Slipping the trap

2. A remarkable 50% success rate at making me give a shit about heterosexuals!

Which is to say, there are two F/M pairings that the show is trying to sell, and I am actually buying one of them! I'm going to see how much I can tell you about the pairing I like without getting into spoiler territory:

Wu Wangyan is a fox demon who seems like trouble -- and is! -- but has a complicated relationship with all the bad things she's ever done. Wu Shiguang is a boy who hunts demons, but may also be at least part demon himself? They're off to a great start when they meet because they absolutely, positively cannot trust one another. She's all slinky and seductive, and he's like, could you be more obviously evil? and she's like, probably, but don't you think I'm hot? and he's like, yes, but that's not the point right now.

And then the two of them get time. That is hands-down the most important part of an enemies-to-lovers relationship. You can pretty quickly learn to trust someone to have your back in a fight. It's much harder to learn to trust them to make you soup when you're sick, or to rub your feet after a long day, or even just to come back home again after they walk out the front door.

So yeah, I get it. I get why finding herself actively, actually falling for Shiguang is tearing Wangyan apart emotionally. I get why Shiguang is going to keep fighting for Wangyan even though she sort of keeps fucking him over. And I totally get why it'll do a number on your relationship when your maybe-girlfriend is suddenly kinda also your mom. (To say nothing of how her somewhat-sister-slash-maybe-girlfriend's-maybe-boyfriend is kinda your brother and also 1/9th of your dad? Look, this series goes to some places.)

The two actors also absolutely sell it. After slogging soppily through Mysterious Lotus Casebook and Fangs of Fortune, Chen Duling finally gets something to work with. Meanwhile, Joseph Zeng, whom many of you will also know also from Mysterious Lotus Casebook but who will forever to be me Ultimate Note Wu Xie, brings a great performance that's honestly way subtler and more nuanced than this show deserves.

I also think this is key to the success of this pairing: They can stop being in wuv~ and get shit done. They can actually talk about the plot like grownups. When the going gets tough, they can be like, okay, you go over there and stab that guy, I'll stay here and stab this guy. They are partners who respect each other's abilities and obligations. They know saving the world is more important than their personal feelings. They are not going to have the same noooooo our stars they are so very crossed conversation while crying every goddamn episode.

I say all these things by way of contrast.

I'm not opposed to the other main pairing in the show. I'm just ... meh. Yes, yes, you two are very tragic. Sure, conceptually you've got some fascinating things going on here. Definitely, I can see how someone could have done something interesting with your setup. But they just don't have the chemistry. She's a baby-voiced widdle ol' me? who honestly looks AI-generated, and he's all over the map emotionally for plot reasons, and 2% of their dynamic is insanely compelling and the other 98% is just variations on cookie-cutter straight-couple drama built on partners refusing to engage in honest communication with each other. Their relationship is absolutely the Fangs of Fortune idea of a sandwich I was never inclined to build myself.

Really, I think the biggest problem with them is that despite all the promises of a tragic love story, they also have the thickest, quickest plot armor in the world. Oh no, she just got stabbed to save him! Twenty seconds later, she's fine. Oh no, he's dying to protect her! Next scene, he's fine too. Oh no, she's betraying him terribly! Don't worry, he'll be un-betrayed by the next episode. Repeat several times. It's hard to be too moved by damage you know will be undone in thirty minutes.

I feel a little bad saying all this because I can tell that this is another one of those pairings that has people screaming crying throwing up etc. and I never want to roll up sounding like THAT THING YOU LOVE IS DOGSHIT. But really, this setup was always going to be a hard sell for me, personally, and so I'm not surprised I wound up not buying it. Maybe you'll have a different reaction! Maybe you'll be able to hook onto that 2% and ride it to something majestic! Truly, I hope so, because the people who can seem to be having a great time.

