luckz

How *beneficial* is to watch DY and perhaps TBOY first? (I know it's not *necessary* to follow the plot.)
I'm more asking how many references there are that a viewer would enjoy/notice.

Would TBOY spoil much of the plot or just the ending between ML1/ML2?

In the novel, how does Dou Shi Ying (FL's father) relate to the treason plot?

In the show, he is listed in the uncle's list of evildoers that he sends to his sister (letter from Jiang Mei Sun to Jiang Hui Sun).
Then the leads talk to Dou Shi Ying and it turns out that he is on the jewelry shop investor list. However, the jewelry shop scheme is a new thing, as it's ran by Wei Ting Zhen and relates to the money from the horse market. When Jiang Mei Sun is still alive, there is no horse market, and Wei Ting Zhen lives in a state approaching poverty without access to this much money.
The show explains that the villain Dou Shi Shu tricked Dou Shi Ying into the jewelry shop scheme, but this does not at all explain his presence on Jiang Mei Sun's list of traitors.

Is it reasonable for Ming dynasty China eunuchs to act like dukes, with freedom to travel far and wide and to meet all sorts of people? The amount of out-of-palace time they have in Blossom makes them look more like minor/major officials than like palace servants.

Blossom's spin on rebooting life and navigating the hazards inside and outside the household initially feels like it's mixed together from other dramas that aired before & after. It does not have the ruthlessness of SOKP, the actors of LLTG, or the charm of TPR. What it does have is decent production values and plenty of actors that you (or at least I) haven't already seen ten times.
However, you also have leads that aren't fully leads material and have so-so chemistry*. One million filler-ish plots of the household villains scheming (usually against the FL), or court scheming of a really flat and boring nature. You have to endure a murky actor like Li Xin Ze for hours upon hours, despite his character being as irrelevant as it gets. Sometimes it's a contender for the worst-dressed FL award. The OST is barely even present.

I thought the first episode was great (the past/original future as a hook), and through the first quarter of the show it kept progressing the overall main plot as well as letting the leads have some meaningful interaction. After that it felt like the C team took over in the writing department. They managed a streak: Every single episode from 09 to 18 contains some huge plot holes or has at least one big scene that is total nonsense. Things that could be resolved in an episode are dragged out endlessly, and the same villains keep getting away with things. The more boring and more minor villains even get more attention than the big bads. The 26 hours contain at most 9 hours of meaningful content.

The ML's look from the opening episode? Criminally underused. They have two(!) sets of *real twins* – but do barely anything with them. The FL gets a whole handbook of the future in the first episode – but that too just becomes part of the wasted potential in the writing department.

In the end, it was very difficult to finish Blossom. At least the ending is fleshed out enough and doesn't just fade out to the credits when the (usual) palace plot concludes.


*: Supposedly they had great chemistry when promoting the show. 🤷‍♂️

In episode 24(!), after being culpable for like 100 deaths(!), the evil stepmother is... still not executed, merely declared mad in the head and dropped from the story.

This show made me wish I was someone who skips or drops. :c

The politics are the boring kind of politics as well.
And otherwise it's boring family intrigue, with characters that were born only to plot and scheme in their own household.

We got so convinced that there was reluctance between the two actors that we kept focusing on it for any kissing scenes. Their eyes don't look like they want to, anything up close is cut short, then cut to some far-away angles to fake it altogether...

To me it was like someone flipped a switch and now it's a completely different person with a fresh-out-of-the-oven personality :(

It just gets harder and harder to finish as it goes on.
If you aren't even excited by the start, there's so much side stuff starting around episode 09 ...

The characters I had the highest hopes for, all used for... nada :<

In the first timeline he worked for Prince Qing and helps kill ML&FL.
In the second timeline, he swears loyalty to ML during an interrogation, and afterwards plays a sort of double agent, pretending to defect to Prince Qing.

In EP01 at 40 minutes he wakes up and says he forgot everything. He doesn't ever remember, other than seeing FL when near-death.

Here it can be taken as "the character(s) had a very long dream" instead of being straight up reborn. Of course this doesn't really work with how the FL takes charge of things, but ...

No, he too is reborn or dreams their deaths in the future, and so is one SML, but ML doesn't remember while the other two do.
When ML first wakes up as a child, he says he had a very long dream but cannot remember anything. And that he feels he should not have forgotten it. (EP 01 40 minutes)

The first like 8 episodes actually still have some merit and premise.
After that there's basically no episode without the script derailing in some way, and the endless family intrigue and focus on irrelevant characters is really boring.

Struggled really, really hard to finish it.
If you are thinking about dropping it at some point after the first episodes, it's better to drop it.

At some point in the middle, the whole "knowing the future/past" element also randomly disappeared from the plot virtually entirely.
There's only one credited screenwriter, but it felt stitched together by about four, all competing for the direction the story should develop.
(There's other times where the FL knows events with absurd precision that she wasn't there for in her previous life, and uses this magic knowledge to intervene like a surgeon of fate.)

he's randomly transformed into a completely different personality later on 🤷

It's short and overall harmless.