#jitd

2. These boys gay, though

I love a relationship where the dynamic is a mutual "you vex me".

The relationship between source and adaptation can often be contentious -- however, so much of this show is a beat-for-beat, sometimes even line-for-line adaptation of the original novel, right up until the point where it has to cut out the gay shit and underage sexual assault. Therefore, because the show is so close to the book, I consider the book authoritative information about the show. And the authoritative information here is that Pei Su is an opportunistic bisexual and Luo Weizhao is a big ol' homo.

The fact that the show is so close to the book, to the point of taking entire exchanges of dialogue directly from priest's original text, means nobody on the production side -- the two lead actors very much included -- could ever have pretended that what they were making wasn't a gay love story.

...Except it's not a gay love story. It is a police procedural laid over a sinister corruption story with murder mystery elements, and underneath all of it there's a gay love story. I'd say it's kind of frustrating how little of their relationship development makes it into the adaptation, except that there's not actually much textual relationship development in the book either. By the time you meet them, Luo Weizhao and Pei Su are already like 85% of the way toward annoying one another into bed. The rest is sort of inevitable.

(Confession: I actually started reading the novel twice before this, and I bounced off it both times because it's so very, very police procedural, complete with tons of names and conspiracies in a genre I don't care for anyway, and that's even before the issues of translation. Annoying name changes aside, reading it alongside watching the show was the perfect solution.)

I love that Luo Weizhao is just ... gay. He's gay. He knows he's gay. His friends know he's gay. His coworkers know he's gay. His parents know he's gay. He's been queer the whole time. His exasperated attitude about straight people is intensely relatable. He is a homosexual cat dad styled like a gym bro who thinks Dean Winchester is gender goals. I'm grateful that the show doesn't even bother trying to straighten him up, either, because there is not a straight bone in this man's man's body.

If you're a Guardian fan, then yeah, the comparisons to Zhao Yunlan are inevitable -- but beyond superficial similarities, they're actually pretty different. Zhao Yunlan is a bisexual disaster, while Luo Weizhao is actually competent enough to successfully cook, clean, and perform his job on a regular basis. You think Zhao Yunlan could manage taking care of a cat who couldn't text him reminders? Please.

The objection that you're going to get is that they're 15 and 22(?) when they meet. The show further complicates this by casting a very young-looking teen to play young Pei Su, to the point where I was shocked when I looked up the actor's bio and realized he was in fact like fourteen when it was filmed. So yeah, if you blow your rape whistle every time people in a pairing are more than five minutes apart in age, you're not going to like this one. So sorry. Keep stepping.

Despite what I said about most of the groundwork to their attraction to one another having been laid pre-show, you really do get why they like one another. It's not just the mutual annoyance, though that's absolutely part of it. They make one another smile. They give and receive care, no matter how bad they can be at both of those things. They each refuse to take the other's bullshit seriously. They're both incredibly difficult people in their own ways, but they've also decided that what they are when they're together is worth it.

They hook up about halfway through the story, and honestly, I love that. It means the will-they-won't-they isn't about waiting for them to fall into bed, but about watching them go from lovers to in love -- without ever forgetting to continue vexing one another. May a love like this never find me, but it makes for great television.

3. Beautifully directed! (about half the time, anyway)

Partway through, I was like, does this thing have two directors? Because sometimes the show has these gorgeous, stage-quality long shots with lots of moving parts, where the director trusts the actors to carry the scene -- and then other times it's plagued by goofy zooms and weird back-and-forth shots that go on so much longer than they need to, and it's like, what?

Well, no, it only has one director. (It's the guy who did the Untamed side movie about the Nie brothers, so make of that what you will.) Your guess is as good as mine. Just be aware that this has a lot of the c-drama cinematography jank to it, but also has many lovely moments that elevate it, and I'm focusing on the latter here.

