[Review] Word of Honor – Episode 1

I was looking for a new BL drama to watch after “The Untamed”. Browsing YouTube for recommendations, I saw this drama from one of AvenueX‘s videos. I would be looking at this from a non-Chinese / international fan perspective without any background from the novel. If you’re interested, I made a recap of the pilot episode here.

Plot

I like the story of Rong Xuan dying and leaving behind an armory. It made me curious what was in the armory, where was it located and how difficult was it to get there. How can it make one man invincible? It’s interesting how everyone was looking for the Glazed Armor. This premise started the whole show. However, I am weirded out by two things:

1. The source of the story was a nursery rhyme.
   Kids sing many weird things that doesn’t make sense. Why would you take that seriously? Why would you believe that as a credible source to the point where you dispatch your guards and have people die on your watch? Is this some sort of culture thing I do not understand or was there something lost in translation?
   
2. Also, who the hell knows how the Glazed Armor looked like?
   There was no internet where you could circulate pictures of lost and found. Plus, it came from a nursery rhyme. Even if you want to draw it on paper, what’s your reference? Was the Glazed Armor a common knowledge?

Prince Jin secretly trained assassins in the Window of Heaven which led to the death of Zi Shu’s brothers and the assassination of Officer Li. This made me curious what were the assassins for? What were they up against? Officer Li, the military governor, mentioned that Prince Jin planned to kill court officials which most likely meant the King’s officials. Made me curious what was that about. When Officer Li said that Prince Jin was one of the bad guys, he seemed to accept that. What was his motivation in joining the bad guys camp? Eighty-one of his brothers died and Zi Shu didn’t have a hint of resentment whatsoever towards Prince Jin. I find that difficult to process. Zi Shu clearly had a good relationship with at least Jiu Xiao.

Seven Nails of Torment was some masochistic move from Zi Shu I didn’t expect. I would assume anyone who would knowingly choose that would be out of atonement. Okay, maybe having eighty-one dead brothers contributed to this slow-burn suicide. This is such a sad start. I mean, he’s already dying and we are at episode one! EPISODE ONE. Plus, I honestly think Seven Nails of Torment all at once is fine. However, one nail every three months is a stupid way to try to keep the Window of Heaven’s secrets safe. Three years is a long time. Why not just chain someone on a dungeon and starve them to death or torture them or something? There might even be a chance to escape that seven nails death.

The Ghost Valley Chief is definitely Wen Ke Xing. If he wasn’t I would be disappointed. It looked like he was the one who took the metallic thing on Hanging Ghost’s hands and it didn’t look like the Glazed Armor from the opening scene. Anyway, the hunt for the Glazed Armor is on. I hope the remaining eight out of Ten Devils are interesting.

The interesting part happened three months later.

I really like Wen Ke Xing. He’s smiling 90% of the time for no apparent reason and I found myself grinning back at the screen 100% of the time he was there. All that sad-boy energy emitted by Zu Shi would definitely be balanced out by him.

Overall thoughts

There wasn’t any wow factor on this pilot episode but it definitely set the tone of the drama. I am interested in the story and would definitely watch the succeeding episodes. While I’m not exactly thrilled to invest my time in more or less 50 episodes only to have Zi Shu dying on us all, I wanted to watch it because of Ke Xing. He’s too charming of a character for me to resist.