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This review may contain spoilers
A typical historical romance drama with a fresh twist
This would have been another one of those typical historical romance cdramas with wronged leads, lots of scheming for revenge, and court intrigue if it wasn't for one big twist - FL here suffers from severe psychological trauma and is an unreliable narrator. Add to that ML having a physical disability, and you get a dire mix of trauma dumping from the crippled leads in this drama, driving most of the plot. All in all, this drama is around 10% romance, 40% scheming, 50% trauma. So if you're looking mainly for romance here, you may be disappointed.
TL;DR:
POSITIVES:
- Very interesting FL character's concept
- Stellar Lishan mountain arc
- FL's cunning revenge schemes
- Different POVs and clever use of unreliable narration from FL's perspective
- Beautiful OST
NEGATIVES:
- Very lackluster, prudishly filmed romance
- Some big, forced angst for the sake of moving the plot
- Convoluted plot device
- Uncompelling, boring villains
- The plot is not easy to follow due to how it was filmed
- Lots of forgettable side characters
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FEMALE LEAD:
FL here is a genius level scholar, martial arts pro, experienced medical expert, skilled painter, savvy businesswoman, wise beyond her years and progressive, yet also kind, selfless and generally liked by all. She's also very cunning and plots elaborate schemes like a veteran strategist. She'd definitely fall into a typical Mary Sue category, but it's easy to close your eyes on all that because of her severe mental trauma.
5 years before the start of the plot, FL suffered a great tragedy at the scholar academy on mount Lishan, where she lived with her grandfather and other scholars. She survived, but it left a deep scar in her psyche, resulting in a severe case of PTSD, with symptoms such as hallucinating imaginary interlocutors, associating herself as another person, and completely erasing the tragedy from her mind. Her hallucinations come and go on a trigger when she's very stressed.
Because of this, it's very easy to sympathize with her - she's traumatized, her mind is fragile, she's lonely and yearns for family's warmth and somebody to lean onto. She's utterly devoted to ML after marrying him.
She expertly hides her plans and intentions behind all sorts of masks to complete her goals - naive, overly cheerful, impassionate, pitiful...But behind it all she's still that lonely, scared girl, crying her heart out on a desolated mountain.
The plot is heavily centered around FL and, like always in Bai Lu's dramas, she carries the whole drama on her shoulders. Forget about ML, he's just a prop here. Her intriguing, unpredictable character is the main highlight of this drama.
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MALE LEAD:
ML here is rather boring, to be honest. It's obvious he's mainly here to love FL and heal her trauma; it's a female-centric drama after all.
He's a typical brave and loyal general prince who got his legs crippled in a war 8 years ago and whose family almost got wiped out on unjust charges of treason. He harbors a grudge towards the same villains as FL and wants to clear his family's name, but in 8 years he hasn't achieved much on that front. Only after FL arrives at his mansion, do things start moving with him. He gets promoted to a prefect position, which allows him to investigate the villains' dealings. But in the end, it's FL who manages to clear his family's name through her scheming.
His character can be described as reserved, brooding, mistrustful and intolerant to pity.
Though very suspicious and wary of people after suffering from his own tragedy, he rather quickly gets enamored with FL, which later gets even a bit obsessive. After she convinces him to heal his legs and he learns of her mental issues, he tries to help her overcome them in return. And in the end, after weathering all the misunderstandings and villains' schemes, he becomes her one constant in the world to lean onto.
However!
One of the major letdowns of this drama also involves ML. To move the plot back to the Lishan mountain, the writers couldn't come up with anything better but to force a blown out of proportion, angsty misunderstanding between the leads. This led to the signing of divorce papers and FL, with all her imaginary friends, leaving back to the mountain. All because ML got into his mind that FL only pitied him and never loved him. He couldn't conceive it could be both. And, bro, you didn't marry for love; she did a lot for you, like, A LOT. But nah, one big misunderstanding and it's "off to the mountain with you, imma divorcing you". If people acted this flippant in marriage all the time, no sane woman would want to get married. It's not a fkn car rent contract.
Thankfully, they didn't drag this for too long. ML hated FL for pitying him, but after learning what happened to her on the mountain, he himself became overwhelmed with pity and rushed after her. The ironic hypocrisy at its best.
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PLOT:
The drama starts when FL is ordered to come down from mount Lishan back to her father's scummy family to marry ML in an arranged marriage. She leaves with a mental checklist of things to do:
• to avenge her mother's death;
• to avenge the mountain's graduates, who got persecuted;
• to uncover the edict plot device lost by her mother, which led to ML's family's ruin, and heal ML's crippled legs;
After the marriage, she immediately starts working on these things.
