Paola

I’d like to say that the story was worth it, but i can't.

To be honest, I hate dramas where an author appears talking to the editor at the beginning and then we’re shown the story they’re writing. In my opinion, this makes the drama lose depth and creates emotional distance from the plot. I should’ve stopped watching at that point, so it was my mistake to continue.

If I had to rate this drama based on the character Jiang Xuening, it would be a 0. This character was incredibly poorly written. How can someone who knows the future and wants to change it do absolutely nothing relevant to achieve that goal? I remember when the Yan family was exiled, she said, “Despite everything I did, I still couldn’t change fate.” I laughed so hard when she said that, thinking: What exactly did you do that was supposed to change fate? Throughout the entire story, she depends on the male lead, Xie Wei, and a guy she *knew* would eventually become a traitor (Zhou Yinzhi). She spends the whole drama lamenting that she can’t change fate—maybe she’s just extremely incompetent and ineffective. If it weren’t for the ML, she would’ve died a hundred times, even with her knowledge of the future.

The romance is disappointing because, for the first 30 episodes, she’s tangled in plot after plot and a romance (if we can even call it that, since not even she seemed to know if she liked him or not) with Zhang Zhe. Only after episode 30 does the romance with the ML start to be explored more directly, and she clearly doesn’t reciprocate his feelings. But out of nowhere, she says she loves him. Excuse me? When did that happen? Did I miss an episode where her feelings for him were actually developed? There’s no chemistry on her part—absolutely nothing. It just seems like she accepted his devotion to her and called it love.

The story also falls short when it comes to her past life. How did she become an empress with such limited brainpower? The empress dowager didn’t stop her? She held that position for so long and never received the poisoned wine, even though the Xue family’s power continued for many years after her coronation.

You Fangyin’s death was another stupidity. Why did she grab Zhou Yinzhi when he had a sword in his hand? She said she wanted to stop him, but was that really her job? If you’re not capable of doing anything against someone with a sword, aren’t you just asking to die? And if Zhou Yinzhi escaped, so what? We’re not talking about a major villain like Duke Xue or King Pingnan. Was it really worth gambling your life to grab the leg of a small fry like Zhou Yinzhi? Chinese dramas make me furious with situations like this—they just wanted to kill off the character and came up with a stupid excuse to do it.

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10 years training or 10 hours training?

I think that when you set up a ten-year training arc for the ML with the sole purpose of revenge, it’s understandable that viewers would expect the ML to be intelligent, patient, and that his schemes would be well thought out.

But that’s not what we see in this c-drama. Up until episode 20, the ML constantly finds himself in situations where he only survives by sheer luck, or he makes up some elaborate lie on the spot and, somehow, the seasoned schemers around him actually believe it. He relies on several people, including the FL, to get out of trouble—completely contradicting his supposed personal vendetta.

As for the romance, I still can’t imagine why the FL fell in love with him. In my opinion, he’s pathetic from start to finish, and she, as the master of Zhen Tower, must have met far more impressive men than this pedantic ML, who acts purely on impulse and ruins the lives of countless people around him simply because he’s incapable of being patient and waiting for opportunities where others wouldn’t get hurt.

When he stole the Gui Seal from the emperor—that was another unbelievable moment, hahahah. Your father died for this, and you just destroyed all his efforts?

This rating on MDL is so unfair. Coroner’s Diary is a masterpiece and only has an 8.7, while this awful series sits at 8.6. How did that even happen?

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