Well ,enough with my rants. Despite the flaws and disappointments, I still gave a very high rating because of all the feels I experienced while watching. YWY alone saved the drama. I might be biased in saying this but regardless of how tired I got from watching it dragged and dragged, I still continued watching it because of YWY and XingYue couple. Last time, I watched TMOPB, I thought Ye Hua must be the most suffering hero in all C-drama, but YWY just took the title. His love was so selfless and understanding that he does not ask for her to stay but only wants her to live happily. And of course, LGX brought YWY to life. Chu Qiao was very appealing and satisfying to watch as a female heroine who rose from slave status to a famous general in the beginning; yet, it became a subdued character in later episodes when she kept staying besides Yan Xun despite all that he has done. And the romance felt real and the two had so much chemistry that even with all the separations, every scene they are together, so much emotions felt between them.
Acting-wise, all the casts did a very great job. No one was lacking in his/her role. LGX especially stood out for me because his portrayal of YWY was majestic. ZLY, of course, did justice to her character. I didn't mention much of YX character because I wasn't a big fan of his, yet, Shawn Dou also did a great job portraying his character change.
So, to conclude, regardless of all the flaws and negative points, it was one of the great dramas this year, evidenced by the ratings and online views. I would still recommend to watch it if you are a great fan of Chinese historical/wuxia dramas and if you are a fan of either of the main leads and of course, if you can stand their pace and editing style.
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The drama is saved only by the heroes of the second plan. I fell in love with the characters played by Li Qin and Shown Dou. They were colorful and passionate personalities. Their tragic history was the only one in this drama that appealed to me. I watched the drama only for them.
It is not surprising the chaos of the plot, the lack of any development of the main characters when you consider that the drama script was based on a novel that lost the plagiarism trial. After the court verdict, I understood why watching this drama I always had a sense of deja vu.
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Chu Qiao is one of my favorite female protagonists I’ve seen in a cdrama. She’s smart, she’s loyal, she’s determined, and she’s a total badass. The growth she undergoes from being a slave just trying to stay alive to super skilled fighter able to take revenge on her enemies is great. She has her own goals and she will not be swayed from the path she has decided to take. I love that while the guys will sometimes come and rescue her from whatever predicament she’s in, she has pretty much handled it already (taken down 9 of 10 bad guys, cleverly talked her way out of a situation, etc) so they are just basically helping her wrap things up lol. Her character growth throughout the entire show is so interesting and fun to watch.
I seem to be in the minority in that I liked Yan Xun wayyyy more than Yuwen Yue. Yuwen Yue was fine, but kinda boring. I gave zero craps about his Heavenly Spies or wtf he was up to. He undergoes some character growth which is great but also... idk I just never really cared. Yan Xun on the other hand changes a lot and I found him and his story so compelling. I also found his and Chu Qiao’s relationship way more interesting. The things they experience together, how that brings them together, and how their relationship changes as they themselves change is great to watch.
I’m also possibly in the minority of liking the cliffhanger ending. I can see how it would be infuriating for someone who was watching the show while it was airing. But I will admit that the show suffers from some pacing issues and gets dragged down by subplots that don’t end up being important or even get resolved. That’s what frustrated me towards the end; not the actual ending, but how I felt like I was dragging myself through the last 10 episodes. I was truly invested in how it was going to end and what would happen to the characters. But because there are all these subplots and side characters, it was annoying to sit through the stuff I didn’t find interesting to get to the actual plot and conflicts that I cared about. They also low key seemed to forget about a few important plot points and just threw them in at the end.
The last episodes were also weird in that there was so much use of green screens. I generally try to not judge a show based on technical stuff but it was so distracting that it took away from the very serious and important stuff was occurring in those scenes. I’m sure there was some reason irl that they needed to reshoot those scenes or something.
Tl;dr this show has a very solid plot, an amazing female protagonist and other good characters, but does get bogged down towards the end.
