Bad Story Ruins Good Premise and Production Values
A terrible script made this drama a giant bore. This story is the braindead webnovel to end all braindead webnovels. The main character has about five golden fingers, between remembering her past life, a secret manual with cryptic predictions, a secret advisor, and sudden second life genius medical skill and second life genius business skill (okay, for the last one she used the manual and her memories to beat the market, call that 4.5 golden fingers?). Do you enjoy watching a Mary Sue pull the strings on all the major players in history with no stakes whatsoever? Then maybe you will enjoy this as a fluff drama. Personally, I got more and more frustrated and bored, started skipping through scenes and missing nothing whatsoever. You can skip from about 10 to the last 2 episodes and have barely missed a thing.
I feel like the scriptwriters actually attempted to give this story a brain, but kept getting pulled back by the stupidity in the original. That's assuming this is based on a webnovel; but it's very hard to believe the drama writers invented this extremely webnovel trope heavy and super inconsistent narrative on their own. One glaring problem is that this drama betrays its own premise. Supposedly, the FL was the wife of a noble household for a decade before going back in time to her childhood, yet retaining her old memories. The only clue that this is a mature person in the body of a child is the MC making what become rather annoying counsels to all the main male characters, which of course always miraculously change their life. The author's conceit must be that men are very dumb. Strangely, this experienced head of a household has no way to deal with the female head of her father's household and can't even seem to understand her thinking. So one minute she is a national preceptor and the next minute she's acting like a totally naive and spoiled girl who thinks she can just run away from her stepmom and she'll just forget about her and forget about marrying her off to improve her biological daughter's marriage prospects.
In a different drama, being smart about politics and stupid about your personal life would work. But here it just reads as terrible writing. There were actually two dramas recently which had a female lead that lived half a lifetime before traveling back in time to their teen years. They were "Princess Royal" and "Kunning Palace". Both of them convincingly portrayed a middle aged, experienced woman getting a do-over. There's a saying "youth is wasted on the young". What if you could have do over with the benefit of experience and wisdom? "Blossom" has never heard of this idea. The author never once uses the life experiences from the FL's first life to guide her decisions in the second life, except to avoid her ex husband in the previous life because he cheated on her. Which means there is no point to her having lived twice--one of her golden fingers could have told her that he was a bad'un. The narrative ends up reading exactly like a modern time transmigrator wakes up in the FL's body rather than a person reliving their own life. Running off to live with grandmother and become a business mogul is exactly what a modern soul transmigrator in a transmigration novel would do.
I wasn't particularly convinced by the romance. It has its moments, but it uses the prior life as a sort of relationship cheat while also not properly leveraging the prior life. Things move along at exactly the speed the script requires without earning it.
Another pet peeve I had while watching this drama were the darn anachronisms. This drama appears to be set in the Ming Dynasty. That's also the latest it could possibly be set. Yet, in the first two episodes, the ML and FL fall through a plate glass mirror which shatters around them. Plate glass did not even exist anywhere in the world until the 19th century (Qing Dynasty). Window glass of some sort was available in Europe in some form during the Ming period. It came in tiny pieces and had lots of flaws and inclusions. That's why people used water and polished metal as mirrors. It's not just this one mistake. In another scene, our business genius MC is promoting cultivation of potatoes. I don't think potatoes were even known in China in the Ming Dynasty, but even when they became available, they were only cultivated as animal feed. Until the end of the 20th century at best Chinese people were reluctant to eat potatoes. So what would be the point of cultivating them? (The same thing happened in Europe. Governments in the 18-19th century used tricks to get common people to accept them.) It just betrays the same bad webnovel author arrogance where she doesn't even realize how ignorant she is.
I think it's a shame this much money and effort was put into such a not-worth-it drama. I also have a bone to pick with people who recommend it. "Strong female lead" -- no, she's the opposite, she's a Mary Sue with golden fingers because the author was too arrogant, too ignorant, and also too insecure to give us a human lead who doesn't have weird advantages but can still convincingly prevail over her circumstances. "Slow burn romance" -- it's fated romance where they meet in the next life after dying together, combined with constructed misunderstandings to draw out the inevitable longer. "Power couple" -- I guess? "Intelligent" -- Wrong. There are so many better dramas--within the same year there was "Are You The One?" and "Prisoner of Beauty" with great lead actors and actually good, intelligent stories. "Are You The One?" has a premise that sounds very stupid and braindead, but, surprise! It's actually a really good story. Go watch that instead.
