ABoyNamedSue

This drama needs a content warning. Trashy, violent melodrama should have been a 2 hour vertical

I love mess. I'm the first to watch a trashy melodrama. Sadly, this drama is too long at 10 hours for what it is and how thin (and illogical) the plot is.

Let me warn you right now: this isn't just a "red flag ML". This drama leads with sexual assault and choking/strangling. I know a lot of people think choking is sexy, but unfortunately it's really dangerous, so even though I was fully prepared to take this drama as a trash drama, the repeated attempted stranglings really annoyed and bothered me. The ML also sexually assaults the FL repeatedly. This is framed as dramatic and sexy, so please know what you're stepping into.

The setup, even the camera angles, colors, editing, are very much like a vertical melodrama. In a 2-2.5 hour drama, the plot does not need to be fully sketched out, since the point is to "jump to the point". The point being the dramatic fighting, crying, arguing, face-slapping, torture, and love scenes. Unfortunately, this drama is a little over 10 hours long, which is too long for its plot holes and repetitiveness. Instead of jumping to the point, it's ambling in circles.

One example of the plot holes is that the mother in law character is supposed to be terrifyingly capable, with spies and connections all through the government. Yet she can't seem to do simple math and figure out that her daughter in law's child is not her son's child. Furthermore, this daughter in law, the FL, does not seem to calculate that her son is in danger from the mother in law. Why would the mother in law willingly raise a cuckoo chick? When you have secrets and revelations this obvious, and a story with such big holes, it's hard to concentrate on the drama and suspend your disbelief.

What the drama tries to do is have the ML and FL work seemingly at cross purposes to each other but secretly help each other. This would have worked much better in a very short drama where you don't have time to logically think through how little the mini conflicts in each episode make sense. Plus, a vertical watcher will forgive the plot being sketched out in shorthand. An example would be when the ML is deliberately poisoned to "draw out the moles" in the army. This is like a story pitch, and in a vertical, with limited time, you would simply accept this at face value. We know this trope. However, in a 10 hour drama, we expect some sort of explanation for why ML needs to do this and why this would draw the moles out. We do not get it.

The ending: I am not sure why there is confusion about the ending--this is a pure trash drama and a revenge story and the ML and 2ML both had bad karma. If anything the creators self-indulgently drag out that death scene longer than a Shakespeare play. But whatever, it's fine.

The acting: Zhou Jun-Wei played a supporting role in Love & Redemption and it's nice to see him be the lead, but I will say his acting is a bit wobbly. He doesn't have the subtlety of a Liu Xiu-Yi to play a violent, controlling scumbag who still has some gears turning upstairs and more complicated emotions. Instead, he veers between playing "sincere" and "psycho". It doesn't really work. Given that the script is bad, and the director wants you to go back and forth with his character at first, I get it, but it is about the quality you would expect for a forgettable vertical. Daisy Li was really great in this, and I wish the writing was better so that her many melodramatic mental torture scenes would have been more moving. For me, usually, the story needs to set it up for me to care. She went through a huge range of emotions in this drama and I hope she will go on to do great things. I looked at her filmography and she does have good ratings on MDL for a lot of her main roles, I just haven't seen them. The support roles are well cast, although the emperor lacked presence. Most of them aren't given justice, either by the director and editor, or by the script.

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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.

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If you want to see Wen Ning kick ass in a fight, this was made for you

Basically what it says in the headline. I think this movie was made to show off concepts they developed for Wen Ning that didn't make it into The Untamed. This is a low production value TV movie with limited cast and a very, very cliched script. I saw the "twist" coming a mile off. However, I came here to see Wen Ning rattle his chains and kick ass, and I was not disappointed. The chains are pretty cool-looking in action and I don't feel like I wasted my time.

