garden of eden

Sometimes I hit a romance in media and I'm like well. I don't know that I'd say that I ship this. I wouldn't be sad if these people broke up. But unfortunately I do actually believe that they are in love and find it compelling to watch what happens about it ....

anyway that's how I felt about the central relationship in The Legend of ShenLi, which is a xianxia cdrama about ✨ The Greatest General Of The Demon Realm ✨ and her epic romance with -- well. For the first five or six episodes ShenLi, the Greatest General of the Demon Realm, is trapped on Earth in the form of an angry CGI chicken, in the care of a sickly human scholar who has discovered that his angry CGI chicken is in fact some sort of supernatural entity and thinks the whole situation is very funny.

Here, for the record, is angry chicken ShenLi:



and here is ShenLi and her love interest when nobody is a chicken:



This whole introductory arc is really charming. Incredibly happy for that sickly scholar and his angry bird wife. But alas! all things must end, the lovers are parted, and ShenLi The Greatest General of the Demon Realm grimly returns home to confront her upcoming political marriage to a playboy from the Divine Realm, in the full assumption that she will never see her sickly scholar again because even aside from the political pressures one day in the Demon Realm equals a year in the human realm so the time difference is not workable.

However! then some monster nonsense starts happening in the Demon Realm, and so the Divine Realm sends its last surviving actual factual god to help out -- who bears a Mysterious Resemblance to ShenLi's sickly human boyfriend .... ( spoilers )

But enough about the leads! ( Here's a short list of my other favorite people in the drama, cut for some images as well )