Eternal Love vs Ashes of Love: The Mother of All Discussions

I personally like Ashes of Love much more than Eternal Love.

I'm a huge fan of historical dramas that involve gods, magic, etc. For me Ashes of Love gave me everything I wanted in a historical drama, great villains, slow burn romance, heartbreak, a naive FL who later becomes stronger, and a story that kept me hooked until the end due to all the twists and turns! Also, as a fan of intense love triangles, I love the two triangles that were shown throughout the story!

On the other hand, I do still hold Eternal Love close to my heart and I do think it is much better than some historical dramas that have been released lately. I loved how strong the FL was, she didn't need the ML's support often(Well, when she had her memories lol). What I also liked about this drama was the secondary couples! (Especially Dong Hua and Feng Jiu :)), they were so adorable and helped me carry on watching.

In conclusion, I think these two dramas are very similar in terms of their production (CGI, Costumes, etc) and most definitely their memorable OSTs! But personally, Ashes of Love gave me more satisfaction because of it's plot (Slow paced romance, villains, love triangle, etc).

It was awesome to read your thoughts here. I hope people will add some more comments to this thread. By the way, does Penn State require sat essay? Maybe you know that.

For me Eternal Love is much better than the Ashes. I am not much into love dramas, but very much into xianxia, which always comes in package with crazy love stories somehow. The characters of Eternal Love are so much better elaborated. With the Ashes this only applies to the Night Immortal. Each and every character of EL has their background and strong reasons to do what they do. You can safely show this drama to psychology students as a demonstration of psycoanalytical typology of characters. With the Ashes I was struggling to understand the nature of the main leads' love. I hate the stories when people fail to be together because of someone's bad will or "cutting off" any ability as such. I hated Jin Mi's pill and couldn't figure out what was that supposed to mean and what exactly did it do. Authors can write anything and make it a drama, but I require some level of psychological realism in this magic world of xianxia. With the Ashes, again, only the Night Immortal gets 10 out of 10 for wonderful description of his process. I had to guess and build my own theories about the rest (which I eventually did and feel more settled with the characters now). 

OST are incomparable either. In Eternal Love you can turn off the text and still track the moods of the drama just by richness of the music. They've  got their special themes for every character, every world, every mood and most of the situations they are going through. It is like a symphony in itself and accounts for 30% of the drama's success (in my own terms). And look at the Ashes' OST: they've only got 3 tracks that keep rotating over and over to the point that they are getting annoying. Didn't the shadow princess couple deserve a separate theme? Poor job indeed.   

The Ashes have got a few real nice comic scenes and there is nothing like that in the EL, but I didn't watch the shows as comedies after all. I am grateful to the Ashes for a few very jenuine and vibrant scenes (not related to love of the two leads, maybe just a couple of them). Composition wise the Ashes seem a little smoother, because they don't have a distracting side love line like Bai Feng Jiu and Don Hua Di Jun and the assimilation phase at the end of the show is longer (a good half a final episode), which feels much more comforting and giving a full sense of completion if compared with the EL, where YeHua resurrects five minutes before the end and this is kinda rough landing. 

You cannot help comparing the two shows because they do resonate and echo with each other. In the Eternal Love and main male lead dies to save the world and in the Ashes this happens to the female lead. But Eternal Love is so much better for me. It is in fact top second in my own (even though quite short a list) rating.

Ashes of Love

It would be interesting to add into comparison also Eternal Love of Dream, which is from the same universe as Eternal Love, but has different story line (about romance of Dong Hua and Bai Feng Jiu).I loved this one. Now I want to watch EL and also AOL.

Ashes of love will be my favorite Xianxia. The main characters in ashes of love had better chemistry and it wasn’t as hard to sit through hour long episodes. Eternal love was super boring for so many episodes and the ending wasn’t spectacular compared to other c dramas.