Dimpled riri

I had high hopes for this and I hate myself for it. The story lost focus from episode 27 onward when all characters started to do stupid stuff and tropey scenes got piled up. From episode 30 I watched on 2x speed only so I can see these lunatics come to their sticky ends.

So what went right ? The first half did. We had interesting characters. A female general who looked and behaved like one. Yi xiao is hard headed but she loves and protects with all her might.
A capable crown prince who is not interested in being an emperor and dreams of a normal life with honesty and clarity. Sui ge is both respected and feared by everyone and he harbors deep resentment towards people who have wronged his mother
These two go from enemies to allies to friends to lovers. Their relationship is mature that leaves no space for tropey misunderstandings.
A mistreated prince, Jing shi, who lives out of sheer spite. All he does is to prove he deserves to be breathing. He's both tender and menacing.
Throw in a love fool princess, a mad king, a masked antagonist and a few scheming politicians and everything seems fine.
There are themes of loyalty, betrayals, obsession and love with a sprinkle of political intrigue. Its well paced with decent production.

What went wrong? Writer cant stop torturing the male lead. Sui ge spends his entire time getting betrayed by everyone minus Yi xiao and barely escaping death. His senile sadistic father spent all his life isolating his son in hopes of manipulating him to be more ambitious. ( his method doesn't make a lick of sense but we digress) All while his own ambition turned multiple people into his sworn enemy who now point the sword to Sui ge trying to seize the throne. There are 6 antagonist in this story and they all trying for revenge of some sort. All of the were walking on my nerves with their crazy shenanigans. we didn't need so many of them . The story just turned nonsensical and it dragged on and on dragging Yi xia too where she was just there to save Sui ge life yet again.
second leads story was also a mess. I stuck to the end for these two specifically but none of them really got what they deserved. Just lame.
None of the characters had a satisfying ending. Couldn't even celebrate the evils dying before main leads fell back to another problem. The ones who got the crown didn't even deserve to have it ( no one cares about the people I guess) and main leads get their peace but do they really?

Now lets talk about production. All actors are well casted and while the main leads are embodying their roles, the chemistry is none existent. The skin smoothing effect was both excessive and inconsistent. It has great costumes and styling but the lightening was horrendous It reminded me of " story of kunning palace" from same director. actually many scenes reminded me of that drama (derogatory)