This is the most fun part of the drama - watching this dissonance-inducing character struggle with her mental trauma, all the while enacting her elaborate, cold and calculating revenge plans with precision and guile.
Another, absolutely stellar part of the plot was the Lishan mountain arc - FL elevated this drama to another level with her performance there. Prepare to cry.
Besides the intriguing mystery of FL's past and her revenge schemes, this is a typical historical romance drama - expect to see court intrigue, incessant scheming and plotting, annoying love polygons, etc. If you've seen a dozen such dramas already, there's nothing new to find here, unfortunately.
What they've tried doing cleverly with the plot here is carefully dosing crucial information about the mystery of what happened on mount Lishan, inserting different POVs, and introducing unreliable narration from FL's perspective.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PACING AND PLOT DEVICES:
Unfortunately, some scenes here were weirdly paced and edited, leading to uneven pacing overall. At times haphazard; at times abrupt; at times mulling over something too long; at times dropping names, but not showing who these people are until later; at times showing people, but you've got no clue who they are; lots of "blink and you miss it" plot points.
The drama also got quite draggy in the last couple of episodes, but at least nothing was rushed. Everyone had enough sceen time for their own epilogue and it was a happy ending for the leads.
There are also some very convoluted plot points here.
For example, the general-governor, whose murder was investigated for a long time, had such an egregiously written path to the capital, you can't help but get confused. He was kidnapped by one party, rescued by another, taken by a third, and murdered by a fourth.
And don't even get me started about the edict plot device. I even wrote an explanation with a timeline in discussions about it while trying to connect the missing dots.
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VILLAINS:
There are 3 main villains in this drama, and unfortunately, none of them are anything to write home about.
Marquis is a lapdog of the main villain - the empress dowager. Together, they staged a coup 8 years ago against the Crown Prince and erected the dowager's son as the new emperor. They then intimidated or killed all dissidents and kept on doing that for 8 years, until other factions started digging under them and eroding their bond with court intrigues.
The dowager's scenes mostly are as dull as watching paint dry, maybe because they tried showing her sickly and heavily burdened by regrets over the years.
And the marquis is so dumb and reckless and gets played so often throughout the drama, you'll quickly start questioning how these two even managed to grab and hold onto power.
All in all, these two are one of the major letdowns of this drama - very uncompelling and flat villains.
Then we also have the 3d villain - SML. The son of the killed Crown Prince and a contender to the throne, he's a typical Hamlet-esque character with some very annoying flaws, such as being obsessed with FL, being self-pitying, self-destructive, ruthless and conniving. He's a bit more interesting to watch, but in the later part of the drama he gets swept under the rug for many episodes, only to reappear in the end with predictable rebellion and pathetic death.
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SIDE CHARACTERS:
There are also lots of side characters plotting schemes against the villains, against each other, and against the main leads, but it's all been there, seen that. If you want to watch smart court intrigues, this drama definitely is not it, to a point it just starts to get cartoonish at times. They also kept adding a new set of side characters on the regular basis, making the cast very bloated in the end.
Some side characters, like the marquis's sons, were boring and a plain waste of screen time. Some side characters, like the stupid assassin boy and ML's merchant friend+rival kingdom's princess, had such big wasted opportunities in their sublots, it's frankly mind-boggling they weren't utilized.
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ROMANCE:
Unfortunately, it was so lackluster and prudishly filmed, it became another one of the major letdowns of the drama.
I've thought about what was so off about it for quite some time and here are my thoughts:
First, in terms of FL, for the bigger half of the drama she so often switched from acting overly cheerful, kind and friendly in one scene only to turn into a stone-faced, cold and calculating mastermind in another, that for the longest time it made me question whether anything she was doing or saying was genuine. So, her budding romance with ML also looked fake and not genuine for a long time. If it was for a purposeful sense of dissonance, it didn't do any favors to the romance subplot. Quite a bit later in the drama, they tried assuring the audience that she loved ML from the beginning by showing her having a teenage crush on him after he saved her one time years ago. But the first impression at that point had already taken deep root, and since it happened years ago, before her suffering mental trauma, it still wasn't convincing enough.
Second, while some viewers praised their good communication in the beginning, it mainly involved FL quickly resolving small misunderstandings with ML. But she never told him about or included him in her big revenge schemes. This led to a predictable, but very overblown conflict between the leads when ML learned she was lying to him. For the larger part of the drama they acted like a devoted married couple, but were working and plotting by themselves, never fully trusting each other, until it blew up in their faces.
Third, their relationship development skipped a few steps and never backtracked to pick them up.
