beesknees

Fantastic drama with lovely characters and nicely depicted relationships. I loved that there were no stalkers in this series - so many dramas have a SML/SFL who are in love with the leads and try everything to derail the relationship of ML and FL. I was a little worried about the FL at first, she seemed like she was going to be a gamine type of character or a dimwitted ingenue but while she is naive, she is outstanding at her job and an actual asset to the team. Favorite scene: Practical, blunt-spoken elder brother Jin Li gives better romantic advice than the playboy best friend. I liked how ML is just sitting there struggling, having a sincere heart towards the heroine but no clue on how to move their relationship from friendship to romance and just bumbling everything along the way.

Episode 24 he starts to try to woo her, 25 is a love confession, then a second love confession in 26.

Several breakups, mostly surrounding big misunderstandings and the secrets they are keeping from each other. There are love rivals - a friend Feiye (ML) has known forever and who has made many sacrifices for him is the rival of Yun Xi (FL) and the SML is in love with Yun Xi, he also makes many sacrifices for her and does a lot for her which she treats, for the most part, as friendship. I would not describe the ending as happy. IHaveNoBias stated it well below - to quote "What kinda punk-ass ending was that? Ugh."

This was one of those shows where I had to double-check the actors and titles to be sure that I was watching the same series that others were loving and I was - definitely not loving. From my perspective, it was the tale of a young, spunky, athletic heroine who leaves her family's mountain hideaway to test her martial arts skills against that of the greater m. a. community. Upon arrival in the capital city she meets the ML, SML and a host of other characters. She falls in love with a man other than the ML, and has a sweet romance with him that ends sadly. If you were to add together all the cute encounters she has in that first love story, they would outnumber the ones she has with the ML. In fact, the ML is her third choice; she actually considers a romance with Qiu An before reluctantly (they have to be on the verge of execution) agreeing to a marriage with ML. The ML lies to her/keeps important secrets from her for almost the entire series and uses her numerous times while doing so to further his own aims. The guy who actually does most of the actions typically done by the hero actually has a rather tragic story arc. Just not my cuppa.

Thanks. I was wondering how long that would last (grew old for me after 20 minutes) and now know not to watch it.

My understanding was that technically, they were not being poisoned. They were being given nutritional supplements which on their own were beneficial but when combined created a slow, toxic effect. Xian He, the young prince who is the hero of our story, was the only one who was really poisoned because they wanted rid of him faster so they changed the formula for increased efficacy. The point of the curse was to cause fear and chaos in the royal family, thereby destablizing the country and making it easier for Xiyin to win a war against them. Xiyin had lost all previous wars, including the one the prince fought in .

I didn't like that either. And I thought it was out of character given how the FL was so typically so confrontational when facing problems.

I think ML is handsome too. I'm mostly interested in this because I loved him in A Pet at Dali Temple and Novoland: Pearl Eclipse. The trailer looks cute so I'm hopeful the story will be fun, lighthearted and romantic.

I loved the humor, the first three episodes are especially hilarious; loved the leads (he did cool and distant while still being warm somehow and she did the spunky, quirky, adorable heroine perfectly) and their relationship was great fun to watch develop; loved the relationship between father and son for the ML and his dad; really liked the relationship between the sisters and the ML and his bestie; loved - well, just about everything. It has some production issues - obvious errors in the first epi with rain in one spot and less than 200 feet away with no rain, certain rooms seemed to have weird layouts due to how they were shot, etc. I felt like we got an overabundance of villain screen time throughout most of the series. The ending wasn't explained well but if I downgraded every drama with that problem I would probably have to stop watching C dramas. :-)