Finished watching all 36 episodes of China's 2021 wuxia Word of Honor, a "BL", or Chinese boys' love drama (not to be construed as gay drama). It's about male soul mates, male friendship and loyalty, hero-worship, masters and disciples, seniors and juniors, and the ability to carry on as a man in the world. It is controversial because one of the lead performers, Zhou Zi Shu, was blacklisted after having photo shoots at shrines in Japan dedicated to war criminals who invaded China during World War II. As of this writing he seems to have been "deleted" from China, where electronic searches for his name come up with no results. Thank God he exists on Netflix. I cannot understand why, in some countries, nationalism always gets in the way of art. It is particularly tragic when great talent is involved.

If you are not into wuxia, don't watch this long movie. I was able to because I had the stamina to watch the equally lengthy Romance of the Condor Heroes and Return of the Condor Heroes a year or two ago. I won't even bother to provide a synopsis (or synopses) because wuxia have a myriad of characters and subplots. All I will say is that it is about the hunt by different individuals and rival sects (among them the Five Lakes Alliance, the Beggar Gangs, the Ghost Valley, the Window of Heaven, the Wudang Sect, the Gentle Wind Sword Sect, the Xianxia Sect, the Taiyue Sect, the Jujing Gang, the Cao Gang, the Feisha Gang, the Healer Gang, the Funiu Sect, the Scorpion Sect, the Mount Hua Sect, the Mount Dagu Sect, the Mount Emei Sect, and the Purple Wave Sect) for the five pieces of the much-vaunted and much-treasured Glazed Armor and the key to opening an armory designed by the chief of the Longyuan Cabinet that contains all the secret records of existing martial arts groups from the beginning of time. 

The protagonists are members of three different sects: the wanderer Zhou Zishu disguised as Ah Xu of the Four Seasons Manor, the chief of Mount Qingya's Ghost Valley Sect Lao Wen Kexing, and 14-year-old Chengling of the Mirror Lake Sword Sect and later of the Yueyang Sect of the Five Lakes Alliance. If you make it through Episode 7 (each episode is only approximately 40 minutes), you'll be hooked through the end. As in the Condor series, the Mandarin pronunciation of "sifu" is "shoo-fuoh". 

Wuxia are theatrical rather than cinematic, and demand a particular style of acting, perhaps the Oriental counterpart of Shakespearean acting. Entrances and exits are done as in Chinese opera, or kao ka. I am, however, an avid wuxia fan. They demonstrate China's cultural superiority over many other cultures on earth. Their exquisite sets and props--massive stone, wood, architecture, fabric, calligraphy, musical instruments, weapons, crockery, jewelry, food, and stunning landscapes, cityscapes, and townscapes that lend themselves well to drone photography--reflect items in reality, emphasizing that art imitates life and not the other way around. (I especially love those marketplaces, those inns, those restaurants, and those bedrooms.) On top of everything, they have the most fantastic and technically brilliant special effects unmatched by any other production on the planet. Indeed, their characters were flying in the air long before Superman was.

I noticed only two oversights:

--In Episode 22. When Gu Xiang ran to get away from Cao Wei Ning, the actress stopped running outside the gate, thinking she was already off-camera.

--In Episodes 24 and 27, Lao Wen Kexing is shown playing the flute--in very good condition--that he smashed to pieces in a previous episode. (The flute seems to have been made of white jade and not bamboo, and presumably difficult to replace.)

Photos from production stills