Their romance here is a "slice of life", "skipping steps straight to the endgame", "old married couple" type. It lacked passion and sexual tension. ML was shown a few times to be nervous around FL, but she herself was looking like she's oblivious to any of this all the time.
Even when they finally consummated their marriage, it all looked so flat and unenthusiastic, it made me wonder whether anything actually happened there. There are literally two prudish kissing scenes in this drama, with none left for the ending, not to mention any mention about kids.
One could argue there was often something interfering with their romantic life - emotional unavailability from one side or the other, misunderstandings, them being busy with work or scheming. But there were also lots of quiet, peaceful moments that were wasted on day-to-day banalities and hand holding. At one point I was starting to wonder whether ML simply couldn't get it up, lol.
All in all, ML here shows more passion in being jealous and angry at FL's shenanigans, and FL acts most natural when she's executing her schemes and suffering from her trauma. It's possible the actors were uncomfortable with each other and failed to convincingly convey romantic feelings. But I saw these actors in other dramas, and I think romance wise the script simply was a disservice to their acting abilities. Not including a kiss in the final episode of a romance drama is just a crime in itself.
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PRODUCTION AND MUSIC:
Compared to some of the recent cdramas, the sets and costumes here are on the cheaper side, but at least they're fresh and new. I'm very tired of seeing the same palace sets in every historical cdrama made in the last 4 years or so. They've also tried stylizing everything with a pretty color palette - you can see it in the filters, sets and all costumes, definitely eye-pleasing.
And the last major highlight of this drama is the music - the background instrumental music is superb, and Zhou Shen's intro delivered as always, and there were some other nice songs here.
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CONCLUSION:
This drama sure was a rollercoaster in terms of how to rate it. I went back and forth as the episodes aired. And in the end, I gotta say that overall it's quite good. Some parts of it were simply stellar; some, unfortunately, didn't deliver.
If you're a fan of Bail Lu's work, it's definitely a must watch - compared to her other dramas, it's one of the better ones. She's been on a roll this year with good dramas. Her performance in the Lishan mountain arc will probably net her all the yearly awards, it was so good.
There were some very annoying letdowns in this drama, though, described in detail above, so I had to lower the score a bit. Overall, it's an 8 from me.
P.S. If you want to watch a drama where Bai Lu unquestionably fits her role like a glove, with none of the draggy soap in the plot, go watch her previous drama - Unveil: Jadewind. And it's funny, but even that grim detective drama had more exciting romance than in Mo Li, even though it wasn't the main focus.
For an intelligent court intrigue and revenge drama with well-written complex villains, I'd recommend the recent Legend of Zang Hai.
TL;DR:
POSITIVES:
- Very interesting FL character's concept
- Stellar Lishan mountain arc
- FL's cunning revenge schemes
- Different POVs and clever use of unreliable narration from FL's perspective
- Beautiful OST
NEGATIVES:
- Very lackluster, prudishly filmed romance
- Some big, forced angst for the sake of moving the plot
- Convoluted plot device
- Uncompelling, boring villains
- The plot is not easy to follow due to how it was filmed
- Lots of forgettable side characters
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FEMALE LEAD:
FL here is a genius level scholar, martial arts pro, experienced medical expert, skilled painter, savvy businesswoman, wise beyond her years and progressive, yet also kind, selfless and generally liked by all. She's also very cunning and plots elaborate schemes like a veteran strategist. She'd definitely fall into a typical Mary Sue category, but it's easy to close your eyes on all that because of her severe mental trauma.
5 years before the start of the plot, FL suffered a great tragedy at the scholar academy on mount Lishan, where she lived with her grandfather and other scholars. She survived, but it left a deep scar in her psyche, resulting in a severe case of PTSD, with symptoms such as hallucinating imaginary interlocutors, associating herself as another person, and completely erasing the tragedy from her mind. Her hallucinations come and go on a trigger when she's very stressed.
Because of this, it's very easy to sympathize with her - she's traumatized, her mind is fragile, she's lonely and yearns for family's warmth and somebody to lean onto. She's utterly devoted to ML after marrying him.
She expertly hides her plans and intentions behind all sorts of masks to complete her goals - naive, overly cheerful, impassionate, pitiful...But behind it all she's still that lonely, scared girl, crying her heart out on a desolated mountain.
The plot is heavily centered around FL and, like always in Bai Lu's dramas, she carries the whole drama on her shoulders. Forget about ML, he's just a prop here. Her intriguing, unpredictable character is the main highlight of this drama.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MALE LEAD:
ML here is rather boring, to be honest. It's obvious he's mainly here to love FL and heal her trauma; it's a female-centric drama after all.