I feel like the scriptwriters actually attempted to give this story a brain, but kept getting pulled back by the stupidity in the original. That's assuming this is based on a webnovel; but it's very hard to believe the drama writers invented this extremely webnovel trope heavy and super inconsistent narrative on their own. One glaring problem is that this drama betrays its own premise. Supposedly, the FL was the wife of a noble household for a decade before going back in time to her childhood, yet retaining her old memories. The only clue that this is a mature person in the body of a child is the MC making what become rather annoying counsels to all the main male characters, which of course always miraculously change their life. The author's conceit must be that men are very dumb. Strangely, this experienced head of a household has no way to deal with the female head of her father's household and can't even seem to understand her thinking. So one minute she is a national preceptor and the next minute she's acting like a totally naive and spoiled girl who thinks she can just run away from her stepmom and she'll just forget about her and forget about marrying her off to improve her biological daughter's marriage prospects.
In a different drama, being smart about politics and stupid about your personal life would work. But here it just reads as terrible writing. There were actually two dramas recently which had a female lead that lived half a lifetime before traveling back in time to their teen years. They were "Princess Royal" and "Kunning Palace". Both of them convincingly portrayed a middle aged, experienced woman getting a do-over. There's a saying "youth is wasted on the young". What if you could have do over with the benefit of experience and wisdom? "Blossom" has never heard of this idea. The author never once uses the life experiences from the FL's first life to guide her decisions in the second life, except to avoid her ex husband in the previous life because he cheated on her. Which means there is no point to her having lived twice--one of her golden fingers could have told her that he was a bad'un. The narrative ends up reading exactly like a modern time transmigrator wakes up in the FL's body rather than a person reliving their own life. Running off to live with grandmother and become a business mogul is exactly what a modern soul transmigrator in a transmigration novel would do.
I wasn't particularly convinced by the romance. It has its moments, but it uses the prior life as a sort of relationship cheat while also not properly leveraging the prior life. Things move along at exactly the speed the script requires without earning it.
Another pet peeve I had while watching this drama were the darn anachronisms. This drama appears to be set in the Ming Dynasty. That's also the latest it could possibly be set. Yet, in the first two episodes, the ML and FL fall through a plate glass mirror which shatters around them. Plate glass did not even exist anywhere in the world until the 19th century (Qing Dynasty). Window glass of some sort was available in Europe in some form during the Ming period. It came in tiny pieces and had lots of flaws and inclusions. That's why people used water and polished metal as mirrors. It's not just this one mistake. In another scene, our business genius MC is promoting cultivation of potatoes. I don't think potatoes were even known in China in the Ming Dynasty, but even when they became available, they were only cultivated as animal feed. Until the end of the 20th century at best Chinese people were reluctant to eat potatoes. So what would be the point of cultivating them? (The same thing happened in Europe. Governments in the 18-19th century used tricks to get common people to accept them.) It just betrays the same bad webnovel author arrogance where she doesn't even realize how ignorant she is.
I think it's a shame this much money and effort was put into such a not-worth-it drama. I also have a bone to pick with people who recommend it. "Strong female lead" -- no, she's the opposite, she's a Mary Sue with golden fingers because the author was too arrogant, too ignorant, and also too insecure to give us a human lead who doesn't have weird advantages but can still convincingly prevail over her circumstances. "Slow burn romance" -- it's fated romance where they meet in the next life after dying together, combined with constructed misunderstandings to draw out the inevitable longer. "Power couple" -- I guess? "Intelligent" -- Wrong. There are so many better dramas--within the same year there was "Are You The One?" and "Prisoner of Beauty" with great lead actors and actually good, intelligent stories. "Are You The One?" has a premise that sounds very stupid and braindead, but, surprise! It's actually a really good story. Go watch that instead.
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