I recently finished watching a Chinese television show called Word of Honor. It began airing at the beginning of this year and is still coming out with English subtitles on YouTube, but I couldn’t help myself and bought premium access to watch all 37 45 minute long episodes in one go. Finishing it in 8 days while school was still going on is probably not one of my best ideas but it was worth it. The plot follows two people, Zhou Zishu and Wen Kexing. Zhou Zishu was the leader of an assassin group that worked under the emperor and had been a member of this group his whole life. Finally, nearing 30, he decides to leave the group with the price of only having three years left to live. He wants to wander freely for these remaining years and do whatever he pleases. Wen Kexing is the leader of a group of outlaws living in a place called the Ghost Valley where they make it their mission to wreak havoc on the rest of the world. Wen Kexing comes out of Ghost Valley to fulfill a plot of revenge, but when he meets Zhou Zishu, their lives become intertwined.
Word of Honor is a very interesting show presenting themes that are related mostly to the idea that everyone has different motives for doing certain things and nothing is cut and dry. Both of the protagonists are arguably villains in anyone else’s story as they have both murdered plenty and committed all kinds of other crimes, but by making them the focus of this show and sympathetic characters with tragic backgrounds, the storytelling is flipped on its head, creating an interesting narrative between right and wrong.
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