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“How to Get Sidetracked: A Comprehensive Manual,” the Drama
Disclaimer: I read a few recaps and skimmed past episode 41.I was watching this when it first aired. I watched around ~25 episodes before life got distracting. Years later, I was idly scrolling through my dropped dramas and decided that if I was still curious about Chu Qiao’s fate after all this time, I might as well give it another go.
I’m not curious anymore. The entire reason I came back—to watch Chu Qiao rediscover her identity and realize her true potential—is so irrelevant it can hardly be called a side plot. They spend so much time ignoring what makes these characters interesting in favor of convoluted politics and half-baked romances and cheap conflicts. I didn’t even technically finish all 58 episodes and I still couldn’t tell you what happened in the episodes I DID watch.
The entire first half of the drama serves next to no purpose. Assuming you hadn’t read the novel, you’d never guess the trajectory of the story from the first ~30 episodes. Is it about Chu Qiao’s past? No. Is it about her toppling the system that turned her and so many others into slaves? Nope. Is it about her revenge, after that system takes the lives of her adopted family? Uh-uh. Is it about her finding a middle ground with her master/mentor/love-interest, and them teaming up to root out the corruption within the empire? Hardly.
It’s about the second-lead, Yan Xun—who you’d think is the love interest based on the sheer amount of screentime he spends with Chu Qiao—and how his soul is blackened by the assassination of his family after the Emperor’s betrayal. Which doesn’t sound half-bad, conceptually. Except it takes another 10 or so episodes (3+ years drama-time) before he can do anything interesting about it, and there’s no payoff because he brutalizes innocent people, betrays his allies, and loses Chu Qiao’s trust to make it happen. The rest of the drama, as far as I can tell, is about:
1. Everyone being in love with Chu Qiao and saving her at the critical moment
2. Yan Xun being hellbent on destroying the capital of the Empire, even if he has to forsake his homeland to do it
3. Princess Chun’er, who was formerly in love with Yan Xun, going insane and seeking vengeance against Chu Qiao because she considers Chu Qiao the catalyst to the series of events that destroyed her life, love, and virtue.
4. Chu Qiao feeling used and conflicted about where to place her loyalties
5. A montage of generally unimportant characters doing generally unimportant crap, just to stir up trouble and remind us that they exist.
And then everyone dies.
I’m kidding. A lot of people die, including (maybe), the main love interest. Chu Qiao ~almost~ dies and potentially remembers who she is, but we’ll never know, because that’s it, folks. Nothing has been resolved. We’re just left hanging alongside a landslide of loose ends, because that’s what happens when you dive into a dozen different plot lines and can’t keep track of them.
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I kind of have mixed feelings about 'princess agents'.It started off really good and i was sucked in into the story as i kept watching, but after about 45 or 50 episodes it kinda went downhill and became messy and didn't make sense at times.
I will start by mentioning my favorite things about this drama, firstly i adore the ost!! it's so beautiful!
Secondly i love the fact that the main female lead is a strong and independent woman and i absolutely love how badass she is!
Now the things that i didn't like, sometimes it felt like the writers didn't know what to do anymore and they just randomly made a character evil or made her make no sense nor her actions.
And the thing i hated the most was the ending
It ended on such a huge cliffhanger and left so many questions unanswered, which was really disappointing.
I still have a little bit of hope that we'll get season 2 one day and all of those questions will be answered.
If you're planning to watch this, just know that you will not get a satisfying ending, but overall i do think that this drama is worth watching, because despite it's flaws it's still enjoyable and interesting.
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Princess Agents must be one of the best chinese historical drama I've watched so far. Everything was awesome : the story was well balanced between love and the political plots.
Chu Qiao is oustanding, she is strong but at the same time weak and fragile. Yuwen Yue and Yan Xun are as convincing as her. The second leads were good as well.
Some characters were getting on my nerves, such as the princess or the king, but I couldn't hate them. She's just a poor soul lost in this cruel world and he's just afraid and scared.
