jeoneungd

I read The Lord of the Rings when I was 14, so fantasy has always been part of my imagination. Give me nine hours of Tolkien’s Middle-earth and I’ll happily sit through every minute. But Chinese xianxia dramas? That’s where I struggle. It’s not the fantasy itself, but the fluidity of the storytelling. CGI spectacles, magical battles, and cartoonish creatures do very little for me. Even the miniature models of the original Star Wars had more charm and felt more believable. Perhaps that’s why I’ve always preferred wuxia, where even the most impossible sword fights are grounded in human emotions, ambition, loyalty, and revenge.

Halfway through Till the End of the Moon, I’ve already skipped more episodes than I care to admit. I feel like I’m watching a tennis match, constantly turning my head left and right as the characters bounce between love and hatred, life and death, suffering and even more suffering. How many times can someone die without actually dying? And how much misery must these characters endure before the writers decide they’ve suffered enough? When death becomes another temporary inconvenience, sacrifice begins to lose its meaning. Instead of building tension, the endless twists simply wear me down.

And here’s what disappoints me most. I’m a fan of Luo Yunxi and Bai Lu. I wanted to love their characters, feel their pain, and lose myself in their romance. But I just couldn’t connect. Maybe it’s me, or maybe the script simply wasn’t compelling enough. The performances are certainly there, the costumes are beautiful, and the production is ambitious. But all that visual grandeur means little when the story fails to touch me. Watching people suffer endlessly doesn’t automatically make their story more emotional. Sometimes it just makes it unbearable.

Tolkien understood something that I feel this drama has forgotten. Fantasy doesn’t need to be realistic, but its characters need to feel real. Frodo, Sam, Aragorn, and even Gollum lived in a world of impossible creatures and magic, yet their fears, sacrifices, and struggles were deeply human. I could understand them, sympathize with them, and care about what happened to them. That’s what makes a fantasy memorable, not how many times the heavens explode or how many lives the characters must endure.

So I’m dropping this halfway through. Not because I dislike the actors or the genre, but because I’ve simply lost the desire to find out what happens next. There’s only so much suffering I can watch before tragedy becomes repetitive and romance becomes exhausting. Perhaps the second half is brilliant, and perhaps I’m missing something extraordinary. But a story shouldn’t require me to endure twenty episodes of frustration just to discover why I should care.

For me, the greatest tragedy of Till the End of the Moon isn’t what happens to its characters … it’s that I eventually stopped caring what happens to them.