Eleison

Oh. I must have missed that! 🫣

It's fine, but only as long as they follow through...

The trailer looked cute and I was kind of excited, until I saw Netflix made it... 😮‍💨 *sigh*

Oh no, it's ends on a cliffhanger? 🤦‍♀️😭

For some reason a lot of romances in the last few years have always had a serial killer/rapist/kidnapper plot, even the rom-coms--I wonder if Strong Woman Do Bong Soon kickstarted the trend? It is odd. Hidden Love was the first rom-com in a while that I had seen that had no dark side plot to speak of. It was great! I don't think he was useless, but he was a plot device and was not a "real" character in the story. It was a smart move not to focus on him to make him a real character since no one would have gone for that and this not a crime drama or action thriller, but the result was a one-dimensional villain with no backstory. He did get a bit annoying by the end cause he kept being the foil to their adorableness in multiple timelines. 😋

Oh phew! 😅 I wasn't sure how much longer I could hold out, haha.

On Episode 18. A fun romp so far!

When does the ML finally find out the FL is not Huaiqing? 😂 It's getting insufferable to wait for the darn girl to speak up. Also waiting for her to get cooler, cause so far she doesn't seem well-matched with Xu Qi An.

Helmed by Netflix, so to me it seems like it would fit in with other Netflix-made Kdramas, like My Name, Squid Game, Mr. Plankton, All Of Us Are Dead, The Trunk, etc.

Gritty, dark, "mature." If you liked those, this might not be too far off. 🤷‍♀️ At any rate, it smells strongly of Netflix...

What about it feels "old school" would you say? I have a special place in my heart for older dramas, so I'm curious. :)

The internet is a toxic "place," haha. It is what it is. 🤷‍♀️

Also, some threads on MDL are more toxic than others. The super popular Kdramas within a year of airing tend to be the worst. Other pages are much better! It does seem to be a newer trend on MDL the last few years for people to dump on new/popular dramas, but I also think it's getting more and more traffic, with more and more people discovering dramas.

Yes, that's what I figured, too! I was just listing some stuff users who dislike the show might cite as "plotholes."

Stuff like the ML's death in Episode 1 never getting explained (why--murder, suicide?), or the fact that the ML had memories of his life in all the timelines at the end which was never explained. Also, Sol had the ability to stop the timeline by speaking of the future, she could have used that get away from the serial killer, etc.

That sort of stuff, I think.

Happy-ish. It has one of those "we didn't end up together in this world/life but in another world/life" endings; if you think those are happy endings, then it's happy. I think they're fake-out happy endings, and they're not my favorite. 😂

So no legal platforms host it?

I know, I wondered if one season would be enough to finish this story. It seems unlikely if it's going to be done well, unless it's twice as long as this season. 😅

I don't know if I got an answer fully, but I realize this is a transition season and not complete. It just seems at the end of Season 1 that Fan Xian realized how he'd been played, and had resolved to work outside the Emperor's schemes and try to be a foil to them, but I didn't see that happening in this season after all. He was still going along with the grand master plan of CPP and the Emperor the whole season.

Yes, as they're slowly starting to show what the scheming does to you (as seen through the Eldest Princess, the Emperor, and Chen Ping Ping), since more and more we're seeing these characters' true colors revealed to be selfish and even nefarious.

The Second Prince has an interesting conversation with a character in Season 2 about how he's been dragged into his evil scheming by his father since his childhood and made to fight for his life, and given no other option. It's kind of heartbreaking to see them show the disparity in how HE turned out versus Fan Xian, who didn't get exposed to this side of the world until he was a adult. Xian was able to grow into a healthier perspective which the princes didn't have the luxury of doing since they grew up in the palace (I will chalk that up to Ye Qing Mei's insight and care, watching out for her son by insisting he was raised outside the palace! 😉 She knew where this kind of life led...).

Oh good, so you have seen them. 🥰 I found Start-Up very lovely, too, but I had to watch it slowly because the lying was PAINFUL. It was a fantastic message, but it was still hard to watch. I prefer this screenwriter's other dramas for this reason, but this one was still thought-provoking and beautifully done (gorgeous styling, cinematography, sets, color scheme, editing--all very aesthetically pleasing and high quality for a Kdrama!)

Not as a general rule, but I think people who usually like one of her dramas usually like all of them. They all have love triangles so those that can't stomach love triangles can't do any of them. 😂

I loved Ki Ho, too, and I actually thought the "Who's Ki Ho?" plot was kind of fun, actually, but I think it annoyed some people.

This screenwriter, in addition to poignant themes (my runner up to WYWS is I Hear Your Voice, which has my favorite theme/message of any drama I've seen), also does fabulous pilot episodes and sometimes people get their hopes up WAY too high for subsequent episodes and trash on the whole drama afterwards because their expectations get dashed.

I always look forward to her stuff and keep an eye out for her new releases. :)

But have you noticed ALL the Viki scores are inflated next to MDL scores? See the rating for this on three separate sites/platforms:

IMDB: 6.1
MDL: 7.1
Viki: 8.8

Now take a popular/highly rated drama like While You Were Sleeping:

IMDB: 8.3 (very high for a Kdrama on IMDB)
MDL: 8.7
Viki: 9.6 (about as high as ratings get on Viki, and that's voted by over 300,000 watchers).

Notice the pattern? It's telling. The stronger dramas get consistently higher ratings across multiple platforms (usually), and more middling dramas have ratings across platforms that will be consistently lower; I just think each site calibrates the ratings differently which accounts for the disparity with this rating and Viki's.

I think the low rating came from the ambiguity of who's really the ML. Many people felt played with the way Ji Pyeong was introduced in Episode 1 and that he was given too much attention, backstory, connection to the FL and time spent on his character and that got everyone attached to him (not to mention his acting is stellar 😉). I'd bet the love triangle and the way Ji Pyeong was written is the reason the rating is low. The themes of this are profound and beautiful, though (even if packaged in a way that couldn't realistically happen outside Kdramaland).

I would call this screenwriter's genre light contemporary fairytales as they are also very thematic, which makes her Kdramas unique.

Have you seen this screenwriter's other dramas? Never seen anything by her I didn't like, and a few I absolutely loved. While You Were Sleeping is my all-time favorite Kdrama and it was written by her. Another good recent one is Castaway Diva. :)

Glad you enjoyed it!

It definitely doesn't end as cliffhanger-y as Season 1, but the cliffhanger isn't a serious one since we know you-know-who doesn't actually die. 😉