So when you have a 40+ episode xianxia romance built across multiple timelines and parallel lives, you know that the plot will be stretched and manipulated to fill the runtime.
Deaths, coughing blood, transmigration, years of separation â it's all here. Too many timelines, too many complications and along the way the characters get lost in the mechanics of it. So i stopped caring about them.
The ML's actor is genuinely impressive. He plays four different versions of the same character across timelines and you can actually tell them apart. Great acting. The FL's actress is equally skilled â but the writers gave her almost nothing to work with. To make the ML more sympathetic - even though he is supposedly the most evil man on Earth or in the Three Realms (or however Xianxia logic works đ) - they sacrificed the FL's character, leaving her inconsistent and too passive for someone sent back in time on a world-saving mission.
Which brings me to the "great love story": both actors are skilled and they clearly have a dynamic together (as we see in Love is sweet also), but for me it felt performative rather than real. And that's because the characters were sacrificed along the way: the ML's supposed evilness is reduced just to trauma and the FL's empathy reads more like pity. So their story didn't convince me. A depressed traumatized man slowly being humanized by his caregiver. Romantic? Not for me. âšī¸
And this is another pattern that frustrates me in asian dramas.
If the ML is evil, keep him evil. If he's strong, keep him strong. Don't sand down every interesting edge he has just to make a point about the "power of love"! Because they usually go from cold/guarded men to shy puppies after falling in love and act so childish that it makes me cringe. Or worse - they build an ultra strong female character by tearing the poor man down (best example - Pursuit of Jade đ).
Evolution â erasure. The best characters change what they do, how they think, not who they fundamentally are.
The most evil being in the Three Realms? Just a bullied kid nobody loved đ â and for half the episodes the writers wanted us to root for him. Scariest villain ever!
But the "real" villains?
His father, his wife, his abusers, the 'righteous' sects. So almost everyone who breathed while he existed.
The "villain is just traumatized", the system that created the monster - these are everywhere, not just in xianxia (with those corrupt elders and hypocritical sects). It's almost a genre staple at this point. They make the bad guy soft, make the institutions monstrous, and call it complexity. It's not. đ
Deaths, coughing blood, transmigration, years of separation â it's all here. Too many timelines, too many complications and along the way the characters get lost in the mechanics of it. So i stopped caring about them.
The ML's actor is genuinely impressive. He plays four different versions of the same character across timelines and you can actually tell them apart. Great acting. The FL's actress is equally skilled â but the writers gave her almost nothing to work with. To make the ML more sympathetic - even though he is supposedly the most evil man on Earth or in the Three Realms (or however Xianxia logic works đ) - they sacrificed the FL's character, leaving her inconsistent and too passive for someone sent back in time on a world-saving mission.
Which brings me to the "great love story": both actors are skilled and they clearly have a dynamic together (as we see in Love is sweet also), but for me it felt performative rather than real. And that's because the characters were sacrificed along the way: the ML's supposed evilness is reduced just to trauma and the FL's empathy reads more like pity. So their story didn't convince me. A depressed traumatized man slowly being humanized by his caregiver. Romantic? Not for me. âšī¸
And this is another pattern that frustrates me in asian dramas.
If the ML is evil, keep him evil. If he's strong, keep him strong. Don't sand down every interesting edge he has just to make a point about the "power of love"! Because they usually go from cold/guarded men to shy puppies after falling in love and act so childish that it makes me cringe. Or worse - they build an ultra strong female character by tearing the poor man down (best example - Pursuit of Jade đ).
Evolution â erasure. The best characters change what they do, how they think, not who they fundamentally are.
The most evil being in the Three Realms? Just a bullied kid nobody loved đ â and for half the episodes the writers wanted us to root for him. Scariest villain ever!
But the "real" villains?
His father, his wife, his abusers, the 'righteous' sects. So almost everyone who breathed while he existed.
The "villain is just traumatized", the system that created the monster - these are everywhere, not just in xianxia (with those corrupt elders and hypocritical sects). It's almost a genre staple at this point. They make the bad guy soft, make the institutions monstrous, and call it complexity. It's not. đ
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