luckz

If I place Lighter & Princess and First Frost somewhere in the 8–10/10 range for chemistry between the leads, this is like a 5/10.

More the "leaning on the shoulder" type.

As a heart-warming family show, this is better than the Korean Reply's: For one because there's no ajummas bickering on the porch. And there's no forced nostalgic "remember how, back in 1980, we used to...". It has fairly high production value as well.

However, the romance side falls quite flat, with the chemistry of the ML and FL being lukewarm at best and there being little romantic affection between them that doesn't just look like their regular family member affection. Even two of their respective relatives have far more convincing romantic chemistry in their scenes. For that, it's just the wrong show to watch.


Judging them just based on their Go Ahead performances, Song Wei Long basically is a bit of an expressionless wooden log (mùtou: 木头), while Tan Song Yun certainly has comedic talent (with a decent modicum of over-acting thrown in), but she looks forced in all romantic scenes, as if it's not her genre or she can't see Song Wei Long as anything else but a brother.

They did, but they're hard to find in the actual scenes.
That they don't have speaking roles in those scenes gives the illusion that they're not around.

Because of https://kisskh.at/33098-dreaming-back-to-the-qing-dynasty

The trailer for https://kisskh.at/33098-dreaming-back-to-the-qing-dynasty explains the buzz cut.
It's quite lazy that over 5-6 years it never changes though.

Quite strong boundary delivery.

Re your drop:
The first episode of this is really bad, it gets to a more palatable level from the second on or so.

Since the authors of this show clearly read Lighter & Princess or whatever the original story is, I'll try to offer context based on the L&P drama which you also watched:
(I don't think I have the stomach to read the novel.)


"the instigator of the leak...he should be in jail not running a wedding business"
In L&P the head villain eventually gets arrested for financial crimes without the leads being involved in it.
Here the relationships were moved around (this character has a girlfriend instead of L&P's Gao Jian Hong having a wife) so that he gets a reconcilliation with his partner instead of being sent to jail. And because this is the gentle all-ages version, neither of them experiences any serious health issues either.


"I hated that they did a completely pointless long distance thing right at the end. There was no need. It added nothing, it just made me dislike FL."
I think this replaces the time the ML is in jail (3 years in the drama, maybe even like 8 years in the novel?) where the FL throws herself into work 'like a spinning top, never stopping' and becomes a famous young executive closer to ML in workplace skills. So basically it's a growth period for her in the original story, and the classic 'proof to the mean mother that they still want to be together/marry after years of separation'.
I usually hate when one of the leads is randomly sent away for 1-3 years near the end of a show,


"Why the hell would you pick those two assholes to be your best man and bridesmaid?"
Think this is some 'bridesmaids in China are not supposed to be married/divorced or pregnant' thing, and ditto for best men? Maybe the producers wanted those non-lovebirds to not only have a some redemption & forgiveness thing but to get them back together, and then decided against it. I needed to pause the wedding scene and look carefully to even find Qin Yue in it (he's behind the wedding planners). He doesn't perform any best man actions.

"Or the weird roommate with the glasses, who seems like she's building up to a great big resentment-filled cathartic monologue, but at some point in the last third of the drama, they just drop her and we never see or hear about her again."

She eventually starts to respect and help the FL: She helps her with the schoolboy who makes her life difficult and afterwards had a scene each with the FL and Shi Ying where she was no longer a hater.
Since it's a Disneyfied bootleg L&P adaptation, everybody gets their redemption arc.

The SML is super creepy and often quite disrespectful.

I would recommend watching L&P first and using this as fluffy recovery. (Btw the first episode of this is really bad.)

Seems you dropped both though? :c

The First Frost is an apt comparison with how in-character the two leads are.

IIRC it indicates the general area of the associated scene.

Is it useful to first re-watch Hidden Love, then watch First Frost, or to first watch First Frost and then re-watch Hidden Love, or just watch this on its own as a drama completely unconnected to Hidden Love?
(Watched HL one year ago.)

You didn't even get to the Final Boss™ there, whose contradictory motivations and allegiances defy all reason and aren't illuminated for more than three lines of dialogue.

Or how else Young Master..., uh, tries to master his only objective.

So the novel has crap tons of Su Rong Qing overload too, but the drama adds another 50%?

Dai Gao Zheng has a tiny cameo-ish part (in the first episode or so). Wouldn't take too much time to watch that.

Liu Rui Lin has a quite big part, but I neither liked his acting nor the role much. Definitely overstayed his welcome.

If you like over the top villains and their sometimes comedic antics, you might have a much more positive opinion than I did, and especially enjoy the way he greets his father each time.

The things the drama writers added to the novel to make the ML "prove himself" and be less of a second fiddle to the FL just aren't good/interesting, and in the latter part they don't have much time for the titular arc(s).

It's unfortunate that WoL does not have sufficient interesting plot content for its extremely long runtime, and ultimately goes in circles for a decent chunk of the second half. On the plus side, at least the final episode has enough time to wrap everything up in a bow.

The leads are neat enough, but the villains and supporting characters are almost all worse versions of something you've seen in other shows. Later on, repetitive villains take up too much screen time with their boring schemes, to the detriment of the leads' synergistic planning (one of the elements that made the earlier episodes entertaining).

So much of the show is green screen (or rather blue screen) that it really hurts scenes coming over as 'genuine'. The backgrounds of some horse riding close-ups are like car interior scenes with rear projection as seen in ancient movies.
There is a lot of CGI as well, and much of it of laughable quality: anything to do with "Wonderland", or any projectiles in combat – whether arrows or catapult-launched rocks – sticks out like an amateurish thumb. I dare you to look up close at a top-down view of the 3D animation of the leads' horses roaming the Leyou Plains without at least a giggle.

Compared to some other drama OSTs handled by the often-amazing Chen Xue Ran, this one is more 'just okay', but definitely not among his best works. Even the song with frequent collaborator Liu Yu Ning is nothing special whatsoever.