I really hope they will make a second season. This drama definitely deserves a second season !
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..like a wall lol.I was bored at the end and I kept skipping. There were far too many chars who were unimportant/didnt add anything to the story but still had screen timw for no reason.
The music was fantastic though!
(Btw theres only 58 eps on viki but it says here 67?! Maybe season two? O.o)
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STORY: After rewatching, I definitely still think that the overall screenplay was lacking in a lot of places. The web novel itself definitely has a lot going on (haven't read it), but I feel like the producers didn't translate everything well on TV. There was so much going on and I was only able to understand everything better because I had already watched it through once. Overall, watching it as a whole show didn't give me as much of a dragging feeling that it gave me when I watched it while it aired - so that's definitely a bonus.
ACTING: Again, I always love Zhao Li Ying (but maybe it was from reading a few stories about her not being happy with how things progressed in the show), I felt like I really preferred her when she was still a slave. I feel like her character had much more personality and expression. Yes, the story gets much more serious in the second half, and Chu Qiao is going through a lot, but a lot of her scenes I feel seemed much more emotionless and just plain. And I LOVE ZLY and know she's a great actress, but that was one show that I feel like she didn't give it her all towards the end (again maybe it was a character progression).
Lin Geng Xin - Watching it this time through, I feel like even though YWY was cold on the exterior, I feel like LGX could have done a bit more to show emotions when the times called for it. Towards the end of the show, YWY got more sassy which I'm totally fine with, but his "romantic" scenes with CQ still felt like something was missing for me.
OVERALL: My impression of it was better than it was by the end of the first watch. Overall I still think that there were a lot of places that could be better (mostly storyline and a bit more emotion in acting) Its definitely a show I wouldn't mind watching again at a future date, but I will admit that even though there were some major aspects I didn't like, I'm PRAYING PRAYING PRAYING that they make the second season (With Zhao Li Ying of course) because I've read a few novel synopses and I need to know what happens in the rest of the story T_T.
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**I watched PA as it was airing over the course of a month or so, so I definitely don't remember EVERYTHING that happened, but just what I remember feeling at the end of it**
STORY:
I began watching about two weeks into the show airing, so the first 10 or so episodes I got to binge and watch all at once (my preference is to binge watch cause I don't forget what happened earlier in the show cause I would have just watched recently).
-The beginning of the story - great, fabulous, and captivating. I loved watching her learn how to be a skilled assassin (from YWY at least) and the slow relationship building between them and everyone else in her life. The bad guys were (sometimes) obnoxiously bad, but apparently that's really how things were in those times.
-By the middle of the drama (before everything with Yan Xun's family), things were still looking good. Chu Qiao/Xing Er was better trained and now actually using the skills she had learned.
-After everything that happens with Yan Xun's family (using that as the turning point), everything seemed to go downhill story wise. Suddenly everything was starting to combust and it was ridiculously hard to keep track of what was going on. (I'm honestly still not 100% sure what happened with Chu Qiao and the events before the story began (the past she forgot)). I kept watching daily to keep up with the show, but (and I'll attribute part of it to me not being able to binge it all at once) it really felt completely disorganized and it seemed to lose focus by the end of the show.
-By the middle-end half of the show, I had completely forgotten that Chu Qiao was originally Yu Wen Yue's slave and whatnot because there was just so much going on that I had forgotten the foundation of the story.
ACTING:
**I honestly don't think any of the actors were bad, but the characters lost points for me due to bad script**
-Zhao Li Ying is my favorite actress (at the moment, but at least for the next few years). Her acting is honestly always great to me. She is great at the cutesy innocent girl with a naive heart (Boss & Me). She was amazing as a hardworking and smart - though super stubborn - female (Legend of Lu Zhen). And she was great as a witty, cunning, and calculative double agent (Rookie Agent Rouge). She still excelled here for me as a trained assassin and super loyal companion in Chu Qiao Zhuan.