As for everything else: I thought the emotional hook with his character was sort of trite, but executed okay. I have problems with how Sizhui was written in The Untamed and while there's nothing much to complain about here, I think the actor who plays him is just much too bland on camera. There's a running gag in the movie about Sizhui calling Wen Ning Wen-shushu and him correcting it to Wen-qianbei that I just found odd. Lan Sizhui is actually a patrilineal relation of Wen Ning and that's also a big secret, so I thought he might object for that reason, but instead he's complaining that "uncle" sounds too "old". Wen Ning knew Sizhui when he was in diapers! Maybe it's a Chinese thing and I don't understand. It also doesn't fit his characterization of being long-suffering and socially timid. It does fit a pattern of a hastily written and cringe script. Get this, in one scene, Wen Ning delivers the badass line "There are no ghosts, just cowardice" (okay, it was more badass in Chinese where it repeats 鬼...鬼) to the camera. Okay, that was kind of cool. Then, in the very next scene, he's talking to Sizhui and repeats the same line to him. Sorry, Wen Ning, you now sound like that weird uncle who practices his lines in front of a mirror before trying them out on the unsuspecting. All that being said, this movie is infinitely more watchable than the Nie Family Special.

PS: I hate that you must give a numerical rating to give a review. I don't feel like it's fair. Yeah, this thing objectively kind of sucks but I *enjoyed* it. If you know what you're getting into and that's what you want, don't let the rating deter you.

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A TV Tropes Field Day

Nice production values, low budget script. You are consciously aware of watching a TV show, because what the characters say and do is so thoughtless and dumb, yet it always works out for them. If you hope for a show to provoke you to think and reflect, or a transport away from reality, this isn't the one; it isn't capable.

Pros: pretty cast, ML is particularly pretty and is quite charismatic as we saw in "Are You The One?"

Cons: the script overestimates itself by taking on extremely weighty, serious, and triggering topics such as domestic violence, but it can't treat the topic with the weight and nuance that it deserves. This causes the show to dissolve into farce and exploitation. Are we exploring a serious topic, or are we triggering the audience to feel anxiety so they keep watching (cheap trick) and titillating an audience with lurid images? "New Life Begins" dealt with domestic abuse without being lurid or titillating, just as "Autumn Ballad" dealt with the topic of rape. But since "Si Jin" cannot clearly articulate a purpose or maintain suspension of disbelief, it dissolves into farce. I found myself rooting for the murderous husband to kill the morally compromised wife who attempted to feed her own sister to him like a cut of marbled beef. Seriously? We're only a few episodes in and the script and directing are this morally and narratively confused?

I would rather watch a vertical melodrama deal with domestic violence. Not only are their depictions more realistic, but they also aren't morally and narratively muddled.

I also don't think the FL is pretty. That's not a big deal if she can act, and so far she's been fine. But other characters overpraising her beauty is cringeworthy. The top half of her face is acceptable by ancient beauty standards, but not the bottom half, which is more akin to modern beauty standards, and the whole is not harmonious. Yes, looking like a melon seed is a modern thing; ancient beauties were supposed to have oval or round faces. It would be quite refreshing to see an ancient beauty in an ancient setting; CENT will only give us that as a side character with the exception of Jackie Li comedies. It's okay if a character is not an extraordinary beauty but an extraordinary mind. Own it. Lean into it. Instead, like with everything in this drama, it generates more "It's in the script" moments.

This script is just so full of dumb moments. Like two characters conspiring to overthrow a third one--by loudly and openly talking about it in their target's courtyard in the middle of the night. Sure, that makes sense. Or when the constables bring a corpse sniffing dog and search a manor court in one single location and only release the dog after the first location fails. Why? It's in the script. Or when the duke's minions resist court-appointed constables with violence and they discover evidence of capital crimes, but they don't arrest any of the servants who resisted the search afterwards. It's in the script. The levels of stupidity in this script are absolutely off the charts.

I haven't dropped yet, since this dumb drama does have its charms and will update if anything changes my mind later.

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