He's a typical brave and loyal general prince who got his legs crippled in a war 8 years ago and whose family almost got wiped out on unjust charges of treason. He harbors a grudge towards the same villains as FL and wants to clear his family's name, but in 8 years he hasn't achieved much on that front. Only after FL arrives at his mansion, do things start moving with him. He gets promoted to a prefect position, which allows him to investigate the villains' dealings. But in the end, it's FL who manages to clear his family's name through her scheming.
His character can be described as reserved, brooding, mistrustful and intolerant to pity.
Though very suspicious and wary of people after suffering from his own tragedy, he rather quickly gets enamored with FL, which later gets even a bit obsessive. After she convinces him to heal his legs and he learns of her mental issues, he tries to help her overcome them in return. And in the end, after weathering all the misunderstandings and villains' schemes, he becomes her one constant in the world to lean onto.
However!
One of the major letdowns of this drama also involves ML. To move the plot back to the Lishan mountain, the writers couldn't come up with anything better but to force a blown out of proportion, angsty misunderstanding between the leads. This led to the signing of divorce papers and FL, with all her imaginary friends, leaving back to the mountain. All because ML got into his mind that FL only pitied him and never loved him. He couldn't conceive it could be both. And, bro, you didn't marry for love; she did a lot for you, like, A LOT. But nah, one big misunderstanding and it's "off to the mountain with you, imma divorcing you". If people acted this flippant in marriage all the time, no sane woman would want to get married. It's not a fkn car rent contract.
Thankfully, they didn't drag this for too long. ML hated FL for pitying him, but after learning what happened to her on the mountain, he himself became overwhelmed with pity and rushed after her. The ironic hypocrisy at its best.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PLOT:
The drama starts when FL is ordered to come down from mount Lishan back to her father's scummy family to marry ML in an arranged marriage. She leaves with a mental checklist of things to do:
• to avenge her mother's death;
• to avenge the mountain's graduates, who got persecuted;
• to uncover the edict plot device lost by her mother, which led to ML's family's ruin, and heal ML's crippled legs;
After the marriage, she immediately starts working on these things.
This is the most fun part of the drama - watching this dissonance-inducing character struggle with her mental trauma, all the while enacting her elaborate, cold and calculating revenge plans with precision and guile.
Another, absolutely stellar part of the plot was the Lishan mountain arc - FL elevated this drama to another level with her performance there. Prepare to cry.
Besides the intriguing mystery of FL's past and her revenge schemes, this is a typical historical romance drama - expect to see court intrigue, incessant scheming and plotting, annoying love polygons, etc. If you've seen a dozen such dramas already, there's nothing new to find here, unfortunately.
What they've tried doing cleverly with the plot here is carefully dosing crucial information about the mystery of what happened on mount Lishan, inserting different POVs, and introducing unreliable narration from FL's perspective.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PACING AND PLOT DEVICES:
Unfortunately, some scenes here were weirdly paced and edited, leading to uneven pacing overall. At times haphazard; at times abrupt; at times mulling over something too long; at times dropping names, but not showing who these people are until later; at times showing people, but you've got no clue who they are; lots of "blink and you miss it" plot points.
The drama also got quite draggy in the last couple of episodes, but at least nothing was rushed. Everyone had enough sceen time for their own epilogue and it was a happy ending for the leads.
There are also some very convoluted plot points here.
For example, the general-governor, whose murder was investigated for a long time, had such an egregiously written path to the capital, you can't help but get confused. He was kidnapped by one party, rescued by another, taken by a third, and murdered by a fourth.
And don't even get me started about the edict plot device. I even wrote an explanation with a timeline in discussions about it while trying to connect the missing dots.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
VILLAINS:
There are 3 main villains in this drama, and unfortunately, none of them are anything to write home about.
Marquis is a lapdog of the main villain - the empress dowager. Together, they staged a coup 8 years ago against the Crown Prince and erected the dowager's son as the new emperor. They then intimidated or killed all dissidents and kept on doing that for 8 years, until other factions started digging under them and eroding their bond with court intrigues.
The dowager's scenes mostly are as dull as watching paint dry, maybe because they tried showing her sickly and heavily burdened by regrets over the years.
And the marquis is so dumb and reckless and gets played so often throughout the drama, you'll quickly start questioning how these two even managed to grab and hold onto power.
All in all, these two are one of the major letdowns of this drama - very uncompelling and flat villains.
