This review may contain spoilers
Only one star makes for a pretty boring sky
I have such conflict over this show given how much I loved it for the first half vs where we ended up at the end. (mild spoilers ahead)This started as such a fresh take on old tropes. We didn't have to watch Ye Li carefully explain to her maids (or the audience) all of her carefully laid plans. What was going on in her world was a mystery for the viewer to solve on their own through clues and actually watching what was happening. The amount of fun it was to speculate with other fans was worth the price of admission, at least in the first half.
So far as the rest of the show goes and I feel like this goes for any story along these lines: The best way to make your main character more awesome is to have everyone else be awesome as well. Moli decided the best way to have Ye Li be awesome was to make sure to not let anyone else be interesting for longer than five minutes.
Before anyone gets mad at me, think about when we (know knowing her methods) watched her set up that whole scheme against her father. Then all she got out of it was a blank piece of paper. That was like a gut punch. We felt her despair; we watched her pick herself up and come back to that crazy climax of a showdown etc. I was high on life and cdrama giddiness about that for *days*.
Compare that feeling to watching her win her conflicts in a one-sided fight like a grown ass woman pushing down toddlers in a playground. Because that is how it went for the second half.
It was alright at first because you’re still very involved in her trauma at that point, but after the Linshan Mountain storyline wrapped that was it. That was the last of anything interesting happening in the show. We limped along till the end with a standard mid-level cdrama plot other than then occasional toddler carnage while we went down a checklist of Ye Li being the best at everything she tries. There wasn’t enough time to build a last arc plot and there were too many eps left as an “epilogue” to the main story.
It didn’t have to be like this. We were shown so many things that never got used or barely got touched on because it seemed like the camera always always had to swing back to Ye Li only. Even after switching to mid-level drama plot in the middle I think the show could have still survived with a high satisfaction level, but there was no one interesting left for her push over. Almost every side storyline was wrapped up in a way that felt like the writers were bored and just wanted to get it over with to rush back to Ye Li.
It felt like a waste of Cheng Lei and a pretty solid supporting cast. It felt like a waste for some of the best acting and a crazy intriguing character for Bai Lu too, but at least no one can argue about who or what the show was about. It just could have been so much better for everyone, including her.
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