"Ragnarok": A Clueless Thor, a Gay Loki, and a Lot of Beefcake

 This is one of the silliest tv trailers that I've seen in a long time, for the Netflix teen soap Meteor Garden:

The University is dominated by the Flower 4, or F 4 for short: four rich, handsome, intelligent, popular, perfect-in-every-way boys who have been friends since childhood and don't allow outsiders to enter their clique.  Although extremely feminine and hanging all over each other all the time, they are heterosexual: "they may look like players, but they respect women."   Finding partners is easy, since every girl at the university wants to have sex with them.  

Every boy, however, wants to prove that he is better than them (I guess it's a Taiwanese thing).  But how to conquer them: they are a hundred times smarter, more athletic, richer, more popular, and more handsome than any other boy at school.  No matter the sport, game, contest, or challenge -- anything from martial arts to "who can blow the biggest bubble," the F4 will always severely trounce him.

Until an androgynous person comes up with a brainstorm idea: Bridge.  "What's bridge?" their friend asks.  "An international card game that's elegant and civilized."  F4 are the best bridge players in Taiwan, constantly winning competitions and bringing home trophies.  Um...wait, they're perfect at bridge, too.  Why would that take them down?

But they insist: we're going to practice until we're really good, then challenge them, and end their reign of perfection forever with a soul-crushing defeat.

So...the series is about a lot of people playing a card game that I know nothing about.  It doesn't sound thrilling.  

They must do other things, too, since this is actually a remake of a very popular Tawainese soap opera based on a manga series,  which in turn inspired a sequel, a boy band, and adaptions in China, Japan, and Korea.  So maybe it's Bridge and Boys.

The 20-minute long intro to the first episode gives away the rest of the plot: Dong Shancai (the friend of the androgynous person)  joins the clique and dates at least two of them, which leads to jealousy and in-fighting: they've never competed over a girl before.  

The F4 are:

1. Daoming Si (Dylan Wang, left), a business major who earned his first million on the stock market at age 18.  His mother runs the Daoming Corporation, which controls 99.99% of China's finance. He falls in love with Dong Shancai.

2. Huaze Lei (Darren Chen, top photo), a soft, passive, shy, gay-coded music major with extremely wealthy parents.  He starts out being in love the girl next door, but switches to Dong Shancai.

3. Ximen Yang (Caesar Wu), a business major, an expert on tea culture.  So he falls in love with Dong Shancai's best friend, Xiaoyou, who works in a tea shop.  Makes sense.

4. Feng Meizuo (Connor Leong).  According to Wikipedia, the "mood maker" member of the F4.  I don't know what that is.  He's in love with Dong Shancai's competitor in the big Chinese Cuisine Contest.

This is a Chinese production, so no gay characters, and it doesn't look like there will be any gay subtexts, either.  I'm not planning to watch -- I just conducted some research to find out if this series was really about playing bridge.  And to see some Chinese hunks.

source http://everydayheterosexism.blogspot.com/2021/07/meteor-garden-chinese-teen-idols-play.html