Acrobit12

He will not fall in love with her. The man SO did not want to be stuck with her and owe her.

I am thinking there is more to the emperor than meets the eye and there are reasons behind his actions. We will see.

I am really begging to wonder if the reason why he treated Suige so harshly as a kid was to protect him from the Zhuangs and save his life because even as the emperor he couldn't control everything. But we will see, I guess.

To me, evil beats out stupid. Usually, anyway. But we will see how things develop I suppose.

Jingshi. Xiyang isn't evil, just stupid.

Just to be clear - in the novel she confessed to the SML in the beginning and offered to be with him on any terms but he rejected her because he was impotent (this was the information the Dowager Empress of Jinxiu used to force him not to compete for the title of the Crown Prince and allow his younger brother to become the Emperor). Once he was sure that Feng Suite was a good man he was fine with her being with Feng Suite because... well, he couldn't be with her.

No. But the ML thought so many times. But again, the novel is very different. In the novel she was very much in love with the SML and the SML was not a villain and was in love with her.

Ugh, tomorrow can't come soon enough ;)!

The novel is VERY different. Xia Jing Shi is a much more positive character.

Yes to the first question. I am not sure about the second.

Yes, but we find out later that her master asked her to.

Yes

The first arc was so good that it was really hard for the second and third arcs to live up to it. Although I have to say, the third arc really grew on me towards the end. Overall, a great watch. 9.5/10

That's why I said the Cultural Revolution is likely more relevant, since that is when the purges of the communist party elite really started happening. The age of Wen's son looks correct for that time too. I didn't mean to imply they started at the same time, sorry if I wasn't being clear.

I think we have to keep in mind that this drama is aimed at Chinese viewers who know that bad things are coming and that nothing good will happen to anybody in the next 20+ years.

As far as I understood it, Yang just collapsed from overwork/was so stressed he couldn't sleep and she was told to visit him on behalf of the youth committee or the party organization or whatever it was called.

Cultural Revolution may be more to the point, Great Leap Forward was more of an economic reform movement.

The Cultural Revolution/Great Leap Forward started. A lot of people denounced their parents. Many had to do it simply as a matter of survival.

I think Wen simply died of old age/associated ailments. He wasn't young to begin with.

As awful as I feel saying this, I think a lot of the cast members in the second arc are too old (by 10 or so years) for the characters they are supposed to portray and because of that the story isn't working well.

True, except that until the last moment I was expecting to be told something a long the lines that they worked for the underground and were executed by the Japanese, and could only relax and fully enjoy everything when it didn't happen.

How it ended? They lived, which is enough to ask in WWII Shanghai. The narrator just tells you they emigrated after the war and then the time jumps into the next arc.