...Also, I hope you're super-duper invested in at least one of these pairs, because prepare for every other ship to get sunk by the end! Okay, okay, not every other ship; there's a few that manage to sail raggedly together over the finish line. Still, know that if the show introduces you to two people who have any kind of connection to one another, romantic or otherwise, the odds are good they will not still be together in a recognizable form by the time the final credits roll.

And speaking of relationships!

3. Well well well if it isn't the Blowjob Brothers (and sisters!)

You ever watch something and it's so full of men who are all vaguely but not specifically homoerotically connected to one another, such that you can kind of choose the pairing you like by spinnywheel and still be able to dig up at least some textual support for it? Yeah. This is that.

There are a lot of characters in this show, and many of them have weird, intense relationships with other characters in the show, and most of them are played by the kind of actors I've come to expect from Edward Guo productions, which is to say, stunning but also a little bit funny-looking, so you have no trouble believing that these are magical creatures. (It's kind of the principle the Lord of the Rings movies used when they cast their non-Legolas elves.) This means that you can spend a lot of productive and enjoyable time imagining them doing sexy things in various combinations.

I'm also big-time excited about the potential for this flower-petal-foreheaded demon-hunting sect/gang/polycule we get to see glimpses of. There's so much going on there that's only hinted about, and I'm like, wait, no, stop talking about the heterosexuals, go back to that! Well, it doesn't, so if you want to get in there and make up stories about these gorgeous losers, you've got plenty to work with.

(And yet, only 113 Works in 月鳞绮纪 | Veil of Shadows (TV)? And it drops down to 74 if you exclude crossovers? And then 44 if you limit that further to English fics only? You're slacking, friends.)

If you are the person who starts the Incest Alarm wailing whenever two people in a vaguely sibling-shaped relationship get anywhere close to one another, you will want to give this one a pass. To be clear: I can recall exactly one case in this show of two human individuals, operating on a normal mortal timeline, birthed from the same parents and raised together in anything resembling a regular family structure. This is much more along the lines of, Person A is an intangible concept given immortal human form, Person B is a different yet related intangible concept given immortal human form a thousand years later than Person A was, and they're going to call one another by sibling terms because that is extremely normal in Chinese culture. If you can't handle that getting a little sexy, walk away.

And I know, I know, I'm doing the thing again where I'm talking about something like it's real queer, and you can't tell if I'm joking or not. I'm going to give it to you like this: This show is overall less pervasively homoerotic than either YYM:DoE or Fangs of Fortune (which is sort of funny, that this show is way more committed to the heterosexuality than the one that literally ran as part of a straight romance series). The tradeoff is that the little homoerotic moments you get -- not the ones you make up, but ones that are textual -- are kind of startlingly overt.

I'm speaking here mostly about the set of characters played by Yan An, all of whom are comically allergic to heterosexuality and deeply invested in earning the love and attention of one guy or another. I cannot and will not speculate about the actor's sexuality (despite how he keeps getting styled like a Tom of Finland sketch in photoshoots), but I tell you what, this beautiful man with tits like an angel and a voice like he's auditioning for Batman sure is capable of Gong-Jun-in-Word-of-Honor levels of looking at another boy like he wants to swallow him whole ... even when that boy is himself.

As with so many things in this show, there may be a nonsexual explanation for this, but there sure isn't a straight one.

Along the same lines, I also am grateful for the complex and fascinating f4f (that's fox4fox) dynamics, to the point where I more than slightly wish the whole show had been about the nine-tailed moon foxes, or at the very least that we had gotten to hang out with more than 2/7 of them for any appreciable amount of time. One could even make the argument that the 2/7 of them we do get to hang with actually constitute the real love story powering the whole show! I mean, the show itself won't make that argument, but one definitely could! I may in fact be doing it right now! It's crazy!

Also, that sound you hear is my delight that finally, finally somebody has cast Chen Duling as a character where, despite those prohibitive acrylics, you absolutely know she's had those soft fluffy ears of hers rubbing between another girl's thighs. Now, I also believe that Edward Guo's understanding of lesbian sex is about as complex as Bryan Fuller's is, which is to say, the gay male gaze trying to approximate the straight male gaze has never once failed to be hilarious. What appears onscreen is mostly about as sexy as gently tapping together two Victorian porcelain figurines. That is, until things get violent, which is when it becomes hot as hell.

