1
from perfectly unhinged to sheer nonsense
A short drama with an unhinged and ruthless female lead that cares for nothing else except her revenge. After being brutally discarded for her 'family' to earn a purity plaque and lift their rank she is given a new face by a powerful ally that comes upon her and makes her way back into the very family that killed her. Dismantling their influence from within our female lead manages to take them down one by one with seemingly little effort.
Short dramas in general have a much faster pacing format than normal dramas but this puts even that normalcy to the test. Moving at lightning speed, the story takes you unto the Liu household and topples each member systematically with ease and brutal satisfaction. But it fails to build a complete story or believable characters. The perfectly unhinged female lead, Wan Qing, has very little background information given to explain her initial sacrifice and then nothing to really give credit to her later revenge build up. You see her steal from and then abandoning her savior so where does she get the skills and network to pull off her schemes before he finds her again 3 years later? Then her massacre of the family becomes swift but with such little believability that you find yourself just sitting back and enjoying her truly insane enjoyment over the whole thing. Until suddenly the show shifts and you are instead scratching your head trying to figure out exactly what you are watching.
Our male lead if the powerful but silent backing that is only there to save her again and again as she recklessly throws herself into danger but you don't see how he really adds anything. He is a high ranking official that is set on bringing down the Liu family for its corruption but no screen time is given to his skill, network, or grievances to explain his whys. The pair do have plenty of chemistry so I found that all the plot holes could be easily ignored until, again, the shift in the story happened.
Our villains here are one dimensional and stupidly easy to fool and manipulate. The son Wan Qing marries is just a drug addict with a bottle permanently attached to his hand and no other personality trait other than sniffing it. The mother is clever enough to embezzle money, control a kidnapping ring, and fool her husband but easily falls for the simplest tricks. The father is shown as just being greedy, lustful, and obsessive. But, sure, we can believe that they massacred an entire family and carried out their corruption by being pawns of the big bad. Now enter the big bad's story line. And this is when the show loses me. For all the enjoyment I got from the beautiful visuals and our female lead's one track revenge journey was snuffed out in a single episode where I truly though I had accidentally clicked on a different drama. The trek to the end of the drama from here really does not improve and just gets more and more ridiculous.
Short dramas in general have a much faster pacing format than normal dramas but this puts even that normalcy to the test. Moving at lightning speed, the story takes you unto the Liu household and topples each member systematically with ease and brutal satisfaction. But it fails to build a complete story or believable characters. The perfectly unhinged female lead, Wan Qing, has very little background information given to explain her initial sacrifice and then nothing to really give credit to her later revenge build up. You see her steal from and then abandoning her savior so where does she get the skills and network to pull off her schemes before he finds her again 3 years later? Then her massacre of the family becomes swift but with such little believability that you find yourself just sitting back and enjoying her truly insane enjoyment over the whole thing. Until suddenly the show shifts and you are instead scratching your head trying to figure out exactly what you are watching.
Our male lead if the powerful but silent backing that is only there to save her again and again as she recklessly throws herself into danger but you don't see how he really adds anything. He is a high ranking official that is set on bringing down the Liu family for its corruption but no screen time is given to his skill, network, or grievances to explain his whys. The pair do have plenty of chemistry so I found that all the plot holes could be easily ignored until, again, the shift in the story happened.
Our villains here are one dimensional and stupidly easy to fool and manipulate. The son Wan Qing marries is just a drug addict with a bottle permanently attached to his hand and no other personality trait other than sniffing it. The mother is clever enough to embezzle money, control a kidnapping ring, and fool her husband but easily falls for the simplest tricks. The father is shown as just being greedy, lustful, and obsessive. But, sure, we can believe that they massacred an entire family and carried out their corruption by being pawns of the big bad. Now enter the big bad's story line. And this is when the show loses me. For all the enjoyment I got from the beautiful visuals and our female lead's one track revenge journey was snuffed out in a single episode where I truly though I had accidentally clicked on a different drama. The trek to the end of the drama from here really does not improve and just gets more and more ridiculous.
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