of her face and choses her out of the whole crowd of pursuers. He is mysterious and seems to be dangerous, yet very chivalrous towards his betrothed and later bride.
She is the daughter of a baron, in any case, and therefore of suitable social position, tho she lives her life sequestered, imprisoned in fact, due to her facial deformity.
There is a lot of violence and a fair amount of blood. There are hints of sex but you don't see it. Edgar can kill lower ranked people with impunity, apparently, because of his rank, whenever he decides they deserve it.
After a while, one becomes suspicious that the mysterious Edgar is really a very good man, in many respects, even though he seems violent and dangerous. Also, he sees through the evil stepmother and stepsister (Kate) rather quickly. In my experience, men are often not so able to see when women are being manipulative and lying, but this guy can.
Curiously, as I was watching the episodes, I saw a teaser for the series again, same script, different actors. That was odd. There were a lot of comments asking the production company to create video episodes with live actors instead of slide shows of stills from the original teaser -- with some other stills slipped in. I wonder if they will do that.
Curiously, also, the audio portion referred to the female lead as being brunette, while the actress who portrayed her in the teaser was blond.
I did some acting in a vertical dramas. Those did seem to have endings. This podcast series does not seem to be likely to end. It seems like they could drag it on forever, just like a soap opera.
I gather from the comments, that the youtube channel is coming up with one episode in this series per week -- but there are also other series and I don't know how they work.
In any case, this was very addictive -- and I lost a lot of sleep over it. I hope I manage to stay away from the other dramas, as I don't want to pay for the stuff.
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