gwennie call

IQIYI ‘s ok too though sometimes it insists your password and username don’t exist when they, you know, do! I managed to watch all of Sleuth of Ming Dynasty on my laptop rather than my phone (bigger screen better for tired eyes). I agree about kissasian- the popunders and redirects have made it unusable. Have you tried Viki and dramacool? They’ve become my goto sites for when I can’t find the drama anywhere else.

Team Yu Ming Ye (Wang Hao Xuan) unite! He called her 小仙女, which the subs translate as 'little fairy' from the start, when everyone was calling her ugly! I love him!

I have a question for someone who watched to the end - how was the hair-cutting scene presented here? I've already seen how The Story of Yanxi Palace did it, but Step-Empress/Ruyi was a villain there, and it was a kind of 'bitches be crazy' interpretation (Yanxi Palace had A LOT of that towards the end).
What set her off?

Wallace Huo (Qianlong) doesn't have an ounce of Nie Yuan's charm and charisma. Zhou Xun is a revelation as Ruyi, but if you're easily depressed, don't watch this. Or do what I did, watch till about episode 47, and call that a happy ending.

Good question, and one I have too. Also, in Ruyi's Royal Love the Fuca Empress is an evil bitch from the start whereas in Yanxi Palace she's practically a saint and martyr. And I won't even go into what Ruyi's Royal Love did with Concubine Ling, the protagonist and heroine of Yanxi Palace.
I think the main problem is that with the women attached to the Emperors, history didn't record much because the historians were all men and yup, you guessed it: the good ol' sexism. For example, we don't even know Concubine Ling's actual birth name, even though she was the frickin' mother of the next frickin' Emperor - in Yanxi they call her Wei Ying Luo and in RRLP they call her Wei Yan Wan. Even the Dowager Empress (HongLi's mother) - every series which features her gives her a different name, because her real birth name wasn't recorded.
Even if we knew something about these women , we'd have to take it with a pinch of salt, cos too often I look them up and I find: "she was corrupt and evil, horrible, horrible woman!" Only to find that she did exactly what a man (Emperor, king, etc) did.
As regards Ruyi/UlaNara, there is one thing history recorded about her (besides becoming Step-Empress, of course) - and that's the hair thing. After that, every bit of information about her was stricken from the record , so to speak. I think, more than research her, what the dramas did was gather the very meagre facts they had about her, and extrapolate from there.

I would agree with you on this - I don't know if this is why, or perhaps it's just my opinion, but I think he was too young for the role. In the early episodes, where's he's a young Qianlong, he's fine, I guess. Then, later, he's just unconvincing - and no, producers, giving him a thin mustache and wispy chin-beard does not confer gravitas.

Yes, I get that now! Before I never understood all that, because I never knew much about Chinese history pre-Mao (yeah, I knew about the Mongolians but only in the vaguest sense of Genghis Khan etc) and now ever since around December I've been doing a youtube/c-drama fueled crash course of Chinese history.
It was Yanxi Palace which started me off on what Manchu/Manchurian really meant, because both Hong-Li and (I think) the Empress Dowager talk A LOT about the hardships of their (Manchu) ancestors. But Empresses in the Palace /The Legend of Zhen Huan makes it much clearer. The Emperor even has some scrolls with Manchu writing (which looks a lot like Arabic to my untrained eye).
And they try not to have the Han people and the Manchu people mix genetically at all - the main character finds out that the girl she thought was her maid is actually her half-sister; even worse, her dad tells her, "her mother was Han! No-one must ever know."
Zhen Huan: "No-one ever will." (Me: this is a BIG DEAL)

I am at episode 64 and I want to add, for the record, that I hate the Emperor (Yongzheng) SO MUCH. So very much.

Good point - I used to watch stuff on Kissasian exclusively, and then everything changed . . . About a month ago, they put in really aggressive popunders, which even my adblocker can't stop. What happens is you cue up a video, click on it to play. Nothing happens except there's pop-up redirecting to an ad site. You click the second time, and it starts playing. You want to change the volume/pause the video/anything, it triggers another redirect. And so on.

I'm sticking to Dramacool, even though they had a stretch of episodes (when she's in the temple and a few when she returns ) in which there's lots of dialogue and none of it is being subbed. Now (episode 64) it's been normal for a while, though some of the dialogue is barely intelligible, but I'm getting the gist.

I don't think it's on Viki - at least when I looked for it, it wasn't there - but I found it on Dramacool and youtube. At least up till episode 13. The main problem is that whoever subbed this decided to translate the names also, in French. I DON'T UNDERSTAND! I mean, I understand French, I just don't understand why anyone would do this. So, instead of just writing "Lady Wan" or "Concubine Wan", it's Lady Sourire. and there's Lady Beauté, Lady Onnête, etc. Just kill me now.
ETA - the subs suddenly stopped on youtube so I went back to Dramacool - and big YAY! No more weird translations of names, and we're back to Concubine Wan and Consort Fei. Ok, sometimes they put in names when they're clearly saying "Meimei" to each other, but it's ok.

I'm at episode 47 and I think I'm done. Something good finally happened to Ruyi and I can't watch everything go downhill from now on (no, I'm not spoiling, because this all happened in real life over 200 years ago).
More in my review - it became too long for this comment! I just want to add for anyone reading this that the title is entirely misleading - Ruyi's Royal Love in the Palace sounds like a charming happy romp. Which this isn't.

