snorlaxintheroad

Without giving spoilers my main thought on this series was that the acting by the leads and most of the supporting cast was absolutely amazing. It's what carried what, in my opinion, was an underdeveloped, repetitive story and sold it to its conclusion.

To touch on a few things: the story was frustrating in a number of respects. One, the conflicts were largely repetitive and didn't develop or evolve in a meaningful way. Basically, the same types of situations kept happening. And two, along a similar vein, I did not feel like our FL was given meaningful development. For me, it was her obvious interest and talent for engineering that seemed like it could have been something to drive her character development from petty revenge scheming to something useful, but instead this interesting aspect to her character became a throwaway in the background and even seen as a character flaw to be beaten into submission. The story got too wrapped up in palace/high society drama and dunking on the FL for basically everything—even hypocritically so when the ML does similar things after chastising her for her behavior. We largely abandon development with her family midway through, when it seemed like this was a focal point for the characters, and then get a rushed montage of events that happen in the years that pass. At the same time, the story took a very frustrating turn in the last several episodes that seemed like it had no purpose except to add shock-value and to draw out the final conflict with a lot of overwrought angst or possibly to just fill the time left.

All of it left me feeling like it was pointless by the end; I really wasn't sure what the overall theme of the story was at that point. With lesser actors I might have quit well before the end, but I do have to hand it to the leads, especially the FL, for their delivery.