While kdramas having been established in global popularity, cdramas are having a bit of a moment with international audiences.
Pursuit of Jade was recently the first to crack mainland China production to crack the Netflix non-English language top ten, and stayed on it for several weeks.
Outside China, cdrama fans seem to intersect with Star Trek fans more than one might expect. Perhaps it’s the willingness to watch massive numbers of episodes to enjoy a series? cdramas typically come in with 40 episode series, and in earlier years some had 60 or 70 episodes.
So, it seems inevitable that Star Trek cdrama fans would want to fancast reboots of classic Star Trek legacy characters with top Chinese Idol drama actors.
u/universalaxototal created these and posted them on cdramafans subreddit today. Shared with permission.
More are in the works for some of the women characters.
From the original post:
• Tan Jianci righteously commanding as Xiang-Luc Picard mic drop 🎤
• Liu Yuning looking so natural in Starfleet uniform. He definitely plays the saxophone […and towers over everyone at 1.91 metres.]
• Hou Minghao as Captain Kirk, absolutely seducing an alien woman on a distant planet while the away team pretends not to notice
Deng Wei as Spock/Data 🖖
• Deng Wei also somehow managing the wearing of a hair accessory on his face (it is the future, luxury brands have collapsed, so the House of Chanel has had to pivot into quantum optics and interface technology)
The creator is a professional vfx artist who was playing, and has included a watermark for that reason.
Yes, AI is part of their toolkit, but these were not just a case of asking a gen AI tool fabricate something.
The “creator.”
If you aren’t aware that there is a certain amount of directed compositing in many CGI engines for vfx and game design, I don’t know what to say.
Using generated render to rough up an idea can be part of the process.
Beating your neighbors unconscious, removing their clothes, and putting them on yourself “can be part of the process” of getting dressed, but people would call you a jerk for doing that instead of getting your own clothes.
China has a drastically different attitude towards AI than the West, for better or worse.