yiinguang

(personal review - all thoughts, opinions, and biases are mine.)

the story is really great. for a revenge plot, it's solidly unpredictable and kept me at the edge of my seat while watching. ye li is so smart from episode 1 and i always love an intelligent FL. both her and mo xiuyao's stories captivated me, and how they actually yearned for each other and kept the other in their hearts for 8 years...

i do think there are some missing components in the story that could've made it even better especially concerning the characters. i think mo jingli's motivations are not really all that? he's insistent on his "love" for ye li and he also wants the throne but he also holds a grudge like dude get real just get it together. i couldn't really figure him out tbh, and the way moli played out gave me no room to sympathize with him despite his sorrowful death (which was really anticlimactic, actually). ye li's ptsd was handled well in my opinion, but her whole dissociative identity disorder was not really touched on at all and that bothered me. because she's clearly great at martial arts but she doesn't think so and she thinks that it's master zhu that saved her everytime she's in danger when it's herself...i guess this does tie into her whole hallucination-delusion problems that she believes master zhu is alive to save her but she clearly also has dissociative amnesia. oh well.

i really do love the entire lishan arc though. the conflict that led up to it was maybe unnecessary because like honestly mo xiuyao DIDN'T need to divorce her, like what the hell guys you dont NEED to divorce, but ik it's a necessary bridge to get ye li back on lishan and oh boyy. cheng lei and bai lu really nailed playing their characters at that time, i cried SO much because i felt so much for both mo xiuyao who was so regretful and sad for his wife, and ye li who lived in the delusion that lishan always remained as lively before the tragedy... (and i had this thought in my mind that the empress dowager must've planted the illness in the academy then sealed it off on purpose so that everyone would die without help and without people knowing but i guess not? how come ye li alone wasn't sick anyway? idk it's weird i'll accept it as just main character things.)

i really loved the side characters here when i usually don't care about them that much. ye li's family are all horrible people except ye ying who was just more pitiful than anything because she held onto her desire to be with mo jingli until the very end. the part where ye li confronts ye ying about her "love" for mo jingli did leave an impression on me because ye ying is pretty much in love with the idea of mo jingli rather than the man himself, but she fell in love with his works, his music, his writing... that struck a chord in me. she's actually a good character (speaking of, where was she in the ending?)
and then there's others a-jin, feng zhiyao, li feibai, han mingxi, even ms wen... just to name a few, i enjoyed them all very much. contrary to others opinions i actually did like the sub romance between feng zhiyao and lingyun i think they were sweet and tragic and i always loved a secret identity romance.

i'm not a hard critic, yeah the last few episodes were a drag but so are most cdramas honestly. and i really do love this story and this couple more than it lets me down, so i don't have a reason to give it less than a 9 in the end. it has good rewatch value for the fact that i'm sure you'll learn and catch on to more stuff on the second watch.

mo xiuyao and ye li make me yearn for marriage and i'm not even joking. they are so so sweet with each other, even when mo xiuyao is angry with her and scolds her, the care he has for her is just oozing out of the man. i loved watching them fall in love as they scheme together and go through life and death together it's just amazing. peak romance honestly.