This review may contain spoilers
Dance of Love and Betrayal
I’ll be real, it is beautiful, but also so damn toxic.
Like, I get the whole “tragic romance” aesthetic, but that dove poison arc with Sha Qian and that Huo Ying and the way they glorified it as love, that was manipulation disguised as love. Till the end, Huo Ying never really saw the efforts of Shen Song, like idk what evolution of stalkhome did Huo Ying possess. Holding an antidote hostage just to get info on Shen Le. Wild
And Shen Le — yeah, he’s elegant, powerful, but half the time it felt like he never really saw what Dan Zi Lang went through. This man literally built an empire, spilt blood, carried guilt, made Shen Le his whole world, and Shen Le kept crying over his brother, who literally killed their dad. This whole dynamic between the main leads after episode 6 makes you feel like "okay, finally things will get better" and BOOOM "fall down a cliff".
The first episode felt like a puzzle dump — faces, names, kingdoms, but once it clicked, it clicked. Still, the ending didn’t need to be that tragic. The whole “afterlife reconciliation” with his brother felt unnecessary. Sometimes you just wish they’d let love live instead of killing it for symbolism.
Still: the show matters. It's worth watching, it's worth crying for, it’s not just beauty, it's brutality. Not just romance, but wreckage. And even in wreckage, there’s longing.
Like, I get the whole “tragic romance” aesthetic, but that dove poison arc with Sha Qian and that Huo Ying and the way they glorified it as love, that was manipulation disguised as love. Till the end, Huo Ying never really saw the efforts of Shen Song, like idk what evolution of stalkhome did Huo Ying possess. Holding an antidote hostage just to get info on Shen Le. Wild
And Shen Le — yeah, he’s elegant, powerful, but half the time it felt like he never really saw what Dan Zi Lang went through. This man literally built an empire, spilt blood, carried guilt, made Shen Le his whole world, and Shen Le kept crying over his brother, who literally killed their dad. This whole dynamic between the main leads after episode 6 makes you feel like "okay, finally things will get better" and BOOOM "fall down a cliff".
The first episode felt like a puzzle dump — faces, names, kingdoms, but once it clicked, it clicked. Still, the ending didn’t need to be that tragic. The whole “afterlife reconciliation” with his brother felt unnecessary. Sometimes you just wish they’d let love live instead of killing it for symbolism.
Still: the show matters. It's worth watching, it's worth crying for, it’s not just beauty, it's brutality. Not just romance, but wreckage. And even in wreckage, there’s longing.
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