Good Grief

Very well, it has 9/10 ratings on weibo for tv. I saw it in a post

Riveting stuff. I am hooked, it's been sooooo long since a show had me this immersed and invested. I keep dropping them left and right and forgetting to even go back/record my progress...

Great acting from everyone so far. It must have been so difficult, living through such treacherous times with so much betrayal, evil, greed and blind ambition at every corner. I mean, honestly not much has changed as far as humans and their awfuness goes, but this time period was a whole stratospheric level, as were some other distinct eras in China's history. Good men/non conniving schemers were CRUSHED like bugs. Damn! This show is EXACTLY why I love Asian dramas in general and cdramas in particular.

I hope they maintain this great storytelling, acting, plot etc. throughout. I'm so tired of poor/rushed endings.

War scenes would be pointless for a drama that relies so heavily on real history. They would make sense if wars were able to resolve so many fragmentation issues in that particular period of time, seeing birth and death of 10 kingdoms and 5 self proclaimed imperial dynasties in just 6 decades. All of them failing, one after another, to deliver organic state services (justice, safety, security, free trade, at least an economic predictability if not prosperity etc), stability and extensive soft (societal, philosophical, cultural, economical...) and hard (military) power. Translated in modern language: they were all small sized powers with no convincing deterrent, that's why they've fought but no power actually won/achieved anything durable, independently of the strategy or tactics they've applied.

So, it's totally logical and natural this drama focused more on what really mattered to overcome such an "empass" state of being.

i suspect It's much more than that, Zhejiang produced drama !! they at least spent half a billion yuan considering the production team built a 60000 sq meter 550 real-life sets, 8000 custom made costumes, & filmed entirely in 8K quality

The last thing would be a budget issue as It's one of the few high budget major cdrama production in recent years. budget is said to be 350 million yuan, most S+ dramas of recent times barely have a 300 mm Budget. Lengthy war scenes could be unappealing to some viewers, maybe that's why?

Indeed, human nature has not changed these thousands of years.

They say history repeats itself is so true. And I love learning about Chinese history because after so many dynasties and empires, you could say that China has experienced it all.

During the Cheng Zhao Yue arc, even the king was hesitant about dealing with him because he held the real economic power in Wuyue. While the northern dynasties might be militarily powerful, but they lacked the economic prosperity the southern parts like wuyue had.

You see that in today politics too, we have politicians and government but how many decisions are actually influenced by the billionaires like Zuckerburg, bill gates etc…

Dialogues are full of wit and insight, I'm intrigued by the script

That’s true…this drama needs a philosophical tag, a lot of their dialogue have deep underlying meaning.

The dialogues are so good, I enjoy them so much that I rewatch them. Every day I hear in those dialogues at least one gem, one pearl of wisdom. Today, the most impressive was: "Opportunity is always reserved for those who are prepared".

Why there's no "philosophical" tag on MDL?

As a longtime fan of historical dramas, I’ve been generally really enjoying this so far. And may I just say, that opening title song is super catchy and stuck in my head.

she is 27 so indeed late 20s

"curious to see how they're going to ruin the rest of the story lol"

LMAO 💀💀💀💀😂

I like the leads story line and FL with her team, especially ML's niece. Other than that, this show has a lot of things that are annoying to me, especially 4 things

1) The sister-in-law story line is way too overdramatized and doesn't really fit with the rest of the story at all
2) The assistant and team leader pseudoromance thing going on
3) The FL's mom is just absolutely horrible
4) I'm so completely over the trope of "Best friend" that never even feigned interest in FL until there's competition. You've known her for 15 years, so what? It hasn't happened and now trying to insert yourself into FLs early relationship with someone else is just annoying, childish and tacky.

Especially with this show and the way 2ML is acting. ML saying our baby etc and 2ML inadvertantly slandering the FL by trying to act like it's unknown that it's even the MLs baby, when everyone knows for a fact that it is. He's trying to act like he has any say into who's in the kids life when that's entirely on FL, even the ML readily agreed to honor whatever decision she makes but 2ML seems to think he can make choices for her

You're acting like Hui Won was open about her crush on Min Uk and Mi Ran decided to try and steal him away. She's never shown any interest towards him to her and her drunkenly kissing him and letting her feelings be known doesn't make her a bad person in any way. She also isn't judging him for having a crush lmao, she literally said "why does it have to be her? The one person I can't be jealous of" she's just sad that he chose Hui Won and Hui Won is STILL not showing any interest towards Min Uk even though he's starting to. Her crush on him basically died by that kiss, yes, but that's not Mi Ran's fault that it flamed out and Hui Won found someone better and started to have feelings for ML