-Lin Geng Xin - I've only seen him in BBJX, but my friend (who I was watching the drama with) had high hopes for him, so I obviously did too. He did a decent job as Yu Wen Yue. Fairly standard "intelligent but cold" male lead. However, (and yes this is mostly due to script issues), he essentially became a background character by the second half. When he actually had screen time, it wasn't super captivating and memorable, so his character really felt lifeless to me by the second half.
-Shawn Dou - absolutely loved him in the first half as the loyal but carefree Prince, by the end he was just another character who kept abusing Chu Qiao's loyalty to him (which obviously makes me dislike him xD). Acting wise, again he did the best with what the script gave him.
**Special Shout Outs**
-Deng Lun !! - my friend was raving about him before he even made an appearance and I wasn't really sure why (hadn't seen him in anything else yet). His character was honestly great. Super awesome comedic timing and really memorable as Xiao Ce. (Loved him so much from this that I watched Because of Meeting You specifically for him).
-Niu Jun Feng (Prince Song) - Adorable in Love O2O and adorable in this too. He was great as the side character who had feelings for the main lead (but never really had a shot lol). In the later half of the series, he did a great job with the serious story lines he had to deal with.
REWATCH VALUE:
Now that the whole series is aired (and subbed) I'll honestly probably go back to rewatch it once just to a) be able to see the whole drama in entirety and maybe be able to keep up with the plot better and b) go back and see if maybe understanding the plot better will give me a better outlook on the drama and c) to listen to the soundtrack over and over (it's already downloaded onto my phone) and sing along.
I might update this once I've rewatched to see if anything changes.
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What an amazing story we’ve got… almost. This drama has as many beautiful characters and storylines as problems with writing and development. And by the end, it left me completely confused.Let’s start with the perfection that was the female lead. Dare I say one of the best I have ever seen in a drama? Yes. She was so strong and so amazingly flawed, it was hard not to love her, even when, at times, her decisions made my blood boil. She was fanatically loyal to people she cared about, even when faced with a moral dilemma. At times she ignored the wrongdoings of people around her, finding excuses for them and trying to justify their actions. When Yuan Song told Xing Er he cannot look at her confident and self righteous face, I couldn't agree more. At that moment I agreed with him and his reaction made perfect sense. But that’s the charm of Xing Er. She is just a human. She makes mistakes, her convictions are not always good and her decisions are not always correct.
Another character that caught my attention was Yuan Chun. The transformation she went through was amazing, yet so tragic. How she was driven into madness and self destructing. She was the true victim of the whole scenario presented to us. She was so innocent, and how these pure intentions she had were used by all the people she trusted and loved, broke her.
I must say, I quite enjoy the whole cast. Some characters deserving a bit of attention were: Xiao Ce - the charming prince with a good heart, Yuan Song - the cute prince with a bright smile, Yue Qi - the loyal bodyguard and the true MVP, He Xiao - the only one that truly deserves Yanbei.
That said, I was quite disappointed with both male lead characters. While Yu Wen Yue was painfully, boringly perfect, Yun Xun by the end of the drama was a dumb, easily manipulated villain without any true plan nor motivation behind his actions. Pushing him towards the dark side was a good idea and it worked for the most part, but the closer to the end we’ve got, the less sense I saw in anything and everything he was doing. I had no sympathy for him even though his character build up was based on the idea that we are supposed to feel empathy towards him, taking into consideration his past. For me, he could burn in hell and I couldn't care less.
And here we have the problems with the plot. For the most part it was perfect. I was truly amazed with the pacing. I was never bored, the plotlines were nicely entangled as we smoothly moved from one story to another. The problem is, at times we did not come back to some plotlines, and they were left unsolved. What happened to Xing Er’s sisters? We saw them meet when she was rescued, and then they were gone. Not even one line telling us where they are and what happened to them.
