Michelle Topham

Dying laughing.

WANG XUAN FAN (to his wife after the birds' nest soup mess): "You drop this disaster on me. Are you God's punishment for me?"

And like I said before and expected, Jinzhao literally mopped the floor with the Wang wife, wrung out her mop, then went back to scrub some more. Hahahaha.

Episode 31...

Sure, she was irritating in the first few episodes, but by Ep 29 and 30 she's a fully-fledged pain in the a*s, and mean too :) Although, you might be correct, as the FL's grandmother did say "my friend has always been difficult" :)

Mother-in-law has turned awful too :)

I've always thought Chinese dramas do the "less is more" aspect of dramas incredibly well. They leave more to the imagination, which, to me, makes it even sexier.

Just like I have been told by many men, they find women sexier who wear clothes that cover their curves, as they get to get to guess about what might be underneath, rather than the women having their boobs and ass out for everyone to see :)

And no, they get great couple time in today's episodes.

Ratings do usually go up rather than down. Unless the ending is horrible. Like you said, the haters have already hit their 1 out of 10 rating without watching a second of the drama, and then gone off to destroy the rating of another drama who's ML or FL they hate :)

Can't fix stupid. Don't even try. Just do the best you can with the dramas you like :) (It's also why a lot of my ratings are slightly higher than they would normally be, but I often bump them up to counteract the idiots :)

Yep, it's rarely anything more than lips pressed together, which isn't really a kiss.

But... it's very much like kisses in western movies in the 30s, 40s and 50s. Same thing. And, frankly, I would much rather have it like this as it's more romantic, IMO, than two actors who barely know each other going at it on a bed, stark naked and eating each other's faces. Always found that a bit disturbing (I've never been good with PDA -- would probably do fine in Ming Dynasty China :)

I would much rather have these kisses than those in western dramas where the actors are eating each other's face. Have always hated that -- just TMI.

Yep. And it's a huge shame as she's a phenomenal actress.

I'm seeing the same trajectory I saw with K-dramas before they became popular. One of the first k-dramas I ever watched was Yellow Handkerchief -- https://kisskh.at/12757-yellow-handkerchief -- and I was OBSESSED. Never did watch the end though, as I moved to Thailand at about Episode 140 and could not find it with English subs in Bangkok :)(watched it on a local TV station in LA before I left).

Nobody I knew in the west watched K-dramas at that time, although they were HUGE in Thailand. Soon after that, though, I started to see K-dramas start to get really popular outside Asia and, within about 5 or6 years, everyone I knew was watching them - I'm now seeing the same type of movement with C-dramas.

Fingers crossed I'm correct, as I would love to see them get the massive audiences K-dramas now have :)

Ah thanks so much. I knew I'd seen it but could NOT remember which one :)

I was writing about K-dramas and C-dramas for about 10 years, but dropped both writing and viewing of K-dramas completely about six months ago in favor of just C-dramas. Not because I disliked them, but because I'm enjoying C-dramas much more :)

And yep, far more viewers, but that is also slowly changing. There have been several C-dramas that have done extremely well on Netflix (in the Top 10 on their Non-English TV Shows chart) -- Pursuit of Jade performed very well, was on the Top 10 for four or five weeks, The First Frost hit #6 on the chart, Hidden Love, Perfect Match and When I Fly Towards You also performed well with many millions of views.

No, they're nowhere near the number of K-dramas that are successful on Netflix, as most of them are released on China's own streaming services, and as some weeks four or five K-dramas are in the Top 10, but they show the same trajectory K-dramas did about 10 or 15 years ago -- on the way up, and rapidly :)

Isn't that often the case though? The "if I can't have her, nobody else can, and I'll make sure her life is a living hell because of it" sentiment.

Look at the disturbing way he acted when he knew she'd been kidnapped by a trafficker. Instead of letting CYY know where she was, he went there and tried to buy her, which I thought meant it was so that he could check she was there and then alert CYY but...nooooooo.

Instead he snuck out the back door because he was up to something nefarious. Even his aide knows he has a screw loose at this point :)

I saw at least one promotion of it on either Weibo or on a Chinese news source I was reading. I cannot for the life of me remember which drama it was (should have bookmarked it) but it specifically stood out. It was because the drama's Douban score was so poor the production company decided to promote the MDL score instead, which was much higher :)

And I think that's coming very soon. The more non-Chinese sign up for Chinese streaming platforms, watch dramas on YouTube and on Netflix etc, the more Chinese companies are starting to realize there is a HUGE market out there.

A Chinese account I follow on X was pushing the narrative that C-dramas are now getting more popular than K-dramas outside China only last week (I'm not sure that's true, but the market is heading in that direction), and it was a big point of national pride for them.

Just wait until C-dramas get really big, and we'll be promoted to and kowtowed to like you wouldn't believe :)

Yes. And all the props are gorgeous in this. Shows just what a high level of craftsmanship people in the Ming Dynasty had, doesn't it? Such superb attention to detail by the production team as well.

I found this Christie's guide about the Ming period when the drama first started, and the high level of artistic skill back then (we're talking close to 400 to 700 years ago ) is stunning.

https://www.christies.com/en/stories/ming-era-art-collecting-guide-d63d84700fa54871ae826bc804e97cb6

And also the clothing - just gorgeous.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ming+dynasty+clothing&ia=images&iax=images

He's blinded by his disappointment that his life isn't going the way he wanted it to, and so he's not seeing clearly.

As we saw in Ep 30 though, any kind of decent life is probably too late for him at this point, as the FL not only doesn't want him anywhere near her in any capacity, but he's also now a murderer.

Last time I checked on Douban it had bumped up to a 5.7, but yep, still way too low. But... I'm not surprised. - https://movie.douban.com/subject/36640247/

Ren Min has had an army of abusers since she starred in The Longest Promise (I loved her in it, some didn't), so no matter what she stars in, she's always going to get a segment of viewers who will downrate the drama because of it.

Chinese production companies/streaming services, though, have started to look much closer at MDL ratings recently, and will sometimes even promote those ratings if the Douban rating is poor.

So, if we can get the rating for the drama even higher on here, it may get some promotion from Mango TV/WeTV because of it :)

Ah sorry, I get what you're saying and my fault for assuming. I'm probably reacting to quite a few other people's posts about him and the FL. Ignore me :)

And yep you're completely correct with your last sentence about him.

He's written well and portrayed superbly by Winwin, and I haven't seen anyone saying otherwise. We're just not all slobbering over a character because he's handsome, when his personality is both incredibly flawed and destructive to himself and everyone around him.

And because the FL doesn't think of him as anything other than a friend. Never has. Never will. And she's made that obvious several times.

Meanwhile, it's odd some people keep trying to frame their relationship differently, NOT because they believe that relationship IS different, because they know it's not, but because they have the hots for Winwin.

And, btw, I don't have visceral hatred for him at all. He's one of my favorite characters because he is so flawed, and I feel sorry for him.

It's an odd one. There's some parts of it I like and some that are annoying just because I've already watched the drama. I probably would have enjoyed it more if I hadn't watched the drama as it stands pretty well on its own. But stack it up against the drama, and it's incredibly jarring that it's just SO different in every respect, up to and including the relationship of the characters with each other and their motivations (and I am only 15 or so chapters in, so I don't have the full story of the 300-plus chapters yet).

The screenwriter must have read the novel, several times, and then decided most of it just doesn't work for the screen -- pulled out what she/he could salvage, and then built a new story from the ground up :) And came up with a truly spectacular result, IMO.