Girlies on the lunar lesbian separatist commune love monthly spa day. This sounds like a joke but is an accurate description of this scene.

And speaking of foxy sapphics, the element of the show that first really got my hopes up was the he/him fox lesbian. I'm going to be vague about the he/him fox lesbian, because the identity of the he/him fox lesbian is an early-show mystery I don't want to spoil. But there is definitely a fox lesbian who is sometimes a he/him and sometimes a she/her, and nobody is particularly bothered or confused by this. It's all like, yeah, foxes, sometimes they do that.

Again, so many of this show's characters are intangible concepts given human form, and many of those have the ability to change their appearances at will, and there are so many genderfucky places you could have gone with that. Did any of these places get gone to? Heavens no! But the promise remains, and the Hump of Compelling Mediocrity beckons us queerly ever forward.

4. The Most Weasel

Remember how I said they took out 95% of the jokes? Yeah, the 5% they kept got handed almost entirely to You Chi.

I know he looks real serious there. They somehow only get shots of him when he's looking serious. Trust me, he's the comic relief.

Part of why he's such a boon to the show is that his main point of interaction is Wu Shiguang, which means that he gives Joseph Zeng a chance to be funny -- and Joseph Zeng is funny. I'm mad at how wasted his comedic talents are in Veil of Shadows, because he is an incredibly funny actor. But when the two of them are together, they spark some laugh-out-loud moments that the show sorely needs.

I'm not going to say that You Chi is the only character in this show I cared about, because that's not true. He's kind of the only one who stressed me out when he was in danger, though. He lacks the plot armor of the more major characters, so his stakes always feel high. For as little screen time as he gets, I was always glad when he was there.

This is, so far as I can tell, the only thing this actor has done, and what a debut! This is one of those cases like Lester Lin in Fangs of Fortune where, up against other far more seasoned actors, he more than holds his own. He should be in more things, and those things should let him be both funny and serious, because he's very good at both.

interlude: Am I overselling this? Am I underselling it?

This is hard. I'm having a hard time hitting the Goldilocks spot on this rec. I don't want to rag on the show too much, because I genuinely liked it, but I also don't want to give credit where credit isn't due. Nearly every critique I had of Fangs of Fortune (insanely slow pacing, people crying constantly, style over substance) still holds here -- and then there's further mistakes it makes that Fangs of Fortune doesn't! I'm going to hit a few of those real quick:

"Every line in this show sounds like Brennan Lee Mulligan responding to a prompt," said my wife as yet another character explained the legendary boss-battle spell they were unleashing, and shit, once you hear it, you can't unhear it.

The plot feels like it was written sequentially and then no one ever went back and combed through to make sure story elements were set up appropriately. It all holds together, but it never felt at any point like it knew where it was going next.

Not only do single actors play multiple characters, but some single characters are played by multiple actors. Sometimes we are given solid reasons for this. Sometimes, less so.

It wants to tell a story it is simply not smart enough to tell. A time-loop multi-secret-identity mystery is the kind of thing you need to have plotted out like a military operation before the first word of the script gets written. That clearly did not happen here.

The CG isn't bad, quality-wise, but it's overused, especially during the battles. Between it and the camerawork, it looks like they're trying to disguise how the actors can't do fight scenes, which is silly, because I have seen several of those actors do very good fight scenes! I want to watch these actors do more very good fight scenes! Instead I'm left watching pixels punch other pixels, and it's less good.

On that last note: I praised Fangs of Fortune for using its CG mostly subtly. There is no subtle here. This is big-time actors in front of greenscreens holding their hands threateningly and biting on blood capsules while expecting at least 50% of their performance to be added in post. (And the less said about the obviously and unnecessarily AI-generated bits of the opening credits, the better.) I once tried to watch L.O.R.D. Critical World, another Edward Guo joint, and I had to bail like ten minutes in because it was just so silly and anime while trying so hard to take itself seriously. If the similarly goofy parts of Veil of Shadows had been in the first episodes instead of the later ones, I might have done the same thing here.