I'm going to make a guess, and I bet I'm right: My guess is that the director wanted to do way more of those weirdly theatrical sequences, perhaps even to the point of making the whole show like that, then got told, no, be normal. Unfortunately, this director is not that good at being normal. This director is blessed with the gift of being surreal and intentionally artificial. The truly memorable sequences -- the kabedon in the park, the reveal of the basement device, the production of Wuthering Heights -- all float and spin in that dreamlike, otherworldly cadence. They feel like stolen moments. You can almost hear in the distance the director cackling an I-got-away-with-it laugh.

A lot of the environments evoke a real visceral, negative reaction, especially all the ones at Pei Su's nightmare of a house, which is a monument to people who have way more money than taste. (Though, uh, the less said about the goof-ass sinister-tryhard setting of the final showdown, the better.) They're places shot in a way that makes you feel the misery of the people trapped inside them.

...Ugh, this section is frustrating me, because I want to show you beautiful crisp screenshots of more of the lovely visuals in the show, and those beautiful crisp screenshots just do not exist. Because the release of this show was such a mess, it never got the media blitz other shows get. (A similar fate befell the Spirealm.) I have the files and could screenshot things myself, but 75% of the show is overlaid with hard-coded subtitles, both Japanese and English. So yeah, if you're wondering why most of the images in this rec post are of the two main boys, even past the point where they two of them are the selling points, that would be why.

Big ups to the action sequences! There are just a handful of them, but they're all way better than they had any need to be. (RIP to all the Audis that died in the making of this show.) If you are a person who has trouble following what happens in a fistfight or a car chase, do not despair! Justice in the Dark's versions of both are clean and comprehensible. Sure, Luo Weizhao is a little overpowered and plot-armored, but that's just one of the conventions of the genre; you can't hold that against him. Take it up with Die Hard or something.

All in all, it's a much prettier thing to watch than its modern setting might suggest. The awkward parts are no more awkward than your standard c-drama fare, and the artsy parts are memorable enough that I think they're worth watching for.

4. The absolutely batshit earth-next-door setting

While the book is set in fictionalized locations in real-life China, censorship demands forced the adaptation to make the aforementioned changes. So, uh, welcome to the bizarre maybe-future island-city-state of Babelia.

It kind of puts me to mind of my favorite television aesthetic of all time: Guardian's Dragon City, where the city might as well be the world. The set designers have all embraced maximalist aesthetics. The setting is exactly like modern-day China except for all the places it's not. Real products and brands exist and get product-placemented at every opportunity. All the dates have been given a letter-number substitution cipher, so you've got people whose official papers say they were born in the years AIGB and BOOE. Huge television screens hang on the sides of office buildings, looming over the city and advertising SMOOTHIE. It's wild.

Similarly, necessary intricacies of the structures of law enforcement are not really of interest to this show. Pretty much the entire main cast works for SID, the Special Investigation Division, which just seems to be the part of the police force where you don't have to wear a uniform (even though there is a snazzy windbreaker). Sometimes you work late. Sometimes there are interns. Frequently there are transparent whiteboards. Basically, it's a TV-ass division that lets our hero cops take whatever actions they need to advance the plot.

And yes, as with basically anything where the main characters are cops (except Beyond Evil), Justice in the Dark is copaganda. It doesn't think law enforcement is perfect, but it blames all those imperfections on A Few Bad Cops, implying that once they are purged from the system, The Good Cops will be able to keep the citizens safe. And who knows! Maybe in a completely fictional setting, that's possible!

If anything, I'm sad about how little they did with the setting. This is supposedly an Earth where everyone lives on different islands -- you can see a shot of the map in the opening credits -- but that hasn't always been true, maybe? Sure hope you weren't wanting to learn more about that. People can travel and even immigrate between these islands, but we barely ever see other ones. There's signs around in multiple languages, but aside from a few words in English, everybody's speaking the same thing. Even the fact that they live on an island basically never factors in, because the island is so big that it might as well be mainland. I really wanted it to knuckle down and explore the weirdnesses that an Earth-next-door world could allow. Alas that it never did.