And it happened to the majority of the characters. We’ve got amazing setups, promising us more than we’ve got. The payoffs were simply weak. Xing Er’s core ability… nothing. It was mentioned here and there, the dramatic opening eyes and awaking her true potential at the end… and what next?
We know Xiao Ce is not just this dumb, playboy prince and he has so much more going on for him, why not show that? Why not show more of his duality? Cheng Yuan’s motivations were far better and deeper than we were led to believe for the majority of the run time. He wasn’t just a cruel and evil person. His decisions could have been logically explained as any other character. His ways of dealing with the problems were wrong, but it was not any worse from what we have seen from the majority of the other characters.
The romance… oh boi the romance. From day one we knew who the end game was, and I did not mind that. I wasn’t expecting some deep love triangles since the drama did not need it. Not even for a moment I thought Xing Er might romantically love Yan Xun. As much as he was obsessed with her, she was obsessed with the dream he created for her. For me it was just an unhealthy obsession she had for the better future and, later on, the need to save him from his own demons. Her heart was always with Yu Wen Yue. I loved their chemistry, their fighting scenes were beautiful and I've rewatched many of them quite a few times. I didn’t need more from it, just the longing, stolen glances, the lovers that should never happen. So why did we get that accidental kiss I am asking? Why did this happen when it was one of the most ridiculous and out of place scenes I have ever seen. The hug that followed a few episodes later had far more impact and conveyed greater emotions than any kiss they ever had. They were simply unnecessary.
The overall production value was beautiful yet questionable. The set design, costumes - perfection. The tragic CGI - painful. The scenes that made me laugh the most were the horse riding close ups when many times it did not look like people riding horses, the movement was wrong. What's more, often the sounds did not match the movement. For the OST though, I could not ask for more.
Truth to be told, I am surprised that with that ending (I don’t even want to talk about it) and the problems I had with the drama, I’m giving it 8/10 rating, but at the same time it makes perfect sense to rate it so high. The outstanding acting we’ve got probably helped a lot, so the frustrating parts of the plot were easily covered by the brilliant performance of the cast. I enjoyed it quite a lot, and watched it in 3 and half days. That's how invested in the plot I was. The ending ruined me. I needed a drink.
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It’s weird I still don’t understand why nobody proved that YX father wasn’t a rebel he was framed by that YH and that Liang princess Xiao yu..??As for YX I do understand his suffering as his country yanbei suffered the massacre, so much bloodshed and his whole family was killed brutally....then in that jiu-you platform how YH was playing with his fathers head they didn’t even buried his family properly ....and even after he was saved from death but they still tried to kill him with all means possible ....further he always introduced himself as the son of a traitor or sinner YX for all those yrs of imprisonment, so much humiliation not only to him but also to his deceased family, it’s really hard to overcome something like that...bcoz no child can endure humiliation of his family..
As for YY I somewhere felt that he could have avoid YX family being framed. Becoz he was ordered by the king to find proof against yin shicheng, but he could used that opportunity to prove him innocent or could have done something else, since he have that “eye of god” org running which provides so much intel on many things. Also whenever a’chu was in trouble he leaves all that hesitation behind of being the heir of yuwen household and his grandfather expectations but YX was his frnd for 10 yrs and still he didn’t gave his best to prove YX family innocent...
As for CQ I can’t really tell whether she loves YY or YX, becoz in case of YY she was guilty of not being able to repay for what he has done for her and in case of YX she share the same dream of him, wanted to protect him from any harm which she explained in the end.....but I really want her to end up with YX so that she can save him. Since only she can make him give up on his revenge and hatred and start realising him of his mistakes and repent on it before it’s too late...i deeply respect her bcoz even after YX changed she never backed off....since it’s easy to run away from things when they get messy but hard to face it ....and one more thing I really want is ....detailed confrontation between CQ and YX about the dreams and hopes he gave her, about people of yanbei and about what bai sheng told YX before dying.....
Looking forward to
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