Say_do

She does not seek revenge. She was living nicely away from the mansion and wanted to go back. She only stayed because her grandma insisted. And she only defended herself when people attacked her. She never sought to attack anyone. If they had left her alone, she would have lived there quietly and left in a year like she planned.

Now she is discovering new things and wants to get to the bottom of it. She is not supposed to be fierce or struggling. She has lived very well for years.

I just did that math. That's true.

They need to separate Yining and LSY very quickly before their relationship becomes weirder than in the novel. Yining is older here. Old enough to catch feelings. Plus the family is now in the capital instead of a province outside the capital, and they are an established family there too. It looks much worse in this situation.

Actually back to when she was dead for 14 years I believe. Because I also remember the rant of LJX, saying he had been going crazy for 14 years. Plus Cheng Lang was still a child when she died.

Yeah, there was not really a love triangle because she had already fallen out of love with LJX after being hurt for decades. It was like 30 years of being resentful and then meeting and falling for LSY in the last 10.

Me too. I really liked the extra chapter ending..

I think they are making LJX the villain. To me in the novel, I felt like he and LSY were just enemies, but not that he was a villain. I think the novel was written quite interestingly actually. That you could feel for these two red flags because of their stories.

Every time I watch this "father", especially with his interactions with LSY, I wish they kept at least some attributes of novel LSY because when things changed, it was so so so satisfying. This man is so annoying.

I forgot about the other maid that tried to kill him. He was indeed cruel. But this is a fact I have said about him.
Interestingly, both he and LJX made preparations to have her go under the protection of her father if anything happened to her. They were both out of their minds, but I still felt for both somehow. Especially LJX. That is why I like the last extra chapter. It was like a what if chapter.

She returned to her family because he instructed his men to do so if they got news that something happened to him. It was not really a thing he did willingly.

LSY did not murder and lie to everyone. He operated on his own and was very secretive because first, he had to keep things to himself because he had no one, and he had to survive. And then he progressively got involved with dangerous work that he could not share. He tortured criminals for information, not ordinary people.

No one in the book, not even Yining was good. She said so herself many times. Most of what she did was to her own advantage. Approaching Shenyuan, when she helped others. She also did not disagree with the things LSY or LJX did. The most pure hearted person in the whole book had to be Lin Hairu.

I have read it and neither was. It is in Kill Me Love Me that I saw that the ml did something like that according to the comments.

Neither was a rapist.

It was. LSY and LJX were very red flags. But in a way, I actually feel for them. It is not very easy to read the novel actually lol.

He was not emotionally unattached per se because you can read his thoughts when he was 13, saying he was jealous of his siblings because they got to be that close to and loved by their mother. And there is a part where they mention that his favourite person in the world when he grew up, was his mother, followed by his Uncle Ting, and then his father would rank somewhere like 5th or 6th lol.
He was distant and unable to show his attachment to his mother.

For the last statement, don't you mean Lu Jiaxue? LSY was not much better than him, but he was still much better than him lol. And he did love her. But he was more possessive of her because she was like the only good thing in his life. She was the only one that treated him like a human being and a worthy person deserving of affection. That was why he did not want to let her go. But he did not do anything to harm her.
Lu Jiaxue on the other hand kidnapped her twice. The second time, he proposed marriage to Yilian in order to get into their house and kidnap her and proclaim the "7th daughter of the Luo family" as his bride. Then he caught her every time she tried to run away, kept her locked up even when he found out she was pregnant, was tempted to forcefully make her abort the baby, tried to get her to sleep together with him and never listened to her no matter what she said, how she begged or cried. He held her captive for over a year, until he was suspected dead. That was when she got released to her father.
LSY did not do anything regarding her, that can hold a candle to what this man did. We can say he was not given the opportunity to, but I really think he would not have done anything close to that. His obsession was not 14 years of pain, regret and madness like LJX. That man had been out of his mind and powerful enough for too long.

They were not. Her real identity had already been settled for a few years.

That is why I am looking forward to the imperial exams, adoption and other things in the story. I want to see if later Shenyuan will have a flavour of what he was like in the novel.

The rebirth or should swap was very understandable. It is not confusing at all because it is well explained. Unfortunately, China would not let such air.

He was very hard on his first son. Transferred so much pressure on him because of how he grew up and because of his position. It was both a good and bad thing. Good because the boy had to be well prepared for the position he was in, and bad because there wasn't a good balance for him to grow up with and that was sad.

Ml was all those things, but he was actually good to those that were good to him. And if he developed even an ounce of care for you, he would still be good to you even if he knew you were using him. Like in the beginning, when they were kids, he knew Yining tried to get close to him on purpose, for a different reason than because he saved her and she felt bad for all the things she did to him, but he acted like he did not know and treated her the best in the world.

They did not water him down. They actually completely re-wrote him. The similarities between the two is like 5%, including name.
If she was 15 when she got married in the novel, it would not be an issue. Historical dramas show that happening all the time. That was a ripe age for it then. She was barely 14 and he did not marry her because he was a bad person. Her family married her off because the emperor was trying to marry her himself and her father lied that she was already betrothed since childhood and they were waiting for her to come of age to get married. So they had to actually marry her off quickly to a suitable person to prevent a negative fall out from that. And after going through many candidates that had big flaws, Luo Shenyuan came and proposed. The reputable families did not want to be a part of it because they knew what had happened in the palace and because they did not want to get caught in the lie and be ruined. So they did not even have many suitable options to start with, and they had so little time.

If you read what I wrote properly, you would see that I was fine with everything until the last four episodes and until Kill me love me dropped. I don't think I explained well why. They completely changed the ml, but they modified Lu Jiaxue and he and Lu Jiaxue were equals in cunning, ruthlessness, intelligence and everything. So it is a bit painful to not see them on the same level, with the same amount of tension between them.
Someone said before the show released, before I even read the novel, that they would most likely water down the story, but they should not change how ruthless the ml was. And I thought they would go that route, but they did not. Seeing the ml look so pitiful like he is seeking approval for his family and is depending on them for his ambitions is off. Luo Shenyuan was very ambitious. He was going to take all the official exams and gain power regardless. But he also ran dangerous businesses that made him wealthy on his own. The only thing was that because Yining told him to get his best result, he made sure to top the list in all the exams, whereby he originally could have put in a bit less effort to make sure that happened.
Seeing that there is a crazy ml, although probably a bit watered down from his novel counterpart, airing at the same time as this one, the difference is so stark for me.
In the end though, because of the route they took with the adaptation, I much more comfortable watching it. After seeing how different things were from the first episode, I relaxed and told myself this is a different story.