Which means, of course, that if you're one of those people who loves to take a grain of something and run with it, this could be a perfect sandbox for you. There are 847 works (129 in English) on AO3 tagged for the show, and 1095 works (244 in English) tagged for the book. That's nothing. Follow your bliss.

5. A weirdly good take on trauma?

On the one hand, no, this is not the most sensitive portrayal of mental illnesses and personality disorders. But on the other hand, it's almost not a portrayal of mental illnesses and personality disorders at all? The thing I keep calling Crime Brain is actually referred to in the show as Apath Syndrome, which is a genetic trait identifiable (maybe?) by scientific testing, one that makes a person incapable of empathy -- though what that means in practice is pretty inconsistent. You may be over here shouting that's not how it works! And you know what? You're right! But for the sci-fi purposes of this setting, it is, so if that makes you a little cooler with how fast and loose it plays with brain chemistry, run with it.

All that said, Justice in the Dark still manages to create a story that walks a good, interesting line about trauma. It is not a story where falling in love heals all your brain problems. Instead, it is a story about how trauma can trap you in vicious self-punishing routines, and love can provide you exciting opportunities to create new habits and discover new ways of interpreting past experiences.

If you're being somewhat serious about it, one big takeaway of the story can be summarized as "hurt people hurt people"; if you're being flippant, it's a little more...

But either way, this isn't just about individual people doing awful things for shits and giggles. If you can parse out all the complicated threads of the story (see my upcoming caveat), it becomes a tale of a handful of people failed by the systems that were supposed to protect them, who in turn decide to become part of those same systems so they can keep from being hurt again.

However, it's not necessarily true that hurt people always hurt people. Pei Su takes advantage of his money and his ability to see the damage around him to give some of those hurt people a chance to help people. Because the takeaway is actually, hurt people want a chance to do something about the hurt. If they are given the support they need and guided toward more positive applications of their time and effort, they can make things better for other people and, ultimately, themselves.

Which is nice! I'm always more than a little wary of stories that give villains legitimately tragic backstories, because there's always the side implication of, trauma makes you a monster. Justice in the Dark rejects that correlation. Maybe you don't feel empathy! Maybe you do have Crime Brain! It doesn't automatically make you do bad things, and it doesn't automatically make you a bad person. You are not defined by your diagnosis. Anatomy is not destiny.

The show is also very good about what constitutes trauma. Not all abuse is physical! People can traumatize you very badly without ever laying a finger on you! Just because someone got hurt way worse than you did doesn't negate your pain! If you look your boyfriend in the eye and say I don't have trauma after he has had a front-row seat to some major parts of your trauma, he has every right to laugh in your face!

Watching this show made me think of how many young people I've talked to over the last several years who are like, yeah, I'm struggling with [mental health issue], but I've never been to a doctor about it because my Asian parents don't really believe in that stuff... So it's nice that Justice in the Dark absolutely believes in that stuff. It's a little flippant about talk therapy at the start, but that's more Pei Su's problem than anything. Could the show have been more positive and proactive about treatments and interventions? Oh, heavens, yes. But when the bar is in Hell, I'll take this as a nice start.

caveat: You may not know what's going on.

The mystery that holds the story together is complex, detailed, and comprehensible. I also do not think it gets told that well.

I am fully, 100% willing to accept that this is a me problem, and that I'm just not well-practiced at following stories like this. Except I don't think that it's just me, because @danmeidiaries has created a post called The Unbelievably Intricate Timeline of ‘Justice in the Dark’ that helpfully maps out what exactly happened with that plot to help the many, many other people left scratching their heads.

I have used before the metaphor of shows where the mysteries are just the celery to get the cute boy peanut butter to your mouth (White Cat Legend, Mysterious Lotus Casebook), but what I usually mean by that is that the mysteries are poorly constructed. In the case of Justice in the Dark, I mean that the mystery is incredibly well-constructed, but poorly explained. And it's not an adaptation problem; I don't think it's well-explained in the book either.

