WM

Question about the female lead to both novel readers and drama watchers - almost all the tags are about the ML (I'm guessing he is high on the Marty Sue's scale), so is the female lead doing anything worthwhile here? Or is she just a typically useless (or overrated) female lead in a C-drama with terrible (or suspect at best) decision-making and getting saved/rescued all the time by the ML?

Yes, they are the only good thing about this drama, especially BSL - they are very active until Episode 17, and then there is a huge fight in episodes 25-26 (?), where BSL shines.

It's much easier to steal the spotlight when your character is written as an almighty Marty Sue, only sporadically slowed down by poison, who can love, hate, kill, manipulate, threaten (the latter two against the female lead as well), etc...

Also, It's not a female-centric show when the ML (and other ML candidates) save the female lead dozens of times and she is quite behind the ML in scheming, intelligence, etc...

Bai Shu Lin was obviously amazing, though. That's where I 100% agree at least.

No matter if I like it or I don't like it at the end, I'm sure I've never seen a drama/movie with so much paper used :)

It's always very naive to think like that.

Regarding the editing aspect, the drama gets better later on; even if at the beginning, I had the same issues as you have,

Are there any old men in this one? When I checked (for another reason) Episode 11, there was a single older guy (Chancellor?) in the Court, while the rest looked like a bunch of teenagers, plus a few years older Emperor.

You know, she is supposedly a "smart female lead".

Never heard about "Love in Between" until now, and for me, the female lead in "Fighting for Love " is a gold standard in gender-bending.

Bai Shu Lin is obviously great as well.

Well, I was trying to be a bit ironic, since the female lead is not necessarily smart either.
She is better suited to the "Badass" or "Resilient" tags.

It would be a perfect Dessert if a 150m budget movie would misspelt a title like that on top of everything else :)
Cheers.

Well, the drama has "Smart female lead" and "smart male lead" tags, but it seems they forgot that the "smart writer" tag is most important.

Yeah, it was definitely a touching moment.`

Around episode 25 (?) she starts to look for some clues about her mother's death and starts scheming a bit against the evil concubine and her daughter.

As a fellow Episode 2 runaway, I salute you for sharing it.
This show didn't deserve such a nice song.

Yup. If you wouldn't like both ep 1 and 5, then IMO it's really no point in watching it further.

I was thinking about something more poetic, but I'm sure it works as well ;).

Well, the opening episode was pretty epic, so if it didn't catch your eye, then it possibly won't.

But, the 5th one is another one which is really good, so maybe give it a shot as well.

"Rebirth"and its 6.1 rating has recently shown that the sky is the limit.
Oops, stop - what would be the opposite of the sky? :)

Thanks for the list.
I hated "kill bok soon" with a passion and didn't like "brave citizen" much either (but somehow, I quite liked "Justice High").
However, I will definitely check "Lady Vengeance".