Then we also have the 3d villain - SML. The son of the killed Crown Prince and a contender to the throne, he's a typical Hamlet-esque character with some very annoying flaws, such as being obsessed with FL, being self-pitying, self-destructive, ruthless and conniving. He's a bit more interesting to watch, but in the later part of the drama he gets swept under the rug for many episodes, only to reappear in the end with predictable rebellion and pathetic death.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SIDE CHARACTERS:
There are also lots of side characters plotting schemes against the villains, against each other, and against the main leads, but it's all been there, seen that. If you want to watch smart court intrigues, this drama definitely is not it, to a point it just starts to get cartoonish at times. They also kept adding a new set of side characters on the regular basis, making the cast very bloated in the end.
Some side characters, like the marquis's sons, were boring and a plain waste of screen time. Some side characters, like the stupid assassin boy and ML's merchant friend+rival kingdom's princess, had such big wasted opportunities in their sublots, it's frankly mind-boggling they weren't utilized.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ROMANCE:
Unfortunately, it was so lackluster and prudishly filmed, it became another one of the major letdowns of the drama.
I've thought about what was so off about it for quite some time and here are my thoughts:
First, in terms of FL, for the bigger half of the drama she so often switched from acting overly cheerful, kind and friendly in one scene only to turn into a stone-faced, cold and calculating mastermind in another, that for the longest time it made me question whether anything she was doing or saying was genuine. So, her budding romance with ML also looked fake and not genuine for a long time. If it was for a purposeful sense of dissonance, it didn't do any favors to the romance subplot. Quite a bit later in the drama, they tried assuring the audience that she loved ML from the beginning by showing her having a teenage crush on him after he saved her one time years ago. But the first impression at that point had already taken deep root, and since it happened years ago, before her suffering mental trauma, it still wasn't convincing enough.
Second, while some viewers praised their good communication in the beginning, it mainly involved FL quickly resolving small misunderstandings with ML. But she never told him about or included him in her big revenge schemes. This led to a predictable, but very overblown conflict between the leads when ML learned she was lying to him. For the larger part of the drama they acted like a devoted married couple, but were working and plotting by themselves, never fully trusting each other, until it blew up in their faces.
Third, their relationship development skipped a few steps and never backtracked to pick them up.
Their romance here is a "slice of life", "skipping steps straight to the endgame", "old married couple" type. It lacked passion and sexual tension. ML was shown a few times to be nervous around FL, but she herself was looking like she's oblivious to any of this all the time.
Even when they finally consummated their marriage, it all looked so flat and unenthusiastic, it made me wonder whether anything actually happened there. There are literally two prudish kissing scenes in this drama, with none left for the ending, not to mention any mention about kids.
One could argue there was often something interfering with their romantic life - emotional unavailability from one side or the other, misunderstandings, them being busy with work or scheming. But there were also lots of quiet, peaceful moments that were wasted on day-to-day banalities and hand holding. At one point I was starting to wonder whether ML simply couldn't get it up, lol.
All in all, ML here shows more passion in being jealous and angry at FL's shenanigans, and FL acts most natural when she's executing her schemes and suffering from her trauma. It's possible the actors were uncomfortable with each other and failed to convincingly convey romantic feelings. But I saw these actors in other dramas, and I think romance wise the script simply was a disservice to their acting abilities. Not including a kiss in the final episode of a romance drama is just a crime in itself.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PRODUCTION AND MUSIC:
Compared to some of the recent cdramas, the sets and costumes here are on the cheaper side, but at least they're fresh and new. I'm very tired of seeing the same palace sets in every historical cdrama made in the last 4 years or so. They've also tried stylizing everything with a pretty color palette - you can see it in the filters, sets and all costumes, definitely eye-pleasing.
And the last major highlight of this drama is the music - the background instrumental music is superb, and Zhou Shen's intro delivered as always, and there were some other nice songs here.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONCLUSION:
This drama sure was a rollercoaster in terms of how to rate it. I went back and forth as the episodes aired. And in the end, I gotta say that overall it's quite good. Some parts of it were simply stellar; some, unfortunately, didn't deliver.
If you're a fan of Bail Lu's work, it's definitely a must watch - compared to her other dramas, it's one of the better ones. She's been on a roll this year with good dramas. Her performance in the Lishan mountain arc will probably net her all the yearly awards, it was so good.
There were some very annoying letdowns in this drama, though, described in detail above, so I had to lower the score a bit. Overall, it's an 8 from me.
P.S. If you want to watch a drama where Bai Lu unquestionably fits her role like a glove, with none of the draggy soap in the plot, go watch her previous drama - Unveil: Jadewind. And it's funny, but even that grim detective drama had more exciting romance than in Mo Li, even though it wasn't the main focus.
For an intelligent court intrigue and revenge drama with well-written complex villains, I'd recommend the recent Legend of Zang Hai.
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