m5m

Fun, classic period-c-drama. Features a very strong female lead performance by Zoey Meng. ML (played by He Yu)is also just as capable so isn't diminished by the FL in any way. He's just, unfortunately, hindered by poison through nearly all the story., which is frustrating because you can feel that holding him back from his full potential The romance-factor is important but develops slowly as, while ML is absolutely smitten by the FL from the moment he sees her and has his heart locked on her with laser precision that never wavers, the FL starts out the story having 'survived' pretty heavy trauma (a forced loveless marriage, the extermination of her entire family, driven to suicide in order to get revenge before being reincarnated within the body of a woman who was, herself, just murdered! So she is quite understandably extremely guarded emotionally. She has her shields up at maximum constantly and so it takes a looooong time before she has finally healed enough from her trauma to let them down and allow the ML to touch her heart. Her apparent coldness turns some fans off but just keep her history in perspective and be patient. Once she finally falls for him, she falls hard so it's all worth it. The only real negative in this show (other than some occasional clumsy edits and frequent reliance on 'off screen' events getting added to the narrative only by talking about them, is the way it handled the Prince Xin character. Xin's character is basically the all-too-familiar 'psychopathic-obsessive-unrequitted love interest' drama trope. Played brilliantly and creepily by Jeremy Xu. This character, like in too many c-dramas, is given too much screen time, beyond what is needed for the storyline, Very popular in a lot of c-dramas to try to mislead the audience into having sympathy or empathy with this sort of creepy based on 'sad backstory'. And this show does too much of that as well. Fine. We just have to accept he's a psycho and endure all his creepy weirdness and eventually this builds up to him doing awful psycho things that the FL needs to overcome. Where it gets weird though is in the end, the show decides to tuck in a one-on-one conversation between the Xin character and the FL, Xi He, where he explains that he did all these bad rebellious things just so she would gain legitimacy through stopping him. So with this revelation, the show gets to portray Xin to the audience as just a misunderstood 'good guy'. A martyr, in fact. But the fact is, to the larger plot, if he was simply a psychopath who rebelled, as we thought anyway, the FL still would have been legitimized because she stopped him. In other words, this bizarre 'reveal' at the end made absolutely ZERO difference to the plot. And this 'twist' doesn't exist in the storyline anywhere outside of that private conversation and then a brief mention later between Xi He and Xin's brother. So it just feels weird and contrived and pointless. The whole conversation scene was totally bizarre - she had NO reason to grant that conversation to him and ultimately just became some 10 minutes of wasted screen time. If they simply left him as a psychopath who rebelled, then the entire rest of the story remains the same. That screen time could have been put to better use on maybe building more interesting foreshadowing of Hua Yong's fate. Make it so that a lot of viewers have a better understanding of what happens at the end without thinking it is magic.