Here's my problem: There's about five billion characters (some with incredibly similar names in ways that are significant, and some with incredibly similar names in ways that are not significant), and they're not always introduced or signposted well. Part of that's the censorship, as there's a lot of awfulness to the story that has to be toned down. But part of it is really just that this is not a story written in a way that sustains this kind of complicated business.

For example, there's one very intense reveal where it's all leading up to a name, a name is about to be uncovered, it's a very important name, we're finally going to get to know the name! ...And when the name is actually revealed, I was full-on Lex Luthor learning the Flash's secret identity. I thought I had just catastrophically missed something, so I went to the text and searched this person's name -- and in the first 4/5 of the novel, that name is mentioned twice.

I like priest a lot, I like her work, I think she writes romances that are so hot they'll melt your glasses off your face. I also think she sometimes isn't the greatest about portraying the glue that holds these romances together.

This is a part where I think the show should have taken greater liberties with its adaptation. The book was written as a webnovel and published serially, which means the final chapters were (likely) not written when the first were released. I'm sure that priest had the novel plotted within an inch of its life, but as anyone who's ever written anything long knows, stories have a habit of not ending up quite where you thought they'd go. The show has the benefit of hindsight ... but didn't take it.

In my rec post for the live-action Hikaru no Go (my very first rec post! so long ago!), my buddy @jianghootinandhollerin pointed out that while the manga did not know where it was going when it started, the drama absolutely did, and that gave the drama the ability to build things better. Justice in the Dark could have made critical clarifying adjustments based on endgame knowledge. It chose instead to stick almost nonsensically close to the book at nearly every turn, and I think that was a missed opportunity.

So if you're going to go in for this one, you need to be prepared to do one of two things: spent a lot of time reading extra material and fan commentary to understand what exactly happened, or not care. And it is entirely possible to not care! You can just roll with it, show up for the characters you like, and trust that whatever the creepy old guys in suits are doing, it makes sense to them. That is a lot of what I did, and I clearly enjoyed myself. Just don't be disappointed when a couple things clearly intended as important beats fall flat. Maybe it'll even improve the comedy of the experience for you? I don't judge.

So you like to watch?

Okay. This one's a toughie.

I usually hesitate to recommend something that's hard to stream, because I know it's stupidly frustrating to get excited about a whole rec post, only to find a giant barrier to entry. I'm doing this anyway, though, because I think the show is worth it.

There are thirty total episodes. 1-8 are moderately easy to find, since they aired on regular Chinese television. Youku has them (1-2 are free, 3-8 are VIP-only), and kiss.kh has them -- and appears to have the whole show, I know. Here's the problem, though: the subtitles crash and burn around episode 12, rendering the show basically gibberish. I asked kind @lunarriviera what to do, and they pointed me toward two solutions: one, this MEGA download folder, and two, this incredibly locked-down sub group's versions. I went with the former, mostly because I didn't feel like fucking around with Twitter, and those subs were perfectly solid -- so shout out to @abysssub for getting it done! Heroic contribution to the fan community, right there.

If the show really hooks you, I do recommend doing the read-along as you're able -- though that's almost as difficult as streaming the show! The title of the book is Mo Du (默读), "Silent Reading". There's an official Seven Seas translation in progress, but it seems to be making some curious censorship choices? Your other option is an older, completed fan translation out there, but it's a bear to parse at times, and that's if you can even find it in the first place.

So I guess, you know ... good luck with that? I hope you like a project!

Ultimately, I think the show is worth the effort it takes to watch it, and I think the show-book combo is especially worth the effort it takes to get both parts together. Honestly, the fact that the show exists at all makes it worth checking out, if only to appreciate how many odds it overcame to make it in front of your face. Turn on your Crime Brain and let those homosexuals work.