So really, if you're going to watch Veil of Shadows and enjoy it, it's going to be for one (or some combination of) of three reasons. One, you are actually game for this level of melodrama and can function perfectly as the show's intended audience. Two, you are watching with someone else and having just the best time in the world riffing pretty much constantly. Three, you are willing to adopt a zen stance that lets all the hokey stuff roll right over you as you prepare to savor...

5. All the perfect little moments

I am increasingly of the opinion that Edward Guo should not be allowed to make television series. Hell, I'm about at the point where I'd argue he should not even be allowed to make feature-length movies. In the middle of my viewing of Veil of Shadows, I watched his short films Wuliang and Painted Skin, both of which were great. It was a mistake to allow him more than thirty minutes of film at a go, because he's not great at the connective tissue, but he's got such an eye for tiny set pieces of intricate beauty.

Some of them are single shots. Some of them are longer beats and exchanges. Some even last an entire scene. They are these little gems, and when they happen, you're like, oh yeah, that's why I'm here.

And they are heavily frontloaded. That's kind of the bait-and-switch you get here, that the first story arc is tight and gorgeous in a way that really does not continue past the first six episodes. Much like White Cat Legend, the show goes all-out real early on a few high-concept (and high-budget) things that you'll tragically never see again.

On consideration, while I can't swear to it, I bet you that first arc was originally envisioned as its own thing: A guy gets called in to discover which rich family member is actually a fox demon in disguise, only to be joined by several mysterious and sexy people who both help and hinder his investigation. That's awesome! That's a great little self-contained narrative, and it hews much closer to "The Painted Skin", the short story listed as Veil of Shadows' inspiration. There's also just no way those episodes were written with the full knowledge of where the series was going to end. You can't sit on that much plot without at least alluding to it. Someone would have said something.

But back to my point, which is that when it works, it works. There are moments that are legitimately showstopping. I won't tell you what they are, not just because they're often spoilers, but because no description can do them justice. Those are the points where it becomes clear why people keep making, over and over again, the terrible decision to give this man tons of money and fabric and beautiful people to play paper dolls with. You would make that same terrible decision. But since you're not the Chinese film and television industry, you're instead just going to tune into whatever he does next, knowing that whatever the disappointment-to-enchantment ratio turns out to be, there's a good chance it'll be worth it.

Want to feast your eyes on this beauty?

Bless you if I haven't talked you out of it completely. It's a pretty popular, mainstream show, so you can find this one on Viki, Youku, YouTube, and (how we watched it) Netflix. I hope this post helps you go into it with the mindset you need to enjoy it most.

Now, if you have gotten through all this and instead come away with the thought 'man, I should really just watch Fangs of Fortune' -- yes! yes, you should! Here's why and how! It is also a show of beautiful ridiculous nonsense, but it's also queerer and just more fun to watch. Once Veil of Shadows locks into the idea that it's a Serious Show Of Seriousness, you stop laughing with it and start laughing at it. While that can be (and, for us, was!) a fun experience, it's definitely not the intended one.

I suspect a lot of the reason this show is the way it is is that Edward Guo has become Too Big To Edit. You find that sometimes with ✨auteurs✨, where their stuff gets so popular that no one's willing to tell them their ideas are bad. How could their ideas be bad? They make so much money! And that is why Veil of Shadows and the last three Harry Potter books and Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis and most of Stephen King's post-1999 works are Fucking Like That. Creative friends, never get Too Big To Edit. Or, I don't know, do? It seems to make you very wealthy, if you don't mind that what you're making makes people go damn, somebody should have told them their ideas were bad. But then you can go cry into all your dollars about it. There is no moral here. Go watch Veil of Shadows. Or don't. The end.