有辱斯文 - or - A disgrace to scholars

In the light of the recent hiatus on recapping episodes of Guardian, A Disgrace to Scholars decided to implement a new group feature: If This, Then That. While Guardian is now back online and we will shortly be resuming our recaps (watch this space!), we assume many of you have already watched the whole thing— maybe more than once— and are jonesing for something new. This one’s for you!

(That, and it seemed a shame to waste all that effort when we’d already written most of this post.)

As you can probably guess from the name of the feature, the purpose is to take a drama that we have been featuring on the blog, distil it down to what we consider to be one of its key selling points, and make recommendations of other dramas you may want to watch that fulfil that same niche need. In other words: like Netflix, but more accurate! Theoretically, anyway.

We make the disclaimer that this is based on our individual— somewhat eclectic— tastes and you may not agree. In fact, we don’t always agree with each other. However, we will try to be clear about the reasons why we are recommending a particular drama in this category, and any significant flaws that may make it less appealing to some viewers.

As you may have guessed by this point, we are kicking off our first If This, Then That post with Guardian— and since the only redeeming quality Guardian has is the intensely gay chemistry between the main leads, that is forming the basis for our recommendations in this post.

We make no guarantee of actual quality for all of these (looking at you, Disguiser), but since y’all sat through Guardian, we’re going to assume that that isn’t necessarily going to stop you. (Although we will be upfront about the dramas we actually recommend as quality TV, as opposed to our “this is objectively trash but may fill the Guardian shaped hole in your life” recs.)

And so, without further ado, on with the heavily subtextual, intensely obsessive and/or pine-scented show!

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Join us again on Monday for our inaugural recap of one of the dramas recced in this post, Nirvana in Fire!

(If you are wondering what this means for the Guardian recap, fear not, we will be resuming those recaps on alternating Mondays. Bad life choices and emotional whiplash for all abound.)