ASmith

I didn’t notice any of those seven surviving his plans but maybe I missed one 👀

Playing devil's advocate, but I think the theory would be that if you assume it deserved a 7 or 7.5 (this is if; ratings will always be subjective, just like any kind of voting in a democracy) and you also assume that biased fans with blinkers on would automatically give it a 10 (because as fans, the enjoyment was 10/10 for them watching their favorite, it'd have to be truly terrible before they docked any stars), then the rating ought to be above what the show would be if only rated by passerby viewers, if being manipulated by fan votes more than haters.

If the rating is under what a passerby viewer would feel the show was, and this is despite ~20% fan votes dragging it up, then the ratings can be assumed to be skewed a tad more by haters than by the fans.

But like, I loved Guardians of the Dafeng, and I have a feeling that one suffered on Douban, and I remember Journey of Legend which I also loved opened with a lower Douban score than Sword and Beloved, and meanwhile Shine on Me apparently has like 7.4. Everyone's taste differs, and what they score for differs, so there's never going to be a "valid" score. For me, at this point, I just accept that my tastes do not align with Mainland China lol, and just get impressed with the sheer number there who do vote on Douban, cuz those numbers are always insane.

310k is a lot of voters 😵‍💫🤩❤️

Are there other sites than MDL that are good for rating & discussing shows these days, do you know? (ideally ones less susceptible to black water attacks than MDL is increasingly getting to be?)

can you recommend anywhere with decent subs? ;-;

Love and Redemption.

yup. insane. 😭

Maybe needs a spoiler tag? 🙏😀

The same stuff the casts in every costume drama eat that means they never need to brush their beautiful hair yet it never gets tangled. Awesome Juice. (Tho to be fair people do die in this from some of these things. But it also depends where the stabbing is aimed for. In Ep2 they established you could aim for not vital places if you were trying to and look like you wanted to kill someone you didn’t kill, so sometimes that helps people to live too.)

I thought the city bits was a flashback to the one day he took that he referred to when chatting with YSF about how he could repay Chang’an by fighting in the granary, and that he’d followed YSF’s advice to wander around for that one day?

Ah well. As the Temu mugs say, don’t stress about what we can’t control. The haters can keep contributing to making CY’s MLs the most talked about character of the year, while I’ll continue subscribing to his shows and buying his shows’ merchandise bc I love his work 😆😂 (Not that I wouldn’t also buy MLC merch of the rest of MLCs cast too, it’s just that they don’t make as much if any 😂)

Just CY haters, I think. The ranking was steady around 50 from April > September, and from there the rankings started decreasing (think it was 47 or 49> 73). I’ve noticed when he has a new show that airs, it’s common for the haters to downvote both it and his past shows as well, unfortunately. 😔

There is a certain fuzziness on timelines for me.

I thought the Tiemo King (if this is Wu Zhongheng)? says that he didn't start infiltrating till the woman came, which gave them the idea to reverse infiltrate.
Then he says that he locked a bunch of guys in the granary and didn't expect 1 of them would survive, recognize him when said guy got back to Chang'an, and derail his plans for years.

I think founding emperor, XHA's dad, Pickles, & YSF all hung out together, but I don't think YSF can have hung out with Wu Zhongheng given the above? (Or maybe I need to rewatch that scene...)

Basically for 15 years he was a puppet emperor under YSF, then his bro basically staged a rebellion and crowned himself emperor. He’s the last legitimate heir, but the nobles of the nation would possibly jump at the chance to have another puppet if the rightful emperor was known to still be alive. Since he isn’t, their options are stage a rebellion with no Divine Right, or support the current monarch. Same as how for the West, you may have the supporters of Bonnie Prince Charlie or Mary Queen of Scotts, but you don’t have support from the nobles for those without any royal blood long term; it’s the same here that if he was known to be alive it would cause a lot of unrest, which is why in ep1 XHA is tasked with finding him before YFS does, since YFS will gather nobles around him to support another legitimate heir if there’s more than one option available.

(For Emperors in China i’m 99% sure the heir isn’t the oldest, but the one who the previous emperor declared heir, which in this case was the deposed emperor hiding under the new face. We don’t know what means YFS used to get him declared the heir, but my understanding is he’s the rightful ruler, he just didn’t want the job.)

There are just that many great songs in this one 😆

This series is so hard to move on from 😂

He looks so cool blind-riding that horse

Breaking the fourth wall-wise:
Keeping things suitably epic so that there will potentially be a S2, but without over-committing in case they can't get the same cast back. << my guess.

In-universe-wise:
When XHA said Pickles didn't side with him, he sided with the grain, he meant it. There is a third party (maybe Pickles, maybe someone Pickles works for) who has the wellfare of the nations at heart and wants to resolve the underlying issue (there is not enough food for the starving north Tiemo folks) but wants to find a better solution than "you starve instead".

They need some enemies dealt with to achieve this end, because the fact that nobles were feeding slaves to wolves to save the sheep says that Tiemo sucks morally, and since Tiemo king was only interested in being the one feeding others to wolves to save sheep, not in setting up stuff like trade to stabilise his economy, they would likely be in even more dire straights than they used to be since 200,000 fighting men who could have farmed or hunted just got slaughtered by some regional governors plus the emperor's army.

They have decided that XHA is a good person to kidnap and make do stuff for them because 1) he's smart, and 2) He's good at picking apart his opponents' weaknesses and 3) he killed the people who got his dad, but there's always whoever got his mum to sic him on if his enemies want him to form a team-up with them, and he's generally fairly pragmatic about how he gets the job done. You can rely on him dealing with problems.

Because of stuff like the blood thinner stuff he drank when his neck got stabbed, he's going to have drastically reduced aging (unless I remember that wrong). He also has unknown injuries from the fire that could have taken time to recover from.

We therefore have no idea how long after S1 the epilogue and special episode are even set. It could even be the children of the emperor who are now adults asking for his help now, we will not know unless s2 happens. o.o But one thing we do know is that XHA lived, because only he has that unmistakable, beautiful voice.

👏🏻🥳🎉

Yup. I mean I don't mind a hero who can forgive an enemy, but I can't stomach a hero who spends the whole time angsting about how tough they have it and/or how much they wish they weren't doing what no one's making them do anyway except themselves, or how bad they feel now that they did it, lol. Here, everyone's pretty confident in their life choices, A+ or F-, everyone except axe murderer picks their life choices and owns them.