Nanfeng

I get that the drama characters are more fleshed out to fit the elongated length and for television format as it is not like a book where a character can described in a few words.

However, I found the change in setting to introduce typical xianxia elements e.g., with a council of elders, ML's tortured background, mistrust between the leads etc. made the ML and FL a bit more cliche - losing the uniqueness they had in the short novel. I liked that the relationship was very nontraditional in the novel and while the drama has fully developed character arcs for both the ML and FL, I just found it not as good as the novel.

I am not saying the drama is bad - it is good in its own right - just that my personal preference is the novel setting with characters that we don't often see in Cdramas. This comes from a decade of watching dramas and reading webnovels and so, I guess, I just prefer to find something new and extra.

I get that they needed to invent more characters and change different storylines to add drama and angst for the TV adaptation but they lost all the uniqueness of the novel characters and just made a run-of-the-mill wuxia with all the usual tropes.

I don't think I have seen a faithful adaptation since Shenli. Recommend any recent good ones.

They really took the "adapted from" seriously as this is a very different drama from the novel

I wish we only had the MYG and XJL pairing. They are my fave and I would just watch a drama with them alone

do you think elvis requests it?

This! it was already weird in Fake it Till you make it. Here, it's worse because the character is also called Elvis Han. Now, it seems like I am watching the actor in different lives instead of watching him imbue different characters

me tooo!

I can't believe its been more than 5 years already! I want to erase this from my brain and restart. I slightly miss the era of palace dramas

thank you

thank you! i'm glad they ease up on it. did you like the show overall?

i just started and highly dislike the OST. it decreases the gravity of each scene where it's used, introduces anachronism, and feels disharmonious.

Wei Jiu and Elder Tu were also my favourite couple! Wei Jiu is just such a cute villain, my standout character that gave me some joy in the middle of the back and forth i love you - i don't angst

it got so draggy with the annoying back and forth but the rest of it is so well executed that it helps counter the weak middle full of useless angst

this exactly is my problem. why would he kiss her in a moment of vulnerability? a hug would have made so much more sense, no?

the chief priestess has her method, the other queen of jolbon has her method, our queen has her method, the queen's sister had her method etc. how can one watch that rape-murder scene for example and not see the monstrosity of Bal Gi?

exactly! some of those scenes drove the point of the subjugation of women home and showed how difficult it was to be a woman at the time. we literally have different examples of how powerful women try to shield themselves from the pressures of society at the time...

I do not get the hate for this drama at all! This has kept me on my toes the entire time! I mean, just when you think you have figured out the chessboard, new information is released about a different piece. Like if you ignore the small directorial artistic freedoms such as the speed of pigeons, the distance between places, and the passage of time, this story is unsurpassable. It is close to the complexity of NIF if Langya Bang was packed into 8 eps

They didn't show any actual photography skills but the BTS photographers who took the pictures for the exhibitions for the script were actually amazing!

I just felt sorry for him and didn't really care much for him - since he knows and we all know that it is never gonna happen

it is more slice of life with a dash of romance. More focused on the coming back of Samdal to her hometown of Samdal-ri