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Freezing Cold Hot Takes - Intro
Nov. 6th, 2022 06:34 pmFreezing Cold Hot Takes, aka blogging about Call Me By Fire season 1 only after Call Me By Fire season 2 has finished airing.
“Who are you and why are you long-form blogging about this show that ended a year ago on Dreamwidth of all places” no one, and for fun :)
I’m Vietnamese-American who did not know a single one of the Call Me By Fire contestants before watching the show, which meant that James Lee and Nathan Scott Lee speaking in English to each other sometimes was an absolute godsend early on. It also meant that “If There’s Still a Tomorrow” was my very favorite cover produced during the show, but I’ll get into that later.
The music was really good and the performances were, on the whole, very fun, so I still think about the show quite a lot! I’ve watched a lot of other material with the geges in it, which my friends call the Call Me By Fire Extended Universe:
I plan to write longer posts about specific songs or geges I have stronger feelings about and to cover the rest of the show in episode round-ups. Will I stick to that plan? Who knows!
Everything I know about these 33 (or 32, or 31, depending on how many pianists you want to censor) geges is what I’ve picked up from a) CMBF and CMBF Plus, b) the Call Me By Fire Extended Universe (all the CMBF spin-off shows like Boyhood, what little I could understand of Afternoon Tea for Brothers, Night in the Greater Bay, and Hot Life and Hot Life Plus), and c) Google.
It was very hard to try to learn how to tell these [checks notes] 32 geges [checks notes again] I mean 31 geges apart. I had to memorize their names and faces and also try to figure out how to read the hanzi for their names despite knowing exactly zero Mandarin, but boy did I figure it out eventually!
I’ll basically be calling everyone what they’re called in the English subtitles, so here’s a list of what I’ll be calling everyone and their names in Mandarin, in the order that they appeared in the CMBF theme song:
My favorite member of this cast is Ricky by far, but I would trust Max with my life and I like Pax Xiaobai very much. I think the most important development on the show was James learning to like making music again after what happened to his hand, and the most fun developments were every lifelong friendship that formed as a result of the program (Andrew + Ricky, Ricky + Paul, Leon + Jerry Yan, MC Hotdog + Vincent, etc etc).
“Who are you and why are you long-form blogging about this show that ended a year ago on Dreamwidth of all places” no one, and for fun :)
I’m Vietnamese-American who did not know a single one of the Call Me By Fire contestants before watching the show, which meant that James Lee and Nathan Scott Lee speaking in English to each other sometimes was an absolute godsend early on. It also meant that “If There’s Still a Tomorrow” was my very favorite cover produced during the show, but I’ll get into that later.
The music was really good and the performances were, on the whole, very fun, so I still think about the show quite a lot! I’ve watched a lot of other material with the geges in it, which my friends call the Call Me By Fire Extended Universe:
- Call Me By Fire season 1
- Call Me By Fire PLUS season 1 (no subs just vibes)
- Night in the Greater Bay season 1
- Braving Life season 1
- Get Smart, Dad!! (Paul Wong, Nathan Scott Lee, and their daughters were on this)
- Call Me By Fire season 2
I plan to write longer posts about specific songs or geges I have stronger feelings about and to cover the rest of the show in episode round-ups. Will I stick to that plan? Who knows!
Everything I know about these 33 (or 32, or 31, depending on how many pianists you want to censor) geges is what I’ve picked up from a) CMBF and CMBF Plus, b) the Call Me By Fire Extended Universe (all the CMBF spin-off shows like Boyhood, what little I could understand of Afternoon Tea for Brothers, Night in the Greater Bay, and Hot Life and Hot Life Plus), and c) Google.
It was very hard to try to learn how to tell these [checks notes] 32 geges [checks notes again] I mean 31 geges apart. I had to memorize their names and faces and also try to figure out how to read the hanzi for their names despite knowing exactly zero Mandarin, but boy did I figure it out eventually!
I’ll basically be calling everyone what they’re called in the English subtitles, so here’s a list of what I’ll be calling everyone and their names in Mandarin, in the order that they appeared in the CMBF theme song:
- Julian Cheung (Zhang Zhilin, 张智霖)
- Jordan Chan (Chen Xiaochun, 陈小春)
- Chen Hui (陈辉)
- Cannon Hu (Hu Haiquan, 胡海泉)
- Vincent Zhao (Zhao Wenzhuo, 赵文卓)
- Edmund Leung (Liang Hanwen, 梁漢文)
- Welly (Zhang Qi, 张淇)
- Shawn Huang (Huang Zheng, 黄征)
- Jerry Lamb (Lin Xiaofeng, 林曉峰)
- Michael Tse (Xie Tianhua, 谢天华)
- MC Hotdog (热狗)
- GAI (Zhou Yan, 周延, but surely everyone has called him GAI his whole life)
- MC Jin (Ouyang Jin, 欧阳靖)
- Key.L (Liu Cong, 刘聪)
- Bridge (布瑞吉)
- James Lee (李铢衔 but we all know he wouldn’t respond to his Chinese name because it’s not his name and he couldn’t read his name in Mandarin yet)
- Nathan Scott Lee (Li Chengxuan, 李承铉, Lee Seung-hyun, master of pinyin)
- Kido Gao (Gao Hanyu, 高瀚宇)
- Henry Prince Mak (Mai Hengli, 麦亨利)
- Owodog (敖犬)
- Liu Jia (刘迦)
- Li Xiang (李响)
- Max Zhang (Zhang Jin, 张晋)
- Andrew Yin (Yin Zheng, 尹正)
- Jerry Yan (Yan Chengxu, 言承旭)
- Leon Zhang (Zhang Yunlong, 张云龙)
- Liu Duanduan (刘端端)
- Unhenry (Henry Huo, 霍尊--we called him this to differentiate him from Henry Prince Mak, the Henry we cared about)
- Pax Congo/Xiaobai (Bai Jugang, 白举纲)
- Terry Lin (Lin Zhixuan, 林志炫)
- Li Yundi (李云迪)
- Ricky (瑞奇)
- Paul Wong (Huang Guanzhong, 黄贯中)
My favorite member of this cast is Ricky by far, but I would trust Max with my life and I like Pax Xiaobai very much. I think the most important development on the show was James learning to like making music again after what happened to his hand, and the most fun developments were every lifelong friendship that formed as a result of the program (Andrew + Ricky, Ricky + Paul, Leon + Jerry Yan, MC Hotdog + Vincent, etc etc).
