Avi:
I don't think Ye Li surviving and picking up skills is particularly unbelievable. She had at least three years of training with the masters and then she was also on the mountain as a child. It was her second home long before all those disasters.
I don't agree but now view the drama as a fantasy one, so that does not matter so much, so the lightning killer epidemic out of nowhere (and the hauling by a diminutive adolescent of corpses without a cart and a donkey and equipment to dig) doesn't bother me any longer. Why did not girl catch sick herself while doing this one person mass funeral job, presumably without eating or drinking? We know she could communicate with Li Feibai through her messenger dove, but did not inform him of the calamity?...
Ok I'll stop : the part about Lishan is a fantasy, a dream, a nightmare, hallucination,.. Who cared for her in the difficulty is not revealed (no help from novel which has a different story) so one may still imagine whatever, to try to bridge the gaping logic plot hole, and as a previous friend said "think of Tarzan" (without gorilla tribe to support). We need a strong dose of "suspension of disbelief".
That the drama felt engaging enough to start the imagination mill churning to conjecture about reasons, is the strongest positive feature. I still liked the drama enough to have been at first tempted to award a 10. although in retrospect, it should rather have been a more truthful 8 or 7.5. I just like Bai Lu and knowing, as I stated in my review how hard it was to film in that extremely hot summer of 2025(when my own fit 20+ son almost had to go to hospital from heat stroke), I can't bring myself to downrate.
That said, perhaps you could have hid your interesting disclosure of why the disciples acted as they did, under a "spoiler tag" ? Anyway, since only a few have done so, let's assume people who read here want the spoilers.
ReallyScary:
@ymynym right! Feel so cheated that all our theories were wrong! It was fun while it lasted!
at least we had the fun of speculating-- some says it activate the same brain rewarding system as the one when we are gossiping lol
YCC:
Thank you for starting this thread. It was fun while it lasted.
you're welcome! thank you for theorizing! it's so much fun!
I really like that the monkeys turned out to be the three wise apes. Ye Li couldn't bear be reminded of the horrible way the disciples met their end. Yet, the Lishan Academy was also so preoccupied with not associating with evil, that they met their doom and pulled disciples with another opinion like Ye Li into death and isolation too. I wonder if they saw the epidemic as a convenient excuse to die out of guilt because everything went so wrong with the edict.
I
yes! there's something really unsettling with their choice to 'hear, see, listen' no evil and dooming themselves to death in consequence. Rather than guilt, I feel like they are just too principled (is that even a word?). Maybe also a criticism to people who too stuck in their way and refused to see reason?