It's hilarious how many people don't realise that this is based on actual historical events, just finessed a little bit. I'm at episode 47, where something good actually happens to Ruyi, and I'm tempted to stop here.

Oh, I laughed. I laughed a LOT. Re. Crunchyroll and anime in general - that never occurred to me, that Japanese might have the same issue. I've watched a couple of K-dramas and meaning is not usually an issue, it's more like tone and nuances - like they say 'oh gosh' a lot and call hardened criminals things like 'brat'.

I looked up the characters in the Chinese title, and one of them has the meaning of 'to collate' , so , yeah - it's hard to see, and it still makes very little sense, but it arises when you have people coming up with titles who might know book English and dictionary English but not the implications and connotations of words. Just like no-one uses the 'something is completed' meaning for 'to consummate' anymore, unless the 'something' is a marriage, the person who wrote the youtube subs for The Princess Weiyoung translated 'burning incense for your deceased in-laws' as 'fumigating the dead in-laws.' Yes, 'fumigating' DOES mean 'to apply smoke to something', but whoever chose the words didn't read the rest of the sentence which added "usually to exterminate vermin' - and what started out as 'usually' is now 'always'. There's also another example - Battle through the Heaven, which is also known as 'Fights Break Sphere'. If you look up the characters, one of them means 'blue dome of heaven/skies'. And presto. I'm not saying 'Battle through the Heaven' is in any way a good title, it just reads less like one of those t-shirts from the 90s.

I've watched a couple of Avenue X's videos and you have to take her with a pinch of salt - like PeachBlossomGoddess said, if I'd listened to her, I wouldn't have watched stuff which I enjoyed, like Sleuth of Ming Dynasty, which I thoroughly enjoyed (I signed up for IQIYI VIP to watch that cos I couldn't wait for the unofficial subs ). Also, then she doesn't point out a glaring problematic scene in one of the dramas she praised and I was kind of done with her vids.
Back to Song of Glory - as these things go, it's very very good. Take it from someone who tried and failed to watch The General and I, this is miles better. FL is so well acted and I like her so much - there's none of the baby-voiced shenanigans these characters usually have. Everything - production, sets, costumes is on point. Having said that, I am putting it on hold till I can be spoiled for the ending , because I need at least a bittersweet ending before I invest my time.

I watched a few later episodes and boy is everyone terrible in this. The FL overreacts as you said. the second FL's acting method consists of hesitant stuttering, and the Emperor? (edited because wrong emperor) but my point still stands. You need a larger than life figure to be the Emperor, and this isn't it.
Zhao Yi Qin and Yu Xuan Hong Hao are fairly inoffensive in their roles, but all the extras are terrible. The best actor in this is the dog, who's clearly in it for the snacks and otherwise DGAF. You go, doggie.

I would also recommend The Story of Yanxi Palace - it's really good ! (as well as Princess Wei Young, but that goes without saying). If you like Palace drama, I've just finished The Legend of Lu Zhen - yes, the color palette is weird (flat tv lighting to the max) and the aspect ratio is dubious, but once you get past that you have the amazing story of a woman who managed to get a man's role in a deeply misogynistic society. I wouldn't get too hung up about how true to history it is, and there is a love story too.

Princess Weiyoung is so amazing! Second the rec. for Princess Weiyoung! I already have an idea for an AU fic for Princess Weiyoung, and the only thing that's holding me back is there's only one PW fic on AO3 and I don't know if it's worth it.
I would also recommend The Story of Yanxi Palace - it is really good and much more satisfying than I'm finding this to be. Yes, it's set in the time of this Emperor, and it's about one of his concubines (she came to be called Concubine Ling, her real name was Wei Ying Luo), and it's mostly an extremely satisfying revenge story. The only thing which held me back initially was the Qing dynasty aesthetic (I don't like the hair or the clothes -even the interiors made me feel claustrophobic), but once I got into the story I couldn't stop.

"It happens whenever there's social taboo involved in the romance (older woman/younger man, one or both were married or widowed, somehow "belonging" to someone else, etc) like they need to serve prison time apart before they're allowed to enjoy their romance. "
This made me laugh because it's so true!! Spoilers follow for 'Legend of Lu Zhen':
I really enjoyed this series, because I really loved the female protagonist, mainly because of her way of solving problems and gaining skills (the less said about the weird color palette and aspect ratio the better) - I also liked the romance and I thought that after so many tribulations they could get together. It made no sense to me that she left after her one true love got a wife foisted on him, because he didn't love this wife and he was the Emperor, FFS. But anyway, I accepted it - she was going to leave for a while so that he could foster some kind of relationship with this wife, but she'd come back. Except on the wedding night he finds out that the woman he married is actually a teenager with brain damage and the mind of a child, so it's obvious that it's not gonna be a real marriage! BUT LU ZHEN STILL STAYS AWAY FOR THREE YEARS! WHY!!! I was so pissed off, because the emperor died in his forties and they had very little time together. And then they try to fob us off with a weirdly coloured, strangely CGI'd (serious floating face issue) sequence of them being together in the 'afterlife' - it's just embarrassing, both for me as the viewer and I bet for the actors too. Dear Zanilia Zhao and Chen Xiao - I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.

I put this in a spoiler comment to add a trigger warning:
Half way through the first episode the 2nd female lead is almost raped by two men in an alley - and by almost, I mean the screaming and tearing at clothes goes on for way longer than is absolutely necessary. We get it, show. Men are assholes.